IN A YEAR it will be nearly impossible to tell that they were ever here. Apple Island lies in the Atlantic, belted in night. The graves where the island dead once lay are open and empty and listen like ears.
THE MORNING AFTER the islanders left, a dozen men assembled at the launch on the main in the predawn cold. Nine of them were laborers, following a day’s work, digging postholes one day, hauling lobster traps or picking potatoes the next. There were three sailors, too, by the look of their pilot coats, who had drifted or possibly fled from Bath or Portland or Portsmouth. Some of the other men knew one another from previous work, but the sailors, after nodding to the others, stood slightly apart, dark, speaking what one of the other men muttered was Portuguese when another asked what the hell was that talk.
The sound of a wagon and single mule pulling it preceded by several moments the appearance in the opening in the trees of what two of the non-seafaring laborers recognized at once from previous stints assisting him at his melancholy chores as the sexton, Barney Kramp. The wagon hit a stone in the road and the clatter of what the same two men knew was a dozen probably borrowed spades and three or four paupers’ coffins ruptured the last of the receding night and suddenly it was day and the birds cried and swooped up and the trees and the wind awoke and the waters, too, and the men themselves roused anew into the new day. The sexton pulled up to the group of men, who broke and ranked themselves in a semicircle in front of the wagon.
Good morning, you filthy gang of scoundrels, the sexton said. Good morning to you groundlings, plowboys, and villains.
Grave digging, one of the men muttered.
Diggin’ ’em up, said another.
NONE OF THE workers saw him arrive, but an hour after they started digging up the cemetery on Apple Island they noticed Zachary Hand to God leaning against the trunk of a nearby tree watching them.
Who’s this old bluegum? said a thin, pale white boy with big ears and a shorn head who looked barely old enough to be away from home.
Got me, said the man digging next to the boy.
Hey, Uncle, who the hell are you? the boy yelled.
Zachary did not answer.
Hey, lazybones, why don’t you grab a shovel and give us a hand, do some honest work, the boy called out. Who the hell are you, anyway?
I’m nobody, Zachary said.
Sure, sure. Salt of the earth, said the white boy.
God has mercy on the meek and the poor, one of the other men said, thrusting his shovel into the ground.
Ha! the white boy said. Then he sure must love all these colored old half-breeds.
Zachary Hand to God stared at the ocean and, as if he couldn’t care whether the boy or anyone else heard him or not, as if the big-eared pale white boy with the shorn head weren’t even there, as if the bones of his neighbors and lovers and maybe even Benjamin and Patience Honey, too, and even, he thought, of Esther Honey’s father, Grant Howden— who he’d known Esther had murdered the moment he’d found the broken-necked, broken-backed body in the rocks below the bluff that morning—as if every one of the souls who’d died and been buried on Apple Island were not being dug up right in front of his own eyes, said, Well, He surely walked among us on this earth as one of us.
What was that? the boy said, bolting upright. What’d you just say?
Zachary sighed and looked at the four raw empty coffins then at the sea then directly at the pale white boy with big ears and shorn head. I said that, for my sake I hope He does, because I’m the last sorry old halfbreed left on this rock.
Here, here! Enough of that blaspheming, you grimy bilge rats! Barney Kramp called from the wagon. Back to digging!
The pale white boy threw his cigarette onto a pile of freshly dug dirt. He shook his head to himself, for Zachary and the sailors to see. He looked at the man digging next to him and snickered.
Beat this, he said.
The other man wiped his bright pink, balding head with a handkerchief. What was left of his hair hung limp from where it grew over his ear, down the side of his face, to his jawbone, thin, sweaty, sparse blond and gray. The man pasted the loose skein back over his pate and tucked it behind his other ear. He sighed, picked up his shovel, and stuck it back into the dirt. A pluff of wind lifted his hair again and flopped it over to the other side of his head.
The sailors returned to digging.
Zachary turned away and walked across the island toward where his house and the others were nearly done burning. The men from the mainland had missed Zachary’s tree so he went to it and got inside. He closed his eyes and ran the pads of his fingers across the carvings as if to decipher them by touch. He opened his eyes and followed the radius of each band of pictures. Really, they were crude. Most of the intricacies and nuances of expression and gesture and architecture and decoration had been those of his thoughts while he’d carved. Very little of the finesse of his ideas had made its way into the wood, he saw now. He gathered his candle and cross. He knelt and cupped up a cone of wood shavings and set it burning with his flint and steel. Smoke rose into the darkness of the hollowed trunk then refluxed and began pulsing from the opening. Zachary watched the fire grow until he was certain it would not smother, then headed for the water.
EARTH IS THIS SURFACE. Earth is this solid stratum. Earth is the hole or hiding place of burrowing animals. Earth is the soil suitable for cultivation. Earth is the medium by which a circuit is completed. Earth is the ground. Earth is a place for burial. Earth is the present abode of humankind. Earth is wordless and patient and suffered the grave robbers’ spades in silence.
