Dead Man's Song

Gaither Carby was the great-grandson of the Carby who had bought the land and built the farm. He was fifty-eight and looked seventy, with arthritis starting in his hands and steel pins in his left knee. He had the blocky build and thick, callused fingers, and the bleak fatalism of the heavily mortgaged man who was seeing everything his family had ever owned being gobbled up by the Pine Deep Farmer’s Bank. He knew it was an old story, repeated a thousand times a week across the country, and he knew that there was nothing unique or exceptional about him or his to elicit any kind of help. No Farm Aid, no Willie Nelson and Neil Young. He was going to lose the place within two or three years, and that would simply be that.



When the workday was finished, Carby came in from the fields, showered, ate dinner, and then went back outside for a smoke. Lily didn’t let him smoke in the house, and Jilly, his sixteen-year-old, always complained it made her ill. His boy, Tyler, never bitched about it, or about anything for that matter, but Carby seldom felt like fighting the same fight every day, so he took his pipe and went outside to walk the fence and think.



Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.



“Any of those rat bastards break in here, I want everyone to grab the closest gun. We ain’t going to end up like Henry Guthrie, God rest him.” Carby had taught Tyler and Jilly how to shoot before they were out of single digits and by the time they were in their teens both of them could drop a pheasant at fifty yards. Lily? Well, she could fire a shotgun and anyone could hit something with a shotgun, especially an intruder in the close confines of a small farmhouse. Even so, Carby was scared for his family. He walked the fenceline with his pipe between his teeth and his own shotgun in the crook of his arm; the gun was broken open at the breech but loaded with buckshot. His dog, a big shepherd named Spooker, was back at the house with the girls and Tyler.



Life’s a bitch and then you die, he thought as he walked. He’d always loved that expression. As close to Zen as he had ever seen, with the exception of No Pain, No Gain, which he had tattooed on his left shoulder back in his wrestling days. Not pro wrestling or any of that TV comedy, but Greco-Roman during his four years at Pinelands College. Carby had studied animal husbandry and agriculture, and for the most part he hadn’t learned much beyond get your cows to screw and plant as many crops as you can.



“Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he said aloud, and that made him think of death. Not just the headline deaths out at the Guthrie place, but death closer to home. His buddy Bailey Frane had buried his mother yesterday morning. Passed in her sleep, even though she’d been healthy as a horse for all her eighty years. Carby had stood by Bailey during the funeral and had sipped kitchen whiskey with him all afternoon, the two of them growing more philosophic about life and death as the tide-line of the bottle receded.



There was a breeze coming out of the southwest and he stopped for a moment at the edge of a fallow field where he planned to grow blueberries next season. So far the blight hadn’t touched the berry crops in the region, so he thought he’d try blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and maybe some raspberries. The better berries sold pretty well in farmers’ markets or to the buyers for the store chains; the second-best always sold to the jelly companies in New Jersey.



He sniffed the wind, searching for the scents he liked—tilled earth, manure, sweetgrass—but then he frowned. There was an odd smell on the air; threaded through the earthy smell of churned soil, wood smoke, and dried corn, there were other scents, and Carby had a farmer’s nose. There was some old skunk there, but that was from roadkill over on Seven Mile Road on the other side of the Pine River, less potent than it had been a few nights ago. A whiff of gasoline, too. And something else. Sweeter, but not sweet like fruit. More like the sugar-up-your-nose stink of something left out to rot. Sweet like that. Nasty sweet. He took his pipe out of his mouth and held it at arm’s length, clearing his nose as much as possible. The breeze brought the olio of smells again, and there it was. The bad sweet smell. Only this time it was stronger. Fresher. Nearer, he thought.



Dead deer out in the woods, he thought, but the idea of something dead in the woods spooked him. What if it wasn’t a dead deer out there? What if that Boyd fellow had killed someone else and what he smelled was a dead body out in the woods?



“Balls,” he told himself and he screwed on a mocking smile. Even so, he reached over to the fence rail, tapped the coal out of his pipe, grinding it into the mud and put the warm pipe in his pocket so that he had both hands free. For a moment he stood there unconsciously holding the shotgun at port arms, sniffing the wind like Spooker. The dead-sweet smell was, if anything, stronger, and that wasn’t right. The breeze was coming out of the west, blowing across Pine River. The state forestland was north and east of his place, and Pinelands College was south and east. There were no deer woods to the west. Just farm fields and the river, and on the other side of the river was a big auto junkyard that covered more than a square mile.



