In a Shallow Grave Read online

  “I want to hear you tell me you know what I keep secret, you know that.”

  “All right! All right for you! Daventry and me followed you one night.”

  I closed my eyes and pushed myself away from him. Then I buckled up like I had appendicitis, only I believe it hurt me more.

  “We followed you,” he went on, “slow oh so slow up the cliffs and down past little creeks and junglelike places and unused cowpaths and all, well you know the way after all, and then we seen you go into . . .”

  “. . . The dance hall . . .”

  “. . . Which I never knowed existed anymore and I born and bred here . . . Yeah . . .’ Quintus grabbed my left foot and pulled it over to him and began rubbing the calf, and held it even though I tried to get out of his grasp . . .

  “We watched you through the windows . . .”

  I groaned and cursed like he was tearing out my guts.

  “We seen you dance with yourself under that revolving . . .

  “. . . Moon.”

  “Well, that ain’t what it’s called, but if you say so, all right, moon. You looked good though under those little polka-dot lights revolving all over you . . . You looked like a fine young white man.”

  “Sure, shit.”

  “We was both impressed, Daventry and me. Only Daventry began to bawl. That was when I found out about him.”

  “That he was wanted . . .”

  “Cripes no, Garnet, desperado, wanted, nothing . . . Daventry turned to me and said, ‘I love Garnet. I’ve loved him from the minute I seen him. I never want to leave him.’ ”

  “Quintus,” I started, and I grabbed him by both his ears and held his eyes right up almost to mine, don’t you bullshit me now, after all I’ve gone through . . .”

  Quintus breaknecked away from me, and standing up said, “Why don’t you listen to anything I ever say to you . . . ? That’s why I have to read to you because you won’t never listen . . .”

  “All right.” I began trying to think it over. “He seen me dancing under that moon that gives off polka-dot lights, all right . . .’

  “Well, I’ve told you everything then . . . We know your secret . . .”

  “And you still want to be friends with me, is that it?”

  Quintus stared at me, if not dumbfounded, considerably nonplussed.

  “But your other . . . statement, Quints, must be some barefaced lie to make me feel bad down deep . . .”

  “What statement you mean?” He would not help me.

  “You said Daventry loved me.” It took everything out of me to say this.

  “That’s what he said, yes. He said you was his other self, and he would never part with you.”

  And speaking of the devil, there he come in the front door, Daventry. He looked a lot younger. Well, he had a new suit of clothes on, and this new pink shirt.

  “What’s this I hear about you bein’ dispossessed and evicted by the sheriff?” He went straight to the point and came over to where I was half-falling out of my chair.

  “Why, they can’t do that to you, Garnet . . . I won’t allow them . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said, but avoiding his face as much as I used to think he had avoided mine.

  “No, siree,” Daventry said. “I won’t allow them to throw you out. And you a war hero and all, just let them try . . .”

  “Where are those dispossess papers, by the way?” Daventry wondered, and seeing them on my little spinet desk he gathered them up, and also seeing Quintus’ dime-store reading specs he took them up also and put them on his nose but didn’t like them and laid them down.

  He studied the papers a long long time, while I studied him.

  “Were you a sheep-farmer yourself?” I said out of the blue.

  He looked up quick from the papers. “My dad was,” he replied.

  “Well, then you must have been too, wasn’t you? I mean you must know all about sheep, even if you ain’t what would be called today a shepherd.”

  I was smoking some of his grass now, and he noticed this.

  “Well, nobody called my dad a shepherd,” he spoke emphatically, and he began marking little sections of the dispossess papers with a stub of a Mohawk pencil.

  “But you lived around sheep,” I had to go on. “Did you have sheep dogs?”

  Both Quintus and Daventry looked at me somewhat cautious, puzzled, and a little concerned.

  “Why all at once do you want me to tell you about my life in Utah, Garnet?”

