Haints Stay (18 page)

That was the way of things. They were men without a country, but each
individual answered to the group. Brooke did not ask many questions, and enjoyed
well enough their day to day to keep in line with what they seemed to expect of him.
They sang a number of songs, but Brooke's favorite was the simple one. On and on as
they rode, or as they sat together and drank late into the night, they would
sing :

Drink and Hang

and Drink and Hang

and Drink and Hang

and Drink and Hang

On and on until it slowly, imperceptibly shifted to :

Drinking, Hanging

Drinking, Hanging

Drinking, Hanging

Drinking, Hanging

But it was all a mess now, thinking back on it. It could just as
easily have been a decade with these men as a week. His memories were insubstantial
fragments standing in for a much larger whole. Like how a wedding ring is said to
represent a marriage. Or an old soup bowl in the dirt, a way of life.

Bird was dragging the bodies into the middle of the street and
lining them up. Mary woke on her pallet and found the room empty, but for the chairs
and the dishes from the night before. She heard the dragging sounds and, from time
to time, the strained clap of a swinging door. She crawled to the window and peeked
out and there he was, hunched and gripping an older man by his red pajama shoulders,
dragging him with one arm through the dirt toward the center of the street. Some of
the bodies had thin little lines of blood twisting up to them. Others had a body's
width of displaced earth tracing their path, as if they'd crawled from their front
porch and down into the middle of the street to flip onto their backs and bask in
the sun. They
were cooking there in the unbroken heat. But they were
not sweating.

“I cannot imagine what it is you think you're doing,” she tried to say
quietly from behind the door.

Bird did not respond, but instead settled the man a foot or so from a
medium-waisted woman in a frilled blue and white dress.

“What are you doing ?” she said, a little louder this time.

Again, Bird did not respond, but settled the man and turned back toward
the home from which he'd drawn him.

“Bird !” said Mary. She stepped onto the porch of their home and checked
either direction, up the street. “Stop.”

Finally, Bird turned.

“They're all dead, Mary. Everyone here.”

“I know,” said Mary.

“How did you know ?”

“That man was killing them.”

“But they're all dead. Every single one of them. He killed every single
one.”

“I know.”

“We are living in a town full of bodies.”

“Don't touch them.”

“Look at all of them.”

There were all of the deputies, in a line. Then several men and women of
middle age or older, and two boys who might have been fourteen or so. A young girl,
probably thirteen. She had been bleeding from the waist before she died. Another
girl had bled from a wound in her forehead. Her eyes were open and staring and they
held the pale blue coloring of the thin clouds above her.

“I don't want to,” said Mary.

“Well, you have to,” said Bird.

He turned and moved steadily toward the next home in the
row that lined the backbone of this small town. He entered and the door swung shut
behind him.

Mary went back into the building with the kitchen and she grabbed two
plates from the table. She came back outside and when Bird finally emerged with a
fresh body, another boy, this one just slightly younger than the rest, she whipped
the first plate at him and struck him in the hand.

“Ow.” He dropped the body and turned and she moved closer and whipped
another plate at him.

“Stop,” she yelled. “Stop, stop, stop,” as if she were whipping an
endless supply of plates at him, but she was only spinning her hands out in front of
her and screaming.

“I can't,” he said.

“You have to,” she said. “I do not want to see them.”

“You have to,” he said. “We have to do something with them. We can't
leave them stuck up in their houses like this. They're rotting on their dinner
tables. They've wound up in the most horrible arrangements.” He was crying and
gripping the young corpse again. This time, Mary let him drag it past.

She would not help him move the bodies. Instead, she agreed to dig.
Finding a shovel wasn't hard. She took the smallest and newest looking one and set
to digging a few hundred feet from the stables at the far edge of town. Beyond that,
there was only desert. A sun, all but risen. Looming red rocks like giants coming to
crush them for all the damage they'd done.

She was not able to dig very much of the hole at all before a break was
necessary. It was hardly big enough to bury a hand. She'd brought the wine out with
her, some of the bread, and a chicken leg. She did not want to go back down that
road any more times than was absolutely necessary. She did not like the
wine but drank it down because she knew that it was supposed to be
good for upset feelings and stomach trouble. She'd already had to dig several small
latrine holes, in addition to the large one she was working on. She felt like
something was eating away at her insides. She did not enjoy the idea of eating, but
knew she needed to. It would be the first bit of food she'd managed all day, and she
was working hard and needed the strength. To get the wine down, she held her breath,
took it into her mouth, then swallowed hard and fast. Then she shoved a chunk of
bread into her mouth to sop up the taste. She followed that up with a bit of chicken
and the taste was nearly gone. The wine was unpleasant and burned in her gut. But it
was settling her a little. She noticed that when she turned her head, it took a
moment for her to realize she was looking back at those rocks in the distance. Each
new vision took a moment to snap into place. It was a decent feeling, but she did
not exactly like it.

“You have not finished even one hole,” said Bird.

She'd seen him coming, but had not lifted herself from the dirt to take
up the shovel.

“It is hard to dig a hole the size of a body, and you want me to dig
twelve.”

“Fifteen,” said Bird.

“But I don't even want to dig twelve.”

“You've got to, Mary.”

“I need help.”

“But you won't help me move them.”

“So dig with me then move them and I will go to bed. I can't stand today
and I can't stand what you have done.”

“What have I done ?”

“You have made this place horrible and made me feel fright
ened and taken away my sense of security in our building with the kitchen while we
wait for Martha.”

“Martha is not coming back.”

“Yes, she is.”

