Copyright 2015 by Marshall Evans- all rights reserved.

The Fifth Tale- Earnest robs a grave.

The first, the only check I ever got as a writer was for one hundred dollars from a major southeastern newspaper. They bought a little travelogue I wrote about going to the Outer Banks. The trip itself, a camping vacation with my wife, cost us around three hundred dollars.

I can’t tell you how much that check boosted my spirits. After three years of calling myself a writer, finally I was a professional writer. Not only that, the editor took up an idea I had thrown out in my cover letter and asked me to do a piece on migrant workers in the Southeast.

That came from my having been a peach farmer, which I was for five years before I started trying to write. I never made any money at it , but I borrowed a lot and lived well and repaid it all by the skin of my teeth. I still have an outstanding commercial credit history for someone with no job and an average annual income for the past three years of thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents.

Well, I’m straying, because really what I want to get into is migrant workers. I worked with migrant workers for five years, Mexican, Jamaican, Haitian, American blacks, even a crew of white American drunks. I don’t even know where to begin telling about them, except to say that I knew very little about them before I became a farmer. As much as I had read or as much as I had seen on T.V. about migrant workers, I knew very little. I have never seen a report by a journalist that didn’t look at migrant workers as a shame, or a problem to be solved.

Well, that’s saying a lot more about it in a direct way than I really want to say. The editor offered to pay me four hundred dollars if they published my article, and in the rush of excitement over getting my first check in the mail, I showed Mary Ruth the letter. She was wonderful about it and said if I sold a couple more like this, got some credits, and then started getting some more income- any income at all, maybe I wouldn’t have to get a job.

There was an idea, though, that had been floating around in the back of my mind for a long time, ever since I was a peach farmer, really. I had always daydreamed about working as a migrant worker for a few weeks, to see the situation from the other side. I already had a perspective that very, very few people ever get, that of employing migrant workers, of actually doing the exploiting that allows well-to-do Americans to eat fresh fruit and vegetables year round and despise those who make poor migrant workers live in such terrible conditions.

Oh, hell, there I go again. I don’t want to get into that. Anyway, I realized long ago that I had an opportunity that most people never have to see both sides of this fence, and as a writer I ought to take advantage of it.

I hit Mary Ruth with this proposition. I could get in touch with Javier, who used to be my foreman on the farm, and who still lived near home and still had a lot of relatives and friends who were migrant workers. I would ask him if I could join up with his brothers for a couple of weeks, let’s say a month, in Florida. It was orange picking time in Florida. Mary Ruth was only six months pregnant, so I would be back in plenty of time for the baby. Well, let’s say three weeks.

Mary Ruth was not keen on the idea at all. But I put it to her this way. I was going to have to get on the road for a week or two to research the article anyway, and all those expenses would come right out of our pockets. This way I could earn my travel expenses, and if I got into some good picking, I might even bring money home. Plus it would give me an unusual angle on the story, both sides of the fence, so to speak, and an unusual story was more likely to be bought.

I had known and worked with a lot of migrant workers and had done much the same work they did from time to time when I was a farmer. On slow days, when the crew was small and things in other parts of the operation were running smoothly, I would strap on a pick sack and help pick, trying to dump equally in everybody’s bin, so it didn’t look like I was playing favorites. And I had spent a fair amount of time down at the labor camp, drinking beer, playing pool, eating dinner every now and then. I really enjoyed that. Frankly, it was what I enjoyed most about farming. Mary Ruth knew all this, and that helped win her over.

What really won her over, though, was later that night when I said I felt it was something I ought to do, something I owed to these people, that they couldn’t speak for themselves to the kinds of people I could speak to. Mary Ruth doesn’t usually go in for that kind of thing, but, and maybe it was the way I said it, I think that’s what finally convinced her to let me go.

So I called Javier and asked if I could drive up from Columbia to see him that afternoon. He still lived up near the farm. When I got to his trailer late in the afternoon, there were twenty or thirty chickens running around the yard, and a goat tethered to a stake in the spare grass sticking out of the red clay. There were two cars parked out front, a seventies model pickup truck and an early seventies model Buick Electra. And a satellite dish. Inside the kids were watching a movie on the VCR. I think Javier has done better for himself since I quit farming.

When I told Javier what I wanted to do, I could tell he thought the idea was ridiculous. But Javier is a nice guy. He wouldn’t tell me to my face it was ridiculous. And I think his wife kind of appreciated it. She said it would be good for me to get out and do some hard work. She said it wasn’t good to stay home all day by myself. She had done that herself with five babies.

Javier told me he would call his brother, who was down near Orlando picking oranges, but it would be a couple of days before he could get back to me.

I went home and spent three restless days. A couple of rejections came in the mail. They had been a long time coming, and I had convinced myself that both of them were taking so long because they were being passed up the ladder. But they came back with the stock, printed rejection slip. That hit hard.

Anyway, when Javier called me up and said there was a lot of work down in Florida, and his brother and cousin were expecting me, I was just ecstatic. Here was not just an adventure. I’ve been on lots of adventures, but this might be something substantial.

I went through the closets, trying to find something to pack my clothes in, but all the bags looked too new. So I finally got a couple of plastic garbage bags and stuffed one inside the other. I got out the rattiest old work clothes I could find, preferably something about ten years out of style. The best stuff was left over from high school, and it just did fit me.

Mary Ruth was in the bed watching me pack, and she started to have second thoughts about the whole thing. You know what hormones do to a pregnant woman. I looked over, and she was crying, and she wouldn’t tell me what it was about. So I sat on the bed beside her and held her. I would be fine, I told her. She knew Javier’s brother and cousin. They had worked for us one summer on the farm, and they were nice boys, just country boys from southern Mexico, not hard boys. Plus I could speak Spanish plenty well enough to get along.

She drove me to the bus station the next morning. When I kissed her good-bye she started crying again, but she said she was really proud of me. She said what I was doing was a good thing, and she was glad to see me working now on what I knew in my heart was right ”That’s what you’ve got to work on, Earnest,” she said. “You’ve been selling yourself short. If you’re going to do it, you have to write about what really matters to you.”

It was hard to leave her, but I got on the bus and I felt pretty good about myself. I felt good about myself all the way to Orlando, a fifteen hour trip. Javier’s brother met me at the bus station there, along with one of the boys from camp who had a car. They took me to a concrete block labor camp on a hill in the middle of an orange grove. The place was dirty, and there was trash all out in front of it. But I’ll tell you the truth, I knew good and well it was like that because the people who were living there had made it like that. Well, anyway, Mary Ruth wouldn’t have liked it, but it didn’t bother me being that dirty.

I’m really not going to go into the time I spent in Florida, because it’s not the best part of the story. The people in the camp were very kind to me for the most part. The picking was heavy, and we worked our asses off every day. I couldn’t keep up with them. We were getting paid by the bushel, and I made some good money, but not like those guys were making. This was the gravy train for them. The gravy train only comes every now and then, and they were riding it as far as they could. The physical labor did me a lot of good. I was exhausted at the end of every day, and it was all I could do to wolf down a few tacos, wash the dishes, and crawl in the bed. I had to wash the dishes since I couldn’t cook Mexican food. I was sharing a kitchen with Javier’s brother and his cousin and a couple of boys from their home town in Mexico. They taught me a lot of Spanish slang and curses I didn’t know before. We watched baseball on an old T.V. they had bought at a pawn shop in Orlando. Told dirty jokes. Talked about women all the time.

The hardest part for me was having some Florida cracker lording it over me all day in the field. This guy was the farmer’s nephew, weighed about two-twenty, red neck. Literally his neck was red, and he was dumb as mud. But after a few days he figured out I wasn’t a social worker or a union organizer, which he had thought at first. I told him the truth. Well, not about the newspaper article. I told him I was an ex-farmer myself, and was now a writer, and I was down doing some research for a book. A novel.

“A novel? What kind? Fiction or non-fiction?”

I get that question all the time. When he found out that I had been in his shoes once myself, he was pretty decent to me. We spent a lot of time talking during the hottest part of the day, and I probably would have earned more money if I hadn’t been so willing to stop picking and talk to that guy.