  “I hear you been spying on me in your spare time.” I brought this up now, for my secret having been discovered upset me almost more than anything since the day I found out I would never look like I belonged among the living again, that my inside was my outside, etc.

  Daventry looked at Quintus as if he could have killed him, so I said quickly, “Quintus’ mother has passed away, and we have been to the funeral.”

  “Oh, Quints.” Daventry got up right away and went over to him. “I’m grieved to hear that.” He tried to take Quintus’ hand, but I guess I am the only white man Quintus ever let touch him, come to think of it, so Daventry had to just pat his shoulder four or five times.

  “So I hope you’re satisfied, Daventry.” I went back to my secret, and I believe the grass was doing something to me now.

  “Satisfied as to what?” His voice sounded like a big orchestra of trumpets so that I thought I was going deaf. He stood of course right by me.

  “What are you so interested all of a sudden in me being a shepherd for?” he thundered. “Hey?”

  “Your dad is the shepherd, ain’t it?” I got out. I felt I was going to bawl, so I handed him the joint.

  “There ain’t no shepherds, only ranchers,” Daventry ap­pealed to Quintus in his growing dismay.

  “Well, you slept with my girl and you found out I have this secret place I go to. The ruined dance hall of course is what I mean, with the polka-dot lights. You’ve got every­thing I have. I also understand you are in love with me, though I don’t quite know what you mean by that.”

  Daventry looked so confounded, I’ve never seen a white man look so at sea before, he looked as if he was going to shake his arms and legs off of him the way he flailed around. He would look at Quintus and then at me, and then he would look down at the dispossession papers which he held still in his right hand.

  Finally he sat very deliberately down on the floor, and put his head between his knees.

  “Is there anything more I have or maybe don’t have that you want, Daventry?” I inquired. I don’t know why I was being so mean to him.

  “I don’t really love the Widow Rance, as you call the bitch,” he said.

  “But you went to bed with her, didn’t you?” I said, and the thought of it made me so dizzy I had to hold my own head between my knees at once to keep from keeling over (one of my doc’s many remedies to keep me among the living or at least the conscious, and as a matter of fact I spent most of my time in the hospital with my head be­tween my legs, it did seem).

  “Now you see here, God damn it,” Daventry began, looking up, and had his face changed. Both Quintus and me was hushed to see it. “You look here, will you,” he began, and the spit began to form on his lips like foam. “You set me up with her! You wanted this to happen, and you know it. You made me the bearer of those messages. I never wanted to go near her. Never even heard tell of her. You set me up.”

  He looked so wild then and I remembered he was after all maybe a murderer. But I didn’t care, and had he meant to kill me I wouldn’t have put up a fight to save myself.

  “Sure she’s beautiful, sure she’s luscious, sure she’s like a ripe cherry and all those things Quintus reads to you out of books . . . But I don’t want her, but I had to do it with her because I thought it was your command. Do you hear that? So I did it with her. Again and again, and then some. I am wore out from it, I can tell you. She hasn’t had any loving for so long she can’t remember when, and it all had to come from out of me . . .”

 
His countenance had changed so much that neither Quintus nor me would have recognized him by his face alone, but we might have by his long yellow hair and the way he talked.

  “She thinks you don’t like her,” he said after a while, which was the most astonishing thing I had heard yet. I laughed a little when he said it.

  “Then,” he went on, but looking down at the dispossession papers, “as to spying on you, that’s a damned dirty fucking lie and you know it. We followed you because we was worried about you. Not to get anything on you. After all, Garnet, I have leveled with you, told you I am a wanted man and all, but I killed in self-defense, and on my dad’s land. And finally,” he said, and he was beginning to bawl now, and the spit from his lips flying in every which way, “this little traitor of a Quintus telling tales out of school. Well maybe I said I did love you, so what? Is that any crime . . . ?”

