Prayers to Broken Stones (37 page)

Captain Montgomery stared, his mouth open, his breath rasping out in short, labored gasps. He clutched at his own collar as if unable to pull in enough air.

Iverson’s voice was soft, almost feminine, and edged with the whine of a petulant child. “You all come back sooner or later,” he said with a hint of a slight lisp. He sighed deeply. “Is there no end to it?”

“You …” managed the Captain. He lifted a long finger to point at Iverson.

“Spare me your outrage,” snapped Iverson. “Do you think you are the first to seek me out, the first to try to explain away your own cowardice by slandering me? Samuel and I have grown quite adept at handling trash like you. I only hope that you are the last.”

The Captain’s hand dropped, disappeared in the folds of his coat. “You goddamned, sonofabitching …”

“Silence!” commanded Iverson. The Colonel’s wide-eyed gaze darted around the room, passing over me as if I weren’t there. The muscles at the corners of the man’s mouth twitched and twisted. Again I was reminded of the nest of newborn rats. “Samuel,” he shouted, “bring your stick. Show this man the penalty for insolence.” Iverson’s mad stare returned to Captain Montgomery. “You will salute me before we are finished here.”

“I will see you in hell first,” said the Captain and pulled the revolver from his coat pocket.

Iverson’s nephew moved very fast, lifting the heavy walking stick and slamming it down on the Captain’s wrist before the old man could pull back the hammer. I stood frozen, my wine glass still in my hand, as the pistol thudded to the floor. Captain Montgomery bent and reached for it—awkward and slow with his false leg—but Iverson’s nephew grabbed him by the collar and flung him backward as effortlessly as an adult would handle a child. The Captain struck the wall, gasped, and slid down it, his false leg gouging splinters from the uneven floorboards as his legs straightened. His face was as gray as his uniform coat.

Iverson’s nephew crouched to recover the pistol and set it on the table. Colonel Iverson himself smiled and nodded, his mouth still quivering toward a grin. I had eyes only for the Captain.

The old man lay huddled against the wall, clutching at his own throat, his body arching with spasms as he gasped in one great breath after another, each louder and more ragged than the last. It was obvious that no air was reaching his lungs; his color had gone from red to gray to a terrible dark purple bordering on black. His tongue protruded and saliva flecked his whiskers. The Captain’s eyes grew wider and rounder as he realized what was happening to him, but his horrified gaze never left Iverson’s face.

I could see the immeasurable frustration in the Captain’s eyes as his body betrayed him in these last few seconds of a confrontation he had waited for through half a century of single-minded obsession. The old man drew in two more ragged, wracking breaths and then quit breathing. His chin collapsed onto his sunken chest, the gnarled hands relaxed into loose fists, and his eyes lost their fixed focus on Iverson’s face.

As if suddenly released from my own paralysis, I let out a cry, dropped the wine glass to the floor, and ran to crouch next to Captain Montgomery. No breath came from his grotesquely opened mouth. The staring eyes already were beginning to glaze with an invisible film. I touched the gnarled old hands—the flesh already seeming to cool and stiffen in death—and felt a terrible constriction in my own chest. It was not grief. Not exactly. I had known the old man too briefly and in too strange a context to feel deep sorrow so soon. But I found it hard to draw a breath as a great emptiness opened in me, a knowledge that sometimes there is no justice, that life was not fair.
It wasn’t fair.
I gripped the old man’s dead hands and found myself weeping for myself as much as for him.

“Get out of the way,” Iverson’s nephew thrust me aside and crouched next to the Captain. He shook the old man by his shirtfront, roughly pinched the bruise-colored cheeks, and laid an ear to the veteran’s chest.

“Is he dead, Samuel?” asked Iverson. There was no real interest in his voice.

“Yes, Uncle.” The nephew stood and nervously tugged at his mustache.

“Yes, yes,” said Iverson in his distracted, petulant voice. “It does not matter.” He flicked his small, pink hand in a dismissive gesture. “Take him out to be with the others, Samuel.”

Iverson’s nephew hesitated and then went into the back room to emerge a moment later with a pickaxe, a long-handled shovel, and a lantern. He jerked me to my feet and thrust the shovel and lantern into my hands.

“What about the boy, Uncle?”

