Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Noooo…” Eddie got out. “That’s awful!”

  Dynamite said, “I don’t think you better let Cap’n Miller see you doin’ that stuff.”

  “Hell—he was the first one who did it to me, back when I was this one’s age.” Billy nodded at Eddie.

  Shit leaned toward Eric. “They been scarin’ kids who come on the boats for a hundred years with them nasty wigglies. They don’t hurt you.”

  “They used to have a wrestler called the Boogie Man who did that,” Eric said. “But he used regular worms, I think.”

  “They did?” Shit asked. “Well, how about that!”

  Then Eddie blurted, “My daddy would never put nothin’ like that in his mouth!” And the men—who, Eric figured, had seen different in their own childhoods—laughed.

  More people were coming down the dock—all Harbor working men, and three Eric knew from the Dump—with pies and custards and cake boxes.

  *

  When the Doris docked at Gilead, Jay was waiting beside the boathouse.

  “Let’s do everybody a favor and put the food in the back of my truck out here. And let’s use my tarp—” he grinned at Dynamite—“not the one you brought over.”

  With his easy smile, Dynamite said, “Hey, you know this ain’t the tarp we use for the fuckin’ garbage. This one is clean. I know enough not to mix the two of them up, especially around nobody’s food.”

  “I know that,” Jay said. “And I know you know that. But this way, nobody else out here got to wonder about it. It’ll just look a little better.”

  “Suit yourself.” Dynamite smiled. “And I ain’t taken no offense, neither.” So they loaded the pots and cake platters and crocks across the deck beside the Gilead Island boathouse and into Mr. Holota’s pickup, on the blue plastic tarp—which Eric had to admit to himself, looked notably cleaner than the black-stained green one they’d brought from Dynamite’s truck. Fourteen people were there—

  *

  The Holotas had volunteered both a car and their own pickup and were waiting at the Gilead boathouse. In two relays, Mex and Ruth Holota drove people up to the Kyle place.

  Hugh had moved two tables into the living room. “My God,” Eric said, looking over the platters spread across them, with the oval hard-boiled egg halves, topped with paprika stars, “how many deviled eggs did you guys make?”

  Tank pushed her hood back, opened her red rain jacket, and shrugged out of it. She was wearing a dark blue, brocaded shirt under it. “I didn’t know how many people were gonna be here.” She frowned. A black braid hung down her shoulder. (He remembered Roan.) “I could put two of these trays in the refrigerator, maybe—and take ’em out later if we need ’em.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “That’d be a good idea. Here, I’ll carry one of them. We only got about sixteen, seventeen people. The kitchen’s this way.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  In the kitchen, they left two trays on the oilcloth covered table to move food around in the refrigerator. Eddie, who followed, said, “You know where my daddy is?”

  Tank said, “Cap’n may have gone back down to the boathouse to make another run.”

  “Oh…!” Eddie looked distressed.

  “Don’t worry,” Eric said. “He’ll be back in ten minutes. He ain’t gonna leave you behind.”

  Hugh came in. “Look. You all can go out to the graveyard—I’m going to stay here and take care of the food.”

  “Well, what’s gotta be taken care of?” Eric asked.

  “I’m gonna put some fire under your pork and beans, for one thing.”

  “You’re not goin’ out for the burial?”

  Hugh smiled. “Nope. I’m not.”

  “Well, all right,” Eric said.

  Hugh explained, “We figured all this out last night. Don’t worry.”

  “You know where my daddy is?”

  “Hey, there, boy,” Hugh said. “Come on with me, Eddie. I think I seen him come in just a second ago.”

  *

  In an odd happening of the sort that sometimes occurs at funerals, the rain ceased as they stepped from the mansion. Strips of cloud peeled from the sky, and sunlight fell through wet trees and across droplet-speckled underbrush, as twelve men and three women gathered in front of the Kyle mansion to walk along the wet path, further up the island, to the graveyard.