Anyway, I’ll be honest with you, or I’ll try to be. You may think I’m crazy, but those were two of the best weeks of my life. They really were, and I’m not going to try to justify that statement.

There was one ugly incident on a Saturday night when some of the guys in the camp got drunk. But I won’t go into that.

Anyway, it was just about the end of orange picking season in Florida. As the work started to slow down, some of the crews were moving up to Georgia to thin peaches. And since I had had such a nice couple of weeks with this bunch, I decided I might ought to check out another crew, particularly a crew of black migrant workers, since I knew the situation would be entirely different with them than it was with the Mexican crews. Oh, there, that gets your hackles all up, but it’s the plain truth, and I don’t think you would find anyone who has spent any time in contact with these people who would tell you any differently. I don’t know why it is. I suspect it’s partly because American born migrant workers come from the most down and out part of our society, while Mexican migrant workers have to travel thousands of miles to work illegally in a foreign country, and that takes a lot of initiative and determination. To hell with that. I don’t know the reason, and I’m not going to try to explain it.

I went to the crew leader of one of the black crews working on the farm with us. This guy’s name was Leonard Robinson, and I could just tell when I met him he was a shifty son of a bitch. He was one of the shiftiest crew leaders I have ever met, which means he was shifty as hell. He looked like Idi Amin in a pair of blue-lensed, sun-sensing glasses. He owned a tremendous red Cadillac Sedan de Ville, and a ratty green Ford panel van for the crew to ride in. When I met him I should have known what I was in for. Well, I partially did. That’s why I wanted to go with him to Georgia.

He was suspicious when I first approached him and explained what I wanted to do. Again, I didn’t mention the newspaper assignment. He knew I had some kind of ulterior motive, but in the end I talked him into it. He said, just rough as hell, “O.k., I’ll take you along, but I ain’t putting up with no shit. You work just like the other niggers, and I ain’t goan have no stirring shit up. You crazy.”

And ooh, I was filled with righteous indignation, because I always had hated these guys, on the one hand because they had always, always done their best to rip me off when I was a farmer. It was their every waking thought, how to rip somebody off. And on the other hand, it made me feel good to tell myself that I, the rich white guy, was trying to do what was fair and right, and it was these black pimps that were ripping the poor drunks off, and they were the real villains of the situation.

So I said good-bye to Javier’s cousin and his brother and all the guys at the Mexican camp and went over to Leonard’s camp that afternoon. I walked down one hill and crossed the highway and cut up through another orange grove. Weeds and grass were growing up in the orchards where the fruit had already been harvested, and some of the limbs were broken from the picking.

Leonard was supposed to be packing up to go to Georgia, but when I walked into the camp he was just raising hell, throwing stuff in the trunk of the Cadillac and cursing his girlfriend and the one other black guy who was there. I asked him what was going on. He told me there was just no way he could take me, that the whole thing was called off and he didn’t know where he was going, and that he might just quit being a fucking crew leader and working with these goddamn drunks. It turned out that his whole crew had walked out on him at lunchtime and left him with just his girlfriend and her brother. I watched and waited for him to blow off steam. I’d watched it all before a dozen times. Different crew leader, same tirade.

He calmed down after a while, then he said, well, he guessed he’d go on up there anyway, and go through Atlanta and pick up a new crew. And I got him to take me with him. I had to do some fancy talking to keep him from charging me car fare to Georgia. In fact he may have been planning to deduct it from my pay when we got to Georgia.

I rode with his girlfriend’s brother in the van to Atlanta that night. We spent a few hours in a rest area in Central Georgia, trying to catch a few z’s on the bench seats. I didn’t see Leonard and his girlfriend at the rest area. I figure he spent the night in a motel.

We met them the next morning out in front of a mission in downtown Atlanta. Leonard parked his Cadillac right in front of the mission, and we parked on the opposite side of the street and down the block a ways. Leonard picked up five or six men there, old drunks, all black. All of them had done this plenty of times before. Then we went to a couple of liquor stores, and Leonard got seven or eight more men there, including a couple of fairly young boys who were out of work and were naive enough to believe him when he told them how much they could make picking peaches. Sure, they might make that on a good day. Well, they might make it. Migrant workers in the East are paid by the bushel mostly, and I doubt those boys would ever work hard enough to make that kind of money.

The best couldn’t hope to make that much but every now and then. You have to figure on all those weeks when they make almost nothing, because there’s nothing much to pick.

We were going to thin peaches in Central Georgia. That’s when you knock the little green peaches off the tree in the spring, ideally spacing the peaches so there is one every six inches along the limb and they will be able to grow to full size. I say ideally. The workers get paid by the tree, and you have to stay right behind them all the time to get them to do a decent job.

Anyway, we drove that afternoon to a farm in Central Georgia, not terribly far from Macon, and moved into a labor camp there.

This was pretty swanky as far as labor camps go. It was a converted peach-packing shed, a big, open building that had been enclosed and divided into hallways and rooms. It had two stories, with a kitchen and a large combination rec room and dining room downstairs. Also downstairs were a shower room and the crew leader’s room. Upstairs were the bedrooms for the crew.

I say it was swanky. It was swanky for a labor camp. A bunch of the windows were broken out, and there was graffiti and red mud all over the walls. The place was on a hill in the middle of a peach orchard, surrounded by high grass and weeds. It had the funky smell of fried foods and spilled beer and dirty people about it. The furniture was broken. The beds were very old. But the building was spacious and was built to withstand some heavy duty partying, which may be why it had been assigned to Leonard Robinson’s crew.

We got there on a Sunday afternoon, and there was no work to be done until the next day, so as soon as we got there Leonard opened up the bar. This was in the rec room/dining room. Leonard had three items for sale, wine, malt liquor, and generic cigarettes.

Well, four items. He had pot for sale, but he was demanding cash for that, instead of marking it down in his notebook to be deducted from the next paycheck. Nobody had enough cash to buy any. Except me. I had a lot of money with me, which was making me kind of nervous. Mary Ruth had insisted before I left that I take a couple of hundred dollars in cash with me, just in case of emergency, since we had cut up all the credit cards earlier that year. Then when I was working in Florida, I had cleared another couple of hundred dollars over living expenses, so I had a good-sized roll of money stuffed in my sock.

Leonard left his girlfriend to tend bar while he took the Cadillac to get groceries for dinner. All the guys lined up and opened their charge accounts. Leonard had his girlfriend stuff the old jukebox with quarters to get the party atmosphere flowing. And there was a pool table with threadbare felt.

I bought a sixteen-ounce can of malt liquor from Leonard’s girlfriend. I would have paid cash, but everybody else was charging it, and I didn’t want to stick out, so I told her my name and had her start a tab. I watched as she jotted down the entry. I was astonished at the price. Well, I decided what the hell, I’d better buy a pack of cigarettes, too, as this promised to be a stressful situation.

After a while Leonard came wheeling back from the store with the groceries. He had a large roll of bologna, several loaves of sliced white bread, and a bag of beans. That was dinner, and I think he ended up charging us a couple of dollars apiece for it. But that part is hazy. What is not hazy is the four women he brought with him.

They were all black, and there was no question how they earned their keep. Two were skinny girls, flat-chested and dark skinned, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. One of them was missing her front teeth, when she smiled. There was a woman who might have been fifty years old. Her hair was graying. She was no more than five feet tall, and she had a kind of a square shape, but she apparently knew Leonard and his girlfriend’s brother very well, and she was the most forward in approaching the other men. The fourth woman, though, was the one who attracted the most attention. She was somewhat lighter-skinned than the others, and while I wouldn’t exactly call her pretty, she was built like a brick house. Really too plump to be considered attractive in high society these days, but well enough endowed that she looked like she might explode out of her skirt and blouse. My guess is she was in her twenties. She had straightened hair with a wave on one side of her head. She seemed very shy at first, but whenever someone said something that interested her, she would get an almost wicked grin on her face. She had a little boy with her, too, I would say about eight years old.

