Romeo dangled the bag like bait. Mani-Mathai asked what was in it.
His uncle fished out a brightly colored package with the word BULLET emblazoned in red. You like firecrackers, don’t you? These will make your heart jump out your mouth—
Old Man won’t allow crackers. He says the elephants get enough noise at work; they should have some peace at home.
Since when do you obey his every order?
Since he gave me your job.
Romeo lost his smile and suddenly the boy understood why his uncle had returned. How sorry Romeo looked, how deflated without the drink to puff him up. He had lacquered his hair with a pomade in order to make himself more presentable, in the unlikely hope of regaining his old position. He smelled like a fruit-flavored candy.
Mani-Mathai had no plan to help his uncle, though he had not disclosed to Old Man the incident with the pitchfork, fearful that doing so would invoke some twisted form of revenge and maybe the meddling of his father. And in small part, he was afraid that Romeo was right, that Old Man might endorse the use of pitchforks.
An awkward silence passed, filled only by the sound of Romeo scratching his fruity scalp. Well, he said. I don’t give a wet fart for Old Man’s orders. Boys should be boys, I say.
He held out the blue plastic bag.
I have work to do, said Mani-Mathai.
Just take the blasted thing. It doesn’t bother the elephants, I’ll show you—
But Mani-Mathai was already walking away.
§
By evening, the sky had turned a jewel blue, lighter at the edges, rich at heart. The Gravedigger was being led back toward the stalls, freshly bathed and drowsy. The bath had doused him in the sort of peace he had not known in weeks, lying on his side with the water rivering over his belly, Old Man humming, husks scratching, and the song joined with the scratch in a rhythm so soothing the Gravedigger fell asleep.
Now he was eager to eat from the mounded panna that awaited him. But a wrong whiff was gusting from the direction of the stalls, something foul and familiar.
Darkness seeped into the periphery of his vision. He was desperate to flee that smell. He wrung his head lightly but kept walking, urged on by Old Man.
As they neared the stall, the Gravedigger scented Romeo. The pappan who had stabbed him, who might force him into the stall and stab him again. Who was squatting over something on the ground.
A sizzling smelclass="underline" sulfur, match.
The boy took a few running steps forward, shouting at Romeo.
Romeo leaped back from the thing on the ground, baring his teeth, plugging his ears. A plastic bag drifted and whispered in the wind.
A fuse, hissing like a plague of cicadas …
And then, the bullets.
In the end, what broke the Gravedigger’s mind was not merely the stab stab stab of the firecrackers, nor even the sight of Romeo. It was the pomade coming off the pappan’s hair, the sticky pineapple rot that slid through the air and up his trunk, shocking his head with a memory from a day long ago, the day his mother roared and sank, the day her thud ran electric through the earth, the day the gunman walked away with her tail — a sticky pineapple rot wafting off his hair.
All the days between then and now collapsed.
Shadows piled like ash at the edge of the Gravedigger’s vision, closing around his target.
§
Run! Old Man yelled, chasing after the Gravedigger, who had broken free of the changala and was now charging at Romeo.
The other pappans scattered, as Old Man would have done were it not for the fact that he had lost sight of Mani-Mathai. Through the maelstrom, Old Man shouted for the boy.
It happened in moments, unfolding beyond his control, so that all Old Man could ask of his fate was: So soon? So soon? So soon? So soon?
§
The Gravedigger snatched up Romeo in his trunk and slammed him twice against the side of the stall, until his head went loose as a fruit about to drop. The Gravedigger felt someone yanking on his chain, igniting his abscess. He stumbled back — a muffled grunt beneath him — and felt the easy crush of flesh underfoot.
By now, the bullets had stopped, but still the singed smell.
A muttering came from down below. It was the boy, who had run up to Old Man, who was not Old Man, who was a limp, dead thing. The boy fell to his knees by the dead man’s head, placed a hand on the dead man’s cheek. He recoiled as if scalded.
His eyes traveled up to the Gravedigger. A moment of stillness passed between them. What was broken could not be mended, neither for Old Man nor for the elephant.
The boy’s eyes went small with anguish. He rocked and bowed and held Old Man’s head as if he meant to take it away. But it was for the Gravedigger to take the body away. It was for the Gravedigger to restore the silence of all things.
Lifting his foot over the boy, this is what he did.
§
Once there was a clan who came across a pile of bones, picked clean by birds. The bones had belonged to a young cow they had known, and the adults took turns sniffing and cradling her remains. Still a calf then, the Gravedigger had stood between his mother’s legs and watched as she dipped her trunk into the hollows and sockets of the skull. A deep-sea murmur in his ears. This was how he learned to grieve the dead.
The memory came back to him as he wrapped his trunk around the pappan’s ankle and pulled him next to the corpse of the boy, trailing a dark sweep of red. Old Man was last. The Gravedigger touched his breathless mouth and locked that smell in some chamber of his brain. Then he curled Old Man into his trunk and laid him across the others. He covered the bodies in panna leaves before limping toward the mountains.
§
In the forest, wild elephants wanted nothing to do with the Gravedigger, not with the death stench of man tattooed into his skin. He would pad quietly to the watering hole, where a clan was taking rest, but as soon as they caught the tidal stink of his coming, they shrieked and clamored away. Even the forests had changed over the years of his absence, blighted by dying bamboo, patched with green and gold farm.
No sight was stranger than the treeless swaths through which he and his clan used to cross, taking shady refuge beneath the ribs of the trees. Little remained of the rosewood and aanjili, only stumps like rivets in the earth.
On hot days, the abscess on his ankle throbbed like a second heart, inviting a musth that left him shrieking and tearing at the trees. The bouts were fewer and farther between, but each time the noises invaded his thoughts and drowned him in fury.
Those were not his final killings.
The Gravedigger thought of Old Man more often than he thought of his own mother; the recollections passed over him slowly, throwing shadows. He remembered Old Man’s musk, fresh upon the air, the stepping-stones of his spine. How he hummed at times. How he appeared in the anakoodu that very first morning, his sun-dark body in the white square of light. The Gravedigger’s mind ran back and forth between now and then, a depthless stream of memory.