In a Shallow Grave Read online

Quintus was making me drink some bouillon as strong-tasting as the sweat off a horse.

  “He’s waiting in the next room,” Quintus finally announced. “He spent the night in my room.”

  “How many nights is this he’s been gone?” I inquired.

  “Well, ah, let me see,” Quintus pondered. “Four.”

  “I been hovering four nights then . . . I’ll be God­damned.”

  Daventry came in. He looked all dolled up, and sheepish, and troubled, but I felt as exhausted as if I had lifted a horse and dray.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said to that look on my face.

  “You’re a fucking liar.”

  “But she wanted me to, Garnet.”

  “And you mean to tell me, you big stiff, you didn’t then?”

  “I don’t think she really wanted it,” he went on.

  I began to doubt if I was awake or still under the hypodermic, but I know now I was awake all right.

  “I don’t know how to tell you, Garnet,” he mumbled on.

  “Well, don’t wear yourself out in trying.”

  “She is though in love with me. That’s for sure.”

  “Aha, good. Well, it was your beautiful letter done it, and your general overall appearance.”

  “All she wanted to do was look at me naked, she said, for the time being.”

  I raised up on my left elbow at that, but it give out right away and I fell back on the matress.

  “I stripped for her, since she wanted that, and she kissed me all over. She nearly drove me mad then, but she wouldn’t go beyond the kissing and feeling up . . . I ran out, but I couldn’t come home here . . . I stayed in some . . . old deserted crumbling dance hall . . .”

  Daventry didn’t understand, nor did Quintus, nor did I why I screamed so, I got up and as I did I fell through the open window onto the lawn below. It was a wonder I didn’t kill myself, but the concussion made me feel better. They carried me in.

  My grief, after I thought about it, was of course that he had discovered my secret. I didn’t want anybody to go to my ruined dance hall. Here he had taken my girl away from me in a worse way than if he had fucked her, and now he had stolen my secret.

  I was sick then for about a month, and after that I got up and was strong again and decided I would live. But the next day they showed me the foreclosure notice. We was to have to vacate my grandfather’s and my great-grand-father’s house.

  “See here. I will get you the money, Garnet,” Daventry told me while rubbing my feet.

  While I was studying the foreclosure and dispossession papers which Mrs. Gondess had sent me, and was wondering what I would do with all my furniture, or rather my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s furniture, when I should be thrown out on the road, I was eyeing a strange long ancient limousine drawing up in the front driveway that looked like it was from the time of the ’twenties, or out from a museum, and this tall black gent gets out. I thought for a while I had smoked the wrong kind of grass, which by the way Daventry had brought. He said he only took it up after he became a murderer, and I noticed it didn’t agree with him too much, so he left it all for me, but since I have these pills that the doc left, I don’t use it, and it has all gone to Quintus.

  All the same this black man was coming up the road to my house step by step, as slow and self-possessed as if he had taken that walk every day of his life and belonged on my property to boot, and I could hear my breathing getting louder and louder just like it does before I have a spell. Then I heard him ring the front-door bell, which I haven’t heard rung for I don’t know how long. This trumpet-clarion made the birds all stop singing and must have been carried to any boats at sea. Quintus stood up with a big book in his hand but I motioned him to stand right where he was, and I went to the front door and was about to say “Good evenin’ ” when the arrival sang out, “Is Quintus Isham within?”

  He was lordly and never looked at me once, but kept his eye on the wren house over the arch of the door.

  “Quintus Pearch you mean,” I amended his question.

  “Is he within?”

  “Well,” I said, disgusted, “why don’t you come in and see,” and I opened the screen, he hesitated a while, pulling on one of his coat sleeves, and then he entered my house and without warning he acted almost hamstrung, there was certainly suddenly something wrong with his knees, which buckling, brought him to sit down before I could invite him.

  “Quintus Isham Pearch.” Our visitor stretched out his hands toward my applicant, and then gave a half-lunge up from the chair as Quintus cautiously drew near him.