Elmira. That was her name. I’m not real sure how I learned it . She was wearing a black knit skirt, one of those tube things, and my goodness, did she fill that thing out. Her blouse was of a gold satiny material, a little old, and with little polyester balls coming up on it.

At first I thought they were all whores who had come to turn tricks. But they weren’t easy pick ups. I mean the men had to buy them drinks and give them cigarettes, and maybe they were just there for a good time. I don’t know.

I said before it was all a little hazy, and the reason is this.

I don’t know if you’ve had a sixteen-ounce can of malt liquor recently. I probably hadn’t had one since college. But those things pack a wallop. Now I’ve always known I couldn’t handle my liquor very well. But I did think I could control it. I’ll just have to be honest with you, though. By the time I finished my first malt liquor I was feeling good enough to be playing pool. And I thought, well, just one more. And after one more malt liquor I was playing pool maybe the best I had ever played it in my life.

Not saying much. Just playing, and taking my time and concentrating on the shots, but I was loose. And hot. I couldn’t miss. I was starting to win a little money, too, which Leonard’s girlfriend was keeping track of in the notebook, too, so we could settle up when we got paid. I think that’s how it worked. I’m not real clear on that.

Late in the afternoon, close to supper time, a horn blew outside, and it was the man from the state employment agency– a middle-aged white man in a Massey Ferguson hat who didn’t want to come into the camp. I watched from the window, so he wouldn’t see me in there. He had a couple of black guys in the front of the pickup with him, and Leonard hired them on. When they got out, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. At first I thought it was just that I was a little drunk. But one of these guys was Gravey Pickens, from back home, who used to work for me on occasion on the farm

I hadn’t seen him in three or four years. He had his hair palmated or whatever into those little greasy curls like Michael Jackson, so he looked different, and I thought I might be mistaken at first. But when he came into the camp building I knew it was him. If I had been a little drunker I might have run up and hugged him.

Let me tell you why. I was already starting to realize I might have made a serious mistake signing on with this bunch. With the Mexicans I had gotten along fine, except for that one incident, but here I was the only white guy in the camp, and things weren’t going well. I was pissing some people off winning all that money at pool. Plus, to tell you the truth, I may have been pissing some people off the way I was eying Elmira. I’ve always had a fantasy about that. But growing up the way I did in the Deep South, it was only a fantasy, and one I never would have lived out, or at least I thought that at the time.

But when Gravey showed up, all of a sudden I felt, I don’t know, I felt like I had an in. I’ll explain.

After I quit farming, when I had just started writing, Mary Ruth and I were still living in our little blue house out in the middle of the peach orchard. I was trying to support the two of us by substitute teaching, which didn’t pay much and wasn’t very regular. So that winter, when the fellow who was leasing the farm started pruning, I asked if I could do some pruning for him, working with Gravey and the other guys. We got paid by the tree, so it was ideal work for me. I could work whenever I wanted and be free to write or take substitute teaching jobs whenever they came up. Plus it gave me something to do outdoors.

I told the fellow who was leasing the farm what it should cost per tree to do the pruning, and warned him how Gravey and the others would work slow the first couple of days so they could demand a price increase. I had been paying to have the trees pruned for four years, and I knew what the price should be.

It was late in the fall, on a cloudy, cool day, when we started pruning. Gravey and the others were already cutting a few trees when the other farmer and I walked up. The negotiations over the price were friendly, and I kind of mediated. At some point though, I can’t remember where exactly or what brought it on, Gravey told the fellow I had leased the farm to, “Man, Earnest just like a brother.”

Well, that really meant a lot to me. It’s stuck with me a long time.

So when Gravey came in to the labor camp, I was delighted to see him. He didn’t recognize me at first, I was so out of place. But when I called his name, you should have seen the grin on his face. Before he could ask what I was doing there, I pulled him over and bought him a malt liquor and took him aside where we could talk. He had run up on hard times at home and hadn’t been able to find any work for a while, so he had decided to come down to Georgia and work thinning peaches. The crop up at home was just about wiped out by frost that year, he said. I told him briefly what I was up to, and said I would appreciate it if he didn’t call me “bossman” or tell the others what I was doing, because I didn’t feel real comfortable with it. Oh, Gravey’s a great guy, I tell you. I could have hugged him.

We had dinner about that time, and I had another malt liquor and bought Gravey another one. And, well, we were talking about all the guys back home, and I was playing pool and still just tearing everybody else up. I was getting pretty cocky about it, too, and would raise the cue tip up and tap the felt at the other end of the table when it was someone else’s turn to rack. I’ve just got to be honest with you. I started out to have one or two malt liquors, but I have no recollection at all how many I ended up having. And that Elmira, she was sitting off to one side of the room up on one of the tables, and she kept stretching that tight skirt down over those big brown legs. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Even made a little eye contact, and she smiled back.

She was sitting right next to Leonard Robinson, and the more I drank, the more I despised that guy. He was such a pimp. Later in the evening, it must have been pretty late, I went over to the bar to buy Gravey and me another malt liquor, and there was this poor drunk trying to buy a bottle of wine. His shoulders were stooped, and he was skinny and gray haired, and he had that sort of milky look in his eyes. And Leonard’s girlfriend wouldn’t sell him any more wine. She said he had already run up too high a bill, and Leonard said not to let them charge more than they could pay back in one day of working. It really got under my skin. So I said, here, I’d pay for the goddamn thing myself.

“You cain’t have no more neither. You done run up twenty dollar already,” she said. That made me even madder.

“Here, goddamn it,” I said, and I reached down in my sock and pulled the roll of money out. I peeled off a ten and threw it on the counter. “I’ll pay you cash for it. And I’ll buy his goddamn bottle of wine, too.”

Well, that was my big mistake, though I didn’t have my wits about me enough to realize it at the time. She took my money, and the drunk got his bottle of wine. He put his arm around me and breathed in my face and said, “Thank you, brother.”

I took Gravey his malt liquor and got back to playing pool. I had lost a few games by that time. I still was ahead for the night, though and was determined to get back on the winning streak. But I was a little tight to be playing well, plus, and this was much more disturbing, Elmira started making eyes at me.

I’ll tell you, she was looking better and better. I might say fuller and fuller. If she had inhaled deeply her blouse would have burst open. And we were making unmistakable eye contact. Long contact, with an inviting smile. I was thinking hard about my wife, and about the baby coming. I tried not to look over there, as much as my eyes wanted to. But it was hard. Anyway, I think Gravey thought she was making eyes at him, because he went over and started talking shit to her in that real cocky way a black guy will. And I was grateful he had removed the temptation from me.

She got up and went outdoors after a while, and Gravey followed. I figured he was going to hit the jackpot with her, but he didn’t stay out there long before he came back in looking deflated. She didn’t come back with him. I guess she was going to the outhouse.

Oh, yeh, the outhouses. This camp didn’t have toilets. It had running water and showers, and it even had toilet stalls, but the holes in the floor where the toilets had been were plugged with concrete. And outdoors was a men’s and a women’s privy. I had seen this before. I had some good friends back home who had a similar arrangement. They said they originally had a nice bathroom setup in their camps, but they would have to go down two or three times a week during the season and unclog the toilets from everything the drunks threw in them. One day my friends went down to a camp and the whole bathroom was flooded. The toilets had clogged up, and the drunks had kept on using them and flushing them, even standing on the seats to use them. So my friends brought in a backhoe that same day, dug privy pits, slapped up a shed over each of them, and filled the toilets up with a sack of concrete mix. The OSHA codes allow privies in a labor camp. At least they used to.

Well, I’m not going to argue this either way. Watching Leonard Robinson’s bunch in action, it was easy to understand how exasperated my friends could have gotten. I don’t know if that was the motivation behind that particular farmer in Georgia’s plumbing arrangement. We had had toilets in Florida. And God, were those outhouses raunchy. Leonard and his girlfriend drove up the road to McDonald’s to use the toilet.

When Elmira came back in, she didn’t pay any attention to Gravey. She was just making eyes at me. I was fighting it. I fought it hard. I tried to ignore her completely. I had a couple more malt liquors to calm myself down, and by this time I was buying drinks for whoever was around me at the bar. And my pool game just went to hell.

