Winter Run (12 page)

But even then in the sudden, slow coil of his mind, he must have begun the shift from life to death, begun to make the connection between the dead doe and the dead dogs—and old Bat. And he must have heard again the professor’s words:
All things pass in their time, Charlie.

You can see Charlie bursting into tears of outrage, saying,
No!
to the dead mule lying before him, with her tongue hanging out and already beginning to go dry, and her milky eye looking up like a huge marble.

So just as he had done after he saw the dogs kill the doe, he started up the hill for Matthew, who had seen lots of dead things, including people, and would know what to do. Charlie found him milking, sitting on the little stool, his cap pushed back against the early summer heat. And just as before, when Charlie smelled the cow and heard the milk swishing in the bucket, he came to his senses and told his story. “She’s dead!”

Then silence, except for the slow buzz of a wasp and the splashing of the milk and the chewing of the cow. Matthew gazed steadily at Charlie with his dark eyes—eyes that had turned bloodshot many years before, as if the accumulated burden of all they had seen had at some point suddenly burst the tiny vessels in the whites.

“She had to die, Charlie. That’s what happens. You know that. She had to die.”

Sobbing, almost unable to speak, Charlie said, “What are we going to do with her? We can’t just leave her there.” And again: “What will we do with her? … Not pull her over the hill to the boneyard. She’s not a cow! She’s old Bat!”

Then Matthew said softly, “Charlie, go home and get your breakfast. Soon as I finish milking, I’ll call down to the store. Most likely Leonard will be there. In a while we’ll figure out what to do.”

At nine o’clock Matthew arrived with Leonard. Robert Paine was also with them. Robert had been on his way to sickle the honeysuckle off the bank below Mrs. White’s garden next to the church when he heard the news from Matthew that old Bat had died and Charlie was going to be a problem. So Robert said to heck with the bank. He was going to see what that crazy white boy would do. They got out of the pickup, three black men dressed in bib overalls with leather baseball caps on, even though it was June, and blue work shirts. They stood next to the truck waiting for Charlie. When Charlie came out of the house they went down the lane to the garden patch, crossed the little irrigation ditch, and walked over to the mule. Her dry tongue was hanging farther out of her mouth, touching the ground, and a single fly buzzed around her head.

Leonard spoke first. “Well, Matthew, I reckon you need to carry me home so I can get the team and pull this dead mule back over the hill to the boneyard. She’ll sure start to stink if she stays here. And I know
Miz Lewis don’t want no stinking mule this close to her house.”

Matthew pushed his cap back even farther. “I don’t know,” he said. “This was a right special mule. Don’t you reckon we ought to bury her?”

“Do what?” barked Leonard. “Bury her? What you talking about bury her? I ain’t digging no hole to bury that huge old mule in and her with only one eye to boot! Dig a hole, I reckon!”

Robert let out a snort. He said later that he knew this was going to be good, because although Matthew Tanner was a physically powerful man, not even he would have had any idea of burying that mule single-handed. And it was a mighty favor to ask two grown men, white or black, to help bury a mule that ought to be drug over the hill where she belonged and forgot about—just because some skinny white boy whose family didn’t even own any land wanted him to.

“Professor James—,” Matthew began, but Leonard interrupted.

“I ain’t studying on no Professor James, Matthew. If he wants that mule buried, then let him come do it his self. I ain’t doing it, period.” Leonard would never have spoken to Professor James like that to his face, but Leonard was under the strain of an outrageous idea that looked like it might actually take hold and he was out of control.

After a period of silence, Matthew, with Charlie gripping his sleeve, shifted his stance, looked right at Leonard and Robert and said, “Professor James is in
New York City doing a speech, but he’s taking the night train. He’ll be home first thing in the morning. We’ll just wait till then. She won’t start to stink too bad before then … We’ll just let it be for now.”

Again, silence. There was staring back and forth, but no contest. Matthew stood still, quiet. People—black and white—respected Matthew. That is, they did what he said, and not just because he worked for Professor James.

