The smell down there coated me like a syrup and began shrugging its way across my tongue. I could not let this spoilage inside me; I held my breath. My father pointed. The necklace, he said. He had left it for me to remove.
It was not that different from sticking your hand into an opened pumpkin. On the way to her neck my fingertips dug tunnels through her cheek; for a second her face was Celeste’s and the wounds were revenge for those she had given me. The set of my father’s lips told me that we were lingering too long. I clenched my teeth and yanked at the necklace. It didn’t come free. Beside me, my father patted the woman’s shoulder. I don’t think he realized that he was doing it. He patted her with more gentleness than he had ever shown me, as if saying to her, shh, it’ll all be over soon.
The clasp, of course. I reined it in, and with each inch of progress the strand plowed deeper into the ulcerous neck. Finally I had it but felt faint and realized that I was still holding my breath. I drew a heaving, ragged gasp and contaminated air slid down my throat. It was inside me now, death was inside me. Somehow the necklace came free and I fumbled it over to my father. My knees pistoned; one foot dipped into coffin liquor. Then I was wriggling like a worm over the hole’s edge, gasping upon the tarpaulin, translated to the stars.
Somehow the casket lid was put back in some semblance of order. I didn’t watch. I rolled off the tarp to allow my father to refill the grave. He was still talking, but it was hard to hear him over the sickly rattle of my lungs. Decay was claiming my entrails. Over the snowy thump of dirt, I detected my father speaking of something called the Satipatthana Sutta, a passage called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. It was one of the books in the cabin, I knew it, and I wondered if he would later assign the reading. The passage, he said as he tamped down the earth, details a process wherein apprentice monks meditate upon bodies in various states of decay until they overcome disgust and embrace the serenity of the body’s ephemeral nature. I knew this was meant to comfort. But there was fetid mortality swelling inside me, I was certain of it—I could feel its long claws thread my organs.
We were up and moving. A heavy sack skipped across my vertebrae. Still my father spoke, and still I tried to listen, but my ears buzzed with the low hum of disease. He told me, and I tried to understand, that what we had done was something ancient and possibly noble, but also vilified and to be undertaken with the utmost solemnity; and that, most importantly, it was a craft passed down for generations, teacher to student, and as of tonight this group included not just my father, not just a clandestine group of men spread all across the country, but also, horrifyingly, me.
“We’re called the Diggers,” he said.
24.
MONDAY, SCHOOL—THERE WAS no way I was going, they would smell my sin all over me. I prayed to the placid and forgiving Two-Fingered Jesus: Save me. Even though I didn’t deserve it, my prayers were answered. Five minutes later, I pushed to my feet to vomit into the sink. I would not suffer school today. I was sick for real.
Consciousness was sporadic. My eyes ached, so I closed them and fixated on the sweat that slopped my shirt and boxers to my skin. I had read about fevers so severe that people’s brains were literally cooked, and I remembered the dark liquid pooling from the dead woman’s mouth and ears. I coughed and spat until everything came up, corpse-tissue mush, coffin liquor, all dredged up from my guts and sent back through sewer pipes and returned to the earth. I glimpsed myself in the bathroom mirror and saw a corpse.
Harnett’s hands were icy. I realized he was lifting me from the toilet. Then I was moving through the air and set back upon my bed, feeling moments later a rag draped over my forehead. There was ice wrapped inside, but a few minutes later it was water. My head pounded and I took advantage of the noise and hid inside. No cemetery, no woman, no maggots, just a fire in which I alone burned.