“That man killed everyone, Mary.”

“So ?”

“Not one of them survived.”

“Stop it, Bird. We survived.”

“Because we were hidden,” he said.

“I've been looking,” he said, “and I've found no one.”

“I cannot dig fifteen holes,” said Mary.

“Then I will dig them,” said Bird.

He took the shovel from where she'd set it and he bent toward the small
hole she'd started. She drank more of the wine. He plunged the shovel into the dirt
and leveraged it against a bent leg to extract the shovel-full. Again and again,
slowly, he unearthed handfuls of dirt. A considerable amount was lost back into the
hole, but he kept at it and it began to make a distinguishable difference.

After an hour or so, he had nearly completed a hole long enough to set a
body in, but far too shallow for it to stay set. Mary was still to the side of the
grave. The chicken and bread were gone. The wine too. She was alternating between
sitting and watching and resting on her back to stare at the clouds moving past.

“You could get a second shovel,” said Bird.

She lifted her palms and showed him that they were spotted with
blisters.

He lifted his palm and showed her the same.

“We cannot dig fifteen holes,” she said.

He nodded. He was sweating and sore and there were still
more houses to check, more horrors to discover.

“We could dig one big hole,” he said. “We could put them all
together.”

Mary liked it. Both as an idea, the whole town together like that, and
because it meant the level of the digging left to do was greatly reduced.

Bird found her a second shovel and they set to widening the hole. She
wrapped her hands in the hem of her dress. Bird removed his shirt and wrapped his
wounded palm in it. It was already bleeding slightly, and it stained the shirt as he
worked. He seemed less and less present to Mary. More and more focused
elsewhere.

“Do you know any digging songs ?” she said.

He shook his head.

“I know a working song,” she said, “but not a digging song.”

He nodded, plunged his shovel into the dirt and pressed it with his foot.
Things were coming up more easily now. The air was cooling off too, which made it
only slightly more pleasant to work.

She sang her working song and a few minutes passed more easily. The song
was about farming, but there was a little bit in there about the earth and working
the dirt and the sun bearing down on you.

Later in the afternoon, the clouds moved in from over the mountains. A
light snow began to fall, but it melted as it pressed into the ground. They would
dig and dig, then take a break. Bird fetched water from the well and wine from the
kitchen, at Mary's request. He set the bottle in the water in its bucket, and
carried a loaf of bread in his armpit. The snow kept falling. A thin blanket covered
the bodies of the townspeople. Bird felt better
already, to see them
covered so peacefully. He recommitted to their plan, which was beginning to feel
less and less possible.

He gave Mary the wine and bread and re-wrapped the shirt around the palm
of his hand. Mary sat down to enjoy all he'd gathered and he set back to work.

“We are doing the right thing,” he said.

“Do you think they will come back to haunt us ?” said Mary.

“Maybe if we had left them in their houses like they were,” said
Bird.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Do you believe in ghosts ?” she said.

“Yes,” said Bird.

“Why ?”

“Because it is better to believe in them and never see one than not to
believe in them when one decides to set upon you.”

“You are forever concerned with protection,” said Mary. She began to
laugh. She was brutally exhausted and giggling.

“It's my hope to be prepared for whatever it is that comes at me
next.”

“Do you think your arm will come to you as a ghost ?” said Mary. “Do you
think one morning you will wake and find it there, settled into place as it once
was, only blue or white and sort of drifting between this world and the next ?” She
laughed again. She drank and ate.

“I do not think that,” said Bird. He plunged the shovel and leveraged it
against his leg again. His strength was not fully in the gesture though, and the
dirt rose up but fell back into the hole, rather than to its side. “You could help.
You could add depth to the hole as I draw out its side.”

“It is important to break and restore your strength. You are going at
this like a mad man with only a day to get it done.”

“I'd like to get it done.”

“We have time.”

“You'd like to sleep with those people in the street like that ?”

“It's snowing,” she said.

“Only slightly,” he said.

“Still, they will be covered.”

“But what about the ghosts,” he said.

“There is no such thing,” she said.

Bird removed a knife from his belt and considered it.

“Do you have a knife ?” he said.

She did not.

“But you can get one ?”

She could.

“We'll take their teeth,” he said.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“We'll bury their teeth. Bury their ghosts.”

“That is horrid and I've never heard of such a thing.”

“Will you help or not ?”

“I will not,” she said.

As the sun began to set and the evening grew cool, they retreated to
their building with the kitchen. The bodies lined up in the street were nothing more
than row after row of raised snow, like a plowed field in winter. The blood was only
faintly visible beneath the thinner layers, and it was vanishing with each passing
moment.

Neither of them was in any condition to cook a meal, so they ate what was
left of the bread with salt and stoked the fire and huddled together. Bird's hand
was well-worn and bloody. Mary's hands were blistered and ready to pop. She rinsed
the wounds with cool water, and bandaged each. It snowed steadily on out
side. For the first time since they'd left home, they slept soundly
through the night.

They woke to find the village covered in several feet of snow, with more
of it still in the air. The rows Bird had set out were unidentifiable. The hole, on
which they had worked so tirelessly, was filled now with snow and marked only by the
snow-capped mound of dirt at its side.

The snow stayed with them for days. They dug out the store of logs lining
the back of the building with the kitchen, and stacked them inside to thaw and dry.
Most would not burn at first, but those that did warmed and worked to dry the
others. They made more bread. Bird practiced with the pistol, although Mary insisted
he do so upstairs. The sound of it startled her, but no matter of fussing or
demanding would stop him.