“Get a shovel, Mr. Yarro,” she said. “And open that grave.”
There was a long moment when the whole thing hung. Doc Yarro could have written off. He could have laughed. What he did instead, and she understood afterward that this was the only truly incomprehensible thing that happened that whole year, was take the shovel out of Anil's hands and walk to the low field and start digging in front of everybody in the rain without a word.
Perhaps because there were nine white witnesses, and a refusal is an admission. Perhaps because he had been carrying it. She never knew. It was not deep. Nothing about it had ever been meant to be permanent.
The box came up in pieces, black and soft, and the men lifted the lid off with the shovel blade, and inside there was a rotted quilt. And inside the quilt there were stones from the creek, 20 or 30 of them, water smoothed the size of a child's head and a child's fists, laid out long, the way you would lay a boy. Zilpa did not scream. Orura had braced herself for a scream, had Llay awake constructing it, and there was none. What Zilpa did was go down on her knees in the mud beside the box, and pick up one of the stones and hold it against her chest with both hands and rock, and the sound that came out of her was low and even, and went on and on, a sound with no shape to it, and every person in that field who had ever lost anybody knew what it was.
And two of the white men turned their backs. Olivant said, “Whose grave is this?” “It is Zilpa's boy's grave,” Orura said.
“There has never been anybody in it. My husband sold him to Ruel Kettleman on the 4th of November 1838 for $410, and Mr. Yarro drove the cart, and Mr. Yarro told this woman her child died on the road.”
And Zilpa's rocking stopped. She got up out of the mud slowly, an old woman with a stone in her hands, and she turned around, and she did not look at Doc Yarro at all. That was the thing that struck everybody who was there. She turned all the way around past him, past Olivant, past all of them, to the edge of the field, where the biggest man any of them had ever seen was standing at the fence rail with his hat off. He had taken his hat off.
That was how she found him. In 5 months, nobody had once seen him bareheaded out of doors, and he had taken his hat off and stood in the rain to be looked at. Zilpa walked across that field. It took a long time. When she got to him, she did not look at his face.
She reached up and took his left forearm and turned it over, and on the inside of it, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, there was an old scold scar, shiny and white and shaped like a spread hand from a pot of grease pulled off a hearth by a 4-year-old in the summer of 1831, when his mother had turned her back for the length of one breath. She put her thumb on it, then she looked up at him, and Obed shook his head once hard. He backed a step into the fence. He put his own hand flat on his chest and pushed twice. Not him.
Gone. Not him. And his crooked face came apart in a way that was terrible to watch. And he made a sound at last, the first sound anybody at Tallow Creek had heard out of him, and it was not a word. It was the noise of a man trying to keep something shut that has decided to open.
Zilpa took hold of his shirt in both fists. No, she said. No, sir. Don't you do that. Her voice was shaking and it did not stop her.
I know what you're telling me. You telling me the boy died anyhow? You telling me they made you into something out there and what come back ain't him? And I ought to keep my grief where I had it cuz it was clean. She shook him or tried.
It was like shaking a post. Boy, look at me. I buried a box of rocks for 11 years. 11 years. I got up and made this family's breakfast with a box of rocks in the ground.
Don't you dare hand me another one. He went down on his knees in the mud. He was still nearly as tall as she was. She put both arms around his head and held it against her, and she said his name, and then she said it again, and she went on saying it, and behind them in the low field, Doc Yarro stood holding the shovel with the rain running off his hatbrim. And Squire Olivant said, “Well, Doc.” and Doc Yarro said the sentence that finished him in Adams County, though it took a year to work.
“It was a business matter,” he said. He got on his gray horse and rode out of the lane and did not come back, and the receiver replaced him in January, and by the following autumn he had gone to Louisiana, not for what he had done, which half the men in that field had ordered done on their own places, but because he had said it out loud in front of witnesses, and there was not a table in three counties that wanted him at it afterward.
The inquisition was held in the Adams County Courthouse on the 14th of January, 1850. It took one day. There were 12 men in the box and perhaps 60 in the room because the story had been going around Natchez since July, and everyone wanted the end of it. Wilkins Renfruit's lawyer was thorough and gentle and did not raise his voice once, which made it worse. He laid it out in order.