He orientated himself that way and saw only crosses. But he took off his blue denim shirt and draped it on Mason. He didn’t think Mason would mind. Then he turned to the east and began to walk the line.
He found the second gap fifty yards beyond and rushed ahead. But where the first one should be, according to his reading of the photo, he found nothing, except a damned sidewalk that led to a little park of what appeared to be abstract statuary a little bit farther out. The rows were nice and even. He looked, uncomprehending how such a huge tree, had there been one, wouldn’t have thrown the lines of graves out of whack. What the hell was wrong?
He looked more carefully at the picture.
Sidewalk, he thought. Where the hell is it going?
He found it, walked to the little garden. Some Confederate thing? No, dammit, Vietnam. The county had erected a little memento mori to the boys of Nam, a plaque, inscribed with words like honor and duty and sacrifice and of course the names. He looked, then looked away. He knew Harrison, and Marlow, he knew Jefferson too, though Jefferson was black. Jefferson was AirCav, right, a brother of the Black Horse? What about Simpson? Straight-leg grunt, draft bait, caught a booby when he was down to days until DEROS, the town’s favorite hard-luck story.
Now Bob’s head ached and he couldn’t deal with the problem anymore. He turned to leave, and as if in giving up, he got it.
The tree comes down for whatever reason, but it was so imposing that its very presence had intimidated the gravediggers, so they’d never gotten near to it. And when it came down, that’s where they build their garden to the Vietnam War dead, and that’s where they build the sidewalk. So that would make his dad’s now hidden grave somewhere along the sidewalk, probably to the right of it. He thought it made sense too. If some guys were exchanging gravestones that probably weighed two hundred to three hundred pounds apiece late at night, they’d need a wheelbarrow or cart and the sidewalk would be helpful. He walked a bit until he reached a halfway point and then just turned west. He saw nothing, then moved up and back and at last up a bit more. He was on a ridge. He could see two gaps in the line before him to the west, one of the tombstones by the farthest gap the blue of his shirt.
“Hey.”
He turned. It was Russ.
“Those old records were miserable, but I got at least thirteen names. Man, it’s amazing the records that place keeps.”
Bob looked to his immediate right.
“I bet one of them says Jacob Finley.”
Russ dug out his paper, looked them over and then said, “Yeah. Jacob Finley. Fifth Arkansas Light Infantry.”
Bob looked at the grave marker, limestone corrupted by the passage of time, untended, leaning ever so slightly to the right.
He knelt and put a hand on the cold stone.
Hello, old man, he thought. I’ve come. It’s time.
This time it was easy. They went back to the County Coroner’s and refiled the exhumation papers for poor Jacob Finley, according to them Bob’s long-lost cousin. No lies had to be told regarding the reasons for changing the request, because, the first paperwork already in order, nobody in the Coroner’s Office particularly cared. Sam wasn’t even necessary. A few phone calls later and all the mechanisms of the day before were reinstalled.
Mr. Coggins and his two boys were luckier this time. The grave site, being accessible off that helpful sidewalk, was now approachable by backhoe, and Mr. Coggins was an expert with the machine. In less than an hour he excavated the coffin, and just as the machine uncovered the box, Dr. Phillips showed up.
“How did you find him?” he asked.
Bob explained.
“Well, maybe you’re right and maybe not.” He went and looked as the quickly erected tackle drew the box from the ground.
“I will say this, that’s a metal casket, circa the fifties. Do you remember the funeral home?”
Bob said no and then a name shot into his memory like a flare out of the void.
“Devilin’s,” he said.
“Yep,” said the doctor. “And your father’s name was Earl Swagger.”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s what it says here. That’s him. Okay, boys, load it into the hearse and we’ll be off.”
It didn’t take a long time at the mortuary.
Bob and Russ waited outside, while a funeral procession formed up in one of the viewing rooms and people filed out to cars. The hearse that took Earl to the mortuary took some other poor joker back to the boneyard a half an hour later.
“I feel soaked in death,” said Russ.
Presently the doctor came out. They went over to a little shady remembrance garden tastefully sculpted into the earth near the funeral home. Beautiful day late in the afternoon: the sun was just setting.
“I can put this in writing for you, but it’ll take a day,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“Writing’s not necessary. The boy’ll take notes.”
“Fine. First of all, then, I found the physical remains of a man in his midforties in a state of some advanced decomposition. What that means is that little tissue remains, which in turn means that some pathological determinations are impossible. Bullet tracks, for example. We can’t tell which directions the bullets went through the body and what damage they did to soft-tissue elements like organs and the central nervous or respiratory system.”
“Damn!” said Bob.
Speak to me, Daddy, he thought. This is your only chance.
“But,” the doctor continued, “the skeletal remains were in good shape and the marks of the wounds were recorded there.”
“Yes,” said Bob. “Go on.”
“I initially noticed two wounds. The first was on the leftside ulna, the outermost bone of the forearm, just down from the thickness of bone we call the olecranon, an inch or so beneath the elbow. I could tell from impact beveling that a bullet struck and shattered that bone; there was a traumatic ovoid indentation visible on some of the fracture segments. This is characteristic of a high-velocity solid-point bullet delivered at close range.”
“Thirty-eight Super.”
“A jacketed .38 Super would get the job done nicely, yes. The bones were in such fragmented disarray that, pending further lengthy examination, I couldn’t rearrange them to get a caliber reading on the damage.”
“Not necessary,” said Bob.
“The second wound resembled the first. The same shattered bone, the same fragment presence, the same ovoid groove in some of the pieces, again characteristic of a smaller-caliber, high-speed bullet. This was observed at the frontal curve of the third rib of the left-hand side of the cadaver.”
Bob mulled this over.
“Could he move, hit like that?”
“If he wanted to.”
“Both wounds were survivable?” he finally asked.
“Well, that’s a subjective judgment, dependent upon the subject’s viability. Given that your father was in extremely robust health, that he’d been hit before and understood that getting hit didn’t automatically equate to death, and given that he stanched his blood flow and that help arrived within a few hours, and given that there were no serious soft-tissue wounds not registered in the skeletal system, then yes, my judgment is that those two wounds were survivable. But there was a third wound.”