Terry L. Welch

Diggers

      Dad was on the phone when I came into the kitchen and he looked up at me with a hardness.

      “Thanks, Dewey. We’ll be right over,” he said into the phone and I knew who he was talking to and knew then that he had been serious. He turned his back to me. The phone went to his chest and he stood with it there for a long moment before dropping it in the cradle. His hand rested on it for another moment, his eyes on his hand.

      “Get your coat,” was all he said to me, without turning, then he straightened, walked around the small table in the kitchen’s center and went out the screen door into the back yard. The door seemed to take forever to shut itself, but as it did, I heard the spring sigh before the rifle shot of its slamming.

      I walked back through the dining room to the stairs and up them to my room. From my closet I grabbed my Carhart jacket, my deerskin gloves and a ballcap. As I backed from the closet, snugging the cap down on my head, my mother entered the room. She stood just inside the door and seemed to be searching my face for something. I could tell that she had been crying. She was thinking about doing it again. I walked past her without a word and heard her start up before I was halfway down the stairs.

      The truck was warming up, but Dad was outside it, leaning against the bed smoking a cigarette. He stared out at the corn stubble three months harvested. His breath clouded with the smoke in the cold. A November sunset was sticking to the shorn, cadaverous stalks,  glistening from the first frost we’d had that hadn’t melted off at midday. Winter was here or would be soon. I looked at the shining corn and tried to imagine that it was nothing but dew, that it was an early  fall rain like we get in Kansas all the time and the corn was fresh-harvested. I tried to imagine it was late August again and none of this had happened or was a ways off.

      Dad was looking at me by then, though. When I noticed his eyes and the set of his mouth, imagining something different than this life was out of the question for me.

      He threw the cigarette down and stepped on it. I went around the truck, got in. A bottle of something sat in the middle of the bench seat in a paper wrapper. Dad took a swig off it and breathed out hard before he put the truck in drive and took off down the long dirt driveway.

      We said nothing to each other.       

      As we entered Crossroads, the town seemed to be folding into itself for the night. Small plains towns tend to do that. Streetlights are few and the patches of darkness that can’t be reached by them are darker because of the light’s nearby presence.

      We rolled through the town and I would glance at Dad trying to catch a glimpse in his eyes of what he might be thinking. His face was green in the dashboard light and his eyes were black slits in it. He gave nothing away until he turned to me and I saw that there was a darkness behind his eyes that no light—green dashboard, streetlight or otherwise—could reach.

      At Crossroads northern edge he turned the truck and shortly the cemetery could be seen in the distance. “This damn place is gettin’ to be as big as the town,” Dad said, and grabbed at the bottle again and drank and sucked in a gulp of air to chase down the heat.

      Jim Dewhurst sat waiting outside his pickup toward the back end of the cemetery. He wore a faded jean jacket and a watchcap rolled up so it just covered the tops of his ears. Two spades leaned beside him, their scoop ends up and leaning together as if they were sharing secrets dug from the earth. A darkened propane lantern sat between them on the ground and another lit one sat on his pickup hood.

      We pulled our truck up behind his. Dad grabbed the bottle and slid out, his other hand going into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. I followed him out. “Whaddya think, Dewey? Do we got a late frost or an early winter?”

      “Shit. You know I quit payin’ attention to the weather when I quit farmin’,” Dewhurst said and then looked at me. “What I put in the ground now ain’t gonna grow no matter what kinda weather we got.”

      Dad laughed in a weird way that said he knew that that was the truth and wasn’t really funny, but wasn’t meant to be. He handed the other man the bottle and he took it, sniffed at it and then drank.

      Jim Dewhurst and my father looked like brothers. Dewey was about ten years older than Dad, but it’s hard to tell a farmer’s age. Sometime around their thirtieth birthday—if they’re good farmers and work hard —they all start to look fifty and continue to until they get planted themselves. They look thin and brown and maybe you’d think a little weak if you didn’t know farmers. I knew farmers and wouldn’t want to go toe-to-toe with Dad or Dewey.

      Dewhurst’s readily available nickname, I suppose, was what had saved him from being called Digger. The last man who’d held the position of cemetery groundskeeper had been called that, and I’d guess every one before him. It was as much of a title as people came by in the flatlands. It was said with respect out here, if not in other places, even though I was pretty sure that graves were usually dug with backhoes nowadays, and there was little or no actual digging to be done.

      The older man took another drink before passing the bottle back to Dad. “Is the Harper boy comin’?” he asked, and looked out toward the meager lights of town.

      “He’s supposed to be,” Dad said. “But we’ll see if his old man has the balls to make him. We’ll give ‘em ten minutes.”