Iverson’s yellow gaze seemed absorbed with the shadows near the foot of the stairs. He wrung his soft hands. “Whatever you decide, Samuel,” he whined. “Whatever you decide.”

The nephew lighted the lantern I was holding, grasped the Captain under one arm, and dragged his body toward the door. I noticed that some of the straps holding the old man’s leg had come loose; I could not look away from where the wooden peg dangled loosely from the stump of dead flesh and bone.

The nephew dragged the old man’s body through the foyer, out the door, and into the night. I stood there—a statue with shovel and hissing lantern—praying that I would be forgotten. Cool, thin fingers fell on the nape of my neck. A soft, insistent voice whispered, “Come along, young man. Do not keep Samuel and me waiting.”

Iverson’s nephew dug the grave not ten yards from where the Captain and I had lain in hiding all day. Even if it had been daylight, the trees along the road and the grape arbors would have shielded us from view of anyone passing along the Mummasburg Road. No one passed. The night was brutally dark; low clouds occluded the stars and the only illumination was from my lantern and the faintest hint of light from Iverson’s cabin a hundred yards behind us.

The black horse tied to the porch railing watched our strange procession leave the house. Captain Montgomery’s
hat had fallen off near the front step and I awkwardly bent to pick it up. Iverson’s soft fingers never left my neck.

The soil in the field was loose and moist and easily excavated. Iverson’s nephew was down three feet before twenty minutes had passed. Bits of root, rock, and other things glowed whitely in the heap of dirt illuminated by the lantern’s glare.

“That is enough,” ordered Iverson. “Get it over with, Samuel.”

The nephew paused and looked up at the Colonel. The cold light turned the young man’s face into a white mask, glistening with sweat, the whiskers and eyebrows broad strokes of charcoal, as black as the smudge of dirt on his left cheek. After a second to catch his breath, he nodded, set down his shovel, and reached out to roll Captain Montgomery’s body into the grave. The old man landed on his back, eyes and mouth still open. His wooden leg had been dragging loosely and now remained behind on the brink of the hole. Iverson’s nephew looked at me with hooded eyes, reached for the leg, and tossed it onto the Captain’s chest. Without looking down, the nephew retrieved the shovel and quickly began scooping dirt onto the body. I watched. I watched the black soil land on my old veteran’s cheek and forehead. I watched the dirt cover the staring eyes, first the left and then the right. I watched the open mouth fill with dirt and I felt the constriction in my own throat swell and break loose. Huge, silent sobs shook me.

In less than a minute, the Captain was gone, nothing more than an outline on the floor of the shallow grave.

“Samuel,” lisped Iverson.

The nephew paused in his labors and looked at the Colonel.

“What is your advice about … the other thing?” Iverson’s voice was so soft that it was almost lost beneath the hissing of the lantern and the pounding of pulse in my ears.

The nephew wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, broadening the dark smear there, and nodded slowly. “I think we have to, Uncle. We just cannot afford to … we cannot risk it. Not after the Florida thing …”

Iverson sighed. “Very well. Do what you must. I will abide by your decision.”

The nephew nodded again, let out a breath, and reached for the pickaxe where it lay embedded in the heap of freshly excavated earth. Some part of my mind screamed at me to run, but I was capable only of standing there at the edge of that terrible pit, holding the lantern and breathing in the smell of Samuel’s sweat and a deeper, more pervasive stench that seemed to rise out of the pit, the heap of dirt, the surrounding arbors.

“Put the light down, young man,” Iverson whispered, inches from my ear. “Put it down carefully.” His cool fingers closed more tightly on my neck. I set the lantern down, positioning it with care so that it would not tip over. Iverson’s cold grip moved me forward to the very brink of the pit. His nephew stood waist-high in the hole, holding the pickaxe and fixing his dark gaze on me with a look conveying something between regret and anticipation. He shifted the pick handle in his large, white hands. I was about to say “It’s all right” when his determined stare changed to wide-eyed surprise.

Samuel’s body lurched, steadied, and then lurched again. It was as if he had been standing on a platform which had dropped a foot, then eighteen inches. Where the edges of the grave had come just to his waist, they now rose to his armpits.