I could feel Elmira watching me for a long time, until she finally strolled across the room with her little boy and went upstairs. My goodness, you should have seen her stroll. Every man in the room stopped to watch her leave.

I finally got my opponent’s attention back to our pool game. The cues were all warped, and we were missing the twelve ball, so we played a strange game of eight ball. The first man to sink a striped ball was at a considerable advantage. I was concentrating hard. But it was no use. I was having trouble keeping my balance by that time, and my ears were buzzing. You know how you feel when you get really blasted and are still trying to pretend you are sober. Well, maybe you don’t, but that’s how I felt. I don’t know how much time had passed before the little boy came back downstairs. He was tugging on my pants leg before I saw him. He got me to lean over so he could whisper a message in my ear.

Well, like I say, I’ve always had this secret fantasy. And it was late at night, and I was in the middle of nowhere in Central Georgia, and I was, to put it accurately, shitfaced. All the invitation needed was a little self-justification, and by this time I was a self-justification machine. So I followed the little boy upstairs, grinning like a fool, I imagine. I lit a generic cigarette to steady myself.

I knocked on the door the little boy pointed out to me, and it opened, and there was Elmira standing in a red satin bathrobe that just did fit around her.

She invited me in, a little bashful, really, and asked me to have a seat. It was a small room, maybe ten by ten, with two metal bunk beds pulled together to make a double bed and one purple bedspread across them. There were two old kitchen chairs and a card table, and a closet without a door. I offered her a cigarette. She took it and let me light it, but I could tell she didn’t usually smoke. She was nervous, and really, here I felt pretty bad. She was sexy as hell still. The robe was short, and her smooth brown legs were hanging all out of it as she sat on the other side of the card table from me. But she just didn’t seem as sure of herself up here. She was a human being, to put it awkwardly. I mean she was a real person up here in this little bedroom in the labor camp, and that has always given me pause.

“Your name Earnest, ain’t it?” she said.

And I said, well, yes, it was, how did she know that?

“That friend of yourn, he told me. I got him to tell.”

I didn’t particularly like that. I thought Gravey had looked pretty guilty after he had gone outside with her.

“You think I’m pretty?” she said. She had that insolent pout to a question that black girls can have.

Well, I didn’t know how to answer that. I don’t know if she had been drinking or not, but the opening of the robe showed the inside of her thigh about halfway up, and whenever she moved I could catch a glimpse of tremendous cleavage.

“You think I’m some kind of whore?” she said. “I mean what you think coming up here? You think I’m some kind of whore?”

“I… No, I didn’t.” I was drunk enough to lie before I would tell the truth.

“I ain’t no angel,” she said. “But I ain’t no whore. I don’t want you thinking bad about me.”

Well, I wouldn’t think bad about her. I would respect her in the morning even, I was telling myself.

“You growed up in Spartanburg, what that boy told me,” she said, and this took me aback. I didn’t want this much information out about me. But I said, yes, I had.

“Your last name so and so,” she said, and I said, yes, it was.

Did I know her?

“I growed up in Spartanburg, too,” she said, and I asked her if maybe I had gone to high school with her. But she said no, and she kept looking in my eyes like she was looking for something. “My name Elmira” something or other, I don’t remember the last name she gave. It didn’t mean anything to me.

“You don’t know,” she said. “You never knowed anything about it.”

It was a strange conversation. I didn’t know what to make of her. She asked me if, and she gave my father’s name, if that was my father, and I said yes, and she started telling me a story. I wasn’t even listening to the first part of her story. Just hoping she would hurry up, but then she started to say some things that grabbed my attention.

She knew all about me, who my father was, and where he had worked and how we had moved out to the country and started farming, and what my mother and brother’s names were. Everything she told me was correct. I was wondering how Gravey had known all of that stuff about my family. And it was unnerving to hear her tell it. Sort of like hearing a fortune teller tell you what is really on your mind. She told me her mother had lived in Spartanburg and she grew up there herself , and as for her father, well, that was a terribly difficult thing to tell. She paused here, and this is when she really got my attention. I mean she got my attention in a big way.

She acted like she didn’t want to tell the rest of the story. She put her face down in her hands and started to cry.

She said she had never told anyone in her life who her father was. Her mother had never let her tell anyone who her real father was, even though her father had come and visited her often when she was a little girl and had helped support her and her mother. They were never allowed to go to see him, and she was never to call him up or go by his house, and she could never, never tell anyone who he was.

My skin started to crawl. “You see, Earnest,” she said, “you and me is brother and sister.”

Well, you may think you can imagine my shock, but I’ll tell you, you can’t. Plus, I was awfully drunk and more than a little disoriented.

“I had to tell you, Earnest,” she said, “Because your friend, he said you was just like a brother, and he told me what you was doing here, and I knowed. I knowed they was something special about you when I seen you. Your daddy one of the nicest men in Spartanburg. I can tell you his boy. They ain’t many would do what you is doing.”

Then she came over and hugged me as I sat on the edge of her bed. She wasn’t particularly tall, and when she hugged me my head was right between her breasts. She held me tight. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was crying again. “But I ain’t never had no real brother. I ain’t never got to do this before. I didn’t think I ever would do this.”

God, those tits were huge. She smelled like a black girl, too, only I never had smelled one this close before. She held me tight, like a sister would hold a brother, and I’ll have to tell you I was really unable to take it all in. It was just too much. I mean it was, I suppose, believable. I told myself it was believable. She had a white facial structure, and I thought I could see some of my brother in her, maybe. I don’t know.

“This all too crazy,” she said. “You don’t want to believe me. ” She let me go and walked to the other end of her bed and sat down on it and faced away from me and played with the sash on her robe.

“I don’t know what the shit I were thinking,” she said. “You go on then. Go on and get.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. I could see her legs sticking way out of the robe.

“Go on and get outta here. Just forget what I said. It were all a lie.”

I just sat there. I didn’t know what to do.

“What would” and she gave my father’s name again, “want with a daughter were a whore? I were crazy. I didn’t think of that.”

“Listen, Elmira,” I said. “If that’s your real name…”

But Elmira just shouted at me. “It were all a goddamn lie. I were just trying to get your goddamn money without having to fuck you . Go on. Go on outta here.”

She sat on the bed and sobbed. She looked back over her shoulder at me.

“Get out,” she shouted. “Go on and get out, or I’ll start screaming.”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want her to start screaming.

“Elmira, ” I said, “I don’t know what to say. This is …”

“Goddamn your white ass,” she shouted. “Go on, get out of here.” She jumped up and came towards me swinging her fists. Her face was wet with tears. I would have jumped up and run like a rabbit any other time in my life, I guess. I don’t know why I didn’t, but I caught her and held her. She hit me on the back and cursed me, and I just hugged her. She hit hard, too. And cried. She was crying pretty hard when she stopped hitting me.

I hugged her while she cried. We were standing in the middle of the room, and I think honestly that was the first black person I’ve ever hugged. Even counting the maids who helped raise me when I was young. She smelled like those maids. She was warm, and her tears were soaking my shirt.

She cried a long time, and then we sat down at the table and had a cigarette each, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it any more. I said I wanted to hear more of her story, but she said she didn’t want to tell it, and she didn’t care what I thought.

You know how a woman can get. We’d talk about it in the morning, she said. I asked her what her mother’s name was, and she looked me straight in the eye like she was surprised, and told me, but it didn’t mean anything to me.

And then later, after a couple more cigarettes, I guess, she told me I had made a bad mistake. She said Leonard Robinson was as mean a crew leader as there was, that he had killed plenty of men, and that she was ashamed to be running around with him. She didn’t know why she had ever gotten in with people like him. Her mother had tried to keep her from going off with him in the first place.

It wasn’t right, she said, what they were going to do to me.

That was a tremendous shock, because I had thought things had been going better since Gravey showed up. The talk was, Elmira said, something was going to happen to me. All the men were plenty damn mad to have me in the camp, she said, but Leonard was keeping me around to get money off me. When I had pulled that roll of money out everybody in the camp had seen it, and if I slept in one of the other rooms someone would probably cut my throat to get it .

