Terry wasn’t wearing a shirt, either, and I noticed that right off as well. He wasn’t as muscled as the colored man, but he looked pretty good, and I remember thinking in that moment that it wasn’t such a good thing he was a sissy.
Terry was grabbing the pieces as they were halved and piling them on a wheelbarrow. He was doing this quickly and with great skill to avoid the rising and swinging of the ax. He looked around and saw me and nodded. I knew he had chores to finish, so I went and sat on the back porch. I heard the door open behind me, and Terry’s mama came out. She was a fine-looking person with dark, short hair that had a perm in it. She sat down on the steps beside me, said, “Sue Ellen, how are you?”
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
I didn’t look at her direct, as I figured if I did I would look guilty, considering the plans I had might include her son.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I had to look at her now. It was manners. I put on my best lying face and turned it to her. When I did I saw she looked a little less full of juice than when I had seen her last; still pretty, but something she needed had been sucked out of her, and I had the impression that if I touched her hard she might fall apart, like a vase that had been badly glued back together. Still, compared to my mama, she was as solid as a mountain.
According to Terry, what was sucking out the juice was his stepdaddy, who he said was well-heeled but had all the personality of a nasty dishrag. He told me once, “Stepdad didn’t become rich by charm. He became rich by discovering oil on some land he bought and by building a brick-firing company that hires most of the people in town that are being hired. After that, he didn’t need to be charming. He just had to have his wallet with him.”
“How do you think Terry is?” she asked me.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”
“I think the new arrangements bother him.”
That was like saying I think the selling of one of our children to buy a pig might have been a bad idea. But since I was thinking about even newer arrangements for him, I didn’t know what to reply, other than, “I suppose that’s so.”
After a bit, the colored man stopped chopping and picked his shirt off the woodpile and wiped his face and chest with it and then put it on. Terry pushed the wheelbarrow over to the porch and started unloading it, piling wood under the porch’s overhang.
The colored man came over, smiling and shuffling. Jinx said that was how colored did if they didn’t want to have a visit from the Ku Klux Klan. She said you never knew when it would be decided you were being uppity in the presence of a white, and being uppity could cause you to come to grief. To add to that, it was probably pretty well known that Terry’s stepdad had a white robe and hood hanging in his closet.
The colored man didn’t say anything, just stood there smiling, like a jackass waiting for a carrot. It made me feel funny, seeing a grown man act like that.
Terry’s mama stood up and smiled and handed him something she had in her hand. He took it without looking to see what it was, and went away. When he was gone, she looked down at me and said, “I think that was worth more than a nickel, don’t you? He chopped a lot of wood and it’s hot.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I gave him a quarter.”
“Well worth it,” I said.
Terry finished up with the wood and came over and sat by me on the porch steps. I could feel the heat off his body and I could smell his sweat.
“Well,” his mama said, still standing on the steps. “I’ll leave you two to visit. But don’t forget your other chores, Terry. You know how your daddy gets when they’re not done.”
“He’s not my real father,” Terry said.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
“I do mean it.”
“Well, it’ll take a little time to adjust.”
“By the time I adjust, the world will be made anew,” Terry said.
“We won’t discuss it right now…Sue Ellen, it’s good to see you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She went in the house.
I said, “You hurt her feelings.”
“I know,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s not her I don’t like. It’s that man she married and all his kids. The smartest one of them barely knows to get in out of the rain, and only does so with considerable encouragement.”
“I’m wanting to look at that map again,” I said. “I’m wanting to find that money.”
“You sure?”
“I am. Jinx might come, and she might not. But I want to go.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“I think I got in too big a hurry the other day,” Terry said.
“You don’t want to go now?”
“No. I want to go. But I think we should find the money, and then we have to dig up May Lynn and burn her, and I need to do some work on that barge so it can run cleaner down the river.”
“You know how to do that?”
“I know how to do a lot of things. My real daddy taught me things, and he taught me how to teach myself about things I don’t know. He taught me how to study, and my mama taught me the same.”
“How much studying you need?”
“For what we have in mind, little to none. But I need time. Burning a body takes more time and work than you might think. You need a real serious fire, and we have to have it someplace where we won’t be seen. I have an idea for that, but I’d rather not discuss it until I’ve had time to consider on it awhile. Thing we should do first is determine if the map is real, and if it is, we have to find out if there’s any money buried out there.”
“Then we steal it.”
“You’re reconciled with that idea now?” he said.
“If ‘reconciled’ means I’m fine with that idea, I am.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Terry said.
8
Terry got the map from a hiding place in the house, put on a shirt, and then we took a walk down the street. There was a graveyard nearby, and we went there. It was a private place to talk. We sat where we often sat, on a metal bench under a spreading oak tree in view of the Confederate dead; rows and rows of sun-shiny stones that held down old rebels who had been shot or died later of wounds, or old age, or disappointment.
We unfolded the map and stretched it out between us and looked it over.
“What I can’t figure,” Terry said, “is what these humps are. Everything else on the map seems accurate, but I can’t make them out, and then there’s the name written here, Malcolm Cuzins.”
I nodded, said, “I figure we can go back there and look things over more carefully and see what we can come up with. Maybe if we look again, something will jump out that fits this. I thought it might mean hills, but after we got to where we was going, there wasn’t any hills. There’s nothing out there but a few trees and-”
And then it hit me.
I looked at Terry. “We are the dumbest people that ever walked on a spinning earth.”
“How do you mean?” he said.
“Look out there,” I said, waving my hand toward the graves.
He looked.
“Okay. A bunch of dead people with rocks on their heads.”
“That’s it, the stones,” I said. “We been overthinking things.”
“You mean that old graveyard up in the pines?”
“Well, I don’t mean this one. Sure. Those humps on the map could be gravestones.”
“But the tombstones there have mostly been removed by vandals,” he said. “Or broken up.”
“Yeah, but that don’t mean these humps don’t mean a graveyard. That would be a way the map drawer could remember things. A graveyard is supposed to have gravestones, even if it don’t. There might even be a stone or two left up there we ain’t seen, and one of them might have the name Malcolm written on it. The money might be there.”
“You know, Sue Ellen, you may be correct. We should check it out. We might get lucky.”