Iverson’s nephew threw aside the pickaxe and thrust his arms out onto solid ground. But the ground was no longer solid. Colonel Iverson and I stumbled backwards as the earth seemed to vibrate and then flow like a mudslide. The nephew’s left hand seized my ankle, his right hand sought a firm grip on thick vines. Iverson’s hand remained firm on my neck, choking me.

Suddenly there came the sound of collapsing, sliding dirt, as if the floor of the grave had given way, collapsing through the ceiling of some forgotten mine or cavern, and the nephew threw himself forward, half out of the grave, his chest pressed against the slippery edges of the pit, his fingers releasing my ankle to claw at loam and vines. He reminded me of a mountain climber on a rocky overhang,
using only his fingers and the friction of his upper body to defy the pull of gravity.

“Help me.” His voice was a whisper, contorted by effort and disbelief.

Colonel Iverson backed away another five steps and I was pulled along.

Samuel was winning the struggle with the collapsing grave. His left hand found the pickaxe where he had buried it in the mound of dirt and he used the handle for leverage, pulling himself upward until his right knee found purchase on the edge of the pit.

The edge collapsed.

Dirt from the three-foot-high mound flowed past the handle of the pick, over the nephew’s straining arm and shoulder, back into the pit. The earth had been moist but solid where Samuel excavated it; now it flowed like frictionless mud, like water … like black wine.

Samuel slid back into the pit, now filled with viscous dirt, with only his face and upraised fingers rising out of the pool of black, shifting soil.

Suddenly there came a sound from all around us as if many large forms had shifted position under blankets of grass and vines. Leaves stirred. Vines snapped. There was no breeze.

Iverson’s nephew opened his mouth to scream and a wave of blackness flowed in between his teeth. His eyes were not human. Without warning, the ground shifted again and the nephew was pulled violently out of sight. He disappeared as quickly and totally as a swimmer pulled down by a shark three times his size.

There came the sound of teeth.

Colonel Iverson whimpered then, making the noise of a small child being made to go to his room without a light. His grip loosened on my neck.

Samuel’s face appeared one last time, protruding eyes filmed with dirt. Something had taken most of the flesh from his right cheek. I realized that the sound I now heard was a man trying to scream with his larynx and esophagus half-filled with dirt.

He was pulled under again. Colonel Iverson took another
three steps back and released my neck. I grabbed up the lantern and ran.

I heard a shout behind me and I looked over my shoulder just long enough to see Colonel Iverson coming through the break in the fence. He was out of the field, staggering, wheezing, but still coming on.

I ran with the speed of a terrified ten-year-old, the lantern swinging wildly from my right hand, throwing shifting patterns of light on leaves, branches, rocks. I had to have the light with me. There was a single thought in my mind: the Captain’s pistol lying where Samuel had laid it on the table.

The saddled horse was pulling at its tether when I reached the house; its eyes were wild, alarmed at me, the swinging lantern, Iverson shouting far behind me, or the sudden terrible stench that drifted from the fields. I ignored the animal and slammed through the doorway, past the foyer, and into the dining room. I stopped, panting, grinning with terror and triumph.

The pistol was gone.

For seconds or minutes I stood in shock, not being able to think at all. Then, still holding the lantern, I looked under the table, in the hoosier, in the tiny back room. The pistol was not there. I started for the door, heard noises on the porch, headed up the stairs, and then paused in indecision.

“Is this … what you are after … young man?” Iverson stood panting at the entrance to the dining room, his left hand braced against the doorjamb, his right hand raised with the pistol leveled at me. “Slander, all slander,” he said and squeezed the trigger.

The Captain had called the pistol a “double action.” The hammer clicked back, locked into place, but did not fire. Iverson glanced at it and raised it toward me again. I threw the lantern at his face.

The Colonel batted it aside, breaking the glass. Flames ignited the ancient curtains and shot toward the ceiling, scorching Iverson’s right side. He cursed and dropped the revolver. I vaulted over the stair railing, grabbed the kerosene
lamp from the table, and threw it into the back room. Bedding and books burst into flame as the lamp oil spread. Dropping on all fours, I scrabbled toward the pistol but Iverson kicked at my head. He was old and slow and I easily rolled aside, but not before the burning curtain fell between me and the weapon. Iverson reached for it, pulled his hand back from the flames, and fled cursing out the front door.