“You goan have to get outta here,” she said. “They goan cut your ass or shoot you. They ain’t goan have no white man in this camp less they got a reason for it.”

“You gots to sleep in here tonight,” she said, “And I’ll lock the door. They know better’n come in here. Leonard won’t let em.”

God, then she started to look sexy again. But the situation was now very complicated, complicated enough that I got a little common sense back. So I agreed, and we pulled the two bunk beds apart to make two twins. She took some satin sheets from the closet and made up the bed for me and was even going to give me the purple bedspread, but I asked her not to. I didn’t want to sleep on her clean sheets in my dirty clothes. I was kind of embarrassed to strip down to my shorts, though.

“Don’t look,” she said, and she went to the closet and took out a nightgown. So I turned away, and when she said, “O.k.,” I turned back around, and she was in the flimsiest red nightgown I had ever seen. It was made of smooth, thin fabric that left nothing to the imagination, and it only came to the top of her thighs.

I was drunk enough then, and I figured the only thing to do was to strip to my shorts, which I did. I was wondering if I could ever tell this story to my wife. Or how I could possibly tell it to my wife, or if I would ever tell anyone.

“You better go on out to the bathroom,” she said. “Then I’ll lock us in here, and cain’t nobody bother us tonight.”

Well, I did need to go. I had needed to go for hours, but I had been fighting a battle to contain myself. I don’t know if it was the baloney and beans, or the malt liquor, or the delayed effects of two weeks’ worth of Mexican food. I said, “O.k.,” and looked at my pants hanging on the foot of the bed, where the roll of money was in the pocket.

“You can go on in your undershorts,” Elmira said. ” Everybody do.”

I picked up my pants and started to put them on anyway.

“Earnest,” she said, “I don’t want you going out there by yourself with that money. You don’t know how bad they is.”

She looked genuinely concerned and afraid. So I thanked her, left my clothes there on the bed, and went out into the hallway and down the hall to the second floor exit. There were two ways up to the second floor, one inside the building, the way I had come up, and the other up a rickety wooden stairway outside the building, which is the way I went out. The only other way into the labor camp was by the door in the rec/dining room on the first floor.

It was warm and humid. I hurried down the steps in my bare feet, trying to be careful of splinters, but the situation was pressing. There’s something about that stroll towards the bathroom that gets the body in the mood. I hurried out through the tall weeds towards the outhouse.

My God, was that outhouse awful. I could smell it twenty yards away. The door was hanging from one hinge, and there were flies buzzing around even in the dark. The light bulb didn’t work. I pulled on the string, and nothing happened. It was pitch dark inside, and I had to stand there in the doorway for a while in that awful smell trying to let my eyes adjust. I thought of running out into the weeds, but then I saw the white toilet seat in the darkness, and it looked relatively clean. And there was a roll of toilet paper beside it. I stepped in, and the floorboards creaked and sagged underneath me.

Damn, I thought, this was outrageous. This thing was probably going to collapse some day with some fool in it. I sprang gently with one foot, and the board underneath it was rotten. And I don’t know why I did this. It must have been the malt liquor, and I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I bounced with all my weight on the boards to see how they would support me. They were flimsy as hell.

“Look at this shit,” I said out loud, and I was going to put this in the newspaper article for sure. In fact, I was thinking some pretty righteous thoughts at the time. I had never let our labor camp get in this shape. But I couldn’t assume that other farmers were as conscientious as I had been. I was thinking it was maybe a good thing after all that I had come on this trip. I was learning a lot, a lot about my fellow man and myself. And I was so drunk and so righteous I wasn’t thinking practically. I jumped up, I mean clear off the floor and was really going to test those boards. And crunch. The boards gave way completely, and I fell about six feet into the mess below.

I don’t know how long the outhouse had been there, but I sank in over my knees in the most God awful mess. It still makes me shiver to write about it. It was so slick and cold and deep. I could just reach the floorboards over my head. I grabbed hold of them and tried to pull myself out. I’ve always been a bad curser. And I’ve always had a terrible temper. But I’m not going to write the things I was shouting in that pit. I just have to draw the line somewhere. I tried to pull myself out, but that stuff was like quicksand. And the smell, I don’t know how I breathed at all. I pulled with all my strength to climb out, and the floorboards gave way again. I tumbled back into the darkness and landed flat on my back.

I don’t know what would live down in that pit. A possum. A rat. But some kind of animal ran across my chest in the darkness. Let me tell you. There are reserves of strength in a man that amaze him when he finds them. I don’t know what I did. I may have climbed. I may have jumped. I may have flown, but I got the hell out of that pit.

I was covered in, oh, that stuff, I can’t describe it. It was slick and smooth and sticky, and it smelled horrible. It was even in my hair. There were streamers of toilet paper hanging off me, and I was shouting and cursing like I have never cursed in my life, which frankly must have been a terrible thing to hear, because I’ll curse like a sailor over the smallest thing.

I was going to run right in to the showers and wash off. I went to the ground floor entrance to the camp and tried to get the door open, but it was locked from inside. I jerked on the door and banged on it, but the lights were off in the rec room, and nobody came.

So I ran around to the wooden stairs that led up to the second story entrance. That stuff was starting to dry on me. God, my skin still crawls to think about it. I dashed up the stairs to go in the door I had just come out of. The passage lock was broken on the thing. I remembered it had been held shut just by the friction of the swollen door in the jam. So I knew it was open. But when I jerked on it, it wouldn’t come. I jerked again, hard. The damn thing was padlocked from inside.

I called for Elmira, softly, since she was only a couple of rooms down the hall. For that matter she must have heard me shouting when I got out of the pit. I called and waited. Nothing happened.

Then it began to dawn on me what had happened. I banged on the door and shouted for Elmira. “Elmira,” I shouted. “Somebody has locked the door. Come let me in.” That was loud enough to wake anybody in the camp. Still there was nothing.

I banged on the door, mad now, and shouted for Elmira and said I wanted in. I kicked the door and cursed.

I went back down the stairs, walked around to the side of the camp, picked up a piece of gravel from the parking area, and threw it against Elmira’s window.

“Elmira, goddamnit, unlock that door.”

I thought I heard laughter inside the camp. I picked up a handful of gravel and slung it up against the tin siding. “Goddamn your ass, Elmira, open that door.”

It was unmistakable that time, howls of laughter coming from all inside the camp. And “Ooowheee!”

Well, I’ve always had a bad temper, but I was drunk and was covered head to toe in shit, and I just lost control completely. I picked up handful after handful of gravel and started slinging it up against the side of the camp, and cursing the whole bunch of them.

“You goddamn thieving nigger bitch. Goddamn all you fucking niggers. Fucking bunch of no-count drunks.” I was screaming it, about to burst a blood vessel.

Well, a window opened on the first floor, and Leonard Robinson stuck his fat, black face out, sans glasses, and said, “What the fuck?”

And I was mad enough that I told him what I thought of him. I said he was a whore-running thieving pimp, and whatever else I could string together in the way of racial slurs and things about his mother. I saw him stick the pistol out of the window. I shut up when I saw the pistol. It was one of those big-bore, long-barrelled things. When he shot it the sound was like thunder, and flame shot out of the barrel about a foot and a half. I heard the bullet crack as it went past me, and that was the last I ever saw of Leonard Robinson and that labor camp.

I ran like I have never run in my life. Out through the weeds and across a ditch and down through the peach orchards, ducking under the tree limbs. The pistol fired twice after me, and I swear one of the bullets knocked a limb off a tree right in front of me. I stumbled and rolled and scrambled up and kept running down through the peach orchard. At the bottom of the hill I jumped a six-foot clay road bank and landed on the tar and gravel roadbed below, and I kept running, as hard as I could, down the road.