      It wasn’t five, though, before car lights lit up the cemetery’s front gate and then a long, blue sedan slowed to a stop behind our truck. Billy Harper got out of the passenger side of his father’s car. He wasn’t a tall kid, but broad-shouldered and with a cleanness to him always. His hair hung on the side of his face and was just long enough to be too long for Crossroads. He looked at me and the two men and the two shovels and just stood by the car door, shivering more than the cold required. The coat he wore would be too heavy once the work started, I saw, and he had no gloves.

      His father got out and walked over to the two other men and said hello. He looked as scared as his son. He wore a bulky sweater over a collared shirt and jeans without a worn spot on them. I tried to

remember if I had ever seen my Dad and Bob Harper side-by-side before. I didn’t think that I had.

      Bob Harper was the principal of the high school. He’d been hired from out of town three years ago and had been adopted into the small circle of people in town who didn’t farm—the bankers, the lawyers, the newspaper editor, the grocery store manager and a few others. He was a short man with a big waist and thinning hair, but his smile seemed to hypnotize people and his eyes looked like a little kid’s eyes. His eyes were full of something uncommon here.

      His son and I had hit it off immediately. There was something that we saw in each other that we didn’t see in ourselves, it seemed. Billy asked me about farming. It wasn’t, it appeared, the fact of it that

intrigued him, though, it was that I knew about it. I told him why we planted wheat when we did and talked about grain prices and tractors.

      He was fascinated, especially, about the amount of blood on the hands of even the youngest country children. He wanted to hear about trapping raccoons and beaver when I was twelve or cleaning chickens at eight. I told him stories about chasing down Dad and Grampa’s shot pheasants and wringing their necks by spinning them by their heads.

      I introduced him to Paul McMillan, too, who had his own stories. Paul had a different way with them, though. Paul would listen, nodding and quiet, to my remembrances of the farm life I’d known and then tell what seemed to be a nearly identical story from his own. There was something in his stories—something I had missed, somehow—that would leave the three of us silent long after.

      Billy had stories of his own, though. The Harper family had

traveled all over the world it seemed—Bob Harper and his wife had been teachers in schools for Army brats—and Paul and I loved to hear about those places that didn’t seem to exist in the same world as the one we knew. We would sit around the Harper dining table (in the old Baker house, as it will always be called) and drink coffee and he would talk for ten minutes at a time about someplace he’d been, then I would ask him a question and he would talk for ten minutes more. I envied him desperately.

      I didn’t envy him that night.

      “I & I don’t know about this. They’re only 16,” Bob Harper said, and looked at my father with his head down and his eyes up.

      My father stared at the smaller man. After a time, Harper turned to his son, still standing beside the car, as if he wanted him to see how he had tried. He looked back at my father, who turned to Dewhurst. “They’d better get started,” he said.

      I walked over to the spades and grabbed them both and turned to where Billy Harper stood. Dewey picked up the lantern and started walking off into the graveyard without a word. I followed him, nodding for Billy to come along. I didn’t look at him again and was almost surprised to see him beside me when we stopped at the gravesite fifty yards from the trucks. Dewey bent down and lit the lantern with a twist of a knob and a click of the starter. He stood up and looked at us.

      “I laid out some twine so’s you could see where you gotta dig,” Dewey said. He talked with a cigarette burning in his mouth. His left eye was squinted because of the smoke and he cocked his head to talk to me. “You’re about six feet tall, ain’t ya, boy?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Then I guess you can figure how much you gotta dig.” He looked at Billy and I looked, too. He stood there looking down at where we were to work. When he looked up, he sighed heavily. A cloud of steam billowed out. Dewey reached into his jacket and pulled out a pair of leather gloves. He held them out toward Billy, who just stared at them.

      “Take ‘em,” I said, “or your hands are going to get all tore up.” He looked at me and his eyes slotted. He reached out and snatched the gloves from Dewey, but kept looking at me.

      Dewey took the cigarette from his mouth with two fingers. “You gotta make sure the sides of this pit are smooth all the way up, you here? If that boy’s casket hits a bump or a rock or a big root as it goes down, &” He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. Neither of us wanted to picture Paul’s coffin tipping sideways and, God forbid, opening up and him spilling out.  I figure that wasn’t really possible, that they had to lock it shut somehow, but the thought of what Paul would look like since two days had passed made me suck in deeply on the cold night air.

      “Just do good work, boys,” Dewey said, his voice soft in a way that seemed to embarrass him. “I think you owe the McMillan kid that much.” He looked at each of us in turn and then strode back to the truck. I could see that Dad and Bob Harper stood apart from each other, both looking our way. They weren’t talking.