When Matthew got back from taking the men to the store, Charlie was waiting, his face splotched from dried tears. He said, “Why don’t we get Johnny Griggs’s backhoe? You know that thing that dug the ditch at the Esso station. That thing could dig the hole in nothing flat, and then she’d be buried and wouldn’t have to be drug up the lane and over the hill to the boneyard by her neck and the hair skinning off and all. Anyway, there hasn’t been anything put in that place for years. Why should she?” Then he started to cry, clutching Matthew’s sleeve as he always did in an emergency—standing in the early June heat: the almost frail, white boy and the black man on whom so many of us depended.

“Now Charlie, you listen here. She’s dead and ain’t nothing going to bring her back. She wouldn’t know nothing about it if we was to drag her over the hill, she being dead …”

“But
we
would,” Charlie choked out. “
We
would know about it. And it would be like her life hadn’t meant anything if we don’t bury her. It would be like
we forgot what she did when she turned the wild dogs, and when she used to get out and stand on top of a hill watching things out of her one eye, and when she snatched that tomato right out of Miss Farnley’s grocery sack and we all laughed…. If we don’t bury her, it will be like she never lived.” He stopped. He was out of breath. But the final recognition of the situation had set in. His mind had turned all the way around. And now it was time to do something. “What about the backhoe, Matthew?” he asked.

“The backhoe!” Matthew said. “Lord only knows what it would cost to get that machine out here to bury a dead mule. It don’t make sense. Just wait. When I meet the professor at the train in the morning, I’ll try to talk him into getting a gang together to dig the hole.”

After it was all over, we realized that there was plenty of warning that Charlie was going to do something. No sooner had Matthew said he had to go to the co-op for dairy feed, Charlie went home and told his mother he was going to walk to the village. Charlie set out with shoes and a shirt on. Mr. Dudley, who was postmaster and owned the store, saw Charlie standing outside the post office door, reading the bus schedule posted on the wall, against his rule that he could not read in the summer.

Charlie walked over to the bus stop. The town was still small and the village smaller so it was not unusual for him to go to town by himself for a dentist
appointment or the like. He was early for the next bus. Leonard’s cousin, Frank Maupin, saw him standing at the stop and pulled over to ask if he wanted a ride to town. Charlie said yes, thank you, that would be nice.

The word of old Bat’s death and the argument over her burial had gotten around. Frank said he was sorry that she had died, knowing how partial Charlie was to her. But she was dead now and Charlie should just let them drag her over the hill to the boneyard the way it always used to be done with dead stock.

“She’s not dead stock,” Charlie said in a tight voice. “She is Bat, the mule …” His voice trailed off un-characteristically. Frank glanced over at Charlie; the boy appeared to him to be really pale and he looked as if he was gritting his teeth. Frank also noticed the shoes and the shirt.

“Where do you need to go in town, Charlie?”

“Could you drop me off at Eighth and Main, please?” Charlie replied. “I need to see Dr. Stokes for my shots.”

Now Frank knew that Dr. Stokes’s office was a good five blocks from Eighth and Main. But Charlie seemed so sure of himself, Frank just let him off without giving it any more thought.

Griggs Construction at that time owned a dump truck in which Johnny hauled his daddy’s old Ford tractor with a scrape blade that he used to finish his excavating jobs. Behind the truck he pulled a trailer with the pride of his life on board: a brand new fifty-horsepower Allis-Chalmers tractor with a Woods backhoe
on the back. It was the first and only one in the county. He had a track loader but it stayed parked in the yard behind the office much of the time now that he had the backhoe.

Johnny’s family lived on a small farm that they had owned for three generations and from which they could not quite scratch a living. So in addition to farming, Johnny’s father had worked at Hick’s Silk Mill for most of his adult life to keep the family and the farm together.

Johnny had enlisted in the navy in ’42 and because he was good with tractors he ended up in the Seabees building airfields on Pacific islands. When the war was over, he came home, borrowed five thousand dollars with his daddy’s farm as collateral, bought the equipment, and proceeded to make a success of himself. Mainly he dug basements for the new houses springing up in the county as the university began to expand and businesses from the north moved in.

