the back of the truck. Unrest mixed with anticipation. Perhaps kids at school would hear about this, the news that Joey Crouch was not like Ken Harnett at all; that he was, in fact, the direct opposite, a crusader, a young man brave enough to defend Bloughton against his own flesh and blood. My mother, how proud she’d be.
There are a million noises in the night, and by the time I noticed his footsteps he was almost upon me, moving fast, making less racket than seemingly possible. I sat up from the fence and coiled my legs beneath me. My fingers, instantly sweaty, gripped the camera. My father sailed toward the truck. One sack was slung over his left shoulder. An object was clenched in his right hand. The bag was swung high over the truck bed and lowered soundlessly. He opened the passenger door with his left hand, while still holding the object with his right. I leaned my upper body past the tree, moving the camera to my eye. I saw him dislodge something from under the seat; moonlight glinted on wrenches and hammers as he unlocked a toolbox. There was the soft sigh of stirring metal as he dug and found what he was looking for. He turned around, wielding the tool of his choice, and leaned against the truck.
The moment was perfect. I pressed the button on the camera, realizing a split second too late that, in all my planning, I had forgotten the simplest of facts: this was an automatic camera and it was night and cameras at night use flashes. White light shocked us. Everything was illuminated in one instant of motionless clarity: individual blades of tall grass, bugs caught in the air like thrown pebbles, the mirrored surface of the truck, my father, his stunned expression, the handheld wire cutter, the sparkle of multiple jeweled rings, and, clenched in my father’s fist, wearing these rings, a severed human hand.
17.
ON THE WAY HOME I sat up in the truck bed. There was no more reason to hide. As we pulled away from the tree, I noted with dulled surprise that the wooden fence I had leaned against marked the outer confines of a graveyard. It rolled gently over the hill, the white ghosts of gravestones perishing quietly into the pitch.
My father is a grave robber, I told myself, over and over and over—the only garbage he carried was carrion. I hoped the horror of it would diminish with each repetition, but instead it overtook me. My brain spun in slow and terrified loops: disgust at such an unspeakable act, disbelief that my mother could have lived with such knowledge, the potential reactions to such revelations by Woody or Celeste or Gottschalk or Simmons or Diamond or Laverne or Ted, and more than anything else the smell—that odor invading the very fibers of the cabin walls as well as my clothes, skin, and hair. I finally knew its origin.
I ran through the last moments back there outside the graveyard: his blank astonishment, my immobility, his slow forward motion to take the camera from my numb fingers. He placed the camera in a pocket, then picked up the wire cutter again. I heard a snip and the soft chip of bone detaching from bone. I watched him remove two rings from the isolated finger, put them in his pocket, and then take the hand, as well as the finger, with him back up the hill. I followed him with my eyes and saw him scale the cemetery fence. He was returning the hand to where he found it. It was lunacy. I could barely think, hardly move. It was much later, maybe another hour, before my father returned. He had with him the other sack, which he placed in the truck bed. He seemed beyond wrath; his eyes were glazed and he spoke not a word. When he looked at me, I held out a trembling hand to stop whatever was coming next.
“Look,” I said, but I had no other words.
He did the opposite and looked away. He entered the truck, slammed the door, and started the engine. It growled to life and I watched the brake lights color the exhaust. I expected him to drive away. Instead he sat motionless behind the wheel. After a minute I climbed into the back of the truck.
Now, the ride nearly over, the wheels left the relative smoothness of pavement for dirt. Here it was, my final resting spot,