“I buried them,” said the woman, waving her shovel.
“You what?”
“I buried them,” said the woman. “And now I am going to dig them back up.”
She went to the side of the house, and dug up One first. He sat right when the shovel touched his arm and dirt fell from his face and legs. He blinked at her, as if no time had passed at all, and she held out her hand and pulled him out. She dug up Three, and Four. She thought briefly of leaving Two there forever, letting weeds grow all over him, but the other three were looking at his spot expectantly, so she dug up Two too.
The woman looked at each in turn. The layers of dirt became them.
“Okay,” she said.
They stepped into her open arms, solemn as monks. As they nestled and burrowed into her neck, the neighbor poked her head around corner of the house, draped in a clean sheet.
“Oh!” she said. “Look at this!”
The woman glanced over with Three on her back and Four clinging to her shoe.
“I didn’t think you could be serious,” said the neighbor.
“I am always serious,” said our woman.
The neighbor crouched down and smiled at Four. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked. Four looked past the neighbor and then climbed onto our woman’s back, pushing off One who fell lightly to the ground.
“They look so pale,” said the neighbor, her voice unsure where to drop, into which voice box positioned between curiosity and righteousness. “You might want to call a doctor,” she said. “I know a good one, who can be here within the hour.”
Four curled his hand around our woman’s neck, and began tugging on the lobe of her ear. Our woman barely smiled at her neighbor. It was a smile not made of pity, and it was not made of envy, even though the two had merged, for years now, on her lips. This smile instead was built of a weariness, of the particular quiet of the body after a long bout of weeping or illness. Certain things endured, and somehow she had ended up with four.
From the ground, Two leaped up to swing gently from her wrist.
“They need no doctors,” she said, walking to her front door. “Trust me.”
Inside, the woman dressed the group in clothing even though they had no hair or blood and would never look normal, dressed or undressed. Still she put them in pants and shirts she had sewn herself; in hats and shoes and belts.
She took their slow-moving hands and walked out the door again. They blinked and ducked under the lemony March sun. Already, like clockwork, the very first buds of green were pushing up from the soil, a ring of nasturtiums and dead potato babies to border her house. Halfway down the block, she turned and glanced at the neighbor, who was wearing a straw hat now, planting tomatoes. The four glanced with her. Thinking of the doctor had been a kind idea; she would thank the neighbor later. Living next to abundance was not so awful after all. It was contagious, in its own way.
The rest of the town was quiet and drowsy as the five walked past the cemetery, where they waved to the headstones, and over to the edge of the county. The air smelled ripe with spring. At the county line, the potato children stood by the fence posts and laid their hands on the dirt. They seemed interested, even pleased, by the new setting. They had no traumatic recollections of their past week buried alive. Instead, they brought fingers dusted with soil to their noses and smelled appreciatively.
They all crossed over, and began walking. A farmer pulling a wheelbarrow full of corn stopped and said hello.
“Good day,” said the woman.
His eyes flicked to the bluish figures at her side, but he was a polite farmer and didn’t say anything.
“How’s the corn?”
“Fine,” said the farmer. “Should be a good growing season. Good weather.”
He kept his eyes steady on her face.
“These are my children,” said the woman, giving him permission to look. “Children,” she said, “say hello to the nice farmer.” The four lifted their hands to touch him, and the farmer, familiar best with things of the earth, felt a wave of fluency, inexplicable, wash through him. His own son ran to catch up with them. “Here’s mine,” he said helplessly.
She shook the boy’s hand, the boy who was fixed on looking at the potato children, and who, the way children do, immediately felt entitled to touch their nubbly elbows.
“Do they talk?” asked the boy, and the woman shook her head, no.
“Do they have magic powers?” asked the boy, and she shook her head again.
“They stay,” she told the boy.
The farmer touched each potato child on the shoulder, and then waved goodbye to return to his work. He gave his son the day off. “Enjoy yourself,” he said, surprised by the pang of longing in his voice. The group walked around the county, trailed by the farmer’s boy; most things were very similar here except for the one movie theater showing a Western. In the interest of novelty, they all went to see it. The farmer’s son ate popcorn. The cowboys rode along the prairie. There was a shoot-out at the saloon. The potato babies found it all amazing, and although they could not eat the popcorn, they clutched handfuls of it in their fat fingers until it dribbled in soft white shapes to the floor.
Afterward, the farmer’s son ran home for dinner, and the family of five crossed back over. The sky was darkening with clouds, and halfway home, it began to rain. The woman tried to huddle the four under her arms, but they resisted, and held their bodies freely under the water. They seemed to enjoy it, tilting their faces to the sky. She had never seen them wet before, and rain, falling on their dirty potato bodies, smelled just like Mother at the sink, washing. Mother, who had died so many years ago, now as vivid as actual, scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink before breakfast. How many times had she done that? Year after year after year. Lighting the new fire of the morning. Humming. Her skirt so easy on her waist. Her hands so confident at the sink. They were that memory, created. Holding their potato hands up, they let the rain pour down their potato arms, their potato knees and legs, and the woman breathed in the smell of them, over and over, as deeply as she could. For here was grandmother, greeting her grandchildren, gathering them in her arms, and covering their wide faces with kisses.
The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers
Let’s face it. The dead bodies were clearly acts of easy murder, done by the husband to the wife, then the wife to the husband. I found them face-to-face, cold, on the living-room carpet. There is nothing here to solve. The only mystery I can see I have addressed in my report, which will soon be on the desk of my superior, and has to do with the number of salt and pepper shakers in a household of two people. Fourteen seems to me excessive. That, in my opinion, is the living core of this mystery. If you want a motive, I will write it out: the husband hated his wife because she had stopped speaking to him years ago; the wife hated the husband because he was stupid with their money. All this has been verified by various neighbors, relatives, and friends. No one I spoke to was particularly shocked by the double murder, seemingly planned on the same day which, if nothing else, seems to show a sense of kinship between the two. But! No one, including the neighbor, the doctor, and the bosses, understood why two people who paid a live-in chef to the very edge of their budget, and whose blood pressure kept climbing up the ladder into the red zone, would collect salt and pepper shakers, in ceramic, wood, glass, and metal. Does this mystery put anyone at risk? No. Will I get reprimanded again for not sticking to the outlines of the report? Of course. But I believe that mysteries surface in unexpected forms, and if I am to be a genuine investigator, then I must follow what I feel needs investigation.
I spent the night in their house staring at the rows of salt and pepper shakers while the bodies were being examined at the morgue. The cook was away for the night, and I slept in the guest bedroom, on top of the comforter, not moving any evidence but just resting and listening, as the only way to get a true feel of a house and its residents is to stay in it overnight. This model was fairly standard for the neighborhood: one story, ranch style, two bedrooms and an office. The pictures on the walls were restful landscapes, and in the guest room, I slept beneath a watercolor of horses running. Every piece of furniture and decor was slippery to the mind and would not stick. I can hardly recall the sofa or the chairs, so unobtrusive was their style, and so involved was I with examining those shakers. Several pairs were masterfully crafted, with zigzag patterns of mahogany and oak, or cut diamonds of crystal, and must have cost quite a pile. One was a humorous set, each a green ceramic frog: salt with a cane, pepper with a hat. Each held varying levels of grain. The house grew so quiet that I could hear the movement of cats next door, paws treading softly on the sidewalk.