The Feet Remember the Steps

When bones lose their home in the body, the worst place they can find themselves is in an unmarked grave, dumped in a patch of Earth called “nowhere” to hide someone else’s sin. I didn’t know how I ended up standing in one myself, perched over a poor bastard’s skeleton.

I reckoned I dug the hole, seeing how I was alone and had the dirt-caked shovel in my hand. Aches shot up my arm. Splinters prodded my fingers. Callouses formed over older callouses hardened from my wrangling days. At 86, I was sturdy, solid. Not a quick-feet, Spring chicken anymore, but I could get a job done.

I was swallowed by darkness as piles of soil circled the grave’s opening above. I could make out a few swaying tree branches up a ways, peppered by the starry night sky. The hole was deep, just about seven feet. Worms wriggled through the dirt. One slinked out of the eye socket of the skull.

I didn’t know who the sad soul was, but I knew it was a man. I could tell by the broad shoulders and long femurs. Something in me remembered how the bones of dead things looked. Hell, I’d seen enough in my lifetime.

Standing in a dark forest seemed to trigger a blinding memory like a sudden migraine: my platoon at war, smoke in our lungs, the smell of a man’s ignited insides, and the raining sound of rocks and blown up bits pelting our helmets.

The flashback faded slowly. I glanced down at the dusted bones scattered before me. Shaking my head in disgust, I said a quiet prayer for him. Only a savage would be so disrespectful, not give a man a proper burial. There’s not enough decency left in the world to milk a drop. What about his wife? His family? Only a savage would be so disrespectful, not give a man a...what was I saying again? My mind ain’t what it used to be.

The man. Who was he? How’d he get here? How’d I get here?

My mind raced. It was flurry-filled, like snowflakes falling in a cotton field, blurred like a frosted mason jar of moonshine. I could see through it, but inside: it’s a mystery of Southern makings.

Then, it got quiet, quieter than a church mouse. No crickets chirped, no frogs waddled through the leaves, just fog.

Through rattled teeth, a whisper called, “Pa.”

I flailed around searching for the source. I about knocked myself to my knees, but I steadied on the shovel rod. I dared not touch that skeleton. My elder back was hunched, curved like the limb of a crossbow, so my stature didn’t reach more than 5 '7, and my leg muscles felt loose and jiggly like egg yolks. I wasn’t going to be hopping out of this hole on my own. I gazed down at the spider veins and suns spots on my wrinkled hands. They used to be so full of life, full of the delicate face of my Delores, my girl. She’d been the reason I’d stayed sane after the war. I think that’s why my mind started to go in the first place, maybe it followed her to Heaven.

“Pa…” It came again but muffled, hushed at the end.

I liked to consider myself a brave man, but cowardice leapt on me like a leech. I clawed at the sides of the grave wall, pulling myself nowhere as the soft dirt tumbled over my head.

A smile flashed into my mind's eye. It wasn’t my smile, nor Delores’ or anyone I knew. It was terrifying, unmoving like a manikin with teeth. I shook my head like an itchy dog to shew the image away.

My eyes searched the death dugout. I needed something to wedge into the dirt, give myself some leverage. I turned back to the bones. Some were broken, sharp. Disturbing that body was the last thing I wanted to do, but I also didn’t want to end up here with him forever. I looked down at my clothes to see what else I could use. It was the first time I realized I was in a white, polka-dotted hospital gown, with a medical band on my right wrist and dangling handcuffs on the left.

Suddenly, like a lifesaver from God, a flashlight beamed through the night. It flickered as the person holding it grew closer, light bouncing on the leaves up yonder.

“Pawpaw,” a man’s deep voice whispered through the fog. I was hesitant, stayed quiet.

“Pawpaw!”

I finally recognized the voice as my grandson. I shouted, “Billy! Down here!”

Billy stumbled over. He was scruffy with sunken, tired eyes and looked madder than a wet hen. No more than 30, but you’d guess much older the way his skin was wearing him.

