Manhunt. Volume 13, Number 5, September 1965

Bury Me Proper by George H. Bennett

It was an obsession. This man had died in the woods, in a cabin, all alone. When they found him, the rats and weasels had...

It was late afternoon when Miss Dolly Freeman saw him come running up from the cold low-ground waving his arms, Aubrey Gilliam from across the frozen creek. Miss Dolly drew water from the well and gave him a dipperful in the yard when he got there. Aubrey drank in large gulps, belching.

“Is something awfully wrong, Aubrey?” She remembered the hounds singing all night and half the day. “Did Little Billy Boy get worse?” Aubrey rolled his blue eyes round and exhaled steam. So Billy Boy was finally dead. It seemed a curse upon the Gilliams. “Aubrey, I feel sorry for you... first Liza, now Billy. Come inside, have something strong to drink before you catch your death of cold.” They were both thirty years old; they had known each other all their lives, Aubrey and Miss Dolly.

“Dolly, this thing has me undone... I don’t know what to do!”

“Hurry on inside before you catch cold,” she said. She took his arm and led him to the living room where a fire lay on the hearth. “Have you notified Mr. Ben Cohen yet?” she said. “He’s the coroner... with Billy Boy dead, I’m sure he’ll want to know.”

“I’ve told nobody but you, Dolly. I went in with his dinner things a while ago and found him dead... same as Liza when she died. I knew he was dead soon as I went into the room.”

Miss Dolly fixed coffee and served it with brandy from last year’s apples. Aubrey drank his noisily, and she was pleased to see some of the color come back to his cheeks. He was still a fine specimen of a man, Miss Dolly mused, although twelve years of marriage to Liza had hollowed his cheeks and took some of the curl from his brown hair, and somewhat softened that devilish gleam in his blue eyes. But he was, yes, still a man that’d make a woman stand up and holler just from the low-down way he could wink his eye and grin.

She saw him staring far off into the fire, as if he was thinking about something deeper and more sorrowful than the death of his young son, and she said, by way of bringing him back to her, “Mr. Cohen is sure to want to know.”

He waved his hands helplessly. “Dolly, I’m all broke up. I couldn’t sit down to write a letter now. You know how to go about this, you wrote when Liza died.”

Liza, that was the wife’s name. She died in hot summer. Miss Dolly remembered the humus small in church, how flies worried Liza’s musky florals. Nobody seemed to care, Aubrey least of all. They rushed to get her underground before she stank. But there would be no hurry with Billy; cold weather would keep him until ground could be broken. Miss Dolly sat down to the letter.

“How old was Billy Boy?”

“Just a baby boy, Dolly, just nine years old. I was counting on him to bury me after Liza died. That’s one reason I didn’t mine so much losing her. I never thought I’d be the one to bury Billy.”

To her remembrance, she had not seen him cry before... certainly not at Liza’s funeral. Thinking back, she wondered if hounds had warned of that death. She did not remember, and it seemed important to remember. She asked Aubrey.

“I think they did, Dolly. But I’m not sure, either. I seem to remember hearing them howl like they usually do when somebody’s dying.”

“But you don’t recollect for sure?”

He shook his head, and she liked the way the brown curls tumbled down his forehead. “Death’s the only thing I’m sure about any more. First Liza, then the boy, going one right after the other like that.”

“We’ve all got to go some time, Aubrey.”

Dolly finished the letter and poured more coffee. She dragged her chair to the fire with his.

“I admire a woman like you, Dolly. Living here by yourself, no man around to do for you. Don’t you ever get lonely sometimes? Don’t you ever get to wondering who’s going to bury you decent?”

Miss Dolly grunted. “Decent, indecent... I don’t think it makes much difference, once you’re dead.”

Aubrey bent and spat into the fire. “Oh you’re a hard one all right. Everybody around says the same thing, the way you can sit down and dash off a letter to Mr. Ben Cohen without batting an eye. Oh that Dolly’s hard as nails, that’s what everybody says.”

She would not meet his eyes. “Aubrey, you’ve got the letter for Mr. Cohen... isn’t that what you came for? And I’m sorry Billy’s dead. But it’s getting late now, and I’ve got a mess of things to do...”

He gave her his cup. “I’m not through yet, Dolly. I’d like some more coffee, I’ve come here to arrange something with you.”

His devilish eye made her nervous; she slopped coffee into the cup and gave it back.

“It only took you thirty years to grow from a sassy little girl to a sour old woman, Dolly. Marriage would’ve kept you sweet and young. No, don’t frown like that. Listen to what I have in mind.” He grabbed her hand in his large paw and squeezed it.

