Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, and shrugged. He looked a bit sullen, but in truth he looked more confused than anything, Davey told Maddie the next day.
‘Ain’t got n’more’n four hunnert gallons of gas,’ he said. ‘Mostly diesel.’
‘There’s five generators on the island,’ Burt Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; as the only Jew on the island, he was regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an oracle that works about half the time). ‘They all run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.’
Low murmurs. If Burt said he could do it, he could. He was a Jewish electrician, and there was a feeling on the outer islands, unarticulated but powerful, that that was the best kind.
‘We’re gonna light that graveyard up like a friggin stage,’ Bob said.
Andy Kingsbury stood up. ‘I heard on the news that sometimes you can shoot one of them things in the head and it’ll stay down, and sometimes it won’t.’
‘We’ve got chainsaws,’ Bob said stonily, ‘and what won’t stay dead . . . why, we can make sure it won’t move too far alive.’
And, except for making out the duty roster, that was pretty much that.
Six days and nights passed and the sentries posted around the little graveyard on Jenny were starting to feel a wee bit silly (‘I dunno if I’m standin guard or pullin my pud,’ Orrin Campbell said one afternoon as a dozen men stood around the cemetery gate, playing Liars’ Poker) when it happened . . . and when it happened, it happened fast.
Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier’s boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad go, that had been, him being their only child and them being such nice people and all), fell over. A moment later a shredded hand with a moss-caked Yarmouth Academy class ring on one finger rose out of the ground, shoving through the tough grass. The third finger had been torn off in the process.
The ground heaved like (like the belly of a pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) a big wave rolling into a close cove, and then the boy himself sat up, only he wasn’t anything you could really recognize, not after almost two years in the ground. There were little splinters of wood sticking out of what was left of his face, Davey said, and pieces of shiny blue cloth in the draggles of his hair. ‘That was coffin-linin,’
Davey told her, looking down at his restlessly twining hands. ‘I know that as well’s I know m’own name.’ He paused, then added: ‘Thank Christ Mike’s dad dint have that trick.’
Maddie had nodded.
The men on guard, bullshit-scared as well as revolted, opened fire on the reanimated corpse of the former high-school chess champion and All-Star second baseman, tearing him to shreds.
Other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was just luck that the armed men had been loosely grouped together when the festivities commenced; if they had been divided up into two wings, as Bob Daggett had originally intended, they would very likely have slaughtered each other. As it was, not a single islander was hurt, although Bud Meechum found a rather suspicious-looking hole torn in the sleeve of his shirt the next day.
‘Prob’ly wa’ant nothin but a blackberry thorn, just the same,’ he said. ‘There’s an almighty lot of em out at that end of the island, you know.’ No one would dispute that, but the black smudges around the hole made his frightened wife think that his shirt had been torn by a thorn with a pretty large caliber.
The Fournier kid fell back, most of him lying still, other parts of him still twitching . . . but by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake were going on there — but only there, noplace else.
Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.
Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch.
Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.
Goddam good thing, too, Dave Eamons said, because a few of the deaders almost got away.
Old Frank Daggett, still two hours from the heart attack that would carry him off just as the excitement was dying down, organized the new men so they wouldn’t shoot each other, either, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bull Run. By the end of the
festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. The sour smell of vomit was almost heavier than the smell of gunsmoke . . . it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.
And still some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs — the fresher ones, for the most part.
‘Burt,’ Frank Daggett said. ‘You got them chainsaws?’
‘I got em,’ Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come.
‘In the truck.’
‘Gassed up?’ Blue veins stood out on Frank’s ancient, hairless skull.
‘Yeah.’ Burl’s hand was over his mouth. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Work y’fuckin gut all you want,’ Frank said briskly, ‘but toddle off n get them saws while you do. And you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . ‘
The last ‘you’ was his grandnephew Bob.
‘I can’t, Uncle Frank,’ Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw five or six of his friends and neighbors lying crumpled in the tall grass. They had not died; they had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the crossfire that had cut his late wife to ribbons; he had fainted after observing her decayed, worm-riddled brains exploding from the back of her head in a grisly gray splash. ‘I can’t. I c — ‘
Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.
‘You can and you will, chummy,’ he said.
Bob went with the rest of the men.
Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest, which had begun to send cramped throbs of pain all the way down his left arm to the elbow. He was old but he wasn’t stupid, and he had a pretty good idea what those pains were, and what they meant.
‘He told me he thought he was gonna have a blow-out, and he tapped his chest when he said it,’
Dave went on, and placed his hand on the swell of muscle over his own left nipple to demonstrate.
Maddie nodded to show she understood.
‘He said, “If anything happens to me before this mess is cleaned up, Davey, you and Burt and Orrin take over. Bobby’s a good boy, but I think he may have lost his guts for at least a little while . . . and you know, sometimes when a man loses his guts, they don’t come back.” ‘
Maddie nodded again, thinking how grateful she was — how very, very grateful — that she was not a man.
‘So then we did it,’ Dave said. ‘We cleaned up the mess.’
Maddie nodded a third time, but this time she must have made some sound, because Dave told her he would stop if she couldn’t bear it; he would gladly stop.
‘I can bear it,’ she said quietly. ‘You might be surprised how much I can bear, Davey.’ He looked at her quickly, curiously, when she said that, but Maddie had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.
Dave didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, perhaps, in the blue
darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping. And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.
She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year — a time that now seemed impossibly distant —
and doing something so trite it was laughable. She was Knitting Little Things. Booties, in fact.
But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across the reach to the Wee Folks store at the Ellsworth Mall for quite some time.