ELLIS
The headstone. The grass. The quiet.
The quiet was a Georgia quiet, which was different from a Mississippi quiet in ways I couldn’t have explained to anyone who hadn’t spent time in both. Georgia quiet had red clay underneath it. Mississippi quiet had delta mud. The sounds that rose up through the silence were cousins, not twins.
I stood at the grave the way I stood at the grave every year. April. The anniversary. Twenty-three years now and the standing had become a thing the body did without the brain’s permission, the way the hands knew the Shovelhead’s kickstart without looking, the way the feet found the pegs in the dark.
GUS RODGER YEAGER. The letters cut into granite. 1968–2003. Beloved Son.
The headstone didn’t say partner. The headstone didn’t say the man who rode beside me for three years on 75 and 85 and every county road between Atlanta and the Florida line. The headstone didn’t say the one who taught me how to read a driver’s hands on the wheel before the driver knew what the hands were planning. The headstone said beloved son because the headstone was for his mother, who was in the ground now too, three rows over, and his father, who’d followed her two years later, and the family plot had filled up the way family plots did in small Georgia towns where the families stayed and the staying was the only story.
I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t said anything in years. The first few times I’d talked—told him about the move back to Mississippi, about the sheriff’s job, about the Shovelhead I’d bought with money that should have gone to something smarter. Talked the way you talk to someone who can’t answer.
I’d stopped talking. The standing was enough.
I knelt once, the way I knelt once every year, and took the Case knife out of my jeans and opened the small blade.
Twelve months of Georgia gets into a headstone. Red clay in the bottom of the cuts, a skin of lichen starting in the curve of the R, the gray-green crust that wants to soften every hard edge it finds. I worked the point down the G. Down the U. Into the S, which was the hard one, the curves holding grit the way a bad carburetor bowl holds varnish. The clay came out in dry red crumbs and fell into the grass. I blew the letters clean and the granite underneath was the same granite it had been in 2003, the cuts still sharp, still deep, still saying the thing they had been paid to say.
It took eleven minutes. It always took eleven minutes.
I wiped the blade on my jeans, folded it, and stood up, and my left knee told me about the Knucklehead and the year I’d learned what a kickback could do to a man who wasn’t paying attention. The knee had opinions. I let it have them.
Three rows over, his mother. ADA LOUISE YEAGER. I walked over and put my hand flat on the top of her stone, which was warm from the day. She had sat in the front room of the house on Pine Street in 2003 with her hands folded in her lap and asked me one question, and the question was not what happened. She already knew what happened. The question was: Did he know it was coming.
No, ma’am, I had told her. He never saw it.
It was the only lie I had ever told her. I had been two hundred yards back. I had no idea what he saw.
I took my hand off the stone.