In a Shallow Grave Read online

  None of the applicants liked anything I did or said and I will not even bother to describe the early ones, none liked anything about me as I say until, well, you wait now.

  There was at least four applicants before my favorite came. And let me warn you, I do not believe he was from this world. I believe he was sent by the Maker of All Things perhaps, if such exists. I do not say that he brought me total joy, but he was the ideal applicant.

  But just before he resigned, packed, and lit out, James Powell had sat down, and said a thing which considerably lightened my heart. “Garnet,” he began, in that pained cautious weary-with-sin look preachers often put on, “Widow Rance reads your letters and keeps them.”

  And before I could ask any details concerning this hurricane sentence, he was gone. I ran out to the big road after him, but his old jalopy had already carried him away. I stood in the big road for quite a spell, and some people going by then in a big car with a New York license took one look at me and said, “Where in hell are we if they are all going to look like him now?”

  These remarks about my appearance still hurt me at this stage of my life, but not like they did when I first come out of the Army, when people would stop on the street in Washington, D.C., and scream or retch, and I would go back to the Army hospital and groan and clench my hands and tear my shoelaces out of my shoes. Usually the doc was watching me by the door, and would repeat the same thing, “These things pass, Garnet, and you are in the land of the living, remember, while all your buddies are gone.”

  But Doc is not marked with the coating of death as I am, and my buddies are at least all safe-dead, while I have been allowed to live but with the appearance of one from the under-kingdom.

  “Doc,” I said, now that I had him engaged in conversation, “how do I look to other folks, do you think?”

  Doc give me his speech then again about bone structure, height, posture, and my hair, yes, isn’t this sort of a joke too on me, my hair is the kind of blond hair that looks like corn tassel, and in the right light looks almost white, so that I remember my first-grade teacher had said, “You have hair a girl would die for,” and whilst everything else turned the color of mulberries, my hair was untouched by when I was blown up in the war, and so it has made me look even more outlandish.

  My education had stopped at the eighth grade because I was incorrigible, but I had what my mother said was the bad habit of reading, but I always read books nobody else would turn more than a page of, and my knowledge is and was all disconnected, unrelated, but the main book I always kept to even after my explosion-accident was an old old one called Book of Prophecies. From it comes my only knowledge of mankind now. I read and have read to me, however, nearly everything, my house is all books and emptiness.

  But James Powell’s words stayed with me—I have said this before—like big smoke rings from the cigarette billboard ads. I could see and taste his words,

  WIDOW RANCE READS YOUR LETTERS AND KEEPS THEM.

  I hurried to the spinet desk, I put the dippen in the violet ink, I praised the Lord almost, though my Lord you must understand I see as a kind of doglike man with a sad face Who watches the gate here, He never says anything to me, He knows my suffering, and He knows that my buddies are not as dead as I, and He knows I must walk upon the earth for a spell before going down into the total mulberry night. Anyhow, I wrote then this:

  My Darling Girl,

  All that I ask is that you allow me to tell you you are on my heart and mind. We will never meet again unless you should go so far as to invalidate your first edict, that I was never to darken your door, never to speak to you, and if possible never appear before you in light or darkness. I will respect your wishes, but allow me to write to you, I cannot say what is on my mind or you would think I pitied myself, the great sin according to the Big World. I do not pity myself, but I know I am as bad off as a man might ever get and yet I cling to life in you. Allow me this.

  Your servant, Garnet Montrose

  There at the door like sent by providence was the egg-man Edgar Doust. He had the practice of never looking at me even indirectly. He counted out the eggs, or the chicken wings, sometimes said, “Garnet, we have pullet eggs today, want any?”

  “And milk, Edgar,” I would remind him, “you always forget the milk. I have a commission I’d like to ask of you, Edgar,” I said, for I spoke half in Virginia language now and half in language out of the Book of Prophecies, and also occasionally from the History of the Papacy, which I forgot to mention maybe because it is the least favorite of my books.

  “And that would be?” Edgar Doust inquired.

  “As soon as I lick the envelope,” I said, hurrying back to the spinet desk and putting my letter to her in it and then licking harder, “Would you deliver this message to the Widow Rance?”

  “Let me tell you something,” Edgar began.

  He was a short, stubby man, came only to my breastbone, for as the doc always said when I felt I was too much a goblin to be counted among mankind, “Remember your height, Garnet. You have the great bone structure of the English-speaking race . . .” (I am six foot four in my stocking feet).

  “Now see here,” Edgar was going on, starting to touch my shoulder and then drawing back suddenly. “You have scared that poor woman nearly into her grave. She has a fear of you that is killing her. She may even pull up stakes and move away.”

  “No, Edgar,” I began proudly. “Let me tell you something. I have news that puts your cocky little know-it-all palaver to shame . . .”

  “What’s in this letter then that I am to bear?” Edgar Doust wanted to know, drawing back.

  “Nothing anybody need be ashamed of having writ or to receive,” I tossed back at him.

  “All right then,” he said, starting to saunter off, and I handed him his money for the poultry, milk, and eggs. “But if I hear you has put anything low-down in this letter, and I am the bearer of it . . . watch out!”

