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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (48 page)

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“Dig!” said the corpse, when Teague had been looking for a while here and there for a place.
“With what? My hands?”
“Until they bleed and your bones poke through the skin!” it said harshly. But then it pointed Teague toward a closet, where, among tall stacks of kitty litter and ammonia and paper towels, a shovel was waiting. Teague took it and picked a spot near the altar. “Do it!” the corpse told him when he hesitated. He raised up the shovel in both hands and stabbed it down, thinking he was going to have to break through cement underneath the carpet to get to the ground. He gave a yell as he brought the shovel down, the loudest noise he had ever made, the angriest noise and also the saddest noise. He was sure the shovel was just going to bounce off the concrete, and that the wooden handle would split, and that his hand would break from the shock of it. He didn’t care if it did.
But it was just soft ground underneath the carpet. The blade sank in completely, and he had to put his whole weight on it to pull up the earth and carpet. A smell rose up—an odor of fresh loamy earth that made Teague think of rainy days and earthworms. The corpse took a deep breath of it behind him, but didn’t let it out. “I am about to get rid of you,” Teague told it, but it didn’t respond. He got to work, driving the blade of the shovel into the carpet again and again, and marking out a rectangle long enough to fit the corpse. He said it again and again, speaking a word every time he made a blow with the shovel: “I . . . am . . . going . . . to . . . get . . . rid . . . of . . .
you
!”
The corpse didn’t talk back, and he was just starting to convince himself that he wouldn’t hear from it again when a hideous shriek sounded in the air. “What?” he shouted, dropping the shovel and jumping back. “What did I do? Why are you screaming?”
“Wasn’t me,” said the corpse, and there was another cry, much softer but still angry. Someone was obviously very upset. Teague walked to the edge of the grave he was digging—it was only a couple of feet deep—and looked in. There was movement in the dirt. Something was trembling underneath the soil. A sinkhole opened up in the dirt, just mouth-sized. The dirt fell in, and then was spat out again in another scream, and then suddenly, horribly, a dead woman sat up out of the shallow grave that Teague had been uncovering.
“Oh, oh, oh!” she cried. “What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing!” said Teague, which was patently untrue, but the first thing he thought of to say.
“Nothing? Nothing? Why have you disturbed my rest, horrible boy? Rude boy! Terrible boy!”
“I didn’t mean ...” Teague began. “I mean . . . I just wanted to bury my friend!”
“He’s not my friend,” said the corpse behind him. “And he is very rude. Terribly rude.”
“Cover me up!” the woman, cried. “Cover me up, boy, before I get
cold
.”
Teague did as she said, heaping the dirt back on her when she lay back down, and throwing the carpet on top in a disorganized heap that he made no attempt to neaten. He left the shovel leaning on the altar and ran out. He stood outside panting and feeling ready to cry again. The corpse heaved an enormous sigh against his neck, and then did it twice more.
“Stop that,” Teague said. “Stop sighing. You don’t need to sigh. You don’t even need to breathe.”
“I am disappointed. When I am disappointed, I sigh.” It sighed again, and then Teague did it, too.
“I forget where the other place was,” Teague said after a moment. “The other place I was supposed to take you.” The corpse was silent, and Teague thought it figured that it would talk when he wanted it to shut up, and be silent when he was asking it for help, but then it lifted its hand again and pointed the way.
The Salty Pig sausage factory was set in a dell instead of high on a hill, surrounded by a greasy, low-lying fog that smelled of bacon. Teague carried his burden down the road for an hour until he smelled it, and it was another half hour before he saw the smokestack spires poking up, tall shadows against the stars. Instead of cars, the factory was surrounded on all sides by a field of gravestones, which made no sense at all until Teague was close enough to read some of the names on the stones: Snorty, Fatty, Missy, Mr. Snorfle, Petunia, Wilbur, Otis; they were pig names. “Why would they bury the pigs from the factory?”
“Respect,” said the corpse.
“Where is the shovel?” Teague asked.
“In your hands,” said the corpse. Teague held up his hands in front of them both, and it clarified, “Your hands are the shovels.”
“That’s not fair,” Teague said to the corpse, and then he lifted his head and said it again to the air and the fog and the strange piggy graveyard. “That’s not fair! I’m doing what you told me to. I’m doing what you asked. The least you could do is give me a shovel!” But silence was his only answer, so he knelt down in a place between graves that looked likely to be empty and started to dig with his hands, tearing up the coarse grass and then scooping up great double handfuls of earth and tossing them to one side or the other (when he tossed them over his shoulder the corpse complained bitterly). And he hadn’t dug far before he touched on a leathery bit of something that proved upon examination to be a pig’s ear, and shortly after that he uncovered the rest of the pig, a dried-up husk of muscle and skin with a slit down its belly. “But there’s no stone!” Teague said. “And why are they burying the muscle parts? What did they put in the sausage?”
