The Dead Won't Notice They're Gone by Myles Robb

The boy approached, materializing out of deeper glens of darkness in the bottomlands. John Benton’s coughs were like old machinery, hacking away rust coating his flesh. “Morning, Willard.”

His steps were quiet and he moved like a cat up to the porch. Thunder boomed in the far distance, advancing across the sinking humidity like a funeral procession. Thickening air began to grow cold, reacting to the changing atmosphere rustling in the west.

Willard Haynes handed the papers to his grandfather. John Benton squinted to read and struggled to focus. His eyes were steeped in violence and beneath them a current moved.

“Where did you find this?”

“It was on the lot. I went out there yesterday.” Willard replied.

John Benton shook his head. “I don’t believe this. I ain’t never heard of something so ridiculous in all my life. My wife is buried there. My son, your daddy. It’s disgraceful is what it is.” He tried to stand, legs trembling, and the boy helped him relax back in the chair. “You tell the sheriff to come out and speak with me. I’ll knock some sense into him.”

Willard paced, agitated. “I already did. He said he couldn’t do nothing. He said to find who signed on it and talk with them.”

“Well I can tell you who signed onto it.” He spat into the grass. “It was that mother of yours. She’s trying to steal what’s left, thinks she’s entitled to everything.”

“I’ll go talk to the foreman.”

“Speak with the witch while you’re at it.” He breathed heavily. “Where are they going to put the bodies? Dig them up and make them dance?”

***

Willard returned home some time later and parked the truck. All he saw were ghosts simmering in the windowsills, shadows of a preordained future. The dogs ran from the treeline and followed him up to the porch before trailing off into the woods and descending into transcendent fog. His sister was still gone, lumbering out into an unforgiving world where Willard could no longer picture her face.

Restless, Willard followed the dogs, hustling through the forest and into a clearing that sat ahead in front of them. There was a single trailer and the beginnings of two framed houses. The forest looked as if it had been flattened by a searing sun, and all that was left was the remnants of some forsaken calamity. The dogs darted across scattered wood and Willard followed behind going off towards the cemetery.

Willard spent the humid evening sitting next to his grandmother’s grave, and speaking with the ones who bore his name, though in all forms of recollection, he could not place their name in any lineage of his. He pictured their stories of the past, tales of lives burning slowly into embers.

***

The next day, Willard wandered up the flatlands that exposed the workings of Hewitt construction. The single trailer solitary amongst a fledgling world, stolen from soil belonging to the dead. Beyond the clouds, a sun was descending towards the west, dragging with it the final heat of the day. Workers were trailing off to their vehicles, cars sputtering to start. A few stray dogs ran past the site and wrestled in the dirt. He pounded on the door.

A short, well-kept man opened it and was unsurprised to see the boy. “Yes?”

The dogs commenced barking and nipping at one another, enraging the man at the door. “Someone shut those fucking dogs up.” He screamed at one of the employees from the front step. The man settled when he saw that they had been shepherded off somewhere beyond his line of sight.

Willard unrolled the paper and the man read it briefly and smiled. “You’re the Haynes boy, I’m Ray Hewitt.” He shuffled away inside the trailer, “Come in.” They sat at a small folding table that was filled with work orders and measuring instruments, formed neatly in piles like a bank of knowledge that would only exist when the boy saw it.

“I was told to come see you.” Willard said.

“For what?” The foreman grabbed a toothpick and placed it in his mouth. “It could be for any number of things I’m sure.”

“Why are you taking the cemetery?”

“I’m not taking it. I bought it.” He rifled through the papers and pulled a yellow work order and slid it across the plastic top.

“Signed right here, by the parties and Limestone County. Purchased for 5000 dollars cash.”

Willard read it through. “That order says it is due to be paid out to my mother.”

“That’s correct.”

“What goes to the rest of the family?”

“I reckon whatever she decides to give you, if anything. I wouldn’t count on it.”

Willard whirled the paper down his sides and stood up abruptly. “Why didn’t you ask John Benton?”

The man contemplated for a moment and shrugged. His eyes studied him as if he had found satisfaction at long last. Like a generational curse had been lifted.

“Who would buy a house on a cemetery?”

“Who said I was putting one there?” The foreman flung his toothpick in the boy’s face. “Go call your mother, she’s expecting it.”

Willard went out the door and left it hanging open. The workers watched him go whilst corralling the stray dogs and sending them off into the forest, away from where they had originated. Ray slammed the door shut.