  I am in such an absentminded distant frame of mind that people often say goodbye to me or give me whole long speeches and then leave and I haven’t heard what they said at all or noticed they have even left. Then suddenly I come out from this brown study and I am sitting looking at vacant chairs. When young men are not reading to me or rubbing my feet, I sometimes say aloud the names of my buddies who were blown up with me. Being Virginians their names are all sort of like mine, names city people say they find odd or made-up when here they are the real names of this country. Still they are hard, I guess, to pronounce for outsiders.

  But Widow Rance, though she loathed and despised me and would rather meet an army of black spiders than see me behind the hollyhocks, here she had give me a reprieve by her kind words issued through that conceited snot James Powell. He done that one good thing anyhow, given me a shred of hope. Though dead I could tell one person some of my thoughts even though she forbade me to tell them face to face as she would had I been counted among the living.

  It must have been the middle of June, because the bob-whites were making such a fuss in the woods as it was their mating time, and they were hollering to one another, and this black fellow about eighteen came up and rapped on the screen door. I don’t know whether he had heard of me or not, evidently not really for he started to speak as I stood slightly shaded by the screen, holding the Book of Prophecies in my right hand, and commencing to lift the latch and saying, “What you want?”

  He started to speak again, his tongue moving and his lips twisting, but no words came out the second time either.

  “Mrs. Pettison wonders if you wants the goats,” he finally got out after looking every which way when he spoke.

  “Why, what does she want to give them to me for?” I inquired.

  “Old Mr. Pettison is dead, and she can’t keep them no more,” he replied. “She gonna move to Richmond.”

  “What are you, their hired man?”

  I opened the door and let him in.

  We was in the kitchen now, if I recollect accurately, and I in
vited him to sit down partly, I think, so he wouldn’t fall down. There was a sliver in my finger that was causing me no end of pain, and having laid down the Book of Prophecies on the tablecloth, I was trying to work it out with a tiny pair of scissors. When I quit looking in his direction to get this sliver out he got easier with me. I heard him tell me his name after a while, Quintus Pearch.

  “Why I know your folks, Quintus.”

  Just then we both looked up at the same time and saw the goats had come up on the back porch and were looking through the screen.

  “Why there’s five of the buggers, Quintus,” I said. “I don’t know, I never kept goats before . . . What I’m really looking for,” and I studied him a little bit out of the corner of an eye, “is a sort of helper around here for myself . . .”

  Before I knew what had happened, he was working that sliver out from my finger without being asked.

  “Mrs. Pettison’s niece Miss Ledsam must have been the one sent you about the goats, wasn’t it?” I went on talking to keep from screaming as he took out the sliver, for my flesh, you see, all falls away at the slightest pressure, exposing the bones.

  He showed me the sliver now caught in the blades of the scissors.

  I thanked him, and then hurried to get out, “Excuse me, but can you read?”

  “I read, Mr. Montrose.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Anything printed I can run my eye over.”

  “Can you read . . . aloud?”

  “How do you mean that?” Quintus inquired.

  “I mean, if I was to put a book in your hands and I sat on a chair, see, when I’m not well, especially come winter, would you sit and face me and read out loud to me?”

  Quintus thought about this, and then I rushed into the next room, and took down a dusty volume of history and put it in his hands and said, “Read this, why don’t you, any place at all will do.”

  Quintus held the book as if it was as alive as one of the young goats outside, that is the book seemed to struggle in his hands and want down, but he began nonetheless to read very neatly and fluidly from this book writhing in his strong fingers:

  “You shed the blood of my brother on the banks of the Mississippi twenty years ago, and what then? I am here today, thank God, to vindicate the principles baptized in his blood.”

  I took the book from his hands, just as it was about to wiggle out from his grasp, and put it down on the cloth.

  “I could pay you good, Quintus,” I said after complimenting him in my mind on the way he could read, “I’m most desperate for company in the bargain . . . Can you rub cold feet, by the way?”

  “I couldn’t leave Mama,” Quintus finally said. “She most bedridden.”

  “Aha . . . Why don’t you want the goats?” I sort of turned the subject.

  “Well,” Quintus stumbled around, “we don’t want the care of animals now.”

  “Well, I want the goats,” I told him, looking out through the screen.

  One was only a small kid, and I went out on the back porch and picked it up and brought it in. “I want the goats,” I said again, holding the little fellow to me. Its fur was quite damp, and I asked Quintus to reach me a cloth and I wiped him dry. “Why didn’t I think of having goats before?” I said.

  I looked up suddenly and saw that expression on his face that everybody eventually gets when they look at me. We both looked down immediately at the floor.

  “Do you find me so sickening to look at, Quintus?” I said throatily after a long pause.

  “No, sir.”

  “You read good, Quintus . . . Would you read for me in the evening, or maybe rub my feet when they get to be on the ice-cold order?”

  “I could come in the evenings, after I tend to Mama . . .”

  “I’ll pay you good, Quintus.”

  “Tell you what,” Quintus began, standing up, “I could come over most days in the P.M., and do your chores.”

  “I don’t want chores, Quintus. I want somebody to read to me and rub my feet.”