  Maybe a hundred-fifty yards beyond the Holotas’ cabin, the Indian cemetery was not a clearly defined space. Rather it was an area of the woods where burials had taken place for six hundred years, sometimes more of them, sometimes less. At one point, when the Kyles had begun to bury their own people here, Orbison Pitkin built a stone wall around the part where a number of the white people were interred. No more than two-and-a-half feet high, a stone hedge ran some thirty feet off to the left, which halted, then after a twenty foot gap, ran another fifteen feet along the back at an odd angle. At that time, so the story went, the Creek families still on the island at the time objected that even so small a wall as this would halt the passage of the souls of the dead to whatever hunting ground they were destined for. So it was discontinued—and some of it torn down.

  While waiting for stragglers, Eric walked off to look at a stand of trees from which hung rags of moss, like ghosts—or, more, like sheer things ghosts might have discarded. Something moved in it, he realized. A step closer over the rocks, and Eric saw dozens of small spiders scurrying and stopping, scurrying and stopping, basically downward. It made him feel a little itchy. Somewhere above, a nest must have just hatched. He saw no webs.

  When he walked back to the others, Shit was asking Jay quietly, “Who done the diggin’?”

  “The Hemmings people came by with their boat yesterday afternoon and dug out the grave for us—like that, by seven o’clock. Gilead’s the largest island out here—but it ain’t the only one, you know.”

  “Oh,” Shit said. “Yeah.”

  Jay added, to Eric, “A lot more people used to live away from the mainland, than do today.”

  A mound of dirt lay on a green cloth, with three shovels sticking in it and two more shovels on the ground. The casket sat beside the rectangular hole.

  “It’s a lot prettier here than in that pipsqueak cemetery behind the Hemmings Interdenominational,” Cassandra said quietly to Tank. “I think Jay’s doin’ him a favor, putting him here.”

  “It’s funny,” Tank said. “But if somebody’s buried out here, you can’t think but so badly of ’em.”

  Jay asked Billy and Tad and Mex to help him lower the coffin.

  Then the men eased back, looking up and blinking in the sunlight still low for morning.

  “Hey.” Jay stood up and let his canvas strap drop to the ground. “I’m gonna say somethin’. Yall listenin’? First—” He stood straighter, one work shoe in the loose loam that would go back in—“I wanna thank yall for comin’ out here to be with me, for this. And for bringin’ all that good food back at the house we gonna be eatin’ in a few minutes. The fact is, at least years ago, before his stomach went, Shad liked his food. He really did. So that’s somethin’ good about ’im—a pleasure he could enjoy. All that warms me. Part of me, I’ll tell you the truth, wanted to get ’im planted and covered up and have done with it. Yall know I think he was a mean, ignorant, small-spirited man—and I can measure my whole life out watchin’ him, in my mind’s eye, do one awful, cruel, horrible, horrible thing after another—to me and everybody else around him. And then he’d go try to call it godly and good. Knockin’ my damned teeth out when I was a kid was the least of ’em. I know of three people he killed, two of ’em black men that never lifted a finger against ’im. I admit it, that’s the part that sickens me most. Then there was the time him and them boys tried to burn down The Slide, where they coulda killed me and a couple of dozen others, if Kyle’s men hadn’t’a stopped ’em. I ain’t gonna stand here and make a list of his sins—though you don’t know how tempted I am to do just that. ’Cause I think it would be really awfu
l if we forgot that that’s how some people have acted in this amazin’ world we live in, that, yes, has as much good and beautiful in it as it does.” He sighed. “Yeah, I wished I was different or more forgiving or…more somethin’ than I am. I do. But I couldn’t lie, though, and say most of what he done was anything but self-righteous and arrogant cruelty.” Jay sucked in a breath. “I know you’re only supposed to speak good of the dead. But we’d have a completely silent burial here, if we held to that.” No one laughed, though a breeze came up, and a thousand droplets fell suddenly from the leaves around, many sparkling. “Now, you also know this isn’t where Shad wanted to be. But I’m doin’ this for—I admit it—really selfish reasons. I think it’s beautiful here.”

  In his denim work jacket, plaid shirt, and green tie, white-haired Walter Holota nodded. Ruth Holota stood just before him, her sweater buttoned up to her neck, her own work shoes half sunk in leafy earth.