***

Willard sat in the dining room with the phone ringing in his hand. The dogs scratched on the door and then dissipated somewhere off into the brush. No one picked up the phone. Outside, humidity clung to the ground and festered in the grass growing odd forms of liquid and mysterious nectar. Willard passed the time chopping wood, setting them in the fireplace and watching them seethe in the flames, desperately holding itself together. The phone began to ring next to him.

“Hello.” He answered.

“Willard.”

“What’s this about the cemetery being sold?” “It’s what it sounds like. I sold it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I do understand. They’re just going to tear it down. It’s our family’s, been so long before grandfather too. What will they do with the bodies?”

“Take them and move them somewhere else.” Willard sat for a moment. “It’s disgraceful.”

“Willard.”

“No. Dad is buried there. What would he say about that?”

She was silent for a moment. “Willard, things change. Needs change.”

“What about my needs?” There was a pause before Willard sighed. “Are you still in Nashville?”

“Yes.”

He breathed. “You know it won’t stop there. Ray’s already bought some of the acreage. What will be left? What am I supposed to do when it’s gone? Or are you just too greedy to stop?” Willard waited a moment and heard the line cut off.

***

John Benton heard a man trudging up the driveway through the falling rain. The ground shifted and moved underneath the weight of the man’s force. It was a short man that he recognized from somewhere in his past, though the picture was faint. The man stopped at the porch. “John.”

“Ray.”

The man smirked and opened his pocket, pulling out an envelope. “Look what I got here.

Money going straight to your daughter-in-law and I doubt you’ll see a penny of it.” John waved his hand. “I don’t believe this.”

“Oh, really? The way I see it is that this is a legal transaction. Signed by the county and the woman herself.” Ray crept up the porch and stood over John. “You know why I am here.”

John nodded and could smell the manicured breath on his tongue.

“You know what I’m going to do? I ought to take a piss on his grave and toss his bones into a wood chipper. You reckon that will teach him his lesson?”

John kicked the man back with all his force against the railing.

Ray regained his stance and laughed. As he went back down the steps he looked back and said, “You're too old to still be picking fights with people. One of these days you won’t be able to escape what’s coming. When you’re dead maybe I’ll own you too.” He jingled his keys and went off down into the yard. He stopped. “It would have been polite to invite me up for a glass of that sweet tea.”

“Get the hell off my property.” “While it's yours.”

***

Leaving after the sun fell that night, he drove the truck out into brooding shadows and bare trees, all clinging to the wisps of the moonlight. The land was silent and the trees whistled with mythic tales of buried untold stories. He could see the trailer across the road.

A dim solitary light glimmered there. The man pulled out a canister from the trunk and carried it up to the trailer. He poured it along the outside, circling it and listening to the gasoline simmer in the ground. From a distance he watched it begin to erupt in heat, flames crawling up into the night and dancing. Metal began to slide and char, glistening in the fiery rays.

***

The Deputy arrived at the Haynes home in the mid-morning. The dogs had come up and were barking at the man walking up the driveway. Already the sun was pounding heat onto anything that dared to linger in its glare. Willard came out of the house and stood on the porch.

“Willard Haynes?” The Deputy asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Could I talk with you a moment?”

“Sure. Come on up.”

The Deputy came and stood on the steps, watching the dogs go and disappear in the woods. “You know Ray Hewitt by chance?”

“I do. He’s trying to buy our cemetery.”

“Did you know his trailer burned down last night?”

“I didn’t.”

It was silent before the Deputy spoke again. “Look, it doesn’t look good for you. Ray is throwing a fit and wants you in jail.”

“There ain’t no proof.”

“Is there anyone here that can vouch for you?”

“No, they’re all gone.”

“I want to believe you, kid. It’s a shame you got caught up with this man but we don’t know what you’re capable of. Your grandfather has made things difficult for you. Just come with me and we can settle this at the station. Give your mother a call and bail you out.”

“No, sir.” “Willard.”

“It’s Mr. Haynes to you on my property.”

“Sir, I don’t know what bad blood has been stirred up here, but Ray is nasty. Don’t be stubborn like your old man. It’s just a cemetery. The bodies can be moved. The dead won’t notice they’re gone.”

“I ain’t going with you.”

The Deputy nodded and shook Willard’s hand. “Good luck, son. Stay out of it the best you can.” He went back down to the car and fought off the barking dogs before pulling out and returning into the tree line and out of sight.