THE TWO MEN from the town who had been put in charge of burning the remaining buildings on the island could not get the Larks’ shanty lit. The schoolhouse burned just fine, and so did Zachary’s shack and Annie Parker’s heap, but the Larks’ home only smoldered and sent out smutty fumes. Whether it was too moldy with rot or soaked through with water or what it was the men could not really tell. After half an hour of repeatedly setting torches to various piles of rags and nesting and debris, the men soaked the entire shack inside and out with kerosene. They stood ten yards back and one of them threw his torch at the home like a tomahawk (he was an out-of-work part-time lumberjack, who’d won cash and pocket watches and wedding bands throwing actual tomahawks at saplings from thirty paces after dinner, often after half a bottle of whisky, on log drives down the West Branch Carry on the Penobscot River). The torch spun through the air end over end, fizzling flames and sparks like a Chinese firework, and disappeared into the shack through the open doorframe and the men heard the torch strike the back wall.
Nice throw, there.
Smoke uncoiled from the windows and stovepipe then a torrent of flames gushed from the doorway and up into the sky like a river of fire in spate.
Like the house was upside down, one of the men thought. Like the fire was pouring out of the house upward the way water would pour through a sluice. The men smoked and the shanty barely worthy of the name smoked and burned and crumpled to one side first then toppled, like an animal, almost, dropping to its front knees as the flames swarmed and felled it.
Like wolves on a steer or something, one of the men thought.
The other man thought it looked like the time he’d seen a woman on fire walk out of a burning house, the way she staggered like the fire was heavy and she couldn’t stand upright under its weight. The men put their hands on the tops of their rake handles and rested their chins on their hands and smoked their cigarettes.
A mastiff and a terrier had come up behind the men and sat watching the fire. The mastiff let out a single deep bark. The man who had thrown the torch like a tomahawk and had seen a burning woman drew his revolver and shot both dogs between the eyes.
EVENTUALLY ONE OF the Portuguese sailors struck bone. He levered up a pelvis, sacrum dry and crustacean.
Aye! he yelled to Kramp.
That’s it, you mangy, flea-bitten dogs, Kramp called, coming to the pit. He shaded his eyes and peered into the hole and looked at the hipbone resting on the shovel blade the Portuguese sailor held as far away from himself as he could without dropping it and scrambling out of the ditch.
God save us all, you rogues, Kramp said, and the pale white boy with big ears scooped up a skull missing its mandible.
I got a head! he declared. Look at it! he said, staring. Just look at that, he said, his smile disappearing. His voice quieted. Just look at that.
The men shoveled up femurs and fibulas, ribs and radii.
Put them in the boxes, you scarecrows, Kramp said. Start with the left one. Don’t get too much dirt in with them. There mightn’t be enough room, otherhow.
Three hours later the man with the woebegone comb-over paused digging. He stood hunched over, shovel in his two hands, panting. He grunted and stabbed the shovel into the ground and pulled himself upright by its handle. He was the only man left. The sailors had walked away across the low tide two hours earlier, without pay, passing oaths back and forth in Portuguese. Even the pale white boy with big ears had gone sulky and silent. He’d slowed more and more with each scoop of bones to the box until, after flipping a tiny, be-cracked ribcage into the third box, he’d stood looking at the crates full of the mixed-up remains and the last crate yet to be filled and had spat on the ground and cursed.
Aw, shit. I ain’t no grave digger, anyway, he’d growled. He’d pitched his shovel against the cartwheel and said, I’m through. Give my pay to the goddamn orphanage.
Each time a man quit, Kramp nodded and sighed and rowed him back to the main in a dinghy that had been left behind by the islanders and said, Farewell, you good-for-nothing, Farewell, you filthy beggar, Farewell, you dirty peddler, and returned to the work. He knew from experience that all but the most desperate or ruthless men would not finish the job, that he would not have to pay the wages he’d promised, which he had not even brought with him, and that he would have to do much of the job himself, alone, through the night, by lantern.
The white man with the sorrowful hair was named John Thorpe. He lived where he lay down each night. He had no money, no regular work, and could not afford to walk away from this cursed job, even though he gave himself fifty-fifty odds at best that that foul-mouthed man who’d hired him would pay him when he was done. He dug all morning and all afternoon and figured he’d probably dig all night, too.
Barney Kramp returned from taking the pale white boy with big ears and shorn head across the inlet, grabbed a shovel, and joined him.
As the light left the sky, John Thorpe saw Zachary Hand to God wading away from the island across the channel, chest-deep in the water. Zachary held what looked like an old faded and patched flag bundled and knotted together by the corners above his head. His silhouette cut through the invisible current of the tide and to Thorpe he looked like a threadbare angel abandoning the wrecked ship over which he’d once been guardian, light fanning across the water behind him as he pushed against the incoming flood.