  “The fact is, I can’t imagine nobody in this place—in a place as beautiful as this—what didn’t have somethin’ good about ’em, even if I’ll never know what it was.”

  Captain Miller said, “Shad wasn’t all bad, son. He had a sense of humor—yeah, sometimes it could get kinda vicious, especially if he thought the people he was playin’ his jokes on was no accounts. I know about them black people. But I’m black, too—and I can remember some good things about him. Not a lot. But some. And eventually, I suppose, Shad was the kind of person what thought everybody was a no-account except him. But his humor was there, and it made me laugh…a few times—at least when I was a kid.” The Captain pulled one large, bare, black foot from the soft dirt. (A tired Eddie was back at the house with Hugh.) Captain Miller set his foot down again—water eased up around his foot’s cracked edges.

  Jay smiled, and Eric looked at the gap along his upper gum. “Well, that’s nice to know, Cap’n Miller.” Jay looked around. “It really is. Thanks for sayin’ it. But maybe that’s why I need to know he’s out here, where I’m gonna be some day, and maybe some of the rest of you are, too.” Again he looked around. “Anybody wanna help me fill this thing in?” He reached over where the three shovels stuck from the mound.

  Eric felt a hand push at his shoulder.

  Dynamite said, softly, “Go on, you two…” So Eric and Shit moved over to the pile and took up the other shovels—with Billy and Tad (who already had one)—and began to shovel dirt down on the glimmering blonde wood.

  (Eric liked watching black and white folks labor together. For him it braided with what gave meaning to his labor—and his love—for Shit.)

  “Move over,” Tank said—again in her red rain jacket—and, picking up a shovel from the ground, she began to scoop and toss, twice as fast as the others. “You gonna fill this thing up, you gotta fill it!”

  It went quickly. (Eric smiled even more broadly.) A quarter of the dirt was left over, even with a three inch meniscus bulging from the grave. Then everyone—Captain Miller, Dynamite, and Tank in the lead, Billy, Jay, and Cassandra at the rear—walked back to the house.

  *

  During the last minute of the walk back, it rained again.

  Eric came in through the vestibule, turned by the foot of the steps, and went into the living room. Tables and piles of plates and silverware and linen had already been set out. Five—no, six—people were already eating. In the middle of the sagging couch, Captain Miller was sitting, knees wide, his shins crossed in his black jeans. Gray dirt was drying on the cuffs. Mud was drying—gray, red, and brown in streaks—along the Captain’s feet.

  Hugh said, “Get yourself a plate—those beans and pork are good, Eric. There’s whiskey on the sideboard, if you want a drink.”

  Jay laughed. “Dynamite’s boys ain’t drinkin’ boys—you know that Hugh.”

  “I don’t need no whiskey.” Shit laughed. “I’m already crazy enough.” He walked to the table, lifted a deviled egg—

  “Put that on a napkin, at least, Shit,” Eric said.

  “Okay, okay . . .” Shit took one of the small plates though. “Hey, these are good. What they got in ’em? Mustard?”

  “And celery salt,” Tank said, from where she sat in the corner, eating pork and beans and chicken salad. “That’s all.”

  “Naw, I don’t need to get no crazier,” Shit repeated, then raised his plate to Hugh, walked to an empty chair, and sat.

  It was a relaxed hour-and-a-quarter of eating and talk.

  Eric said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it started really comin’ down again.” He glanced at the room’s high ceiling, edged with floral molding.

  Cassandra sat in a large armchair. She had a glass of something. “You ain’t gonna mind driving us back down to Captain Miller’s boat, are you?” There were still rain droplets on her full fleshy face, which sat near the two, blue inked ones.

  Walter Holota said, “I drove you up here, honey. I’ll drive you back down. It’s good to see you two again. I know a while there, about ten years back, you was havin some trouble with Tank’s mama.”

  “Mr. Holota?”

  With his flat, red-brown face, Walter Holota looked over at Eric.

  “I was just wonderin’—your nephew, Roan, he had somethin’ on his shirt, about…I think it said, ‘Tie a feather to it.’ What was that supposed to mean?”

