The World by Night

Sadie was sixteen when her parents died, and the gravedigger told her he would charge her less if she would help him. Typhoid had killed so many people in town that he was tired of digging. “Can we do it at night?” she said. Her skin could not weather long hours in the sun, and in the glare of day she would be nearly blind. He agreed, and so there they were, twilight till dawn, shaving slivers of hard-packed earth from the walls of the graves. They had the coffins lowered by morning, and the gravedigger looked at Sadie’s flushed face and said, “Go on and get inside now. I’ll finish this. I’ll do it proper. You can have your own service tonight.” “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she said. She’d been wanting to ask all night. When she was tired or nervous, her irises often jumped back and forth uncontrollably, as though she were being shaken, and she knew they were doing so now. It unsettled people, and more than one preacher had tried to cast spirits out of her, to no effect. The gravedigger looked at the earth for a long time, the pits with the bodies resting at the bottoms. “I saw another girl like you one time, at a freak show in Abilene,” he said. “White skin and hair like you have, eyes like I never saw, almost red. They called her the devil’s bride, but I think she would’ve liked to’ve been married to a good man, tending chickens and baking biscuits just like anyone else. Anyhow, you’re a fine digger.”

Now Sadie is twenty and it is June and her husband Zachary has been gone for two months, southeast across the Ozarks and maybe farther, to look for work. She is not afraid of being alone for a while. She was alone for two years before she met him and thought she would spend the rest of her life that way. It is sickening to think of that time, and just to know he will come back sooner or later is enough. She sleeps in the sod house through the bright hours of the day when most women do their chores, saves her work for early morning and dusk. When the dark has settled, she walks across the prairie, making her way by scent and feel. She finds some clumps of grass that smell like onion, others like sweet basil, others covered in silvery down that tickles her fingertips. As the days pass, she saves up things to show Zachary when he comes home: A patch of sweet blackberries by the side of the pond where she