* * *
It sounds pretty bad, but I left Mama sitting on that log and went to warn Terry first cause he was the closest. Mama just didn’t have the strength for a lot of scouting around. I left her there thinking about horses.
It took me a while to get out of the river bottoms and into the crooked-built town. I went along, watching carefully, and as I was walking to Terry’s place, trying to figure how I could get to him without being discovered by his stepfamily or his mama, down the road he come, walking in the moonlight, moving in such a way it looked as if he had one foot in a ditch and the other on something slick. He had two shovels slung over his shoulder. He saw me and raised his hand.
When we met up, I spilled out all that Mama had told me. I didn’t mention she planned to go with us. I thought I’d save that tidbit.
“Damn,” Terry said. “I assumed I’d already have May Lynn dug up by the time you and Jinx showed. I knew pretty soon Cletus would put two and two together as far as Jinx and myself went, so I started making trips. That’s how I hurt my ankle. Stepped in a hole.”
We started walking together in the direction of the graveyard where May Lynn was buried.
“Trips?” I said.
“I’ve already been to the graveyard, and I carried a tarp out there to put the body on. I’ve made three trips, taking supplies we’ll need. I have a wheelbarrow there as well. I’ve been busy. But I haven’t dug up the body yet. Why I brought the shovels.”
“Jinx is probably there by now,” I said.
“Works out right,” Terry said. “By the time they come to tell my mama and the stepdummies what’s what, we’ll have May Lynn dug up, and they’ll have no idea where we are. I got a surprise in store, too.”
It took us about a half hour to get to the place where May Lynn was buried. When we got there, Jinx was sitting on the ground by the grave with her little bag of goods. When she saw us coming she sprang to her feet.
“It done took you long enough,” she said.
“I was here before you,” Terry said.
“I figured that, all this stuff being here,” Jinx said. “But still, I been waiting and thinking Cletus would be after me like a pig on a mushroom since he knows Sue Ellen and she knows us.”
“Good figuring,” I said. “That is, in fact, in motion.”
I filled Jinx in quick-like. She said, “Mama, she knows I’m going. I couldn’t just leave her. I told her.”
“How’d she take it?” I asked.
“She took it good,” Jinx said. “She took it so good I almost stayed. She told me I might ought to go even if I hadn’t stole nothing; that there’s not a thing here for me, and that maybe there’s something out there. She said a colored girl might have a chance out in California or up north, but here there wasn’t nothing but raw fingers and tired bones. I’ll write her when everything blows over-Daddy, too, where he’s working up north. I almost figure I’m doing it for them, giving myself a chance. Besides, me having hit that white man with a stick upside the head isn’t going to set well around here.”
“I reckon that’s right,” I said.
“Take a shovel,” Terry said, handing me one of them.
I took it, and me and Terry started digging.
After a while I traded out the shovel with Jinx, and as I was sitting on the ground beside the grave, it really hit me. We was digging up May Lynn’s dead body.
I was startled out of my thoughts when Jinx’s shovel hit the lid of the coffin. Jinx and Terry stopped for a moment. Jinx said, “We’re standing right on top of her.”
“We have to rake the dirt clear, prize up the lid, and take her out,” Terry said. “I brought gloves for it. They’re in the wheelbarrow.”
I got the gloves, and by the time I done that and looked in the hole, the wooden coffin lid was visible. Terry was pushing the last of the dirt off it with his hands. The coffin was made of wood so cheap it looked as if you could spit through it.
Jinx climbed out of the hole. Terry took the tip of the shovel and pushed it under the edge of the box, and started prying it up. It didn’t resist much. The nails squeaked like a rat, the lid lifted and cracked in the middle, and a stink came out from under it big enough and strong enough to deserve some kind of government promotion.
I turned and threw up. When I looked back in the grave, I could see the lid was off and I could see the body in the box. They had tossed her in on her side. She was thinner now and darker, and she still had on that old dress, which had sort of melted into her. She wasn’t blowed up no more. She had popped and gone flat against the bone. You could see where water had leaked in from below, making the bottom of that coffin come apart in places. If the wood had been a penny cheaper, she’d have fallen through the underside of it before she was in the ground.
“Those sons a bitches,” Terry said. “This thing wasn’t good for a day in damp ground.”
He reached in his back pocket and took out a handkerchief and tied it over his nose. Me and Jinx didn’t have a handkerchief, so we had to depend on scrunching up our faces and trying to think about something else. But me and her got down in the hole and yanked May Lynn out. When we did one of her arms come off, and I had to climb out and throw up again. By the time I got back down there, Jinx was throwing up in the grave.
Terry didn’t so much as cough, but when we finally got her out of the hole, he wandered off a ways and puked. I glanced at May Lynn, and her face was dark as old pine sap. There were no eyes cause bugs and worms and groundwater had done been at them, and she had been full of river when we pulled her out, so she looked way worse than that dead man under the money bag; and she hadn’t been near as long gone as he had. It didn’t seem right.
After a bit, Terry come back and helped us load the body into the wheelbarrow. We put the tarp down first and put her on top of it. We had to bend her some to make her fit, and she came apart a little more, and something fell out of her that I couldn’t recognize. Terry used the shovel to put it in the wheelbarrow. Jinx brought over her arm and laid it on top of the body. Terry folded the tarp over her on both sides and at the ends.
“Now what?” I said.
“The brick kiln,” he said.
11
Now, there’s no use going into all of it, but what I will say is it’s a wonder we didn’t end up being caught. I guess we didn’t because it was late and we didn’t see anybody but a couple of dogs. They came out to smell the dead meat and Jinx threw rocks at them and ran them off.
We took turns pushing the wheelbarrow, and it wasn’t no real chore, because what was left of May Lynn seemed as light as a new loaf of bread, without the freshness. The night was clear and the wheelbarrow squeaked a little. Her stench made us push the barrow along quite smartly.
Terry guided us to the back of his stepdad’s brick company. We stopped under a window, and me and Jinx made a cradle with our hands, and Terry stepped up on it and pushed at the window till it come up. He wriggled inside, and in a moment the back door opened to let us in. I pushed the wheelbarrow through the door.
I guided the barrow between rows of stacked bricks, and finally we came to a spot along the wall with a dozen brick beehive kilns. They all had metal doors on them, and there were some handles on the doors-wooden ones in metal slots-and on the wall between each door was a dial.
Terry fumbled a match out of his pocket and lit it to a twist of paper that had been lying on the floor. He turned one of the dials, opened a metal door. There was a hiss like a surprised possum. It was gas shooting up from a grate on the bottom of the kiln. Terry stuck the flaming paper through the grate, touched a spot inside, and the hissing turned to a whoosh; the heat from it nearly singed my eyebrows. The fire rose up and licked out with blue and yellow tongues, and in an instant, I was sweating.
“We got to wait a little bit,” Terry said, and closed the door.
There were some stacks of bricks, and we used them to sit on.