He yelled through exhausted heaves. “You find it?”

“What…what’s going on? Help me up! How’d the hell I’d get in here?”

“You took off runnin’ when we got to that big stone just off the road. You were haulin’ ass, hollerin’ you knew where to go. I been lookin’ for you for hours.”

I thrusted my arm up to him, tremors quivering my cramped fingers. Billy’s face was taut with rage. He didn’t reach back. Stern, with his hands folded and still on his head, he grumbled, “Pawpaw. Where’s the gold? You said there was gold, plenty of it. So much, it blinded you. You promised me.”

“Gold!?” I barked a hearty laugh, hard enough that deep phlegm shoved itself from my lungs. “Clearly, I’ve lost my mind. Take me back to the home…my nurse…whoever the hell’s taking care of me.”

He winced, started pacing along the edge of the grave’s top. “You never been gone this long.”

Billy’s body began to shrink as my eyes painted him as the small, freckled face boy with school-age snaggleteeth that I remembered. He stomped his little feet, a tantrum in each step. “We need that gold! You promised, Pawpaw, and I’ve never known you to break a promise.”

Pat. Pat. Pat. The steps’ vibrations transported my mind again to a time when I was a boy. I remembered my Uncle Teddy used to play the banjo, every afternoon right before dinner. It was ritual. And he was mighty good at it. I got it in my mind one day to join in, intertwine with his twinkle and twang and perform a little jig. One, two, step to the tune. Grinning a ragged smile, Uncle Teddy nodded, swinging his long, mousey brown hair. He whistled at me, “Look at those feet go!”

Not more than 10 seconds after, my Pa came blazing out of the house onto the porch. He raised his knee high into the air. His shadow darkened my face as he stomped his size 12-foot on my tiny six-year-old toes. Crack. He broke one.

His voice thundered at me, “No boy of mine gonna be sissy footin’ round here.”

I don’t think I ever picked up much of dancing after that, not even at my own wedding. Delores got no more than a snap and a shallow sway.

Even in the dark, I could see Billy’s flustered face turn beet-red as he wined. Impatient, I shouted “ I don’t got no gotdamn gold. Now, haul me up, before I whoop your tail!”

Billy, the man, reassembled in the boy’s place. He bowed over cackling at the idea. A fruitless demand from an old man with nothing to bargain with but a blood tie. My eyes flickered. Confused, delirium devoured me. I beat down a watering eye. I’d have to tear the decades-old duct tape from my tear ducts to let one escape.

Billy wiped his dehydrated mouth with a dusted hand and continued. “The prison is taking care of you, Pawpaw. Not some big-tittied nurse you done prolly cooked up. You and I been in the same block for years. Don’t you remember? You was in the medical ward here recently. It was easier to break us out from there.”

Back and forth, we fired off at each other in the dark. I shouted, “Bullshit.”

“God’s honest truth.”

“You ain’t bright enough to break us out of no prison. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.”

“I ain’t lying! I got us out. More than you ever did! Now, hold up your end. You said the gold was ‘seared’ in your memory. Where is it? You bury it down there or what?!”

It all came rushing back, hitting me like the ocean’s deepest pressure point.

“The gold…”

My neck tensed as I slowly turned my head down toward the bones. I knew who he was, and I couldn’t stay in that grave for another second.

Memory gripped my brain like an enraged husband strangling his philandering wife. Through a dark mist, I could make out a wide, sinister smile, fixed in defiance. The teeth were eerily white next to the charred, ash-black, burnt skin surrounding them. Three of the teeth were gold. They beamed as flames danced in their reflection.

Snap! Something stirred in the distance. Billy swiveled and murmured, “Lights! Shit! They found us.”

He gazed down at me, maybe a moment’s sympathy before whispering, “sorry.” He dashed into the night. Was this my legacy? Seed of my seed. Rotten. Worthless.

Panic plopped on me like white on rice. I hadn’t wanted to see it, but it was there: a chain tied in a knot just under the jawbone of the skull. I seized it, and the memory of Jesse loosed itself upon me.