***

It was past midnight when Willard woke to an unusual silence in the house. It was dark in the halls and Willard lit a match to lead him out to the porch. He stood there watching the grass turn over in the soft wind. The air was a frosty cold, a shift from the scorching heat of the daylight. A moon shone above painting the ground with a faint glow. He could see in the grass two imprints and he wandered down to them. With each step he could feel a dark liquid pestering his feet. The dogs were lying in the grass cold and asleep, and when he felt them, there was no sound save for the silence protruding from them. When he removed his hands, they were covered in blood that dripped down his sleeve.

He felt the fur of their carcasses and looked out to the trees. Underneath the dog, Willard felt a wrinkled paper and pulled it out. There was a stack of twenty dollar bills with a note attached that read, “Your share.” He pictured Ray Hewitt watching him there from the thicket, waiting to see what his reaction would be. Willard rose and left the bodies in the grass, pocketing the bloodied money, and returning to sleep with a shotgun laying next to him in the bed.

***

Willard got a call from the deputy sometime in the afternoon, then drove out down the road to where the trees opened up in the bottomlands. His grandfather was sitting in the grass. He was holding his knees and for the briefest moment, Willard could picture the old man fifty years ago and how he might have looked. How Willard might look in fifty years. Willard helped him up and guided him to the truck and hoisted him up into the leather seat. “How did you get out

here?”

John Benton wiped something from his forehead. “I don’t know. I reckon I walked.”

“Where were you going?”

“I thought about paying Ray a visit. But I got tired.” The old man set a shotgun down in the seat and let it slide down the leather, falling without grace onto the floor mat. Willard drove him back to his house and let him stay in the shade while he told him about the dogs. John Benton could see them lying in the grass from where he sat on the porch, analyzing what it had been like for them to die, determining if they knew it was ending.

“The Deputy wanted to arrest me.” Willard said.

John Benton sat up in his seat and spat onto the wood. “I assume you didn’t take up his offer, then?”

“No, sir.” “Good boy.”

“Ray killed the dogs.”

“You know it was him?”

“Yes, sir. Left a stack of cash in the blood.”

He thought for some time. “If I were still able to kick around here, I’d probably just kill him if I had the chance. But I don’t think I can do that no more. He’s been stubborn about this whole thing, like he doesn’t care about anything. No decency. Back in my day, we settled our differences like men. Didn’t steal things one piece at a time, no no. We would burn the damn house to the ground. Not holding to the past and letting it eat us up for decades. Guess a man like him is a romantic. Dedicated to the craft.”

“I don’t even reckon he’s going to build a house there. Just demolish it and lose the bodies somewhere in the woods.” Willard stomped the grass into the soil.

“Look, boy. Don’t bother the law with this. Sometimes man is meant to settle their own differences the way God intended.” He spat. “This whole place is going up in flames. No good daughter in-law selling off the acreage. Men fixin’ to dig up graves and kill family dogs. The way I see it, there won’t be nothing left of the family soon. Once I’m gone it’s just you and only God knows where your sister is.”

John reached out to grab his grandson and pulled his wrist in close. “Take care of it, now that I can’t.”

***

Every time the road bumped, Willard looked out the back to see if the dog carcasses were still in the trunk. He brought them into town where an old family store hung on the edges of a corner. It held to its rotting frames while neighbors sprouted with new and wiser blood. Willard hauled them inside. The bodies were wrapped in a linen sheet and the man behind the counter gave him a curious eye when they were set on the floor. “What’s all there?”

“My dogs.”

“They dead?”

“Sure are.”

The attendant disappeared behind the curtain and a moment later returned with an older man. The old man put on some glasses and unrolled the cloth to look at the animals, inspecting the marks on their throats. “How do you want them done?”

“Just so they look alive.” Willard unwrapped some of the blood money and gave it to the elder.

“No problem, kid. Come pick them up in a day or two.”

***

It was a steaming night when Willard drove back out to the construction site. Mosquitos clung to the air as if it would never return, and in the distance was a faint beating of rain trickling from the sky. The night was suffocated blackness and there was no light on the road save for the interior dashboard of the truck. When he parked, he took the dogs out from the back and set them there on the ground. To him, they looked like cartoon animals, stuffed with cotton like they could be bought at the fair. He scooped them in his arms and took them up to where Ray had inserted a new trailer. There were two cars parked in the dirt and though his curiosity wondered who might be there, he did not investigate further. He set the dogs down, mouths gaped, facing the door as if they had been raised from the dead to tear Ray Hewitt down to hell.

