“It’ll be the only fresh one,” he said. “Lucas said there hasn’t been a burying here since last winter.”
“Yes,” Miss Habersham said. “The flowers too. Aleck Sander’s already found it.” But to make sure (he thought quietly, he didn’t know to whom: I’m going to make a heap more mistakes but dont let this be one of them.) he hooded the flashlight in his wadded handkerchief so that one thin rapid pencil touched for a second the raw mound with its meagre scattering of wreaths and bouquets and even single blooms and then for another second the headstone adjacent to it, long enough to read the engraved name: Amanda Workitt wife of N. B. Forrest Gowrie 1878 1926 then snapped it off and again the darkness came in and the strong scent of the pines and they stood for a moment beside the raw mound, doing nothing at all. “I hate this,” Miss Habersham said.
“You aint the one,” Aleck Sander said. “It’s just a half a mile back to the truck. Down hill too.”
She moved; she was first. “Move the flowers,” she said. “Carefully. Can you see?”
“Yessum,” Aleck Sander said. “Aint many. Looks like they throwed them at it too.”
“But we wont,” Miss Habersham said. “Move them carefully.” And it must be nearing eleven now, they would not possibly have time; Aleck Sander was right: the thing to do was to go back to the truck and drive away, back to town and through town and on, not to stop, not even to have time to think for having to keep on driving, steering, keeping the truck going in order to keep on moving, never to come back; but then they had never had time, they had known that before they ever left Jefferson and he thought for an instant how if Aleck Sander really had meant it when he said he would not come and if he would have come alone in that case and then (quickly) he wouldn’t think about that at all, Aleck Sander using the shovel for the first shift while he used the pick though the dirt was still so loose they didn’t really need the pick (and if it hadn’t been still loose they couldn’t have done it at all even by daylight); two shovels would have done and faster too but it was too late for that now until suddenly Aleck Sander handed him the shovel and climbed out of the hole and vanished and (not even using the flashlight) with that same sense beyond sight and hearing both which had realised that what Highboy smelled at the branch was quicksand and which had discovered the horse or the mule coming down the hill a good minute before either he or Miss Habersham could begin to hear it, returned with a short light board so that both of them had shovels now and he could hear the chuck! and then the faint swish as Aleck Sander thrust the board into the dirt and then flung the load up and outward, expelling his breath, saying “Hah!” each time—a sound furious raging and restrained, going faster and faster until the ejaculation was almost as rapid as the beat of someone running: “Hah! ... Hah! ... Hah!” so that he said over his shoulder:
“Take it easy. We’re doing all right:” straightened his own back for a moment to mop his sweating face and seeing as always Miss Habersham in motionless silhouette on the sky above him in the straight cotton dress and the round hat on on the exact top of her head such as few people had seen in fifty years and probably no one at any time looking up out of a halfway rifled grave: more than halfway because spading again he heard the sudden thud of wood on wood, then Aleck Sander said sharply:
“Go on. Get out of here and gimme room:” and flung the board up and out and took, jerked the shovel from his hands and he climbed out of the pit and even as he stooped groping Miss Habersham handed him the coiled tie-rope.
“The flashlight too,” he said and she handed him that and he stood too while the strong hard immobile flow of the pines bleached the sweat from his body until his wet shirt felt cold on his flesh and invisible below him in the pit the shovel rasped and scraped on wood, and stooping and hooding the light again he flashed it downward upon the unpainted lid of the pine box and switched it off.
“All right,” he said. “That’s enough. Get out:” and Aleck Sander with the last shovel of dirt released the shovel too, flinging the whole thing arching out of the pit like a javelin and followed it in one motion, and carrying the rope and the light he dropped into the pit and only then remembered he would need a hammer, crowbar—something to open the lid with and the only thing of that nature would be what Miss Habersham might happen to have in the truck a half-mile away and the walk back uphill, stooping to feel, examine the catch or whatever it was to be forced when he discovered that the lid was not fastened at alclass="underline" so that straddling it, balancing himself on one foot he managed to open the lid up and back and prop it with one elbow while he shook the rope out and found the end and snapped on the flashlight and pointed it down and then said, “Wait.” He said, “Wait.” He was still saying “Wait” when he finally heard Miss Habersham speaking in a hissing whisper:
“Charles ... Charles.”
“This aint Vinson Gowrie,” he said. “This man’s name is Montgomery. He’s some kind of a shoestring timber buyer from over in Crossman County.”
Chapter Five
THEY HAD TO FILL THE HOLE back up of course and besides he had the horse. But even then it was a good while until daylight when he left Highboy with Aleck Sander at the pasture gate and tried remembered to tiptoe into the house but at once his mother her hair loose and in her nightdress wailed from right beside the front door: “Where have you been?” then followed him to his uncle’s door and then while his uncle was putting some clothes on: “You? Digging up a grave?” and he with a sort of weary indefatigable patience, just about worn out himself now from riding and digging then turning around and undigging and then riding again, somehow managing to stay that one jump ahead of what he had really never hoped to beat anyway:
“Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham helped:” which if anything seemed to be worse though she was still not loud: just amazed and inexpugnable until his uncle came out fully dressed even to his necktie but not shaved and said,
“Now Maggie, do you want to wake Charley?” then following them back to the front door and this time she said—and he thought again how you could never really beat them because of their fluidity which was not just a capacity for mobility but a willingness to abandon with the substanceless promptitude of wind or air itself not only position but principle too; you didn’t have to marshal your forces because you already had them: superior artillery, weight, right justice and precedent and usage and everything else and made your attack and cleared the field, swept all before you—or so you thought until you discovered that the enemy had not retreated at all but had already abandoned the field and had not merely abandoned the field but had usurped your very battlecry in the process; you believed you had captured a citadel and instead found you had merely entered an untenable position and then found the unimpaired and even unmarked battle set up again in your unprotected and unsuspecting rear—she said:
“But he’s got to sleep! He hasn’t even been to bed!” so that he actually stopped until his uncle said, hissed at him:
“Come on. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know she’s tougher than you and me both just as old Habersham was tougher than you and Aleck Sander put together; you might have gone out there without her to drag you by the hand but Aleck Sander wouldn’t and I’m still not so sure you would when you came right down to it.” So he moved on too beside his uncle toward where Miss Habersham sat in the truck behind his uncle’s parked car (it had been in the garage at nine oclock last night; later when he had time he would remember to ask his uncle just where his mother had sent him to look for him). “I take that back,” his uncle said. “Forget it. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings and old ladies—” he paraphrased. “Quite true, as a lot of truth often is, only a man just dont like to have it flung in his teeth at three oclock in the morning. And dont even forget your mother, which of course you cant; she has already long since seen to that. Just remember that they can stand anything, accept any fact (it’s only men who burk at facts) provided they dont have to face it; can assimilate it with their heads turned away and one hand extended behind them as the politician accepts the bribe. Look at her: who will spend a long contented happy life never abating one jot of her refusal to forgive you for being able to button your own pants.”