It was one of the hottest summers in 1955. Jesse, before he was decomposed matter in an unmarked grave, was a tall fella, similar in age as me at 16 at the time, but bigger, more brutish. Pa said the boy grinned too long at Ma, and that was enough to rile the fellas up in town. I guessed it was made worse by Jesse’s gold caps. They reminded Pa of Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight boxing champion, who had a thing for putting pure things to his lips, too rich for his mouth: gold teeth and white women. Pa hated him with a passion, like the moon cricket personally whipped him up in a match.

One of the men in the mob, his eyes crossed with exhilaration, poured coal oil on Jesse as he squirmed. Another fella lit a stack of kindling. Pa wrapped the chain around Jesse’s neck. He didn’t cry, didn’t scream. He just…smiled. The men hoisted Jesse up. His legs kicked as he choked. Pa had me stand to the side just to watch. He nodded proudly at me, so I hollered in jest, “Ooowee, look at those feet go.”

They lowered him in and out of the fire for about two hours. I remember the smell, pungent and rancid in that heat. Even as the skin melted off the bone, the sneer on his face never left.

We didn’t typically bury them back then, but Pa didn’t want my mother to feel any shame if she’d hadn’t been entirely truthful about the whole ordeal. So I helped dig the hole and tossed his body in.

I knew the country wouldn’t miss him. His people don’t belong to this land, but maybe now that’s why the Earth had thrown him back up. Pushed out the bile, acid, and chewed up bones to be exposed from where it came.

Holding the chain, I didn’t just remember, I felt it. I felt him. My own throat constricted. The rusted metal clinked as I trembled. Tears poured out of my eyes, and my skin burned like hot lava was being rubbed in like lotion. Everything hurt.

I had to escape. My mind may have gone, but I still had muscle memory. I whipped the chain above my head with all my might, twirling it in circles, just like my days of roping bulls. I tossed it into the air. It snatched right onto the branch above. I yanked it. With enough tension, I pulled myself up, cupping my hands over each other, one at a time, digging my feet into the grave wall. Step, pull, step, pull, step.

After what seemed like eternity, I lifted myself out. As I rolled over, my old body exhausted and out of breath, I could still feel the tortured suffering Jesse endured. I don’t recall thinking at all about what he felt. They don't feel. Even the ones in the cells next to me and Billy, they don’t feel. They’re animals. And back then, Jesse was just that, an animal entertaining us. It was fun at the time. I know that cross-eyed fella from the mob had one of his toes in a jar of formaldehyde for some years after. “A souvenir,” he said. The men and I even posed with a photographer for a picture. Jesse’s burnt feet dangled behind our heads like Christmas lights on a well-decorated home.

Suddenly, a gnarled growl rose from the darkened trees and shook me from my stupor. A crescendo of hungry dog barks grew closer and louder. I pushed myself up as I ran into the night.

I didn’t see any officers or flashlights, but the barks chased behind me. I recalled a mental picture of my hand being tugged by a dog and a leash, chasing after other Jesses through the woods. They always looked back bug-eyed, terrified. The moonlight glistened in their sweat, making them into a night light, easier to spot them in the dark than you’d think.

My brain swayed back and forth. Were the dogs real or memory? The whiplash consumed me. I began running in circles. I grew dizzy as I stumbled into trees, bark pressing into my hands. Cottonmouth made me choke as I thirsted for water. Hobbling as quickly as I could muster, I saw an opening in the forest up yonder. I picked up speed, and before I could stop my feet, I tumbled back into the grave.

As I plummeted to the bottom, something sharp pierced my lung. I struggled to breath, as blood and air spurted out.

I knew I’d surely die. If they found me, my death, and life, would be further sullied by the reveal of this past sin. It was a different time then, but I didn’t think this would be forgiven. If they didn’t find me, my bones would meet the same fate as Jesse’s.

So, I laid there bleeding out next to him into the soil, smiling.