Father and Son by Larry Brown Page B

quietly.
    Byers was crying without making any sound as he went down the length of his father’s body, uncovering the arms, the hands. At last he stood up and bent over and grabbed the wrists. He pulled hard, straining against the earth that had temporarily claimed this cadaver. He dragged the body from the shallow grave. They could see blood on the shirt, knife cuts on the throat that were coated with dirt. There was a light smell of rot about him already, that and the fragile pungency of the earth, reminding Bobby of spring somehow, the freshly turned dirt in the rows, small green things growing.
    Byers released his hold and the arms dropped stiffly. He squatted and looked at them each in turn for instructions as to what came next.
    â€œCuff him,” Bobby said. “Give him a cigarette and I’ll go call the coroner down here.”
    He got up to walk over to the car and Jake pulled the cuffs from his pocket and snapped them back on the prisoner. He was pulling his smokes out when Bobby opened the door and sat down on the seat of the cruiser. He watched Jake bend over Byers and he picked up the mike and called up to the jail. Harold answered and Bobby told him they needed the coroner, and he was thinking that he should have told Jake to find something to cover the old man with, a blanket, something. It didn’t seem right to have him lying out in the sun like that. He keyed the mike again and told Harold to call over to his house and tell his mother that it didn’t look like he was going to be able to make it to church and probably not dinner either. Harold said he’d take care of it and Bobby thanked him.
    He hung up the mike and looked out. Byers was sitting on the ground right in front of the car, smoking, talking to the body. Bobby didn’t see his deputy.
    â€œJake?”
    â€œI’m over here.”
    Bobby got out of the car and turned around. Jake was over in the turnip patch, digging with the shovel. He walked over there.
    â€œWhat in the hell are you up to?”
    The deputy paused in his work only for a moment. He already had a good-sized pile heaped up in a growing mound.
    â€œIt’d be a shame to leave these good turnips down here. Ain’t gonna be nobody here to eat em now.”
    â€œHave you lost your rabbit-assed mind?”
    â€œNaw. I just like a good mess of turnips once in a while.”

Virgil was sitting on the top step eating a biscuit and smoking a cigarette when Glen walked out on the back porch and stepped to the end where a wringer washing machine and a tub full of car parts and empty dog food sacks rested. The boards were dangerous with decay and Virgil watched him place his feet carefully on the joists where there were nail heads and then start peeing off the end of the porch into a flower bed made out of an old tractor tire that now held only grass and weeds.
    â€œYou got any coffee in this house?” Glen said.
    â€œLook in there next to the sink.”
    Virgil turned his head away and just sat there gazing out across what he called a yard. There were several junked cars back there with cardboard boxes full of hay and they were inhabited primarily by scrubby chickens. Virgil would go out there and get an egg or two once in a while. There was a car battery on the porch and it was wired to a headlight. Whenever he heard a ruckus among the chickens at night he would go out with a little Sears single-shot .22 and flip a wall switch for the battery and with the whole pastoral scene illuminated he would ventilate whatever house cat coon fox or possum was making off across the yard with one of his squawking fowl. He rarely hit the birds and they could usually be returned minus a few feathers to their nests. The coons heroasted in deep pans covered with tin foil and stuffed with carrots and sweet potatoes and feasted on them, dividing the bones for gnawing with the Redbone puppy.
    Glen finished and leaned on the post there and fished his cigarettes