Free The Gardener's Son by Cormac McCarthy Page A

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    M ARTHA Harvey.
    Y OUNG M AN Yes. That was it.
    M ARTHA He has a son that’s a district court judge. He had five children and they wasnt a one of em ever worked the first day in that mill. He’s got a slew of grandchildren. I dont have no kin. I had a nephew . . . My sister had a boy but he got gone from here years ago I couldnt tell ye where to. She and her husband is both dead.
    Y OUNG M AN I see.
    M ARTHA She was lots different from me. She didnt hardly remember Mama at all and she was ... I dont know. She must of been ten or eleven when Mama died. She died in the dead of winter and I remember they had her laid out—back then ye had your services at the house, they wasnt no funeral homes—had her laid out and they brought Maryellen in there and she looked at Mama and she said: What’s Mama doin in bed with her clothes on? I mean she was big enough to understand . . . Years later she told me, said she didnt hardly even remember Mama. I was five year older. I know. But I remember her from when I was just teenineey.
    Y OUNG M AN Did your sister remember Bobby?
    She looks up at him. She looks at him very quietly for several minutes and then she looks down. She picks at the hem of her gown.
    Y OUNG M AN I didnt mean to . . .
    She looks up again.
    Y OUNG M AN Mr Bolinger told me . . . I never knew very much about it. Miss McEvoy. My mother has the old Bible and it’s about the last thing in it. My grandmother moved to Charleston right after the . . . She even took the monument. When Mr Bolinger told me that you were . . . that you were here I just... It was just a family story. It was like something in a book. It didnt seem like real people.
    M ARTHA I know you now.
    Y OUNG M AN I didnt come here to make you feel bad.
    M ARTHA I dont feel bad.
    Y OUNG M AN I just wanted to talk to you. You’re the only one who knows what happened.
    M ARTHA I dont even know where he’s buried at. Daddy never told us. He never put up no marker. Just a nameless grave somewheres. He was afraid they’d come and dig him up. Them doctors. They’d come and dig up anybody like that and get they head. They’d take it and study it. Daddy said that God would know where to hunt him. Mrs Gregg moved all her dead from Graniteville Cemetery. She took em over to Charleston.
    Y OUNG M AN She was a bit eccentric. Toward her old age.
    M ARTHA She was a bit what?
    Y OUNG M AN Eccentric. She was a bit peculiar.
    M ARTHA No she wasnt.
    Y OUNG M AN Well, she . . .
    M ARTHA Peculiar. She wasnt peculiar. She used to make gingerbread horses and she’d have all the young’ns up there and she’d give us lemonade of a summer. She took a lot of pains about that cemetery. She had my daddy up there all the time to see about first one thing and then anothern. They used to be a stone up there it just said “the little boy” and she would have flowers on it all the time. Just some little boy that they had took off the train down there and he’d died they wasnt nobody knowed who he was nor nothin. I wonder if God has names for people. He never give em none. People done that. I wonder if people are not all the same to him. Just souls up there and no names. Or if he cares what all they done. I dont know why Bobby done what he done. Once people are dead they’re not good nor bad. They’re just dead.
    Y OUNG M AN Mr Bolinger spoke highly of your father.
    M ARTHA He always said we’d save up and go back to Greenville. I say Greenville but it was really Pickens. Pickens South Carolina. But we never done it. I reckon he’d made a start but them lawyers got it all. We’d had a farm up there—what we called it—it wadnt nothin. I’d never seen a whole dollar fore we come to Graniteville. After Bobby . . . Daddy just never did come out of it. Never after did he ever hold his head up on this earth. I remember bein glad that Mama was dead. I never thought I’d ever be glad anybody was dead, least of all my Mama, but I remember bein glad that she was dead and that