“Not meat,” said the corpse. The pig opened an eye at that—the socket was quite empty—and began to squeal wordlessly, but Teague got the sense of what it was saying:
Cover me up. Leave me alone. I’m getting cold.
He covered it up swiftly, then knelt on the grave with his face in his hands.
“Get up!” said the corpse. “Try again. The dawn is coming, and if I’m not buried by then you’ll be sorry sorry
sorry
!
”
Teague was so tired from digging, and so dispirited from failure, that he didn’t even argue, but moved a few hundred feet away and tried again. But he had not been digging ten minutes before his hand touched on leathery skin, and a muffled sound of squealing came up through the dirt. Teague jerked his hand back and cried out. “Again! Again!” said the corpse, but the next time the squealing started as soon as he started to dig, and then there was squealing even when he trod on a grave, so with every step he took there was another squeal, each one in a slightly different tone, so as he stepped and jumped, trying not to step on a grave, he made an odd sort of music, and the whole graveyard had become an instrument for him to play, and he was its exhausted, unwilling virtuoso. When he finally escaped it he sank again to his knees and started to weep freely.
“There, there,” said the corpse after a while. “There, there. It’s not so bad as that. There’s still the Green Swamp, and dawn is still a little while off.”
“Dark dread diarrhea of poodle!” Teague said. “Deadly sad acid bitterness! I can feel it starting already!”
“That is something else you feel,” the corpse said. “You have not yet failed in your mission, and the kindly ones keep their word to the letter. Get up and take me to the swamp. I hear my grave singing to me and feel sure you’ll find a place for me there.” So Teague pushed himself up, and followed the pointing finger of the corpse one last time.
It wasn’t very long before the ground started to become soft, and not much longer after that that he was walking in places through sucking mud, and he very shortly lost his shoes, and then his socks. The stars began to dim, and the sky to lighten. “Hurry!” the corpse whispered to him. “Hurry! The sun is coming, but we are close, close!” Teague felt sure he could hear other voices telling him to hurry along. He thought he heard the voices of the old man and woman coming at him from the trees, telling him he was almost there, and being more encouraging than scolding when they demanded haste of him. He thought a possum, hanging upside down by its naked tail, told him to hurry it up, and an alligator, just a dark shape at the edge of a pond, opened its mouth and told him to run. He tried to do that, but he was so tired all he did was speed up his shambling, weeping lurch through the swamp. “Ah!” said the corpse. “The sun . . . the sun! Don’t let it touch me . . . we are so close!” And indeed they were. There weren’t any corners in the swamp, but Teague had the impression of rounding one, and then there it was: a tidy grave set under the sweeping branches of a willow, as pretty a place to be buried as you could ask for, and nicely dry as well for all that it was in the middle of a bog. Teague lurched toward it just as the sun was rising, and the gray swamp suddenly became green all around him. He was sure he was going to fall in with the corpse and be buried with it, but he fell short, and rolled on his side just to the edge. The corpse let go its hands and fell in.
Teague rolled over and looked in. “Are you down there?” he asked, because the grave was full of shadows. “Yes,” said the corpse. “Good-bye, Teague O’Kane. Think of me every time you dance.” Then it was quiet, and Teague never heard its voice again except in dreams. He stared another moment into the darkness, even though something in him told him he should look away, and so when the sun rose up and cast a little light into the grave he saw very plainly that the corpse’s face was his own.
I encountered Teague O’Kane in one of William Butler Yeats’s
Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland.
It stood out for me as being a pretty creepy story in a book whose stories tended more toward charming than creepy. It also stood out as particularly weird, which is saying something given the character of the other stories Yeats collected. There was something arresting about the image of a man with a corpse on his back, and something deeply affecting about the depths of suffering into which this unlikable young man has journeyed by the time dawn comes. The original story is considerably more complicated than my retelling—in the original the corpse is less chatty, and more profound in its silences, and can be seen to stand for more than just the intrusion of mortality upon callow youth. And in the original the corpse is never named or recognized, but it seemed obvious to me that Teague would recognize it if he were allowed to see its face.
—CA
JIM SHEPARD
Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay
TWO AND A HALF WEEKS AFTER I WAS BORN, ON JULY 9, 1958, THE plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather Fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.
The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant’s Jacuzzi. Mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high next to it twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who’d turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington’s seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park—40 million cubic yards in volume—broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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