  “Dear son,” the visitor continued, not quite risen up from the chair, “I am the Reverend Spinney from Three Oaks . . .”

  As Quintus gazed fearful at the Reverend struggling to rise from his half-sitting position, my own sorrows all sort of vanished, for I could presage what was about to over­take him as one foresees the bad ocean storm that is to come from some tiny little warning, like the way a spider weaves its web.

  “I have tried repeatedly to reach you for days . . . I had no idea indeed you had left home and mother . . .”

  Reverend Spinney had now risen to his full height, and towered above Quintus in a wavering toppling manner. He folded his arms and his mouth set hideously.

  In considerable confusion I sat down and motioned Quintus to do the same in the little chair beside me, which he gradually was able to do.

  The Reverend from his finally achieved height gave me one sweep of a look as if to be sure he had seen me right the first time on the front porch, he stopped short again after this examination of my countenance, cleared his throat, and then leaning over Quintus and touching his forehead got out, “I am the bearer of the saddest news one man can impart to another. Your beloved mother is dead. We have translated her remains from the Heytesbury Fu­neral Parlor to her own domicile, where we have been so long awaiting you, her only son and heir. The services will begin, Quintus Isham,” he disentangled his left hand from his right, drew out a timepiece which might almost have passed for an alarm clock for all the noise it made when out of his shiny purple-black vest pocket, “services due to start at twelve noon this day.”

  I remembered what Quintus had read to me then about the fact that at twelve noon we have no shadow and it is then the Power of Evil has jurisdiction over us, and I looked over at him, but his face had a sort of grin like that really means, and what he also was in store for.

  Reverend Spinney looked away briefly from the bereaved son to half-look at me, almost as if he knew what I was thinking about.

  “Shall we pray then, gent’men?” The preacher bowed his head, and waited, but only Quintus got up, and kneeled down, and the Reverend waited a bit more and then realizing, I guess, I wasn’t going to follow suit spoke on the subject of how short a day we have, like the flowers, quick to bloom, quick to be cut down, and so on. I don’t recollect what else he said because I was still too provoked by the way the Reverend had walked right in my house like I was going to lose my property, and who knows, maybe this black Reverend was going to buy it out from my hands, but then my attention was brought back to Quintus. His whole body was shaking like he had malaria, and the Reverend irritated me still more then because he did not seem to notice the state Quintus was in, but then all of a sudden while my mind had been on something else Quintus was standing up and talking, saying, I don’t know if I can attend the services at such short notice, Reverend. You see . . .”

  “Why, whatever do you mean by that, son?” the Reverend Spinney wondered, throwing his head way back and letting us see a set of teeth entirely gold through his open mouth.

  “My friend Garnet here,” Quintus turned to me and I only needed to give him one glance to know he was never going to be the same boy again, “my friend here is near . . . near . . . Garnet is a very sick man, Rev . . . He’s a vet, you know, and has nobody to tend him . . .”

  “I’ll go with you to your mother’s funeral, Quintus, so don’t worry any . . .” />
  I went off then into the back part of my house, and let him take leave of the preacher. I fished out a bottle of bonded rye up from a cupboard nobody knew about and then I walked on out again past Quintus, acting as if I didn’t notice how he was shaking even more now that the Rev had gone, and I got some ice, and brought him a big tumbler full of liquor, and handed it to him.

  “You ought to let it all out, Quints,” I said after he had swallowed a big mouthful. “Don’t hold back your grief.”

  “You can’t go to the funeral,” Quintus said.

  “Why can’t I?” I turned on him scolding.

  “Can you?” He sort of grinned with the new expression on his face. The whites of his eyes was red like someone had swatted him with a towel, but there was no water in them.

