Tall pines and sycamores surround the graveyard. Rusty iron fences teeter towards the headstones, themselves crooked and crumbling. The wind soughs through the trees as crickets chirp and cicadas launch a long-winding weave of ear-searing sound. 

CC, a rotund man points out graves with a gold-tipped cane. Twenty-four, a winsome smile, tender eyes, and almost girlish long lashes.

Aristides Jones, (Deezy) scampers from plot to plot, a skinny, barefoot boy, looking for a grave that’s fresh and not too deep. He’s also a fugitive from the School of Christian Perfection in Montgomery, Deezy can act, sing, dance, pray and pick pockets.

“I got one!” he whispers. He pulls up a femur, clotted with mud, but it’s intact. He holds it out in front of him and makes a gruesome face.

“Ye-e-e-ech!”

He wears suspenders and a bow tie, but no shirt or shoes. Sweat glistens off his chest and back in the moonlight. A sprig of waxed blond hair sticks up in the back of his head

CC approaches, bends down. He stays up late reading, drinking laudanum and smoking, so gray is already snaking into his wavy brown locks. A faded, frayed black suit, muddy shoes. His face is florid, and his lips flecked with cigar tobacco. A crumpled chimney pot hat on top cocked back.

.

He’s about the take the bone when a dog streaks in from out of nowhere and clamps onto it. Growling, the mutt tugs one way; Deezy tugs the other.

CC swings his cane at the dog, but the animal’s skinny and fast. He dodges the blows, keeping up his claim. He and Deezy spin round and round. The dog’s having fun. 

“Damn you, Cerberus!” CC cries.  “Thou wipe breech, thou godebillio.” He hurls rocks and mud clods, but the dog is in this fight to win. He rips his head back and forth.

Deezy drops pellets on the ground. 

The dog releases the bone. He trots over and sniffs around the pellets, suspicious, but always on the lookout for a free meal. Once the olfactory all-clear is given he snarfs them up along with clay, twigs and leaves and then leaps onto Deezy with his front paws on his chest, begging for more. 

“Sorry, buddy,” Deezy says, rubbing the dog’s dirty head. “Them’s my last.”

On two legs, the dog cocks his head, looks back at CC, who scowls. Discouraged, the dog goes back down onto all fours and sniffs around the graveyard. He appears to recognize he’s on top of a bone gold mine—which he can’t touch. He circles some more and wanders off.

CC picks up the bone with his handkerchief. He wipes it clean of the dog’s saliva.

“What was that manna from heaven you dropped?” he asks.

“Rabbit turds,” Deezy says. “Always keep a pocket full. They good for what ails you.”

CC throws back his head and howls. “De-e-ezy Jones, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

He gives the sweaty boy a hug.

Deezy grins up at him, “You’d wind up in the gutter, drunk and naked as Adam.”

CC recovers his gravitas. “My boy, that ecclesiastical iteration of yours will lead to your predestined undoing.”

“Opium’ ll get you first.”

A look of regret comes over CC’s florid face. “Alas, my addiction. It’s true. The slings and arrows have worked to unhouse my soul. And they may, eventually, work their wickedness on you, as well. One day even the Bible babbling Aristides Jones may be tempted to relieve the vice-like pressures of this life with one of the many magic elixirs our apothecaries offer.”  

“Not me. I ain’t never drinking that laudanum. It’s ripped through your brain like a tornado.”

“Easy on the aspersions.” 

Deezy falls to his knees, closes his eyes and prays. “Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly…”

“Now what?” CC asks.

The boy opens his eyes and glares at the older man. “CC, we just robbed a grave. I’m asking the Lord and this poor soul to forgive us.”

“Oh…of course, of course…”

“Please, mister,” Deezy prays, “or maybe you’re a nice gentle lady like my teacher Miss Olivia back at Perfection School, I know what we done is an abomination”

The boy stretches the prayer to a half hour. CC lights the cigar stub he keeps in his coat pocket. As he sucks in, the stub brightens, a golden glow in the dark. He’s used to this. The boy covers Psalms 1-10, the Ten Commandments, and the Beatitudes, both the Matthean and Lukan versions. 

