The rail clacked beneath my feet sharply, reverberating through my soles. A field of dry interstitial grass spread away from the tracks on both sides. The sky was bruised, the clouds tinted with glowering red, and the grass seemed lavender as it waved in a breeze I could not feel. The clacking in the rails grew quickly fainter but continued long after the train had disappeared into the darkness that was not quite night.

            I stepped from the rail to the gravel embankment. The brittle crunch beneath my feet gave only slightly but the grass was around my waist now and, turning, I could see no rise or cut through the field that the train might have followed. I could see no true horizon, either; the lavender grass stretched out forever and no matter how far afield I cast my eyes, the blades wove and slipped among the stalks as though through a telescope. In between the overlaps and crossings, a further set of the same, clear and defined. It felt like falling and I shook my head and threw out my arms to steady myself.

            In the distance now: a stand of quaking aspen, the leaves spinning in the same unfelt breeze that tugged the grass. The white undersides flashed brightly as though with their own light, whiter even than the bark. A figure seemed to pass in silhouette beneath the trees. From long habit, I raised my hand to see better and instead caught a clear view of my palm.

            “See here,” mouthed the man among the trees, only a few feet from me, lifting a leaf to show the underside. As white as the hot sky back home, it showed a mark, an ink drop, that recalled something else back home, something useless and important. The man wore a black suit and white shirt, both sharply pressed but old and puritan, his face just out of mind’s reach. Only the silver cufflinks were recognizable. “Now listen.”

            I nearly laughed at the words and readied a retort just as I recognized its sudden untruth: a vibrating spike drove into my skull. Barely a second of it, and the echo still tingling, before he lifted another leaf and said again, “Listen.” Another singular piercing, terrifying in its magnitude, lanced through me. This was different than the first, the rhythm of it slightly slower.

            Again and again, the man Firsts and I had dug up turned leaves and forced me to hear. Faster and faster he moved, picking up his pace as my flinching and wincing settled into a steady stream of powerless tears. Frozen in place, both horrified by the sensation and increasingly cognizant, I noticed a rhythm and a pattern. I remembered the piano at home and the bone-tickling feel of it if I laid my head against the wood. As though seeing my comprehension, the man lifted two leaves, one marked like a petroglyph of sunset. And this sound would not stop. The man, arms spread and a leaf in each hand, raised his chin and the sound grew louder and louder. My eyes began to quake, and my tongue grew fat in my mouth. I woke up gagging deeply as Firsts opened my door to see what was wrong.

-=][=-

            He put his mug down on the kitchen counter and said, “We already got what matters and can’t put it back anyway.” He then gestured to the cans of corn and beans, the jars of pickled asparagus, the still-dirty carrots, all waiting to go down to the cellar. “This isn’t enough to fill in those ribs you’re showing. Not mine, either.” He moved to grab his mug again, but said instead, “We should dig up another. Bob liked the silver stuff, so let’s get more of that. Get ourselves some meat, if he has any.”

            “No.” My own mug sat on the old formica our grandmother had had put in, only a sip or two of water missing. “You’re not paying attention to what I’m saying.” I had only given Firsts an overview of the nightmares, discounting the sounds as what I imagined it would be like, focusing instead on the terror and helplessness. I stared at him, trying to balance a look both determined and pitiful, hoping one would play a nerve. “I see him every night.”

            Instead he picked up his mug and turned around to look out the kitchen window at the yard, ending the conversation as effectively as a door.

            Outside, the late summer heat had killed what little grass had survived the last four years, the stalks just a mangy blond stubble stretching out past the fence to where the dust-hazed distance met a white sky. Even the areas beneath the white oak and the stand of Johnny smokers, usually shaded enough to keep a yellow-green carpet nearby, had given way to bits of broken straw and split dirt. On the north side of the yard, just visible within the angle of the window, the old potting shed hunched in the heat as though trying to fold into its own interior shadow. All around the shed, even the blackberries had died and now clutched motionless at the slumping walls in a desiccated knot. And strewn across the yard, the old stones had taken the surrounding colors and disappeared into the scene, their shadows like semi-regular folds in the ground. The bigger ones could be picked out by looking for the heat ripple above them.

            We had another week, roughly, before Bob would be back around with the wagon. In that time, we could dig up at least two, maybe three, graves. Maybe we’d get faster, more efficient; our inexperience didn’t help against the century of packed dirt. Even digging at night and stripped to the waist, we had soaked through our waistbands and staggered home to sleep almost to sundown. Already half-nocturnal, our clocks weren’t thrown too far off, but when you don’t have enough to eat yet, what doesn’t kill you only makes you weaker.

            I went to stand next to Firsts, to tell him we could get one’s worth of silver and then dig up the man again, but he put his mug down and turned to me just enough to say, “We’ll knock out as many as we can before Bob gets here. And then, if your dreams keep up, and if we can get enough to get through the next few months, we’ll get your man out again.” He looked at me like a parent, pretending to ask my agreement but really just making sure I understood the situation.

            I put my mug in the sink and said, “Bob’s not reliable. Plus, just because ‘my man’ gave up some cufflinks and shit doesn’t mean anyone else will.” Firsts cocked his head a bit as though to reiterate his one-sided agreement. “Firsts, it’s a fucking pioneer cemetery. Pio-neer.” I formed the word slowly, spelling it out like I did when we were kids and we were still learning. “What did they have? A couple Bibles? Some oxen and chickens and what, enough grain and seed to maybe last a year and hope next year showed sprouts? All the silver and gold stayed above ground where it might have some value. No-one let them take it down with them.”

            “They let your man do it.”

            “He’s not mine.” I said. In fact, in sleep, it seemed exactly the opposite.

            “They let him take it,” he shrugged. “Cufflinks, cross and watch, all into the ground with him. Why not that lady?” He gestured rhetorically out to the yard. “Or that guy? Or, oh! What about that family in the east corner? All dead in a year. Who’s going to refuse them the last dignity of their precious things?”

            “Whoever laid them down.”

            “That’s the Spanish flu, Robin. Or great-grandad Lowell. Neither were the type.” I could see him chuckling to himself a little, the slight shudder to the chest and the tight half-smile. It didn’t last long before he turned to me fully and said, “We need food. That’s indisputable. And, yes, Bob is unreliable. The same cufflinks that got us this little bounty might bring in only half next time. But if we have nothing to trade, we’ll get nothing back. And we need to get enough food to start worrying about winter fuel.” When I didn’t reply, he finished, “We’ve got nothing else to trade.” That was the final nail and I knew it.