  We took the bottle of rye along in case one of us (this was my idea) was taken bad, I wasn’t sure which one would be first, and we got into my used cream-colored Oldsmobile, and we drove to Three Oaks, which though not too far is a place I had never been to. Actually, all it amounts to is a gasoline station, a church, four houses, a silo, a big field of something wavy and green growing, and this Civil War cemetery full of blacks they claim fought on the side of the Confederacy.

  Quintus’ mother’s house was the best house of the four. They had black crepe all over the pillars, there was gladi­olus on the front porch in big silver vases, an American flag waving, and inside in the front sitting room was the orange casket, and lots of white-haired black ladies in big hats sit­ting on camp stools.

  Quintus didn’t greet anybody, and motioned me to follow him into one of the rooms off the hall. I could see by the way he didn’t speak to anybody what I had feared from the first might happen, that is he would go all to pieces, and I hoped to God I would not have one of my spells and let both of us down. If only he would cry, he might get through the funeral, but no he wouldn’t. So I made him drink some more of the rye right from the bottle, and then we went back to the mourning room and sat down on camp stools.

  “Quintus,” I said after having started to speak twenty times, “you have got to go up and look at your ma in the casket, you can’t just sit here with me a stranger.”

  “By and by,” he said.

  My eye was running over the flowers, which I guess had been mostly sent by white folks his mother had worked for all her life, and all of a sudden I saw this big bouquet of roses and lilies with the card Georgina Rance, with deepest sympathy.

  While the choir in the back of the house was singing one of the many hymns they comforted us with, without a word, I sort of lifted Quintus up by his arm pits, and then led him up to his mother’s casket. Everybody else had their eyes closed in prayer, they didn’t appear to notice. Quintus looked down on his mother’s face, but he couldn’t look more than once, and he took hold of my hand as if he was falling from a precipice, it was that kind of grip, and we went back to the camp stools.

  I think we was in that room for four hours, only it seemed fifty, but gradually sort of, to my relief, though I knew this augured ill, Quints got just like a rag doll, I never saw anybody change so, and his forehead which had been as smooth as a sheet that morning suddenly was wrinkled and careworn like an old man of eighty. So gradually, but with all kinds of queer feelings, but not knowing what else to do, and afraid he would keel over without I did it, in front of everybody I took his right hand in my right hand and held it tight as I could against my breast and I sensed he appreciated and wanted this, well, after all he had been rubbing my feet and waiting on me and reading to me all these past weeks, and he was the only one who had never cared that I looked like death itself.

  But at the graveside, after the Reverend Spinney had read those most terrible words, words I never knew or had forgot that human beings would say to one another in public, such as we are short in time in this life and cut down like grass, are only after all a shadow and dust to dust and ashes to ashes, and then they threw clods of earth on the coffin, and afterwards, Quintus would not get into the car and be driven to my house or his, and I was thinking lucky Quintus, at least they are not going to foreclose on him, when all at once I realized what had happened, the day was coming to a close and the funeral party had finally give up and left us behind in the cemetery because he would not go with the funeral party, and then at last it hap­pened, so I could relax a little myself, he was crying and hollering like a wild man, his spit flying out from his wide-open mouth, kneeling on his mother’s fresh-dug grave, for he could be himself alone with me, he didn’t mind saying or doing anything around me. I let him scream and holler for a long time, and when his tears came, I let them gush and rush and flow for as long as I thought it did him any good. Then I went up to him and kneeled also on the grave, and he tried to turn his face away from me, as if it still had any secret from me, and I slapped him a little, and then harder, I brought his shoulders up square and looked at his closed eyes with the eyelashes as wet as a drowned animal’s fur, and I brought out the bottle of rye which was getting ever so little low, and said, “Come on now, Quints, put this between your teeth now.”

  “Oh, Daventry, a heavy blow has fallen upon our house, which nobody could have foresaw!”

  I said this upon reading the eviction notice again from the sheriff after we was home from Quints’ ma’s funeral.

  “What do you want to call on him for,” Quintus won­dered, “when here he stole your girl from you . . . ?”