      I put the tip of my spade to the ground at the edge of the twine and pushed it into the earth with my foot. Billy walked to the other end of the site and did the same. In the stillness of the night, I could clearly hear Dad and Dewey talking over the sounds of our shovels cutting and lifting and piling the dirt. I looked over at them and the circle of light their lantern threw seemed so far away.

      Billy had just tossed dirt onto his growing pile when he dropped his spade to the ground, jumping back. “Jesus!” he yelped. I looked to the other men to be sure that they hadn’t noticed before I looked to Billy and what was bothering him.

      On top of the small mound of dirt on his end of the grave was a writhing mass of worms. A dozen or more nightcrawlers twisted  together, blindly seeking their way back into the ground. Billy stared at them, a little wild-eyed, then picked up his shovel. His eyes met mine and I could see he was embarassed. I tried to imagine what this was like for him: his soft, office-worker hands beneath the leather of the work gloves; Paul’s blood being the first he’d ever seen; the newness of

everything I’d known since I was knee-high.

      “It’s the cold,” I said, going back to work. “When the first cold weather comes on, nightcrawlers head toward the surface. Grampa used to say that at night the cold would start to settle into the ground and that’s what made ‘em come up, but I don’t know that that’s it for sure. We used to dig ‘em up damn near by the gross on nights like this.”

      Billy had begun to dig again. “I wasn’t expecting them. I just saw something moving out of the corner of my eye and it surprised me, that’s all. I’m not scared and I’m not stupid.”

      “I ain’t suggestin’ you’re either.”

      The lantern was sitting on the ground and its light cut low into the deepening hole. We were getting further down faster than I expected. When I stopped to take a breath, the air’s chill would seem to take a bite out of me, so I dug without stopping much. We were about a foot-and-a-half down when Bob Harper walked up with a thermos and two styrofoam cups.

      “Would you like some coffee, boys?”

      “I’d appreciate it, Mr. Harper.” I leaned on my shovel and took one of the cups in my right hand. The man filled it there and smiled at me, but he looked like he wanted to cry as he did. The smell of the coffee was heaven, some of the stuff I knew the Harpers ordered as whole beans from a catalog that came from another place I’d never been.

      He looked up into the sky. I followed his gaze past the tree limbs into the clear night. The stars were brighter out here in the country. Bob Harper had once told me that he’d lived his whole life in cities and I wondered what the country skies looked like to him with their lack of man-made light and the richness of God’s. He looked back down at me, smiled again. “I’ll never get used to all those stars,” he said. He walked around the hole. I tried to remember if I had said something out loud, but didn’t think that I had.

      As he filled his son’s cup, Billy nodded toward me. “He says he’s having a great time, Dad. Says it reminds him of digging for fishbait with his graahyumpaw.” He looked at me over his coffee as he sipped it. He looked like he expected me to come after him.

      Bob Harper chose to ignore his son’s mocking me. I think he chose to, anyway. He looked at me and smiled again. “I don’t think I’ve met your grandfather. Does he live in Crossroads?”

      “He’s here,” I said and sipped at my coffee. “But he ain’t livin’. He’s about thirty yards behind you.”

            Bob turned a little bit, a reflex. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
            “Don’t be. It was a coupla years ago now.” Then I added, “He was one of the good ones, though. Taught me nearly everything I know, but I didn’t have the patience to learn even a quarter of what he knew.”

      Billy snorted. “It appears Dear Old Dad’s taking over in the

education department now.”

      I looked away from him to where Dad stood against Dewey’s truck. He was smoking again and handing the bottle to the older man. He looked at me without expression.

      “Billy,” I started, through clenched teeth, “I think you better watch your mouth.”

      “Wait a second here, you two,” Mr. Harper interrupted. “You’ve got more important things to do than fight out here in the cold. Let’s get this over with and be done with it. This&this lesson—if that’s what you want to call it—it’s&well&it’s,” he looked at his son, who stood with a hand cocked on his hip and a thin-eyed look for his father, “it’s not going to kill you. Take what you can from it. You could be worse off. You could be&well, let’s get back to work, OK?”  Without another word, he poured me some more coffee, turned on his heel and walked away.

      We didn’t talk for a long time then. The night began to dissolve away into the work. Darkness pressed against my back every time I lifted a shovelful of dirt out of the hole. The conversation of the men against the truck made me turn again and again. It sounded as if their voices were closer than the chk-shusss of the shovel and its burdens.

