The Ballad of Dingus Magee by David Markson Page B

Antonio was an impoverished district not far from the ruins of the Alamo. The cousin was in his early thirties then, rheumy and myopic and of solitary habits (a neighboring half breed woman with some dozen youngsters of her own gave him advice or small aid with Dingus when needed). He never sent the boy to school, but he did take time to teach him to read out of an ancient anatomy text, and cope with the rudiments of arithmetic. It developed that the cousin had actually used the text in the study of medicine at one time, and certain of his acquaintances were practicing doctors in fact—several remote, secretive men who would knock on occasion, although never in daylight, and who never entered the shabby house either but would speak briefly and clandestinely with the cousin outside. That was when the cousin would be busy, those same nights. It would take almost until dawn.
    And then one evening the cousin took him along. Dingus was eight then, and Magee did not explain. He said merely, “I reckon it’s time you learned to make somewhat of a living.” Dingus followed him for almost two hours along a road which crossed the length of the town before extending into the barren countryside beyond, gradually diminishing to become little more than tamped sand. Then they left the road to enter a once-cultivated but now abandoned field, and at a lightning-gutted hollow tree the cousin told him to wait while he boosted himself up and rooted around within the shell. When the cousin descended again he had two shovels with him, and a bulky folded canvas, apparently once part of the sleeve of a Conestoga wagon, but still he failed to elaborate. “Come on,” was all he said.
    But it was not much farther now, and Dingus had come to realize where they were anyway, had recognized the location if only out of recollected hearsay description and so began to comprehend vaguely some of the reasons for the furtiveness of their mission also, if not yet its specific purpose. When they entered the cemetery itself he began to get frightened. He said so. “Lissen,” the cousin told him, “there ain’t no physical thing on this earth a dead man can do, except wait for the worms to gnaw at him. So in a way we’re doing him a kindness by preventing that. Get to digging, now. The dirt’s easy enough, since it were jest put back this morning.”
    He was right about the latter part of it. They were finished in less than an hour, although the return trip consumed considerably more time than had the journey out. Dingus waited in an alley while the cousin delivered the improvised sack at the doctor’s rear door. The cousin gave him a dollar, which he said was one third of what he himself was paid.
    He went along regularly after that, perhaps once a week and doing more and more of the work as time passed (although he was restricted to digging only; he had always been small for his age, and even at ten could still barely lift, let alone carry). “But you can be grateful you’re learning a trade,” the cousin said, “especially since I been right upset, ‘times, remembering what a unpromising start you had in life, and I weren’t sure a unwedded feller like myself could bring you up Christian and respectable.”
    “I appreciate it,” Dingus said.
    It was around then that it struck him to ask Magee about his mother also, but Magee could tell him nothing. “I never even heard tell your pa had got spliced,” he said. “But you take a incompetent chap who slips a ace out’n his sleeve without he remembers it’s the same ace of diamonds he’s already got in his hand, I don’t reckon he’ll hold onto a wife any longer’n he’s about to hold onto his money. Or his life. But anyways, I done my best to be a mother to you, likewise.”
    “I appreciate that too,” Dingus said.
    But then the cousin died. It was rain, an unseasonal downpour which lasted two full nights and those ironically the first two in the cousin’s life on which he had ever