Good Digging

Good Digging

“You go first,” Jed is saying to me as we’re lying there in the tall grass like soldiers, absolutely still, peeking out at the tombstones in front of us.

“We gotta get home, Jed,” Dottie says. “Pop’s gonna be mad if he finds us gone.”

“Shut up,” her brother hisses back at her, and then he says to me, “Come on, you going or not?” He’s grinning at me in the dark, all crooked teeth and shiny eyes, and I don’t want to disappoint him.

“They look really old,” I say, trying to sound casual like I’m making a scientific observation or something, while inside I’m all nervous and wanting to go back home.

“I told you,” Jed says, “They’re Confederate.”

“What’s ‘confedrit’?” Dottie asks us, and I can see Jed rolling his eyes, wishing he could have left her home and not had her tell.

“It was a war, dummy,” he tells her. “Over a hunnert years ago.”

“I know that,” Dottie says, like she hadn’t just asked.

“Pop says they’re all over the place,” Jed’s telling me again, and I can tell he’s stalling, too, just as nervous as I am. “On old farms everywhere, even in folk’s backyards. They’re good digging. He’s found all kinds of stuff. Old coins, a hat, he’s even got an old sword.

“’Course,” he adds slyly, “He says it isn’t anything like in the old country.”

We both roll our eyes at that one. It’s always like that with the elders. The old country this, the old country that. If it was that great, why did they ever leave in the first place?

“Hold on,” I tell Jed, cause I think I’ve just seen someone at one of the windows of the farmhouse. “You’re gonna wake everybody up.”

“You guys are chicken,” Dottie says, and I can feel her smirking at us in the dark.

“Shut up,” Jed hisses again. “We’re just looking a sec.” Then he leans in and whispers to me, “Seriously, we gotta be back by sunup or we’re dead. Dead, dead, dead,” which is something we both know, but there’s hours left before that, and I can see he’s trying to get me to make the decision.

"What are you, scared?" I ask myself. And then I say, “Okay,” and suddenly I’m crawling forward on my elbows and knees, and Jed has to scramble to catch up. We start moving in among the headstones, Jed taking the lead now, looking for what, I don’t know, but he’s taking us closer and closer to the farmhouse. Finally I grab hold of his ankle and ask, “What are you doing? One’s as good as another, ain’t it?”

“I guess not,” Jed says, pointing just ahead of us, and I can see that one of them is open, piles of dirt shoved to the sides.

“It’s dug up,” I tell him the obvious, feeling my mouth hanging open.

“Pop was here digging last night,” Jed beams proudly.

“Well, then there won’t be anything left,” I say.

“Yeah there is,” Jed says. “Pop had to leave early because the farmer came out and drove him off.” And there it is, everything that was left unsaid between us. Doing something that you knew wasn’t right, but doing it anyway because you didn’t want folks to call you scared.

We slide up to the hole and peer in together, and what can I tell you, it’s like Christmas morning. Whoever it was had been a big fellow, and his big old skull is gaping at us from under a few remaining wisps of ratty hair, an old, moldy suit crumbling around him.

Next thing I know, Jed’s in the hole and I’m in there with him, both of us giggling and tearing at the cloth. We get to work and soon Dottie’s giggling. She’s pulled a ring off one of the fingers and she’s trying it on, but it’s so big she can only keep it on her thumb.

“Look,” she says, “I’m a princess.”

“Big deal,” says Jed, “I’m a general.” He set the old rotted hat on his head, not much more than a leather band, and he’s pulled the scraps of a shirt around him, his mottled grey arms poking out of the tattered sleeves.

Suddenly, a deep, male voice yells, “Who’s out there?”

“Uh-oh,” Dottie says, and I can finally hear some fear in her voice. Jed and I are both scared, too, but sometimes a kid’s curiosity just overloads his sense, and so both of us stick our heads up right when a flashlight beam sets on us.

The farmer is standing by his back door, the light in one hand, a shotgun in the other, and I can see that he’s frozen in place, staring dead at us.

“Oh, God,” he says, and I can tell it’s hard for him to take us all in, our lumpy looking bodies covered with scraps of burial shrouds and corpses’ clothing, our eyes gleaming back at him in the glow of the flashlight. I realize I’m still chewing on the end of a leg bone, and I tuck it behind my back while we all just sit there staring at one another with the cicadas singing around us.

And then all of a sudden Jed hollers, “Run,” and we’re all three of us scrambling out of the hole. I can see the farmer trying to come back to his senses and raise his gun, and I’m thinking that this was the way it was back in the old country; the old priests waving their crosses and their holy staffs and such while the elders scurried out of the churchyards with their scraps of bones and meat, just trying to put supper on the table.

Before the first shot rings out we’re already deep into the night and out of harm’s way, loping along. We’re laughing out loud, happy and scared at the same time, and we know we’ll be back because that was real good digging.

But we’ve got to be home by sunup or we’ll be dead, dead, dead.