I looked to Dad and the other men every now and then and saw that Bob was talking to them in the light. He was handed the bottle and I stopped, by this time waist-deep in the grave, and watched the long moment in which he held the bottle, looked to the other men and then, finally, drank. I looked away with a grin and saw that Billy was watching me from the other end of the hole. He wasn’t smiling.

      Billy wasn’t digging as fast as I was and the hole’s floor was canted toward me some. “You wanna switch ends?” I asked Billy the next time I raised up from digging.

      “Whatever,” he answered.

      We moved awkwardly around each other. As we did, Billy grabbed my arm and pulled me close to him. I tensed, expecting a punch, but he only whispered harshly to me, “We have to tell them.”

      “No. This is going to be over real quick,” I whispered back. “It’s better if we just let it go.”

      “Better for who?”

      “Everybody.” I grabbed his hand and pulled it away from me. “Paul especially, I guess.”

      Billy moved on to the other end of the grave. “Paul’s beyond caring, now,” he said. “We have to live with being called murderers.”

      “It was a hunting accident.”

      “It wasn’t. You know that.”

      Dad came over with Bob Harper’s thermos and filled the two cups on the side of the hole. I reached for the closest one and thanked him.

      “Your end’s lookin’ a little on the high side, son.”

      “Yes, sir. I’m workin’ on it.”

      Dad looked at Billy, who was sipping his coffee and smirking a little. “Son,” he said to me without looking away from Billy, “didn’t you start out over here?”

      Billy looked up at Dad. The side of his face toward me was in

darkness and the lantern was a halo behind him. I didn’t answer, but put my cup down and got back to digging. After a bit, I heard Dad walk off and after that, Billy’s spade biting the dirt.

      As we dug further, the lantern cut a harsh shadow across the mouth of the deepening hole and the soil was so rich and black that it seemed we were scraping out pieces of that shadow with every bend of our backs. It became hard to see the bottom. I had to duck below the lip of the grave to see and close my eyes as I brought my head back into the light to preserve my night vision.

      It was nearly two hours later when Billy and I went to switch ends again. I had passed him up again and he looked angry when I asked him if he wanted to move. I tried to show him a face that said I didn’t mind working more. My back was screaming at me, so I figured his must be about to give up completely. There wasn’t much left to dig, anyhow. The ground was at shoulder-level.

      As we moved past each other, the sky around us was lit up. I looked to the men at the truck, but they were looking toward the cemetery gate. I followed their eyes and saw a car pulling down the cemetery drive. It pulled up behind the Harper’s car and killed its lights and a man got out and walked into the edge of the light cast by the lantern on the truck. He was big man, standing a good six inches taller than Dad, wearing nothing but a flannel shirt despite the cold. It took me a few beats to recognize him.

      “Aw shit.”  

      “Who is it?” Billy asked.

      “It’s Carl McMillan.”

      McMillan stood at the edge of the light without saying anything. Dad started walking toward him. “How ya doin’, Carl?” he offered, along with his outstretched hand.

      “Not good, brother,” the big man said. His voice rumbled

drunkenly our way and his eyes glanced after the sound. “Is that your boy over there?”

      Dad looked at me.  Around him the night seemed to get darker, become thicker.  In my mind I saw him towing himself through with his arms like a swimmer.

      “We better get up outta here,” I said to Billy. I put my hands on the grave’s edge and kicked my way out of it, my arms straining. I stood, then realized that Billy’s arms weren’t going to get him out of the hole. The work had been too much. I turned, crouched on one knee and put out my hand to help Billy. He grabbed and I began to pull, leaning with my rubbery back. Billy got his waist to the edge and then lay on his stomach there, breathing softly with his cheek on the ground.     

      I felt something in the air snap behind me.

      As I stood again and looked back toward the truck, McMillan had swiveled our way and was stomping in our direction, clumsy but fast. Dad and Dewey were on his heels, grabbing at his jacket and saying “Wait a minute, Carl” and “Hold on a second” and “Slow down, Carl.” Bob Harper was behind them, looking as out of place as he’d looked all night.

      McMillan looked as unstoppable as a freight train. I stepped away from the grave to avoid being knocked into it when he reached me. “Get back in there if you can’t get out,” I said to Billy. I heard him thump softly behind me. I looked over my shoulder and he was out of sight in the hole.

      I stood and waited.

      “What the hell do you think you’re doin’, you little pissant!?” Carl McMillan reached me and shoved me back with both hands to my chest and I fell to my back out of the light and rolled up, walking backwards. Dad was yelling at him and trying to grab him, but the man was bigger, thicker and full of liquor and sadness. Dewey and Bob Harper stopped at the grave’s edge as we moved past and helped Billy out.