“Don’t, Aubrey. I’ll have nothing to do with your crazy plans.”

She broke from his hand and went to the window. The evening sun was dropping behind the distant mountain. Aubrey came and stood beside her. “Is it crazy because I want somebody to bury me, somebody strong? Didn’t I tell you about the fellow that died out in the mountains, up in some hunting cabin in the middle of the woods? He died all alone out there by himself. When they finally found him, his body had started to rot... what was left of it. Weasels and rats, all other kinds of animals, had started eating...” He twisted and squinted in her face, but she looked at the cold ground, drew her eyes away.

“You told me the same story,” she said, “when we were children together in school. You told me when Liza died. You’ve told it to me a thousand times.”

He sighed, and she saw his big chest swell like a barrel before his breath came blowing against her neck with a gentle caress, bringing the vintage of mellow apple orchards to her wide nostrils. A real man, she thought... a real fine figure of a man.

She said, “Aubrey, you just want to make sure that I’ll bury you in case everybody else is dead.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, but drew it away when she stiffened. “You’re smart, Dolly, always have been. Well, Billy Boy’s dead... I’d put all my hopes in him. I didn’t want to have to come to you this way. But you’re the only one left I can depend on.”

She turned, went back to the fire. He followed her, and they sat down together on the settee.

“I thought all your talk was done in fun!” she cried. “I remember in high school... Lord, that’s been a long time ago...! Dolly, you said, I want you to promise to bury me when I die. I thought you were proposing marriage, but when I mentioned marriage, you just laughed and married Liza. Well, you see what it got you?”

There was a round swimming in her head; it seemed the culmination of an old dream.

Aubrey squinted at her. “Did my marrying Liza hurt you a whole lot, Dolly?”

Her hands trembled like an aspen; she hid them inside her apron. Could she tell him about the “sickness” she went away for? Of creeping down hospital corridors in the middle of the night, searching for an end to the misery of living without him, without his wanting her? Of how her heart had burst like a popcorn seed over fire when she finally came home and found that Aubrey and Liza were already married and that Liza was going to have his child? She wanted to tell him all about the meaning of being hurt, but the wound was still an open sore, and she would not trust herself to speak.

Aubrey fell to his knees in front of her in the old-style country fashion. Filled with a vague horror of what she knew he was going to say, Miss Dolly squeaked, and tried to scoot away from him across the settee. But Aubrey held her this time with a damp hand, and she could feel the excitement of his pulse beating rhythm with her own.

“Dolly girl, I want you to marry me.”

Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears. Her voice broke into a high laugh. “Aubrey, that’s a cruel thing to say! Asking me to marry you after all these years...”

“You were my first love,” Aubrey said contritely.

“Then why’d you marry Liza instead of me?” It was a question she had wanted to ask him for a dozen years.

He laughed wryly. “You really want to know?” She nodded, and he went on. “Because Liza was a right strong woman in her young days. You remember how strong Liza was? Why, she could almost split a log in two with one chop of the axe, almost like any man.” He glanced sideways at her. “You always struck me as being kind of peaked, Dolly. I wanted me a strong woman, somebody’d who’d live a long time...”

“To bury you when you died,” Dolly finished for him. “And yet, I’ve outlived not only Liza, but your son as well.”

He nodded. “I have to give it to you, Dolly. You were a whole lot stronger than I figured. I’m always willing to admit when I’ve made a mistake. I sure should have married you instead of Liza.”

He was still kneeling in front of her, and when he nodded, the brown curls again fell to his forehead. But this time, she did not find him beautiful and appealing, and the thing that she did feel surprised her.

She wondered if the man she had loved and cried for and gnashed her teeth over for all these years was really a man after all.

It struck her that she had been in love with a devilish ghost, a dream with brown curls and a wicked grin. But not with a man.

The thought was so funny that she felt almost like laughing, and she would have, if she had not remembered the tragedy of loving a selfish boy, and the terrible thing it had done to her.

“Aubrey,” she said, “don’t you know how to love? Did you really love Liza when you married her?”

He shrugged. “I guess I did.”

And she knew with a certainty that he did not. A man knew how to love. A boy like Aubrey could only guess. Suddenly, she almost despised him.

He snickered, in boyish embarrassment. “But, you know, as long as we’re being honest like we are, I’ll tell you something, Dolly. You know, there were times when I’d look at Liza and I’d find myself wishing she was dead.” He dropped her hand, and shifted his position on the floor at her feet so that the firelight burned like blue coals in his eyes. Dolly felt grandmotherly, and tired. She wished he would stop talking and leave her be so that she could forget the sour taste of loving a little boy dressed up like a man.