  Mr. Holota’s face erupted in a laugh. “Oh, that. Well, the boy’s an artist—over at the Indian arts college, in New Mexico. He makes jewelry—like they sell in some of the stores in Runcible and Hemmings. See, the kids in the jewelry classes wanna make modern jewelry, like all the other modern jewelers do. But people who come to the college and the shops around there, want the stuff that looks Indian—I mean, authentic work. Hell—” He looked down where his own silver buckle had a stylized eagle with blue stones for the feathers—“I like that kind of stuff, too. I admit it. But the kids don’t wanna do that no more. They’re tired of it. Problem is, that’s the only kind they can sell. Then awhile ago, someone figured out you could make pretty much any old piece of silver or copper you wanted, and if you soldered a silver or a copper feather onto it, like as not it was gonna sell. ’Cause now it looked Indian.” He chuckled. “I admit, I don’t understand half the things he makes. But, like he says, tie a feather on it, and he can keep ’em movin’ in the shops.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Yeah…”

  “Yes, but that’s long over with,” Tank was saying to Ruth, a few feet away. “Cave et Aude’s doin’ nicely. It ain’t makin’ us rich, but we’re eatin’.”

  Cassandra let a loud sigh. “This is so nice out here,” she said. “Even in the rain.”

  Eric frowned, wondering what it would be like to have a problem like Roan’s. Maybe, when Roan came back, Eric would ask to see some of his work…

  Over a plate carrying only potato salad, Ruth Holota was saying to Jay, “You know, I’m a big believer in tradition—and this was not what I’d call a traditional funeral, by anybody’s lights. Still, I wanted to tell you, Jay, I appreciated what you had to say out there about Shad. I really did. But that’s because I love that place, out there. I do. I know your uncle was a hard man. I mean, you knowed him all your life—and I knowed him fifteen years longer than you did. We had our own grievances against him, though all that’s forgotten now and in the ground out there with him.”

  Eric had refilled his plate with pork and beans. It was tasty—surprisingly so, even though he’d cooked it himself. And there’d be enough left over, he’d begun to figure, for a week—

  The sound—to Eric—was like an animal’s distant slaughter. Logic told him it was outside the house, but at once, everyone in the room turned to look toward the hall into the kitchen.

  Shuffling from the dark archway, hands over his face, bleating miserably, Eddie came forward. “I’m scared…” he got out through his sobs. “I’m scared…where’s my daddy?” His tie was gone, his collar open, though he still wore his dark blue suit jacket.

  Billy and Cassandra looked questioningly at
one another.

  So did Tad and Mex.

  Captain Miller put his plate on the sofa cushion beside his hip. “What’s a matter, boy?”

  “He was tired,” Hugh said, with a deeply questioning frown. “So after you went out to the graveyard, I let him lay down in the room inside, down from Jay and Mex’s.”

  “I’m scared…I’m scared…” Sobbing Eddie moved forward, blindly toward his father. “I wanna go home…I’m scared.” Eddie came around the end of the sofa. Under his jacket his shirt was rumpled and half out at the waist. “I wanna go home…”

  “Hey, there, big boy.” Captain Miller opened his arms. “What scared you, now? You want somethin’ to eat? They got chicken salad—you like that.”

  “I don’t like no salad…I wanna go home…” Eddie repeated, rubbing his eyes, his face.

  “Well—” Captain Miller held the boy at a distance, but Eddie broke away and pushed up against him—“if the truth be known, maybe it is time we all thought about gettin’ back to the mainland.” He embraced his son. “This was a real nice spread. Jay, I think you done fine by Shad. Given some of the stuff that man pulled on you in his time, I know a lot of people wouldn’t have done this much.”

  Through the room people grunted assent.

  Tad said, “You know we should be thinking about gettin’ back. I’m supposed to be in bed in about an hour, and tomorrow’s a workin’ day.” He stood up from the chair he was sitting in and put his plate on the sideboard’s white doily.

  “Come on, Ruth,” Mr. Holota said. “Let’s run these people back down to the boathouse. You wanna drive the other car?”