  “Well, let me see . . . Why do I call on him . . . ? You think he’s a pretty bad character, do you . . . ?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow he took your girl from you.”

  “Well, I pushed him over the precipice though . . . He didn’t want to go to her . . . But the thing I hold against him most is he discovered my secret.”

  Quintus watched me from the kitchen where he had sat down by the calendar, one of those big shiny things with pictures of Bible characters in robes which was put out by a company that sells chicken feed.

  “We have to have all the furniture out of this house by next Tuesday so that the dispossession can take place,” I reminded him, walking out into the kitchen to say this, and then walking back into the sitting room.

  “What secret are you talking about?” Quintus’ voice sounded sort of sly, and I was glad to note he didn’t speak so sobby and bawling anymore. I believe, as a matter of fact, I was feeling worse by now than he, but I always feel worse than anybody else on account of I’m not supposed to be among the living at all, or as the doc always kept harping, “Consider it like this, you were spared by some unexplained breaking of natural laws.”

  I could have bitten my tongue off now for ever mentioning it in the first place. The secret, I mean.

  “Oh, forget it, Quints,” I flared up as he asked again what it was. “Let’s think about dispossession . . .”

  Quintus had changed all right since the funeral. I knew he would never be the same as before with me because something had happened between us from the moment old Reverend Spinney materialized to give us the bad news, and then something had happened as we sat in the little room next to his mother’s coffin. Put it like this, we had a claim on one another from that time on.

  “I thought you would want to share everything that bothered you with me,” Quintus said. “That’s what you said when you was so sick one night . . .”

  “That so?” I mumbled. Had I been able to blush I would have then.

  “O.K. That was in delirium though, I reckon, Quints,” I said after a few moments’ thought.

  “What’s the difference, Garnet?” That was the first time he ever called me by my Christian name.

  “Well, see here, Quints. If you don’t know the difference between delirium . . . and . . .” But I stopped because I felt he was right, at least in my case there is no difference. I have gone through so many dark valleys there just is no difference . . .

  “All right, Quints, now you spill it . . .”

  “Just know that I know, Garnet . . .”
r />   “All right, what do you know? . . . That I killed a hun­dred men . . . That I harbor a desperado here under my dispossessed roof, who took my girl . . . That I am a dead man who goes on living . . . Come on, spill my secret . . .”

  “Don’t you bait me, Garnet, or I’ll go home for good now . . .”

  Of course he was not serious, but what he had said struck me. This Quintus had a roof and a home he could go to, and I would soon be lower than white trash, cer­tainly lower than any black man around here, because my land would be gone . . .

  He came over to the chair I was sitting in now and watched me.

  “You all right, Garnet?”

  “Yeah, Garnet is all right. After all, I can’t die, can I, so how can I be but all right . . . ? If you don’t tell me my secret, though, pretty damn quick you may be my hundred-and-first victim . . .”

  He sat down in his old lazy-bones loose-jointed way and began unlacing my shoes.

  “Will you let me rub your feet, Quintus, after I am dispossessed?” I inquired.

  “Oh, I might oblige you on that score, Garnet.”

  Quintus was already rubbing my feet but with an absentminded sober look on his face that was new to him.

  I touched the hair of his head for the first time, and he jumped.

  “Tell me what you know, Quints.”

  “Daventry don’t love the Widow . . .”

  “Oh no? But he lays her just the same according to you . . .”

  “It ain’t love.”

  “All right, what’s my secret if you know so damn much?”

  “I ain’t the only one who knows now, mind you,” Quintus began. “Say, your feet ain’t so cold today, you must be improving your circulation.”

  “I never knew you to tease before, Quints.” I was touching his hair still more partly through astonishment at how much bear grease he must have put on it that day, but he jerked away from me as though my hands disgusted him.

  “Do you want me to read to you now?” He had put back on my shoes and socks.