      I looked over my shoulder as much as I could, trying not to trip over a headstone as I nearly ran backward. “Mr. McMillan, I’m sorry. I am. I don’t know what to—”

      “Shut up! You murderin’ son of a bitch!”

      “Damn it,Carl! This was my idea,” Dad yelled, dragging at McMillan’s arm to little effect. “He’s just a kid. He’s payin’ for this as much as you are.”

      Carl McMillan spun on Dad then and swung quickly. The punch connected solidly and Dad went down like a shot duck, fast and wondering. McMillan stood over him, breathing heavily. “If you want these boys to pay, then let go of whatever strings you pulled to keep them outta jail.”

      Dad came to his elbows and I could see that he was trying to decide whether to fight this man, sadness or no. “I didn’t do any such thing,” he said. “It was an accident. A goddamn hunting accident. They

happen all the time. The cops didn’t want to put these boys through anything more than they’d–”

      “I don’t give a damn what they’d been through! At least they’re alive! Paul is&Paul,” McMillan began to choke on sobs and his voice trailed away. He turned to me then and he yelled, “They killed my boy!”

      Carl McMillan started toward me again. I had moved and half his face was lit by the lantern’s glow, the other melting into the night. Tears rolled freely down his daylight cheek. Dad began to struggle up to his feet behind him and then another voice, loud and shrill came through it all and everything came to a stop. “We didn’t kill him!”

      “Shut up, Billy,” I said, without taking my eyes off of McMillan, who had turned toward Billy’s yell.

      Billy wasn’t going to shut up, though. He had turned to his father and was talking loudly and quickly to him, crying himself now.

      “We didn’t. We didn’t. We were sitting there, talking at the end of the field and Paul said what a good day it was and he didn’t have a lot of good days. He had his gun there on his shoulder and the next thing we know, he’s sliding it down and reaching for the trigger. He had to reach so far. He shot himself, Dad.”

      Carl McMillan stepped unsurely toward Billy. “Shut up,” he said.

      Dad was looking at me with his mouth hanging open. He hadn’t made it up off his butt. “Mr. McMillan,” I said. “Mr. McMillan, don’t listen to him.”

     Dewey and Bob Harper were staring at Billy. They stood directly over the lantern and their faces were underlit and white.

     “The cops knew, Dad. They knew he’d done it to himself, but he”— he pointed at me—“said he’d shot him on accident, but they knew. I could see they knew.” Billy broke down, then. He sagged into his father’s arms. The words kept pouring from his mouth, but I understood few. He said “his head” and “so loud, so quick” and “blood blood blood.”

      Carl was still walking toward the trio by the lantern, but he had deteriorated as well, crying loudly. He reached them and grabbed at Billy stiffly. Now, though, he was spent. Dewey pulled him off the crying boy. He leaned heavily into the groundskeeper.

      “We’re leaving,” Bob Harper said. He was crying now with his son as he pulled him toward their car. Dewey led Carl McMillan away

toward his truck.

      I stood in the sudden silence. The night was made up of something else then, something clear still, but as thick as honey. My arms and back were numb from the work, but I could sense the coming ache. My breath came in shuddering, excited gasps.  

      “Help me up, son.” Dad was resting on one elbow, holding his other arm up in the air. I walked to him and gave him a hand and pulled him to his feet.

      His back was to the lantern as he stood and I couldn’t see his face, but could feel him staring at me. “Carl’s a good man,” he said. “He’s gonna feel like shit about all this.”

      “I know.”

      He shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “What the Harper boy said, was that how it was?”

      I looked down at my gloves and said nothing.

      “Well?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Dad nodded slowly. He reached out a hand and put it on my

shoulder. I let it sit there a second and then walked away toward the grave. Holding the lantern up, I located the spades at the bottom, then set the light back down and dropped into the hole. I picked up one of the shovels and pitched it out of the grave, then picked up the other and started, again, to dig.

      A moment later, Dad dropped into the other end, the shovel in his hands. 

About the Prize Winner:

Terry L. Welch is a senior in English – Creative Writing at Kansas State University. Born and raised in St. John, Kansas, he has recently reached a milestone at KSU, as he celebrated his tenth anniversary semester Fall 1999. He did take time off during those ten years, however, to work as a military journalist for both the United States Navy and Army, living and working in Iceland, Bosnia, Guatemala, and aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Terry is also the father of two sons, from whom he admits to stealing his best inspirations. His story “Diggers” received this year’s Touchstone prize in undergraduate fiction, and his poem, “Fall River,” was selected as the undergraduate poetry contest winner.   

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