“Aubrey,” she said sternly, “you better get up off the floor before you catch cold.”

But he went on talking, as if he had not heard her. “If you want to know the truth, Dolly, I gave up on Liza way before she died. I saw her getting weaker and weaker, and I knew I’d made a bad deal. So I turned my attention to the boy. When Liza finally died, me and Billy Boy was out fishing together. I’d never really got along with the boy,” Aubrey said. “So I was trying to get to like him... to get him to like me... so I wouldn’t have to die alone somewhere...” He scrunched around and gazed at her in the fetching way, Dolly thought, of an old hound appealing to its master. “Dolly,” he said, “you see now why I want you to marry me? You do see, don’t you? You remember my telling you about the fellow that died out in the mountains, up in some hunting cabin in the middle of the woods...?”

But she could only stare at him in stark disbelief while he told the story again.

“Dolly?”

“Aubrey, you don’t want a wife! What you need to marry is an undertaker, somebody with the whole setup for burying dead people.”

But he seemed not to understand the horror that she felt, for he said again, “Dolly, I love you. I want you to marry me. I don’t care what you might’ve done in the past...” It was a strange thing for him to say, for him to accuse her.

For one tense moment, there was naked silence in the small cabin room as they faced each other with the squat settee between them — he, with his head cocked to one side and his blue eyes inspecting her quizzically, wondering if she understood the full portent of what he had said; Miss Dolly, straight as a ramrod, suddenly content and without restlessness for the first time in twelve years.

So, he wanted her to marry him. “I’ll marry you, Aubrey. I think we ought to have a drink to seal the bargain.” Her laugh was rich with triumph. “We’ll drink some of my real good brandy, what I keep for special occasions.”

He would have followed her to the kitchen, but she stayed him with an imperious hand. “Wait by the fire,” she said, using much the same tone as she might have used with an old hound that whimpered behind her and got underfoot.

Aubrey waited by the fire as she had ordered him to. But she took such an uncommonly long time in the kitchen, that he became restless; and he called to her in a loud voice. “Dolly, you know what I was doing when Billy Boy died?”

She came back to the living room then, carrying two glasses of amber-colored brandy. She handed one to him and set hers near him on the arm of the settee, while she stooped and poked in the fire.

“When Billy Boy died, Aubrey? Why, weren’t you with him?”

“Naw... I was out courting, trying to find me a wife.”

She threw another log on the fire. “At that hour of the morning?”

“How did you know he died this morning, Dolly? I didn’t say a thing about the time Billy Boy died. For all you know, he might have died this afternoon, just before I came running here.”

She chunked a few more times in the fire, her head tilted to one side, secretly watching him from the corner of her eye.

“Drink your wine, Aubrey,” she said pleasantly.

“How did you know, Liza? Is it because you sneaked over there and smothered little Billy Boy with a pillow, the same way you smothered Liza?”

“Drink your wine,” she said.

But he kept on talking. “You’re a strong woman, you’d have no trouble suffocating a frail sick woman like Liza, somebody as small as Billy Boy.”

She turned just in time to see him switch the glasses of wine.

And she knew then that it was all over, that the anguish of a dozen years would soon come to an end.

“Aubrey,” she said, “it seems that I’ve hated you forever. And in the middle of my hate, there’d come a remembrance of when I didn’t hate you... of when I loved you... like the clouds that roll back and show a pinch of blue sky on an overcast day. But those moments were rare, Aubrey. Most of the time I hated you. And that hate spilled over, the older I got, until I hated Liza and Billy Boy, too.”

“Why?” he said.

“Because they were yours, or a part of you.” She picked up the wine glass he had traded with her, and drank the liquid down at once. “You thought I’d poison you, Aubrey?” She smiled scornfully. “Poison is a weak woman’s way. I want you to suffer a long time, Aubrey, and to die alone, like the man in the cabin you’re always talking about.”

He jumped to his feet and tried to embrace her. “Dolly, it doesn’t matter to me what you did before,” he cried. “I need you now... I need someone!”

She pulled away. “You’d marry me any way, thinking like you do that I murdered your wife and son?”

“I’m not accusing you, Dolly. It’s just that Mr. Ben Cohen did an autopsy on Liza after she died that way. He found bits of lint in her lungs... he said that could only have come from her being smothered by a pillow. I knew a long time ago how she died.”

Dolly nodded. “And Billy Boy?”

“Somebody killed him the same way... this morning, like I said... while I was out looking for me a wife... Did you kill them, Dolly?”

“I killed them,” she said.

He seemed to go weak in the knees. “I’d never have believed it, Dolly. Why? Why would you want to do a thing like that?”

