One summer night
The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove
that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That
he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to
admit. His posture--flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon
his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without
profitably altering the situation--the strict confinement of his
entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body
of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without
cavil.
But dead--no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the
invalid's apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the
uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he--
just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a
pathological indifference: the organ that he feared consequences
with was torpid. So, with no particular apprehension for his
immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry
Armstrong.
But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night,
shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a
cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief,
stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the
monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them
dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely
to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there,
digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.
Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles
away; the third was a gigantic negro known as Jess. For many years
Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it
was his favorite pleasantry that he knew "every soul in the place."
From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the
place was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be.
Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public
road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.
The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the
grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little
resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its
box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of
Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing
the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air
sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world
and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the
men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on
earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was
of another breed.
In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard from
anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating
tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical college.
"You saw it?" cried one.
"God! yes--what are we to do?"
They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse,
attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the
dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in
the obscurity sat the negro Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and
teeth.
"I'm waiting for my pay," he said.
Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the
head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade.
-THE END-
Ambrose Bierce's short story: One summer night
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