I may have run the better part of a mile before I stopped, doubled over and gasping. The night was moonless and dark except for the starlight. The road was bordered by pine woods on both sides. I listened and looked. Nobody was coming after me. Still, here I was, somewhere in Central Georgia in my shorts, drunk, covered in shit, with all my money stolen. The first thing I had to do was get washed off. So after I caught my breath enough, I kept walking down the tar and gravel road in the direction I had been running, looking for a creek or a pond to wash off in.

The tree frogs were crying. The stuff covering me was drying and cracking. The gravel of the road was sharp under my bare feet. I walked and walked, stopping to look over the edge of the roadbed at every low spot. But there were only dry ditches, no water to be found. I came out of the pine woods, and the road curved through some overgrown pasture land. I must have walked a mile or two.

Then I saw a light in the road up ahead. At first I thought it was a car with one headlight, but it came very slowly, and I saw it was two men walking with a lantern. I didn’t want to face anyone in the shape I was in, so ducked off the road and into an old tumble-down barn about a hundred feet into a pasture. As the men came closer I heard them talking. They were black. When they got up even with the barn, they stopped and held the lantern up, and one said, “Here it is. I couldn’t see it in the dark.”

They started toward the barn, so I scrambled to the back and crawled behind a stack of half-bushel peach baskets. The men came on into the barn, and their lantern lit the place up.

I peeked between the peach baskets and watched them as they took a sledge hammer and a couple of rusty crowbars off the wall. Then one of them picked up an old truck axle that had been sharpened to a point at one end. One of them was an old man, skinny and slightly stooped. The young man with him was huge, maybe six feet five and well over two hundred pounds. He had a fat, simple-looking face.

“Goddamn,” the old man said, “something done crawl up in here and died.”

“What,” the younger man said. “That ain’t me.”

“Shit no, they something dead in here, ” the old man said, and he took the lantern and traced the smell back towards where I was hiding. “Gimme that axle,” he said.

The young man gave him the sharpened axle, and he started to jab it into the stack of baskets. The first jab went right past my knee. I jumped up and said, “No, wait.”

You would have thought I was a ghost, the way they shouted and started. “Goddamn your ass,” the old man shouted. “What the hell you mean jumping out like that?”

I calmed them down and apologized for scaring them. I said it was obvious what shape I was in and I didn’t want anyone to see me. They just stood there, waiting for an explanation, so I gave them one. I said I had been in Leonard Robinson’s camp, and I told how I had fallen, and how I had been robbed and shot at.

“Shit, you lucky that all you got,” the older man said. “That Leonard Robinson the meanest nigger in this state. What the hell you doing in with his bunch?”

His companion agreed. “You go back there they liable to cut your throat and bury you in a peach orchard,” he said. “How you get mixed up with him?”

Well, I didn’t want to tell them the truth. It was just too ridiculous. Plus I was drunk, and honestly, I was drunk thinking, insisting on consistencies that were unnecessary, so I told him I had been down and out, had let the booze get me down again, and had needed some money in the worst way, and I had thought the work outdoors would do me some good. Right now, I said, what I needed was some way to get cleaned up and get some clothes and maybe get into town to the bus station.

“How you goan take the bus? You ain’t got no money,” the older man said. I knew exactly how. I was going to call home collect, but I didn’t want to tell him and drop my disguise.

The older man pulled the younger one aside for a minute, and they discussed something in hushed tones. The older one held the lantern up and looked me over. He shook his head.

“Listen, brother,” he said. “We might let you in on something, what could get you a little traveling money, if you can keep your mouth shut.”

I said I could, and the younger man asked, “You ain’t ascared of haints, is you?”

I almost laughed, but I said I wasn’t.

“You ever touch a dead man?” the older one asked, and that threw me back a little. No, I said, I hadn’t.

“I mean you ascared of them or what?”

Well, I didn’t know if I was or not, but I certainly didn’t want to be involved in any killing.

“We ain’t goan kill nobody,” the old man said. “You ever heard of Willis Johnston?”

Frankly, the name did ring a bell, but I couldn’t think why, and I shrugged my shoulders.

“White dude, own all these orchard round here. You was goan work for him.”

Well, that was how I knew the name. When I was a farmer, I had been active in several farm organizations, among them the Southeastern Peach Growers Conference. At one time I had known most of the major peach growers in the Southeast. I couldn’t place a face with the name, but it did sound familiar.

“Well,” the older man said, “Old man Willis done passed last Friday, and they buried him this morning, up to the Methodist church. My boy here work down to the funeral home, and he say they laid him in wearing a gold Rolex watch and a big old diamond ring. My boy helped lay the casket in hisself. They had the casket open at the church, and he sealed it up and seen the watch and the ring when they did it .”

He looked to his companion, and the companion nodded. “The thing is,” the older man continued, “they ain’t buried him. They laid him up in a big vault, up offen the ground. The boy here put the lid on it hisself, and all we got to do is prise it open enough for one man to crawl in. We get that watch and that ring, I know a man will pay us five hundred dollars for it. It ain’t much, but I like to help a man out when he down, so we’ ll split it with you, three ways.”

Well, it was a most unusual scheme. And to tell the truth, I was flattered to be invited to join in on it. My pride was still hurting from the affair at Leonard Robinson’s camp. Plus, what the hell, stealing from a dead man, that doesn’t strike me as much of a crime. And I was drunk, which explains a lot of things. It didn’t strike me as a high risk crime anyway, robbing a vault in a country graveyard in the middle of the night.

They carried the sledge hammer and the crowbars and the axle, and I followed them around the barn and down across the pasture. They stayed well ahead of me. At the far end of the pasture we crawled through a barbed wire fence, crossed a short section of woods, and came into another pasture, this one covered with deep, lush grass. We climbed a long, low hill. The faster I walked, the faster the other two walked to stay out in front of me.

The stars were bright overhead, but without a moon it was hard to see anything. I stepped in a couple of fresh cow patties in my bare feet, but that was nothing compared to what I was covered in. All of a sudden the two grave robbers stopped in front of me. “Goddamn!” the older one said in a harsh whisper. “You got to wash that funk off.”

I caught a whiff of chlorine on the breeze. My companions led me up the hill to a swimming pool surrounded by a high chain link fence. Just up the hill past it, set back in the shade trees, were two enormous white houses. No lights were on anywhere. The other two boosted me up the fence. I scrambled over and dropped to the concrete deck on the other side. I padded across the deck in my bare feet and lowered myself into the water. It was still early May, and the water was bracing, but it felt fabulous. I waded out into the middle of the pool, took a breath, and ducked under. I wriggled in the cool water and scrubbed the stuff out of my hair.

I’ll tell you, the clean surroundings, the smell of chlorine, the feel of the concrete bottom on my feet, it was the first time in weeks I had felt comfortable. It was like arriving in the United States after a trip to a third world country.

I ducked under a few more times, then swam a couple of laps, oblivious of my companions outside the fence. I hung on the edge of the pool underneath the diving board, hyperventilated, held my breath, and swam a lap and a half underwater, holding my breath until my diaphragm was convulsing.

When I burst to the surface, there was the most awful racket.

Two enormous dogs were barking and growling and lunging at the chain link fence. I looked for the two grave robbers, but they were gone. One of the dogs was sort of a cross between a German shepherd and a Lab. The other was a white Malamute. Even in the darkness I could see their teeth snapping.

It is so frustrating hoping a barking dog will shut up, but these dogs, when they saw me come to the surface, went wild. They were jumping their full height up against the fence and yapping and growling and whining.

A light came on up at the house, and then another. I swam to the edge of the pool and tried to keep still, but this made the dogs even madder.

After what may have been a few minutes, the outdoor spotlights came on up at the house, and I heard a screen door slam. I climbed out of the pool and started to climb over the fence, but the dogs came growling around to me and snapped at my hands where I grabbed the fence. Then the underwater lights came on in the pool, and I panicked. The only place to hide was a low pump house, about four feet high, at the far end of the pool deck. I ran to the pump house, opened the door and crawled in beside the sand filter. I closed the door tight behind me. The pump was whirring.

I heard voices coming down from the house, and I heard the gate being unlocked. The dogs came rushing in. I heard them growling and barking right outside the pump house. The voices came into the pool compound. It sounded like a man talking to his son.