From across the road, he parked the truck back in the woods and he watched from the cemetery. Sitting there waiting to see what would happen, waiting to see how the foreman would react. After some time, the boy fell asleep and dreamed strange sorts of myths. The graves emptied and their bones rose up to face a virgin alien sky.

He woke to a scream sometime after the earth became even darker shrouded by the shadows in the trees. Across the street, he saw Ray and a girl at his shoulder. They were stopped dead on the stairs staring down at these creatures that seemed to have crawled from the grave to haunt them. The animals were still, an unusual silence passing between them as if their loyalties would never waver. Ray retreated back inside and returned with a shotgun and loaded up into the truck and drove off into the night. Willard slowly got back into his truck before dusting off and following the road back home.

His hands gripped the wheel and he took a moment to check the glove box for anything of use. His eyes monitored the mirrors, anticipating some form of retaliation even there on the road. When he arrived back, Ray’s truck was sitting in his lawn, caving through the mud. He could hear John Benton in a vicious argument with the foreman and both were waving guns in each other’s faces. Willard approached them and Ray turned to face him, pointing the shotgun now at Willard.

The three were in silence watching each other and the call of the night became

bloodthirsty. John’s legs began to twitch and the boy watched him try to stand tall. Ray turned at the noise and watched as the old man fell to the floorboards, collapsing with a great thud. Willard ran out into the deepened woods, and heard Ray shoot the gun towards his direction. He slid down into overgrowth and sat still, holding his breath and watching the foreman stand there and yell out into the dark.

John Benton was still gripping the gun and shakily lifted it back up. He pointed it at

Ray’s legs and fired, watching as the short man wobbled and screamed. Ray angrily loaded the shotgun and fired on the old man, killing him instantly. He fired two more times and began to wipe the blood away from his gaping leg. Willard continued to watch, eyes peering through the bushes viewing some sort of a sordid painting. The man rose again and took up both weapons, descending into the brush to look for the boy. Willard began to move and went further into the thicket, wary of every sound he made.

The man fired the gun again and screamed, “Come out here, boy.”

Willard stopped against a tree trunk and held his body to the bark and listened. The man grew closer each step, crunching on every leaf. He monitored the footsteps and waited for the man to move past. Ray groaned, “I swear to god I will kill you and finally be rid of you all.” He patrolled on by and looked all around. In the distance, Willard could hear a faint siren that was approaching fast, piercing the stillness of the night.

For a brief moment, Willard and Ray looked directly at one another. Ray sprinted towards him but slipped into the mud. The man laid on the ground and breathed, laughing through a cough that had overtaken him “What a fucking mess.”

Willard crouched and approached him, listening to the labored breaths of the man. He finally stood over him and the man’s eyes fell blank, like all color had vanished suddenly.

“Look, kid. Don’t do nothing now. We can work this out. The damn cemetery is yours, I don’t want it. I’ll even sell it back to you. It was all just a misunderstanding. Please, just don’t kill me, please.” His corroded hands begged shakily, gripping the boy’s leg to hold on.

Willard looked at the weapons, took them into his hands, and cocked them against Ray’s forehead. Pressing them into his flesh, he waited for a moment and let them drop before tossing them both off deep into the thicket. He pulled Ray up and drug him back out to the acreage, while he cried and begged for forgiveness. Two deputies waited on the porch where they inspected the old man. Willard brought the sniveling Ray up to their feet and dropped the body down hard. Crouching, he took a finger and wiped the blood from his grandfather and smeared it underneath his eyes.

***

After a week in the Limestone County jail, a deputy took him out to watch John Benton’s burial. The wooden casket was lowered into the earth, in a lonesome plot away from the family cemetery. Willard’s eyes drifted to his feet. When they began to pile the dirt back into the ground, Willard left of his own volition, the deputy trailing close behind.

Willard left the jail some odd weeks later, acquitted by a judge who had been a friend of old John Benton. Returning home, a deafening silence protruded over the walls. Shadows danced and ghosts whispered, a haunting presence of those who would continue to linger on. He lit a match, the flame casting brief flickers of light against the encroaching darkness. He began to burn the house down from the foundation, watching the wood writhe and twist.

Soon later, he drove out towards the construction site, a barren landscape laying before him. There were dreams lingering in his head, a small flicker of a flame still burning deep within, directing his sense of sight. Leaving the trailer with an envelope in his palm, Willard drove into that dwindling light. A land of desolate destruction left behind, the road ahead winding and corroded, living eternally in mystery.

Myles Robb is an undergraduate student and a fiction writer. He has previously been published in Frontier Tales Magazine Issue 175.