With the pipe gone his sense of smell began sharper with each breath, and now the dead-sweet smell was much stronger. Not distant at all and…not a dead scent, really. More like sick-sweet. Earthy and rotting and somehow—he fished for the word—vital.



“Balls,” he said, and decided that he’d had enough of moonlit strolls. He had walked the fenceline for half a mile and it ringed his property, but if he cut across the fallow field he could be home in just a couple of minutes. He looked due east to where the lighted windows of his home gave the house its own definition against the utter blackness of the fields and forest beyond. Those yellow rectangles had always looked homey to him, warm and inviting and—even he had to admit it—safe, but now those tiny dots of light seemed dwarfed by the immense darkness and as he looked at them he thought he had never seen anything look as lonely.



Carby started out across the field, looking down as he went to pick a path through the shadows on the ground. It wasn’t until he was a third of the way across that he saw the mound, and it stopped him in his tracks. The hump of dirt wasn’t big, no more than three feet high at the crest, but it was there and he sure as hell hadn’t made it. He hadn’t done any digging in this field all year.



“What the hell is this shit?” There was a small flashlight on his keychain for finding key slots on the fence locks, and he fished in his jeans for his keys and then flicked it on. It was so dark out that the tiny flash threw a pretty good beam and Carby played it over the mound. It was maybe eight feet long, but only a yard high in the middle and tapering off pretty quickly toward each end. The dirt was rough and chunky like it had been hand dug, not clean packed the way a shovel would have done. He shone the beam all along it and then swept the area around the mound. He saw two things that caused gooseflesh to pebble him from feet to hairline. All around the mound were footprints. Clear prints that went this way and that, sometimes standing alone, sometimes overlapping. City shoes with smooth soles, the complex tread-pattern of sneakers, and the rippled ridges of work boots. He counted five separate pairs. That was the first thing, and it froze him to the spot.



The second thing he saw made his pores open and burst with cold sweat. Just beyond the mound, maybe ten feet farther on into the darkness, was a second mound. He moved the light around and saw a third. And a fourth. All of them were about the same length, the same height. All made up of hand-churned clods of dirt. Then he saw the fifth mound. It was not as high as the others, nor as rounded on top. In fact the top of this mound was ragged and the sides had caved back from the crest. Carby swallowed a lump the size of a corncob. His flash beam played over the uneven dirt and even without drawing any closer to it he could see that this mound was open.



Open was a strange thought, and Carby took a step closer, examining the mound, trying to understand them all, but trying to understand this one more because this one bothered him more. This one looked even more like a…



Grave?



He didn’t even want to think that word, but there it was. The thing looked like a grave. “Oh, shit,” he said, and a thousand thoughts flew around in his head like hysterical crows in a lightning-struck tree. Christ! What if Boyd had killed someone else and had come out here to the ass-end of town to hide the body? No, bodies! Terror had him by the throat. What if Boyd had been killing folks all day and had buried them here on the farm. On his farm! Mary, Mother of God, that would be the end of things. No one would ever buy crops from a farm where bodies had been buried. This was the end of the farm, sure as cows shit brown. This was the end of him. Blinking sweat out of his eyes, Carby took a step closer, and then another, crouching to see along the beam of the flashlight, expecting to see a dead hand sticking up out of the earth like a stand of asparagus, hoping he wouldn’t see that and yet weirdly fascinated. He was bent at the waist, head bowed, peering at the mound from four feet away when the earth moved.



Carby froze as if sprayed with liquid nitrogen, his eyes bugging wide. The shotgun was something stupid and forgotten in his hands as he stared at the movement, still locked in the awful fascination and at the same time not really understanding what he was seeing. The mound of dirt trembled—and Carby had the fleeting thought that it was loose fill stirred by the wind—but then the farmer in him realized that the wind was blowing the wrong way for dirt to fall toward him. He watched, wide-mouthed, as the dirt fluttered down, running in dry rivulets as the whole mound began to shudder. A large clod broke off and fell right by his toe. He picked it up. It was ordinary dirt, of course, loosely packed and cool. Another clod fell out of the mound, and another. Then one large clump, right near the top, seemed to lift. Carby stared at it, still unable to explain or understand what he was seeing. The heavier clump rose, standing almost on edge, and then broke under its own weight and the individual pieces toppled off in all directions.