Finally, he concludes: “Amen and amen.”
             “That was a fine prayer, son. The Lord will surely honor it.”

Deezy looks up from his knees. His eyes glisten.

It amuses CC the way his protégé compartmentalizes life. He will spend half an hour praying over this stolen bone and turn around and swipe a demi john.   

He chuckles and scratches his head. “Well, I can see you’re planning to hold more lofty discourse with the Deity, so I’ll be off. Try not to stay more than an hour. Cemeteries attract some misguided souls, especially at night.”

CC leaves; Deezy prays on.

He thinks he hears someone moving around. 

“De-e-eezy Jones!” a deep voice from the darkness.

Deezy opens his eyes wide. His heart pounds.

“De-e-eezy Jones!” The voice seems near but far away. “Can you smell de stink of yo’ own flesh? A-sizzlin’ and a-poppin’ on Satan’s spit.”

            The sweaty grave robber gives off a long sigh and falls back onto his palms. “How the dickens did you find us?” he says, grinning toward the nearest big pine trunk.                                 

Bug steps out from behind the tree. “Followed CC’s ashes.”

 He’s shirtless, bare foot, and wears a dried frog leg he calls Mr. Jam around his neck, along with a string of buckeyes.

            “What’d you do to your necklace?” Deezy hops up to examine the buckeyes.

Bug slips it off.

“Holy Meshach,” Deezy says.

            “Polished ‘em with The Countess’s face cream,” Bug says,

.           Deezy sniffs. “M-m-m.” He holds them up. “Look how they shine in the moonlight.”

            The two head back to camp. There are cornfields on both sides, the stalks head high. The sky is clear, a bulbous moon on the horizon.

Deezy holds the bone with his thumb and index finger. “Yuk, I ain’t carryin’ this thing one step more. Heah, you take it.”

Deezy is also scared of thunder and left-handed women.

He hands the bone to Bug, who backs away. 

The bone drops into the sand.

“Naw suh,” Bug says, “touch that–no tellin’ what kind of dreams I be havin’ tonight.”

“Hey!” Deezy says, louder. “Pick it up!”

“You the one drop it.”

“You’re the slave. Pick it up!”

“Oh, so now you playin’ Mr. Massa with your old friend Bug. How many times these last two years I saved your skinny butt when you was in a pickle, huh?”

At a defiant impasse, lips thrust out, the two plop down in the sand.

About an hour later, CC in a night cap shuffles down the road, barefoot, holding a lantern high and wearing a long wool overcoat.

“Boys!  It’s bedtime! Deezy, pick that bone up and ya’ll come on back to camp.”

Deezy shakes his head. “I ain’t totin’ no dead man’s bone.”

CC stares at him.

“Bug?” CC says.

Bug shakes his head. “Boss, I don’t mean no disrespect, but that bone is bound up with a spirit and that spirit, he gon’ tag along behind that bone like a puppy dog. Where that bone goes, the spirit goes.”

CC looks back and forth at the boys pouting in the middle of the road. Behind him, the faint glow of the campfire rises above the tree line.

“Boys, you do realize that this bone, this lowly Tennessee farmer’s thigh, which neither of you sluggards sees fit to carry a few yards back to camp, is going to make us all rich?”

“Rich?” Deezy says, looking up.

Sighing, CC picks up the bone and makes a magician’s grand gesture. “Presto prestissimo! Voila, you are now looking at the thigh bone of the venerable General Albert Sidney Johnston, late of the CSA.”

“The one shot at Shiloh?” Deezy says.

“The very wight. And his much-grieved kin were so generous as to permit our humble troupe to exhibit it both for the public’s edification and, of course, for our own emolument.”

Deezy rolled his eyes. “CC, I just dug it outta that cemetery.”

“You know that, and Bug and I know that. The rest of the bookless and brainless farmers in this culture-parched country do not.”

“What’s he talkin’ ‘bout?” Bug says, as they tramp back to camp. He’s carrying the bone.

Deezy kicks a pebble with his toes. “Lyin’ and cheatin’, what CC Cash does best.”