Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,17
commit either way.
“What are you all grubbing for anyways,” he says, “buried treasure?”
“Just Civil War things, buckles and such,” Wesley says. “No money in it, just kind of a sentimental thing. My great-great-granddaddy fought Confederate. I’ve always been one to honor them that come before me.”
“By robbing their graves,” the old man says. “That’s some real honoring you’re doing.”
“I’m wearing what they can’t no longer wear, bringing it out of the ground to the here and now. Look here,” Wesley says. He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. “I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great-great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause.”
I’ve never even seen a politician lie better, because Wesley lays all of that out there slick, figuring the old man has no knowing of the buckle’s worth. And that seemed a likely enough thing since I hadn’t the least notion myself till Wesley showed me the prices.
The old man fetches a flashlight from his coveralls. He lays its light out on the stone. “North Carolina Sixty-fourth,” he reads off the stone. “My folks sided Union,” the old man says, “in this very county. Lots of people don’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought Union as Confederate. The Sixty-fourth done a lot of meanness in this county back then. They’d shoot a unarmed man and wasn’t above whipping women. My grandma told me all about it. One of them women they whipped was her own momma. I read up on it some later. That’s how come me to know it was the Sixty-fourth.”
The old man clicks off his flashlight and stuffs it in his pocket and pulls out an old-timey watch, the kind with a chain on it. He pops it open and reads the hands by moonlight.
“Two-thirty,” he says. “You fellows go ahead and dig him up. The way I figure it, his soul’s a lot deeper, all the way down in hell.”
“Give him his twenty dollars,” Wesley says to me.
I only have sixteen and am about to say so when the old man tells me he don’t want my money.
“I’ll take enough pleasure just in watching you dig this Hutchinson fellow up. He might have been the one what stropped my great-grandma.”
The old man steps back a few feet and perches his backside on a flat-topped stone next to where we’re digging. The shotgun’s settled in the crook of his arm.
“You ain’t needing for that shotgun to be nosed in our direction,” Wesley says. “Them things can go off by accident sometimes.”
The old man keeps the gun barrel where it is.
“I don’t think I’ve heard the truth walk your lips yet,” he tells Wesley. “I’ll trust you better with it pointed your way.”
We start digging again, getting more crowded up to each other as the hole deepens, but leastways we don’t have to worry about noise anymore. We’re a good four foot in when Wesley stops and leans his back against the side of the hole.
“Can’t do no more,” he says, and it takes him three breaths to get just the four words out. “Done something to my arm.”
Sure you did, I’m thinking, but when I look at him I can see he’s hurting. He’s heaving hard and shedding sweat like it’s a July noon.
The old man gets off his perch to check out Wesley as well.
“You look to have had the starch took out of you,” the old man says, but Wesley makes no bother to answer him, just closes his eyes and leans harder against the grave’s side.
“You want to get out,” I say to him. “It might help to breathe some fresher air.”
“No,” he says, opening his eyes some, and I know the why of that answer. He’s not getting out until he’s looked inside the coffin we’re rooting up.
Maybe it’s because Lieutenant Hutchinson was buried in May instead of January, but for whatever reason he looks to have got the full six feet. The hole’s up to my neck and I still haven’t touched wood.
The old man’s still there above me, craning his own wrinkly face over the hole like he’s peering down a well.
“You ain’t much of a talker, are you?” he says to me. “Or is it just your buddy don’t give you a word edgewise.”
“No,” I say, throwing a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.
It’s getting harder now after five hours of digging and