“I’ll betcha it’s a coon, Will,” the man said. ”See, look where he’s muddied up the water.”

I heard a shotgun being pumped, and the two voices came towards the pump house.

“Tie the dogs to the fence, Will,” the man said. “I don’t want them fighting that coon. When you open that door, jump back to the side, behind the building, so it doesn’t come after you.”

God, I was miserable. I was dripping wet, drunk, in my underwear, in this man’s pool house, wondering what in the hell I was going to do. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been in a lot of terribly embarrassing situations drunk. You run from it, no, let’s be more precise, I run from it and run from it until I’m cornered in a situation where there’s just no dignified way out. I figured finally the only way out of this was to come clean, just to step out of the pump house and explain to the man what I was doing there and to apologize for trespassing.

“O.k.,” the man said, and the door sprang open. I heard the boy scrambling out of the way. And there fifteen feet in front of me stood Willis Johnston, Jr., past president of the Southeastern Peach Producers Association.

I hadn’t remembered the name clearly, but the face was unmistakable, even after five years. This was the man who had presented me with the Young Farmer of the Year Award and had taken me and Mary Ruth out to dinner with his wife at the annual convention on Sea Island. He had been on the awards committee that had come up and toured our farm. He had told me I taught him a thing or two about managing peach orchards himself, even though his family had been growing peaches for three generations.

I guess he couldn’t see me back in the darkness. I hope he couldn’t see me. But all I could think of, no, that makes it sound like there was some reason to my thinking. Actually I was just drunk and embarrassed and scared, and I wanted more than anything in the world not to have this man recognize me. So I burst out of the pump house, screaming and waving my hands in front of my face like a madman. I vaulted over the corner of the pool and dashed out the gate and ran down the hill through the pasture. The dogs were howling and barking, still tied to the fence.

I think I ran faster from that situation than I did from Leonard Robinson’s gun. I had seen what may have been a brief look of recognition and surprise on Willis, Jr.’s face, but surely he would never associate what he saw with the promising young man he had met four or five years before.

I put about half a mile between me and that swimming pool before I stopped to catch my breath. I was gasping, trying to hold my hands over my head like I had learned on the cross country team in high school. I had run down through the lush pasture behind the Johnstons’ houses, crossed a paved road, run across the earthen dam of an irrigation pond, and up through some hardwoods to the edge of a peach orchard. God knows where I was. I caught my breath some and started walking to my left around the edge of the peach orchard. I guess I had gone two or three hundred yards, when I came to a point of the woods where two orchards met. As I was walking past a big oak tree right at the point, two shadows stepped out from behind the tree.

“No!” I shouted. It scared me so badly I shouted out loud. But they just laughed. It was my two grave robbing companions.

“Did you see them dogs?” the big, young one said.

“You’re goddamn right I saw those dogs,” I said. “Where the hell do you get off leaving me out here in the middle of God knows where…”

“Shut the hell up,” the old man said. “You want to wake up the whole damn country?”

They were carrying their tools, still. They said to keep quiet and come with them, the graveyard was only a little ways off.

By that time a quarter moon had just risen, and in that clear, humid night it lit the fields nicely. Tree frogs were ringing around the pond. The church was only a quarter mile or so away down a dirt road. It was a white, frame, country church with a steeple over the entrance. The dirt road led out of the peach orchards and beside the graveyard. The church was on the main highway, but there was no traffic this time of the night. And the cemetery was screened from the highway by a hedge of red tip shrubs.

Willis Johnston, Sr. ‘s vault dominated the small cemetery. The vault was of peach colored granite and was set on a pediment a foot and a half above the ground. The vault was huge, much larger than the two coffins it was built to contain, about five feet tall and better than eight or ten feet square. The sides were decorated with a bas relief of all the fruits Mr. Johnston must have cultivated in his lifetime. Willis, Sr.’s name was carved on one end, with his birth and death dates carved underneath it. His wife’s name was carved beside his, with no dates yet.

We took the pointed truck axle and stuck it under the lip of the six-inch granite slab covering the vault. The slab was laid with a rubbery sealant that gave us a place to start the point of the axle. We wrapped the axle with rags so it wouldn’t make so much noise, then they made me hold the axle while the young man drove it in with the sledge hammer.

He was really swinging that hammer, and it was all I could do not to let go. I was scared he was going to miss. We drove the axle in about six inches, then all three of us put our weight on it and lifted the slab. The old man stuck one of the crowbars in the crack that provided, and we moved around to the side to get a new purchase.

It took us fifteen or twenty minutes of hard work and prising to get the slab lifted about sixteen inches at one end. Just enough for a man to slide in. The slab was propped up with two crowbars, an arrangement that was too precipitous for my taste, but I didn’t say anything about it.

When we got that done, I stepped back and wiped the sweat off my brow, and the old man said to me, “You ready?”

They were both looking at me.

“I ain’t going in there,” I said.

“I be damned,” the old man said. “We was nice enough to bring you along on this. Now it time you did some work. “

It wasn’t the thought of the dead man inside that bothered me, it was those two crowbars holding the slab up. I said I was sorry, I wasn’t going in there.

The young man grabbed me and threw me up against the side of the vault. The old man held the sledge hammer up to my chin and threatened to lay my head open, so I agreed to crawl in. They boosted me over the lip, and I slid into the darkness inside.

The young man handed me a key to unbolt the coffin lid. That was awkward work in the dark. I had to feel for each bolt by hand.

I got the lid unbolted and swung it open. This took a lot of pushing myself, but I reached in to touch the corpse. My fingers hit cold flesh and a day’s growth of beard. I couldn’t see anything inside the vault, just the two silhouettes of my companions in the moonlight outside. It took a little getting used to. I stuck my hand back in and touched the face several times, until I convinced myself it was dead and inert, and there was nothing to fear from it.

The two guys outside were telling me to hurry the fuck up. I found the mouth and the chin and felt down the neck to the shoulder, then ran my hand down the sleeve of the suit jacket until I felt the flesh of the left hand. There, underneath the French cuff of the starched shirt, was the Rolex. I lifted the hand and managed to get the watchband unsnapped. I pulled the watch off.

“Here,” I said, and I held the watch up to the opening. The old man snatched it out of my hand.

“Now get the fucking ring. Hurry up. We ain’t got all night.”

I didn’t like it. I had already been ripped off once that night, and now I smelled rip-off big time. The way he grabbed that watch out of my hand told it all to me.

I reached into the coffin and felt around until I found the right hand. There was the ring, sure enough, and it felt huge. I tried to pull it off, but it was stuck. I worked the arm around to where I could use both of my hands, and I pulled as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t come. So I had to get my leg over in the coffin and hold the elbow down with my knee and pull on the ring with both hands.

I pulled and twisted and pulled. Pop! The whole finger came off with the ring on it.

“Goddamn!” I shouted. The shout just died in the granite around me.

“What wrong?” the old man asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just touched something funky.” I pulled the ring off the torn end of the finger and stuck the ring in the waistband of my shorts. I tossed the finger back in the coffin.

Then I patted around loudly on the body. I wasn’t going to trust these guys.

“There’s no ring here.”

“The hell you say.”

I patted around loudly again. “Listen,” I said, “there’s a wedding band here, but there’s no big ring. I’m counting down every finger of both hands.”

“You bullshitting. Don’t pull this bullshit on me,” the older one said.

“You want to climb in here yourself and look?”

“Goddamn boy,” he said. “You said they were a diamond ring.”

“It gotta be,” the young man said. “I mean I saw it. I were there with him, the whole time, except right at the end when them boys shut the coffin up.”

“What the hell you been telling me?” the old man said. And he started raising hell. Apparently the young man had not actually bolted the coffin shut as he had said earlier. Two other employees of the funeral home had done that, but he swore the preacher was there with them the whole time, and there was no way they could have taken the ring off.

The two of them argued about this for five minutes or better, and I thought the old man was going to have an apoplectic seizure. The hole in the young man’s story was really a stroke of luck for me, or at least I thought so at the time. I been planning to give them the ring, anyway, once I was out of the vault. I just wanted to make sure they didn’t run away and leave me stranded here.