“Because of the baby, Aubrey. You know what my sickness was, why I really went away that summer after high school? To have a baby, Aubrey... your baby. I didn’t say anything about it to you then because you’d already announced that you and Liza were going to get married.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “A baby,” he said. “What happened to it?”

“Dead,” Miss Dolly said. “I was away for nearly a year, if you remember. I was in the hospital when I heard that you and Liza had married. The baby... your baby, Aubrey... was born a little while after that. I was in the hospital... I tried to kill it then, but there were too many doctors, nurses, too many people watching. So I waited until they sent me home... and I smothered it one morning with a pillow. I couldn’t bear the shame of coming back here with a baby, and me not being married. The Sheriff there said it was an accident, the baby’s being smothered...”

Aubrey slapped her. He slapped her so hard that her hands flew up and the empty wine glass shattered around her feet.

“All right, Sheriff,” she heard him cry, “you boys can come on in now.”

And then, surprisingly, as she tried to clear her vision, she saw Mr. Ben Cohen and the uniformed Sheriff with his two deputies coming through the door. Witnesses, her mind dully recorded. He tricked me into confessing with witnesses listening outside in all that cold...

“Whew, boy, I thought you’d never get her to admit those murders,” Mr. Ben Cohen said. “Lucky thing you came to me this morning when you found the boy dead.”

Vaguely, as if from a great distance, she felt the Sheriff’s heavy hand on her shoulder, and heard his voice drawling, “Dolly Freeman, in the name of the Commonwealth, I arrest you for the murder of Liza Gilliam, William Gilliam, and the infant child born to you at Sedgewick Hospital on the 12th of December in the County of...”

Mr. Ben Cohen and Aubrey were alone now in the cabin. Aubrey stood at the window. Although night was fast approaching, he could still see the Sheriff and his deputies herding Dolly Freeman back down the hill and across the frozen creek to his own farm at the top of the farther rise where they had parked the official black limousine that had brought them all from the County seat. He saw them disappear into the lowground; then, in a few moments, he saw the four figures silhouetted against the darkening sky as they emerged again near his farm.

“That’s how she knew I was gone,” Aubrey said to Mr. Cohen. “She could stand right here at the window and see me every time I left home. So she knew when Liza and Billy Boy were there alone.”

Mr. Cohen clapped him warmly on the shoulder. “You did a good job, son. We’ve been suspicious of her ever since her baby died. But tell me... have you ever thought about going on the stage?” Mr. Cohen said, half jokingly. “You almost had me fooled there for a while, all that talk about wanting somebody to bury you...”

But Aubrey’s mind was already ticking off the names of women around who might marry him. “I wasn’t fooling about that,” he said. “I wasn’t fooling one bit.”

He gazed at Mr. Cohen with his hollow blue eyes dulled by a lurking fear. “You see, I heard this story once,” he said, “about a fellow that died out in the mountains, up in a hunting cabin in the middle of the woods. He died all by himself. When they finally found him, well, the weasels and rats had been having themselves a real feast...”

But Mr. Cohen was impatient to be going. “It’s getting darker by the moment,” he interrupted gently. “I expect they’re waiting for us over there at your place... it’s a long drive back to the County seat. Don’t you think we’d better be going?”

Aubrey shook his head. “Mr. Cohen, I’m all broke up about this thing... I couldn’t go home right now. I think I’ll stay here awhile.”

“Well, you’ll be hearing from us in two or three weeks,” Mr. Cohen said. He left, and went walking fast down the twilight hill toward the creek and the darker lowground.

Aubrey’s hands and knees were shaking. He was desperately in need of a drink. He gulped the brandy that Dolly had given him... and the pain hit him in the stomach almost at once.

“Dolly, you poisoned me!” he screamed, and reeled for the door. But the poison was already acting on his limbs, numbing them, swelling his tongue until he could not move, or scream again. He crumbled to the floor near the fireplace.

Only his brain remained active as the seeping death crept over him. She was always smart, that Dolly, he thought. Her drink had the poison all the time... she was expecting me to be suspicious and to switch glasses on her. Yes, she really is a tricky one, he thought, almost with admiration. And strong... she would have made a real good wife...

But then, his frightened eyes noticed that the fire had died long ago in the hearth. At first, he could hear only a rising wind whistling down the chimney.

There was this fellow that died all alone in a cabin, he thought.

And then his mind screamed a shrill warning as the hungry whispers of weasels and rats mingled with the laughing wind.

They were always hungry at this time of year... they could smell him down here, the odor of his dying.

His heart revolted, and scudded to a stop as the first of them dropped, with an obscene thud, to the cold hearth.