The Marble Orchard (13 page)

“You’re in a cemetery,” said Pete. “In case you were wondering.”

Beam dragged the hair from his eyes. He tried to sit up, but it was too painful, so he lay back again, looking up at the night sky
that seemed with its spread of stars like a sherdpiece of charred crockery, cracks of weltering light zagging off through the void, the bone-fingers of comet trails holding up the dark bowl of the fissured heavens. Stars were failing up there. Planets were being felled, shooting off in arcing traceries and burning out in vague plumes that flared and then were gone, but he was here in this world beside a fire in the warm night.

“You aim to bury me out here?” Beam asked.

Pete’s shoulders jostled with quiet laughter. “No,” he said. “You’re stove up, but miles off from being dead just yet.” He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his hands together. “Do you hurt?”

Beam rested his hands on his chest. His head ached and a long sluice of pain seemed to run behind his eyeballs, and some of his ribs were possibly broken as each breath made his lungs feel like a pair of old worn out accordions.

“No. I don’t hurt,” he said. “Not even a little bit.”

Pete pushed a log deeper into the fire with his boot. “Go ‘head. Tell another one.”

The smoke from the bean tin thickened and blew over Beam so that he caught its rank and sour smell.

“What is that you’re cooking?” he asked.

“Salve.”

“Salve?”

“Yes.” Pete crouched closer to the fire and drew a rag from his back pocket. He wrapped it around the tin of beans and lifted it from the grille. Some of the liquid, which was a thick syrupy brown, spilled over the side onto his fingers and he cursed and pushed his thumb into his mouth. “Hot,” he said. Then he winced and spat. “But not too tasty.”

At his side was a possibles bag that appeared fashioned from calf skin. Pete folded the flap over and took out a ring of aluminum measuring spoons, leaning into the firelight and squinting until he had selected the right one. “Daughter says I
need cataract surgery but I say good sense makes up for a double round of walking blindness,” he said. “Course, my eyes are so bad anymore I got to put my glasses on to go to sleep.”

Finally finding the correct spoon, he took out a small baggie filled with what appeared to be ground red pepper. He measured out a dose and stirred it into the salve, the liquid thickening as it cooled to the consistency and color of paving tar, its smell growing loud and woodsy.

“Soon as this gets cool enough I’ll doctor on you,” said Pete.

“Right,” said Beam. “Tell another one.”

Pete looked across the fire at him. “This stuff here is a fix,” he said. “You don’t got to take it but I’d not advise that. You was beat pretty bad back there at Daryl’s and this salve will put you on the mend.”

“What’s in it?”

Pete lifted a gallon milk jug filled with water and poured some into the tin, causing a thick steam to boil up. “Oh,” he said, “few newts and toads. Dick bone from a crooked back coon. A little paint thinner for flavoring.”

Beam stared at the old man. He didn’t feel much like joking at the moment. The past few days had sent his mind plummeting through an electric maze until his nerves felt like the bitten and frayed ends of wiring in a house too long left vacant. He didn’t know that trouble could actually hunt a man, but that seemed to be the case with him, as every move he made only sank him lower and lower in the quicksand of bad news and wrongdoings. He thought suddenly of how the stranger on the ferry had said that the river had no bottom. Now, he wondered if trouble had a bottom, and if he’d ever find it.

The smoke from the fire had dried his mouth out and he reached a hand toward the milk jug. “Can I have some of that water?”

Pete picked the jug up and shook it so that the water sloshed around inside. “This?” he asked.

“Yeah, give me a drink.”

“Sure. Anytime you want it, it’s right here.” Pete set the jug back on the ground and smiled. “Then again, maybe you ain’t so healthy that you can get up and get your own drink of water. Maybe you better take this salve after all.” He stared at Beam, waiting to see if he might raise himself up from the ground to take the milk jug. When he didn’t move, Pete picked up the jug and stepped over to where Beam lay and handed it down to him. Beam uncapped the top and drank the cold water down in long, refreshing pulls.

“They could just take you up yonder, honey,” Pete said when Beam had finished and handed the jug back to him. He seated himself on the elm log and placed the jug between his feet.