  “But what do you mean by it, Daventry?” I said in a soft voice, but any voice the sound only of a tiny locust leaf blowing through the soft summer air would have been too loud at that moment, for the next second he was at my throat, strangling me, and shouting, “What do you think I meant by it, damn you, can’t I love somebody without me being put on trial for murder?”

  He let loose of me almost immediately then, as I guess he more than realized I had such a thin tie holding me to this world anyhow.

  “I’ll pack and leave now,” he said quietly and went off into his part of the house to get ready.

  I knew then that if I didn’t get up I would never get up again, I knew then though my pride had never been so high, and my spirit so ignoble, I knew if he went I would, yes, I would die at last, and though I wanted to die I didn’t want to die without him, all because mostly of that speech he had just made, no, it was all of him, from the moment I seen him with his yellow hair and no front teeth and his sweet smile looking at me from the jungle of trees, I even liked, to tell the truth, the way he had vomited when he took me in the first time.

  He was tying a bandana around his neck when I got into the room, but he never once looked at me. I went up to him several times, but he paid no more attention to me than if I was his shadow or the hollyhock bush that was looking through the window at him. I fell at his knees not because I had planned to go down on my knees before him, I was as a matter of fact passing out, and knelt to break my fall, but I knew I had to say what I had to say, for if I didn’t I would be done for, so I said, “Don’t you ever leave me, Daventry.”

  “How’s this?” he said, his savage face bearing down on me, and I knew then he had killed.

  “You forgive me before you go, but if you go, Daventry, I think my heart will break. Don’t forgive me if you don’t want to. All I said to you was a lie.”

  “A lie, huh, yeah for once you said it. Worst lie I ever heard.”

  He was looking though at Quintus, who had followed us on back and who I could kind of feel was even more troubled now than when he had been at his own ma’s funeral.

  “Don’t go and leave him, Daventry,” Quintus spoke up. “You can’t desert him now,” he pleaded.

  “You know my secret,” I spoke up, “you know you do.”

  He had just turned to look at me when this new hemorrhage came out of both my ears at the same time, and he and Quintus started toward me, but I didn’t want them to do anything because the pressure that had been building up in my head was leaving me, and all the blood pouring out gave me such a good free feeling just then.

  “It’s all right, I can tell I’m all right,” I told them, “Don’t do nothing just yet. Just get cloths and clean up the mess.” I leaned against the bed and watched them. “But don’t let Daventry out of the house, you hear,” I addressed Quintus, “don’t let him . . .”

  Shortly afterwards when everything quieted down I heard Daventry playing the mouth-organ. Quintus was sitting by me looking through a set of old seed catalogues he had found in the attic, trying to decide, I guess, if he could find anything particular to read to me after what had occurred, and he had begun a few times to read little bits and pieces of paragraphs, like one I remember even now:

  “Varieties of wheat are not the same everywhere, and where they are the same they do not always bear the same names. The most widely known are common wheat and hard wheat . . .”

  I motioned for Quintus to be silent, for what I was hearing was too beautiful. I knowed what it was and I didn’t. It was my mouth-organ of course which Daventry had found and which I hadn’t played for so long, long before I went into the army, but hear how he played it! He made it sound almost like a flute. I remember too he was playing “On the Alamo.”

  Quintus went on pretending he was reading now to himself, but his eyes didn’t really move from one side of the page to the other, and I knew he was listening.

  When Daventry stopped playing we clapped. He came out of the bedroom grinning to beat the band.

  But as I turned away from him owing to being so moved, my face all wreathed in smiles at the hearing of how he could turn an old harmonica into a beautiful solo instru­ment and about to congratulate him through my embarrass­ment and happiness, who do I see but a man at the side door who I recognize as the sheriff.

  I got up and went out to speak to him.

  The sheriff had some more of these legal papers, and I was about to take them from his hand when another hand snatched them from out my grasp. It was Daventry of course.

  “Now you look here, officer . . .”

