The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

dug, town council don’t want to pay. They done me that way once—for the good, white people’s graveyard—and I dug up that old woman and her child and took them over and laid them on the mayor’s doorstep. Since they had died in a fire, they didn’t look so good. They had to pay me what they owed me, and they done it quick, and they had to pay me more for burying them again. They could have got somebody else, but they knew I’d be mad about it. You don’t want me mad. You especially don’t want me drunk and mad, which is why I don’t drink. There’s a demon in the bottle when I do, and the town knows it, and the nigger haters have tried to settle me down, but they got settled, so they live with me. That whiskey, it’ll make me do wrong. One sip I’m happy, two I’m mad, and three I’m crazy. Maybe it’s the Indian blood I got, or maybe it’s just me.”
    I had almost quit listening at this point. I was still thinking about what he had told me about the woman and child. I said, “You dug up a woman and her child?”
    “Took them right out of the coffins. They were dead, so it didn’t matter none to them. I needed that fifty cents, and when it was all said and done I made a dollar. By the way, I ain’t sharing the grave money with you just because you’re digging. Consider this like a down payment on me hunting down those fellows that’s got your sister. Tell you what. You stay here and pat that grave down some more, and I’ll go borrow a horse, pick you up when I got it.”
    I didn’t like the sound of that, but I had a feeling that there was only so much I could worry about at this point, though I might could make a mention of Jesus to him at some point and see if he’d come around to a better way of thinking. Eustace and the hog went off about their mission, leaving me to finish the work.
    I trembled when I thought again of Lula. We had always got along fine, and I had even stooped to playing dolls and tea parties with her, though I had never even known anyone of my acquaintance to have an actual tea party. She was a good girl, and we were good friends for a brother and a sister. Though when I was younger, I do remember chasing her more than once with a frog to scare her, or with a sticker-burr switch. She was a good runner. What I remembered most about her was how strange she could be, studying on things and considering on matters of no interest to anyone else. Like how could a hummingbird fly backwards and a chicken that had wings couldn’t do any real flying at all. It didn’t seem a deliberation of prominence to me. She was always coming out with that kind of thing, and I was always telling her if God wanted us to know the answers to such, he’d have written it down. One time she looked at me when I said that, and said, “You’re telling me God wrote the Bible with his own hand, and in English? And knowing all things, he has no word on the hummingbird and the chicken?”
    I had never thought on such a thing for a moment, and before I could say as such, she had already moved on to some other contemplation that most likely had no explanation, either.
    I patted the grave down some more, then got bored and leaned on the shovel. Then I got tired and sat down. The sunburn on the back of my neck had started to sting, but there wasn’t a thing I could do for it but bear it. About the time I began to think I’d been hornswoggled into digging a grave for nothing, I saw Eustace riding up the shadow-covered hill on a horse, the hog trotting behind him. There was a bridle and reins on the horse, but no saddle.
    When he got up by me, I saw he had an automatic pistol stuck in his belt. It was the same sort Fatty had. He said, “We better get on our way.”
    He held out his hand and I took it. He swung me up on the back of the horse. We went away at a trot, the hog running along beside us, hardly blowing any air at all.
      
    It wasn’t an easy ride, bareback like that, and I nearly bounced off