“Why are we in a graveyard?” Beam asked.

“Was there some other place you needed to be?”

“It ain’t what I had in mind, to tell the truth,” he said.

Pete chuckled. “I expect you was looking to wake up on satin sheets with the Queen of Sheba?”

Beam didn’t say anything. His chest pained him greatly, and the breath dragged through him in thin serried gusts, as if one of his lungs might have collapsed. He managed to get up on his elbows and, arching his back, propped himself against the sack of pine chips that had served as his pillow. Suddenly, he coughed violently and spat a bloody clot onto the ground. His breathing evened, and a sudden lightness filled his chest.

“We’re in a graveyard because they won’t look for us here,” Pete said, taking a pack of non-filtered Berley cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook one free, struck a match, and began to smoke. He offered the pack to Beam.

“I don’t smoke,” Beam said.

Pete nodded and tucked the pack into his pocket again. He stroked the side of his belly, then spat a sprig of tobacco. “You’re a Sheetmire?” he asked.

“If you know that,” Beam said, “there’s no need for me to talk.”

“Plenty I don’t know.” Pete drew on the cigarette. “Like the kind of trouble you’re in.”

“I don’t know exactly what kind of trouble I’m in,” Beam said, shutting his eyes.

“Does Clem know?”

Beam opened his eyes. Across from him, the firelight bronzed the old man’s features so that they seemed hardened and polished.

“You know my dad?”

“Yes, know your mama, too. Not well enough to speak to, but I could sure enough spot both of them if I was to see them in a crowd somewheres. Do either of them know the kind of trouble you’re in?”

“It don’t matter what they know. They can’t help me.”

Pete studied the embers swarming up from the fire into the blackness overhead. “Maybe not,” he said. “But Clem is your daddy, right?”

Beam settled himself against the sack of pine chips. He recalled the Sheetmire homecoming, and the rowed kinfolks lining up to fill their plates, each with the sad loose smile of his father, and none bearing neither trace nor sliver of resemblance to himself.

“I don’t know who else would be my daddy,” he answered.

Pete pinched the fabric of his pants between two fingers and then crossed his legs. “What does Loat want with you?” he asked.

“You know about Loat Duncan?”

“Everybody knows about Loat Duncan,” Pete answered. “But not everybody who gets in a fight up a Daryl’s forces a phone call to the sonuvabitch. If you’ve gotten yourself in trouble with Loat, then you’ve waded out over your head.” Pete picked up the metal skewer and stoked the inner coals of the fire until they burned even hotter. “You’re in some bad country and it’s full of bad men,” he continued. “There are folks around here that don’t never even see all the trouble that’s right under their noses. They sit out in the evenings on their porches listening to the whippoorwills and
think that everything is peaceful. Then there’s the other kind. The kind the porch sitters don’t like to think about. These are the ones that stand up and walk around with the dark all their lives until they are the dark. And who knows, maybe they are the whippoorwill singing way off in the wild places while the homefolks swing on their porches. Maybe that’s what they are. The birds and the dogs crying and howling in the nighttime.”

Beam didn’t know what the old man was trying to tell him; his voice sounded far off and lost in the night. “I got no truck with Loat,” he said. He waited for Pete to respond, but the old man remained silent, for once.

Beam lay his head back against the sack of pine chips and watched the stars in the great and silent distance of the night sky. His breathing leveled and steadied until he was on the verge of slipping quietly into the realm of sleep. He felt calm, as if all he’d done was some flimsy dream fetched from the back closets of his mind, easily forgettable and forgiven.

“You like graveyards?” Pete asked.

Beam snorted awake in surprise. “Can’t say I ever thought much about them,” he said.

“You can tell a lot about a patch of ground by who’s buried under it. Who was in the wars, when and where they fought. You can tell if there was a tough winter by how many babies and women were buried one year. All of that’s on these stones.” Pete waved through the firelight. “The great marble orchard. That’s what all it is.”

“What are you talking about?”

“History.” Pete patted the ground. “Right here under us is history.”

