‘You go take care of it,’ the sheriff said to me.
When I got there they had the coffin hid in a shed with a guard out front to make sure nobody came snooping around. They was smart enough to know if word got out about such a thing people in Oconee County would be stirred up like hornets. The Carolina Power man said as much to me and Calvin, asking us not to say nothing to anyone about what he called a‘unfortunate occurrence.’
‘We’ve spoken to Pearson Funeral Home,’ he told us. ‘As soon as you men give the O.K., they’ll get it in the ground with the others they dug up.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ Calvin said. ‘This won’t take but a minute.’
The Carolina Power man lifted the tarp off the coffin. I didn’t have to see any more than the wood to know what was inside.
Calvin gave the body a quick look-see and laid the coffin lid back on.
‘O.K,’ Calvin said. ‘You tell Melvin Pearson he can rebury it. You got any problem with that, Bobby?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But it’s best I be the one to deliver it.’
Calvin looked a little puzzled.
‘That’s what the sheriff would want you to do?’ Calvin asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Calvin shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, I guess that’s fine by me,’ he said.
The Carolina Power man didn’t say nothing either way. He was just happy as hell to get that coffin off his hands. They helped me load it in the back seat, one end poking out the window like I was hauling a piece of furniture.
‘Please tell Mr. Pearson we’d like him to get it reburied today if at all possible,’ the Carolina Power man said.
‘I’ll tell him,’ I said.
I started toward Seneca but when I got to Highway 11, I took a right toward Mountain Rest. The largemouth bass was spawning, and my brother might have quit early and took the boat out himself. That was my worry, for I’d be in a tangle if that was the way of it. But when I drove up Wendell’s drive the jon boat was beside the barn.
Wendell was working in his corn field. When he saw me drive up he hopped off his tractor and walked out of his field to meet me.
‘I need your boat,’ I said. ‘Your truck too, I reckon, since I got no hitch.’
‘That ain’t no problem,’ he said. ‘The rain’s put me so behind I’ll be lucky if I wet a line by August.’
Wendell went inside the barn and got the motor. ‘Let’s get it hooked up,’ he said.
He backed up the truck while I lifted the trailer hitch. ‘There,’ he said, handing me the keys after we got the motor on. ‘Make sure you give that cord a few yanks for it’s stubborn to start.’
Wendell looked ready to get back in his corn field but I nodded toward the police car.
‘If you got a minute I could use another set of hands.’
We lifted the coffin and laid it in the boat. I got a blanket and rope out of the trunk and covered it.
‘Damn, Bobby,’ Wendell said when we’d finished. ‘What are you about to be up to?’
‘It wouldn’t do you a speck of good to know,’ I said. ‘But if you was to know you’d be glad I was doing it.’
He mulled that over a few moments. You could tell he was curious as a cat about that coffin.
‘Anything else you need?’ Wendell asked.
‘Just a box of salt.’
Twenty minutes later I left the blacktop and bumped down what was already being called Old Jocassee Road. I parked where the road disappeared into the water. I got the boat in and headed toward the heart of the lake.
I drove slow, for the coffin made it a damn awkward balance. The jon boat rode high, though if that coffin had been oak instead of cedar it would have been a hell of a different story. Carolina Power claimed there’d be places four hundred foot deep when the lake filled up completely. When I got to where I figured one might would be, I cut the engine.
‘Still waters run deep,’ my Grandma Murphree used to say, ‘and the devil lays at the bottom.’
l lifted the blanket and lid. I looked in the coffin and saw her old hollow-eyed skull grinning at me.
‘You’ll not rest in no graveyard with my kin, witch,’ I told her. Then I lifted what there was of her from the coffin.
‘Sink straight to hell,’ I said and dropped her in the water.
The clearest water of any lake in the South—that was another Carolina Power claim, and I could believe it. I watched those bones drift down, the skull-face nodding back and forth, the arms unfolding off her ribs and spreading out like wings, getting smaller and smaller, the lake so clear it was like she fell through air, not water.
When I couldn’t see her no more I yanked the cord and headed back. It was a blue-sky afternoon, the kind of warm, perfect day you sometimes get around here in spring, the kind of day to get out on water like this with a rod and reel and give yourself a chance to leave your bothers behind and be trifling a few hours.
You got done what you had to do, I told myself. Just relax now and enjoy the scenery and let your mind drift. But I couldn’t because my mind kept snagging on Billy and Amy Holcombe. Which wasn’t the least surprising thing considering where I was. I was thinking how they was dead and sunk in the lake and wasn’t going to rise till the Judgment Day.
I thought about their son too. How he was living with the sheriff until he went down to Clemson in the fall. I wondered if he’d be like the sheriff and never come back up here, even to grieve.
I was getting near shore now so I eased the throttle. I looked at the bank and realized I was eyeballing the top of Licklog Mountain. Down in the water I saw a road and I knew there was but one road it could be. Everything was so clear it was like looking through a window. I cut the engine and let the boat drift above the old river bed, the boat’s shadow dragging across the lake bottom like a net.
This is the way God sees the world, I thought. Soon I saw the truck, still bogged down in the mud the way it had been six months ago, then a mailbox and finally the house and barn and shed me and the sheriff had searched so long ago.
The front door of the house was open and I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone might step out on that porch any second and look up at me the same way I might look up at a plane—someone who didn’t even know they was dead and buried under a lake.
That thought sent a hell of a shiver up my spine. I didn’t want to be on this water no more. I yanked the cord and got to shore quick as I could. I hitched the jon boat to the trailer and drove up the road a few yards. I lifted the coffin lid and spread the salt around the inside, then threw in some rocks before I closed it. When I got back to Wendell’s I’d hammer a few nails in the lid just in case Melvin or one of his workers took a notion to peek inside.
I drove out of Jocassee, for the last time if I had any say in the matter. I wouldn’t be coming back here to fish or water ski or swim or anything else like that. This wasn’t no place for people who had a home.
This was a place for the lost.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Marlin Barton, Frye Gaillard, Tom Rash, Amy Rogers and Robert West for their valuable assistance in the completion of this book.
Ron Rash, One Foot in Eden
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