  He looked discontented and troubled.

  “Well, don’t come then, Quintus, don’t come . . . I have to have my feet rubbed, though . . . I’m not trying to . . . you know . . .”

  “I’ll come at four today if you want me to,” he all of a sudden blurted out, and rose.

  “By the way, do you know Widow Rance, Quintus, who lives down the road?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You’re a familiar face to her and all?”

  “Widow Rance knows me, knows Mama, yes . . .”

  “Because the other thing I might ask you, and I don’t know why I forgot it, for it’s way and beyond the most important thing, is to deliver and fetch letters . . . Well, we’ll talk later . . . Till the P.M. then, Quints . . .”

  It’s like I disremember Quintus’ ever coming on that P.M., though, but of course he come, and was to come and go again and was regular about a lot of things, but he didn’t have had to come in a way, because somebody else did.

  Oh, there was other applicants too. I can’t begin to remember all of them, though I have wrote their names down on a slip of paper I keep in the family Bible, but none of them was right, and Quintus might have been too right, but you see this other person came, and that’s the real occasion of me writing down on, slip by slip of paper, this diary in my mind.

  Let me try to say it like this. I thought he was a will-o’-the-wisp when I first laid eyes on him, for we have plenty of them here in the early summer. I had gone to let the goats sleep in one of the little sheds we used to have for sheep in the winter, the goats were making a fuss, I guess, at their strange surroundings, and I paused, after having locked them in, and I looked out toward the ocean, which was still as flat sand, and I saw this motionless something that looked like a light about maybe to go out.

  “Who is that?” I said to this “appearance” which was now leaning on the pine tree as I spoke. “What are you about?” No answer.

  I didn’t need any sign about warning trespassers on my land because I was dreaded more than a hundred riflemen.

  Had my appearance scared the daylights out of whoever was leaning against that tree? I walked slowly over the sloping ground to the hemlock tree. There he was, the trespasser and staring at me with his open blue eyes, with his hair even lighter than mine, and a face that was most winsome except he had, as I was later to understand, no front teeth, which only made him somehow more agreeable, at least younger looking.

  “Are you an . . . applicant?” I inquired at last, as he merely stared in my direction.

  “Go away,” the trespasser finally spoke, and a moment later, “Can’t you leave me be, mister?”

  “Go away, huh?” I chewed my ire. “Do you realize you’re on my property . . . ?”

  “I’ll get in a minute. Give me a chance to catch my breath . . .”

  Just then he slipped and fell to one knee, and I instinctively reached down and lifted him up, and then he caught a full view of my face as I was bending over him and he let out a yell of horror. Before I knew what I had done I had struck him, and I don’t think I have ever struck a man before except in self-defense in all my life, and I mean I really struck him, for the blow brought the blood.

  He kept wiping off the blood and looking at it on his fingers, and paid no attention to my many apologies of “I’m heartfelt sorry, I didn’t mean to, don’t know what come over me.”

  Just then the smallest of the young goats, which had escaped from the shed where I put them, come wandering out and crying. The trespasser stooped down and began petting it.

  “Well, what do you aim to do?” I questioned him at last, my anger sort of returning. “You can’t just stand here . . . Tell you what, I’ll invite you in even though you say you ain’t an applicant . . .”

  He paid me no more attention, absorbed in his attentions with the kid.

  Disgusted with him and his having made me lose control of myself I said, “To hell with you then” and went inside.


  I got all wrapped up after a bit in taking apart an old hall clock that had belonged to my grandfather, and forgot all about the incident in the pine grove.

  I don’t know how much time had slipped by, but I know it was dark, black dark out. I looked up from my sitting room where I was fixing the tiny wires of the clock and seen the trespasser standing at the kitchen screen door still holding the kid in his arms. We stared at one another through that long expanse of rooms as if he was looking at me from the entrance of the world to come.

  Suddenly he reached to open the screen door and came inside with the goat.

  “You can’t bring no animal in here,” I spoke sharply.

  He paid no mind and sat down on the smallest kitchen chair with the kid in his lap. It had gone to sleep under his petting.

  I came rushing then into the kitchen.

  “You have a most irksome way of not answering questions,” I said. “I asked you if you was an applicant and you didn’t deign to answer.”

  “I ain’t an applicant,” he replied, saucy, through his missing front teeth.

  “Where you from then, and what do you want?”

  “Utah,” he said after a deliberate hesitation.

  Then for the first time he looked me straight in the face with his merciless wide-open sky-blue eyes, and then making a terrible sound, dropping the goat, he retched fearfully bending down trying desperately to vomit, but nothing coming up but a few strands of phlegm and water.

  I left the kitchen and stumbled into the big front sitting room, and sat down under an old floor lamp with a shade decorated with tassels. I often played with these tassels when I was upset, but I was too upset now even to have the strength to touch one. In fact I felt then I was going to die. I felt again somehow like I had the day I and my buddies was all exploded together and we rose into the air like birds, and then fell to the erupting earth and the flames and the screams of aircraft and sirens and men calling through punctured bowels and brains. My face was bathed in a film like tears, but it wasn’t tears, it was the sweat of death.