  I marveled so at him talking up to the law like that when here he must be wanted in I don’t know how many states, or on the other hand, I thought, still marveling at him, maybe he ain’t wanted nowhere, and this talk of him being a murderer is one of his tales, for I was pretty sure by then Daventry was crazy.

  When I left for the Army I did not know one crazy person, but while I was in service I got to know enough for several lifetimes, I got to know more than most doctors ever know in their lives unless they are crazy-specialists. But Daventry was crazy in a way you will never find in any other man. He was divine-crazy or heaven-crazy, I mean God had touched him, for instance when he said he loved me I knew what he meant, but I wanted to play the part of an ordinary soldier from Virginia and spurn him, when the truth of it was I loved him from the beginning but my deformity, my being turned inside out would not allow me at first to see he loved me for what I am. I knew then there was God, and that Daventry had been sent for me, and I knew also he would leave me. That is why I didn’t care anything about what the sheriff said, and this puzzled Daventry, for he knew he was going to leave me, but he wanted me to be left in a safe quiet place, but I didn’t care any more. Of course I still loved the Widow Rance, Georgina, would always love her, but Daventry was more. When he played the harmonica I knew he was not human.

  “You’ve got to fight for your house and land,” Daventry was haranguing me. Our quarrel had long blown over of course. “You can’t let them put you out on the big road with your furniture, Garnet. You served your country. They can’t do this to you. Now you listen to me . . .”

  He told me the strategy we were to take, he mentioned the names of Mrs. Gondess and I heard the sheriffs sur­name several times (Mr. Hespe), but I had taken to smok­ing his grass more than I should have at this time and didn’t pay close attention, which annoyed him.

  “Can’t you do anything with this son of a bitch?” Daventry finally appealed to Quintus.

  “I can’t and I won’t,” Quintus replied, still poring over another catalogue he was stuck on at the moment concern­ing crops and animal husbandry.

  “Then there’s nothing to do but put all his furniture out by the side of the road, for tomorrow they’re coming in . . . Unless I can think up something, that is . . .”

  Daventry’s attention was very gradually and slowly diverted to a recent local newspaper that had been allowed to lie undisturbed and unread on the carpet. His gaze grad­ually became riveted to something in it, maybe a headline. He stooped down to pick it up oh so slow, li
ke he had found a telegram there from his sheriff. I can still see the expression on his face as he looked at something that was printed there and which he roved his eye over in astonished disbelief. I could see his lips move as he took in the print, and then he looked up at me, dropping the paper, as if he had found something published there that I had said against him.

  “Now look here, Garnet, why didn’t you tell me?” he spoke, and I felt indeed as if they had put something in the newsprint I had said in his disfavor, that maybe it was claimed I had reported he was a desperado.

  Going back to the paper and reading more, he then looked up again and exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be damned . . . Is this true?”

  Even Quintus looked up and gave his undivided attention.

  “You mean to tell me you have hurricanes here?” Daventry accused us.

  He acted as affronted as if I had invited him down here to Virginia, had given him his job, and then had withheld this sensitive information.

  “Don’t they have hurricanes just about everywhere, Daventry,” I replied, for I was more than dumbfounded by the way in which he was plainly holding me accountable for this.

  “And it’s expected in a few days, they claim!” He threw the paper in my direction.

  “Oh, those weather forecasts,” I scoffed. “Why, you can’t go by them. They have them around here, bad storms of course, sure, but we never get hurricanes Daventry . . .”

  “You don’t care about anything!” he vociferated. “Your girl Georgina, your hemorrhaging (here I gave him a rather nasty look), the sheriff, losing your land and home when as that old rip from the Real Estate Office said your family goes way back to the beginnings of this country. You just don’t care, Garnet . . .”

  “I care about your harmonica playing, Daventry.”

  “Oh well, yes I suppose you do . . . But why oh why, Garnet, didn’t you tell me about the hurricanes . . . ?”

  Both Quintus and I just stared at him point-blank.

  “Just the name hurricane scares me to death. I can’t bear it!”