After considerable argument, the old man told me to get the wedding band off, that would be worth something. Fortunately it slid off easily. I even took off the cuff links and handed them out to make the old man a little happier.

“That everything?” the old man asked.

”Yeh,” I said.

“You sure they ain’t nothing more, like a necklace or something?”

“Listen, you want to crawl in here and see?” Neither one said anything. “Do you want me to bolt the lid back down?” I asked. I was ready to get out of there.

“Yeh, you better do that,” the old man said.

So I crawled back to the head of the coffin to search for the key, and all I heard was the scrape of the two crowbars on the granite, and then a deep whoooomp! as the lid of the vault fell back into place. I scrambled back to the other end and could just hear the two of them shouting at each other outside.

“Man, you cain’t leave him there like that,” the young grave robber was saying.

“Why the fuck not?” the old man said. “He just a drunk. A migrant worker. Ain’t nobody goan miss him.”

It took a few seconds for me to realize what was going on. I expected to hear the hammering on the vault as they started working to get me out. I heard them pick the tools up, then I didn’t hear anything else.

I shouted. That shout was the most stifled, deadest sound, closed in that small place by the granite. I shouted and pounded my fists on the granite. I screamed, as loud as I could, but sound just died in there. It was absolutely dark. I put my hands up and found the lid of the vault and got up in a crouch and tried to lift the granite. I pushed and shoved with all my strength, but I couldn’t budge it.

I shouted again, shouted and screamed and begged and pounded with my fists on the sides of the vault, but there was no response.

I went crazy then and pushed and strained and struggled. You know you hear those stories of women lifting cars when the adrenaline gets flowing. I think the adrenaline was flowing that hard in me. I pushed and screamed, with a strength I had never known I had, but the lid didn’t budge. Nothing at all. I kept pushing and straining and screaming. I prayed and said the Hail Mary over and over. I cried and banged my head on the slab.

Finally I started quaking, and my legs went weak. I don’t know if it was the lack of oxygen or the exertion, but I must have passed out.

I don’t know what time of night I went into that vault. So I have no idea how long I lay there. I have no recollection of dreaming, so it wasn’t like I was asleep. I was just gone. It’s all a blank, until the very end, when I heard something like a bell tolling regularly and far away- ring, ring, ring, ring. I was imagining Frere Jacques tolling the matins. The ringing was coming closer, or I was coming closer to the abbey, and I could see the tower where Frere Jacques was pulling the bell rope. Then as the ringing became quite loud, I came back to consciousness. I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt around, and after some time I realized I had fallen down beside the open coffin.

The ringing kept getting louder, until I began to feel a draft of fresh air, and I heard men’s voices, redneck voices. I saw some faint light, like moonlight, above me. The rednecks were telling each other to hurry the fuck up, that they should have come earlier, and it was going to turn daylight if they didn’t hurry up. I didn’t say anything. I just lay there. I was still weak, and I felt it all might be a dream.

Soon I could see the bar coming into the vault as they worked. The opening grew wider. I could see the men’s hands and see their silhouettes outside on occasion. They were saying some terrible things about Willis Johnston, Sr.- what a ring-tailed son of a bitch he had been, and how he had stolen all his damn money anyway. Soon I could smell liquor. They were cursing each other as much as they were cursing Mr. Johnston. All the Johnstons, really. I just lay there as the slab slowly rose. They propped it up with four-by-fours at two corners. When the opening was big enough for a man, they started arguing about who was going to go in.

“I be goddamned if I am,” one of them said.

“What? You think they’s a haint in there?”

“You should a gotten it off before you laid him in.”

“Shit. I couldn’t. The goddamn preacher stood there with us till we screwed the top on. And the goddamn nigger was there before that. You know a nigger. He was eying that diamond ring like it was a plate of chitlins.”

I smelled liquor again, and I could see them passing the bottle around. They started arguing again about who was going in. None of them wanted to, but finally the one who sounded drunkest said, “Fuck it. That sonbitch cain’t do nothing to you dead.”

I heard him scrambling on the side of the vault, and then his head stuck in the opening. I reached up and grabbed him by the hair and started pulling him into the vault with me.

I’ve never heard a man scream or felt a man fight like that in my life. I dragged him about halfway in before the others grabbed his legs and started pulling against me. He was flailing and screaming and writhing and calling on Jesus to help him. I was pulling hard, but the two men pulling outside got the better, and they yanked him back out and left me with two hands full of hair.

They didn’t ask what had happened or anything. The man took off running as soon as he hit the ground, and the others took off after him so fast they were already rounding the church building by the time I stuck my head out to look.

The sky was just starting to turn bright to the east. I was still in my underwear and nothing else. I guess after all I’d been through that night it wasn’t hard for me to do what I had to do then. I took Willis, Sr.’s ring out from under my waistband and put it on my finger and crawled back to the open coffin. I had to wrestle the body around a good bit, but I managed to get the suit and the tie and the shirt off and the socks and shoes. Though the clothes smelled a little of embalming fluid, they weren’t too bad.

I stuffed the body back down in the coffin, face down, but I didn’t figure that would ever matter. It took me a while to find the key, and I was beginning to worry about time, but I did find it, and I bolted the aluminum coffin lid down, so the family wouldn’t be upset whenever Mrs. Johnston was buried. I tossed the clothes out of the vault and climbed out after them.

Willis, Sr. had been just about my size. Everything fit better than I hoped it would. By the time I snugged the tie up tight, I probably looked pretty damn respectable. The pants were a little too long, but I hitched them up as high as I could, tightened the belt, and buttoned the jacket. It was a nice suit. Felt like a hundred percent worsted. The wingtip shoes were too loose, but not so bad I couldn’t walk in them.

By this time the sky to the east was turning red. I stretched myself out and kicked one prop at the same instant I jerked the other one out with my hands. The stone fell so perfectly into place I couldn’t tell it had been raised.

I picked up all the tools and props, carried them to the back side of the cemetery, and tossed them into the honeysuckle. Then I went out to the highway and started walking. In a half hour or so I came to an intersection, and I followed the signs towards Macon.

Not long after the sun came up, I caught a ride with a couple of Mexicans in a faded, red van.

There was curtain fringe hanging around the windshield,and pictures of the Virgin and Jesus on the ceiling over the front seats. I acted like I couldn’t speak Spanish. The whole way into Macon they talked and laughed about me, a rich, drunk gringo wandering down the highway in the middle of nowhere.

I got them to drop me off downtown in Macon. I found a pawn shop and hung around the entrance until it opened. There was no inscription on the ring. The pawnshop owner looked at me like he could care less what the story was behind it. I made up a name and a local address. The diamond in that thing was a least a carat.

The ring was worth thousands, I’m sure, but he offered me two hundred, and I took it without a word.

I walked up the street to J. C. Penney’s and bought a polo shirt and some slacks and cheap tennis shoes. Then I went to the bus station, bought a ticket to Columbia, and changed clothes in the men’s room. I stuffed Mr. Johnston’s suit in the trash receptacle and covered it up with paper towels.

When I called Mary Ruth from the bus station in Columbia, she was surprised and delighted at first. She showed up at the station with her mother, who had come down to spend the weekend with her.

Her mother even seemed a little happy to see me. I covered my ass with stories about the camp in Florida. They weren’t particularly interested anyway. Mary Ruth asked if I had written any of the article yet, and I said I would get on it that week. Her mother just sat there with the corners of her mouth turned down. She didn’t say anything at all.

So I waited until that night, when we were in bed, to tell Mary Ruth what had happened. I told her the whole story, the honest truth. She got pretty mad when I was telling about the drinking and going up to Elmira’s room, but by the end of the story she was laughing. She wouldn’t believe me at first. She said I had to have made it up, but I swore up and down

“Now why can’t you ever write anything like that?” she said. “People would buy a book like that.” She said it like the idea of somebody buying one of my books was a fantasy of the wildest sort. But she kissed me and said she was glad to have me home.