Then the first all-hydraulic backhoe attachments became available. This was the machine Johnny had wished for in the Pacific, but the war was over before they were ready for the market. Now, if he had a bigger tractor with the backhoe attached, he could expand his business. The bank lent him another five thousand. Johnny figured out what he had to get to make his payments and some profit—twenty-five dollars an hour. No one had ever heard of such a price for a single piece of machinery. Also, the backhoe was a whole new thing. Nobody was sure what it could do.
Johnny stayed busy with the other equipment, but business for the backhoe was slow, because drain fields were still dug by hand. He wasn’t getting enough jobs to make the payments. He was worried.

But you would never have guessed it. He always wore khakis—pants and shirt—short sleeves in the summer, long sleeves in winter. He also wore aviator’s dark glasses. He looked like a “can-do” man. He had smooth, tanned skin over heavy muscles, and a square, well-boned face.

“Well, hi Charlie,” he said when Charlie stepped into his office. “What are you doing here? … Look at that, you have shoes on.”

Charlie started right in with his usual urgency. “Johnny, I’ve got a job for the backhoe. Have you heard about old Bat? She died this morning, early. At the garden patch next to our house. We need to bury her. Professor James would want her buried, but he is in New York City giving a speech and won’t be home until tomorrow morning. We can’t wait that long because she’ll start to stink, and it would take a whole gang of people to dig a hole for her. And no one wants to do it. So you need to bring the backhoe. I’m sure Professor James will pay for it. I know he would want her to be buried. You’re always saying you need jobs for that thing so people will get used to having it around. This job is perfect. But we better get going. This is an emergency! How long will it take you to dig the hole?”

Johnny thought about it. He knew that Charlie was
hardheaded when an idea took hold of him, everyone knew that. But it was the truth that it would be a good way for people to see the backhoe in action. If he did it, he and Charlie would pass the store and people would notice them and want to come and watch old Bat get buried by the wonderful new machine …

Actually, they stopped at the store for a soda. Charlie was getting anxious but Johnny insisted. It was like advertising. Charlie had taken his shoes off the minute he got into the dump truck, so when he walked into the store, he looked normal except for his color, which was too pale. Johnny started telling folks what was happening. Mr. Dudley poked his head around the corner of the room and listened, glancing back and forth between Charlie and Johnny. He hardly ever left the store/post office, but he always knew what was going on.

It was one-fifteen when they drove up the lane to the Corn House, past the rock where Charlie had seen the dogs kill the doe. It was a tight fit for a dump truck.

Matthew had gotten back with five bags of dairy feed for the milk cow at one o’clock. He drove the pickup down to the little milking barn to unload. As he was finishing, he heard a tractor start up. He thought it must be the echo from Mill Creek Farm, which was owned by rich people from the north and had big tractors. By the time he got back to the gate, he knew it was no echo. When he was halfway down
the lane from the big house to the Corn House, he saw the backhoe with Johnny in his aviator glasses taking up the first bucketful of dirt. Off to the right he saw three pickups and a jeep coming up the lane past the rock.

As Matthew got to the foot of the hill, Gretchen called from the house to find out what was going on.

“Nothing wrong, Miz Lewis, we’re just burying old Bat. That’s all.”

Matthew broke into a trot, and at fifty yards he started yelling, something he never did. He seldom used bad language either.

“Charlie Lewis, what in hell are you doing? And where did you get that goddamn backhoe?”

Charlie looked up at Matthew and for a second was scared. But he knew Matthew’s broad face in all its looks, and after a glance he knew for sure that it would be all right. Matthew would let it happen. And even though he was almost twelve and had shot up to five foot four over the spring, Charlie took hold of Matthew’s sleeve once again. So they watched—there in the unused garden patch with the sun high in the early summer sky and the multiflora rose and honeysuckle coming to bloom and the paradise trees in full leaf overhead.

Johnny dug, and piled the dirt on the side opposite from Bat. The tractor belched away as the throttle governor cut in and out.

By quarter of two, there were twenty people, black and white, standing in the lane watching. No one
crossed the old barbed-wire fence into the garden patch for a closer look.

Then Robert Paine and Leonard drove up in Mr. Dudley’s pickup. Mr. Dudley might not leave the post office himself, but when Robert came running down across the railroad because he had heard the news, Mr. Dudley told him where Leonard was and to go get him and get up there to see what was happening. Leonard was so excited that he danced across the garden patch as if he were on hot coals. “What’s going on, Matthew?” he demanded harshly.