Read Online Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell - Free Book Online Page A

gazing at Temple with a look of abject irresolution.
    I shoulda let you die, dummy, she says. What you thinkin pulling a train of slugs behind you like that? You ain’t destined to survive this world. Most likely I just went against God’s plan for you, fool that I am.
    He looks up at her and back toward the carnage behind her.
    Do you talk? she asks. Or are you the kind of dummy that don’t say anything?
    He reaches down to the corpse of the old woman and uses his knuckles to move her hair out of her face. A low moan escapes his mouth, inarticulate, like a mewling baby.
    How long your granny been dead? Not too long I guess. But you best leave her go before she starts creepin around again. Cause when she does, she ain’t gonna be thinking about feedin you soup no more.
    She goes to the car and opens the door and gets in. The day is bright and the road ahead is wide open and the breeze is cool and feels nice on her skin and her hand is feeling fine. But sheknows she’s not going to get that picture out of her head—the picture of that man kneeling by his dead granny and fixing her hair for her. So she climbs back out of the car.
    Doggone it, she says. Come on, dummy, let’s put your grams in the ground.
    In a nearby garage, she finds a shovel and two small fence pickets and a ball of string and she loads them into the man’s arms and leads him out into one of the small garden plots where the soil is loose. Then she hands him the shovel.
    Go ahead, dummy, start digging. She ain’t none of my grandma.
    She points and the man digs. He stands a full two heads taller than she, and his shoulders slope downward as though it is difficult to bear the dense, lumbering weight of his body. She has to show him how to use the shovel, how to hold it—but when he drives it into the earth it sinks deep and true. Meanwhile, she takes the two fence pickets and puts them crosswise and uses the string to tie them together tight.
    Now you gotta put her in it, she says when the hole is deep enough. She points to the ancient bony body and then to the hole.
    He lifts her and gently sets her down on the raw clayey earth and then looks to Temple for further instruction.
    Okay, um, now you gotta get some flowers. A whole bunch.
    She picks a tiny wildflower from beneath her feet.
    Like this, but bigger. There’s a bunch round the front of the house. That way. Go on.
    He goes, and she takes the pistol she brought from the car and gets down into the grave. She examines the woman closely, touching her fingers and her wrists. Then she pulls up the eyelids and sees the eyes. They are rolled back in the head, but they are already beginning to rotate ever so slightly.
    Temple tries to pry open the mouth, but the teeth are clenched shut. She puts her fingers under the old woman’s nose.
    Get a whiff of this, granny, she says. Come on, now, open up.
    The old woman’s head tilts slightly upward and her jawopens to try to get her teeth around Temple’s fingers. Temple puts the barrel of the pistol in the mouth and points it upward and fires. Then she quickly pulls some handfuls of loose dirt into the grave and puts them under the old woman’s head to hide the mess and climbs out of the hole.
    When the man lopes around the corner from the back of the house looking frightened, she shows him the gun and points to a nearby tree.
    Ain’t nothin to worry about, she says. I was just takin a potshot at a squirrel. It got away. You got them flowers?
    He has a handful of them, pale and broken-stemmed with roots and gobs of dirt hanging from them.
    They’ll do, she says. Now come on and fill in this hole.
    He does it, and she watches his slow movements, which seem to her like tectonic movements of the earth, glacial and resounding, full of pith and mineral.
    She takes the picket cross and hammers it into the soil at the head of the grave.
    That’s so God knows where to look when he comes to find her, she explains. Now go ahead and put those flowers on there.