Beam looked at the headstones that were visible. He had never thought of any of this before, and he didn’t want to think about it now. What he wanted was a soft bed and silence from the old man.

“You like ghost stories?” Pete asked.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Beam answered.

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you like ghost stories.”

“No.” Beam shook his head. “I don’t. That’s kid shit. I don’t believe in any of it.”

Pete stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and pitched the butt into the fire. “I don’t believe it neither,” he said. “But what I will say is that there’s an old house down in the woods here where ain’t nobody lived in quite a time and there ain’t money enough in the president’s wallet to make me sleep in there of a night.”

Beam readied himself. He knew another long story was coming.

“There were these two brothers,” Pete began. “Grown men. They lived there with their mother. Had a little farm, but they never worked it much that I know of.” He spread his hands on his lap and began picking at the dirt under his fingernails. “So it was the three of them. The brothers and the old woman. I don’t know where the old man had gone. Maybe he just left. I would have. But they lived there and the brothers never went out chasing girls. Or work neither. They just lived down there in that holler. One was all right, but the other, he was kindly simple and the woman was old. One day she says to her eldest, the one who wasn’t simple, she says, ‘Jessup’—that was his name—‘I think it’s time we took care of David.’ That was the one that was simple. She says, ‘We have got to be rid of David. He eats all the groceries and can’t hardly talk plain and he’s not bringing any respect to me and you.’ Jessup said he reckoned that was right, though I don’t know why any of them would care what other folks thought. They never seemed to before. And I don’t think they never even saw many folks. But, and now this is something you may not believe though it is what happened, Jessup took David out one night in the woods and got him drunk and tied him to an old dray pony they had. I guess they wanted rid of the pony as well. So he’s got David drunk and tied in the saddle and then he knots a rag soaked in kerosene to the pony’s tail and lights it and there they go, off through the
dark, the horse bucking wild and screaming and poor David screaming too with that flame growing smaller and smaller as it went slithering off through the trees.” Pete dipped a spoon into the salve and held his hand over it, to see if it was cool enough. “Jessup didn’t have the heart to just knock the poor boy in the head, but he got rid of him just the same he reckoned. But then Jessup went out one day, doing I don’t know what. Maybe he had him a still going somewhere, though they take work and I don’t think that old boy Jessup was too much of a hand at anything other than getting rid of simple-minded brothers. Anyway, he come back and the old woman was gone, which was some curious, seeing as she never went further than the toilet they’d dug out back. But the house was empty as Christ’s tomb. Jessup sat around the house for two days waiting for the old woman to return. Finally, he goes out looking for her, thinking how maybe she’d got drunk and wandered off somewhere and he’s gone for the good part of a day and when he comes home it’s night and there’s a lamp burning in the window and he creeps up and looks inside. And there his mother is. Sitting on the bare floor of the living room with not a stitch of clothes on. Hair full of leaves and streaked with mud like she’d been drug through a creek. When Jessup looked in at her she started screaming, beating herself and waving her arms. And then the horse comes tromping into the living room, blinking its sad eyes. Like it was wondering what the old woman had to scream about. It didn’t have but a stub of a tail left and its rump was burned black and it stood there in the house looking at the crazy old woman while she screamed and beat herself.”

Pete sat back against the log he’d been resting on. “That’s the way Jessup told it when he wandered into town the next morning. He was white as an old fish bone. But all that we found, me and the ones who went out to the place, was that horse in the living room, standing with its head in the fireplace like it was a feed trough. There weren’t no old woman and there weren’t no David.
And they weren’t never found neither. But I’ve heard a few old fox hunters say they’ve seen things in these woods. In the black of the moon, they say they see an old naked woman wandering lost through the trees and that they hear a horse screaming awful. They say the hounds won’t run in that holler where the house still stands. It’s marked ground, you see. And the dogs know it. Me, I don’t much believe in hauntings. But I will say that a place can get old just like a body. And a place can die out just like a body. And once a thing dies it starts to rot. And what is rot but a kind of haunting. You think blood don’t remain with a spot? You think all the trouble that goes on in certain little places just goes away once it’s over?”