Anyway, driving back to town I picked up Vernon Boswick–he’s the town gravedigger.  He don’t have no car.  Fact is, he can’t pass the test to get a license.  He just puts his pick and spade over his shoulder and walks the mile and a half to the cemetery, does his job; hot in the summer, frozen ground in the winter, then walks home.  Vernon’s a couple of years older than me but he’s already raising a family.  He’s a muscular guy and hardly ever wears a shirt in the summertime.  One day he caught the eye of a girl from the county seat who happened to be driving through town. That night she picked him up in her yellow Jeepster convertible and they drove down into the very bottom of the stone quarry located just outside of town.

I can’t speak for other towns but in Crooked Springs when a love garden is plowed and the seed is sown there’s gonna be a dadburn harvest.  Not no church wedding neither where folks get all dressed up and throw rice and the couple so they’ll be fertile.  No sir.  Pastor Russell goes to the bride’s house, reads from the Bible–that part about cleaving to one another–and that’s pretty much it.  Vernon’s wife is a learned woman–he can’t read or write so I don’t know how that will play out.

Old Otto told a story about how Vernon, when he was four years old, found a can of blue paint in his daddy’s shed, stripped jaybird naked and painted himself head to foot.  Looked like a 60 pound bluebird, Otto said.  Then he found himself a big old cardboard box, placed it in the middle of the street and climbed inside.  Townsfolk drove around him for about two hours before he finally had to go to the little house out back.  Otto said with a laugh that it took two gallons of kerosene to scrub that kid clean.

Ginny Lou’s daddy is the cemetery caretaker and lives in the first house beyond the graveyard atop Roseburg Hill, the steepest hill in Reefer County.  Can’t nobody get a bicycle up it without getting off and pushing.  Anyway, I kinda liked Ginny Lou but she always had a boyfriend.  One Wednesday night we were both at the free show in town and her boyfriend had the mumps.  I was 14 at the time and I asked if I could walk her home.  She agreed.  That meant  walking past the graveyard after dark which didn’t bother her since she lived right next door to it all her life.  It bothered me some.  While we walked I daydreamed of getting old enough to drive so I could take her down to the stone quarry.  I walked her to the front door where her daddy met us so that was pretty much that and began the trip back to town.  This next–I swear I’m not kidding.  Old Otto hollered at me from the graveyard.  Scared me so bad I ran all the way to the hard road about a mile off.  I’ve always wondered what he wanted.  Maybe he had one last story he wanted to tell me.