The dirt was a liar.

I'd been digging in it twenty-two years and it lied to me one more time on a Tuesday in July, out at Bobby Crane's place, on a fence line Bobby had no intention of paying for. He owed me for two jobs already. He'd owe me for this one too. I knew that the way you know weather. I dug it anyway. A man digs.

It was six thirty in the morning and already up in the nineties. The heat in Mississippi in July has a weight to it. It has a color too, the color of old brass, and it comes off the clay in layers you can almost see, like the ghost of yesterday's heat standing in for today's.

The auger hit something soft at four feet.

I cut the motor. The silence came back in like water filling a hole, slow and then all at once, and I stood in it and looked down.

There was a mouth in the ground.

I'll be plain about it, because the plainness is the only true part. It was a mouth the size of a tractor tire, set down in the red clay at the bottom of my hole. The lips were the color of old salmon, the pink of a thing that used to be red and got left in the sun. The teeth were there. They were a little crooked. The second molar on the left was chipped, the way a man chips a tooth on a bottle cap back when he's younger and dumber than he'll later wish he'd stayed. The tongue was the color of a fresh-cut watermelon and about twice the size a tongue ought to be. It moved while I watched it. Not much. Just the small adjustment a thing makes when it's been closed up a long time and is getting used to the air.

My first thought was that it was going to be a pain to work around.

My second thought was that it was a tongue.

I climbed out of the hole. I did not run. There was nowhere to run that the heat wasn't already standing in, and anyhow I'm forty-seven, and running is for men who believe the thing behind them is slower than they are. I sat down on the clay at the lip of the hole and got a cigarette going and thought about Bobby Crane and what Bobby was going to say about a mouth in his fence line. Which was, I figured, that he still wasn't paying.

Then the mouth breathed.

It was a wet sound, patient, like a man breathing through a rag. It wasn't loud. But you have to understand a thing about July in Rankin County, which is that nothing is louder than the cicadas. The cicadas are the whole sky. And I heard the breathing over the top of them, clear, the way you hear one voice in a church over the organ, and that was the first thing that told me how serious this was, though I couldn't have told you then what kind of serious.

Then it said three words.

It said them in my own voice. I'll set that down and let it sit there, because it sat there with me. My voice, coming up out of the ground, up out of that salmon-colored mouth, saying: I got tired.

Which are the first three words of the note my wife left on the kitchen table three years ago. I got tired of waiting for you to start. I haven't read that note since the Wednesday she wrote it. I didn't need to. I had it the way you have a scar.

I stubbed the cigarette out in the clay. I picked up my auger bit and put it in the truck. I drove to the next job. I didn't tell Bobby Crane about the mouth and I didn't tell the man at the next job and I didn't tell anybody, and when I got home that afternoon I sat in the truck in my own driveway with the engine off for forty-five minutes. The manifold ticked as it cooled. I watched the heat come up off the hood. Then I went inside.

I went back the next morning before light.

Bobby Crane sleeps till nine. I knew this the way I knew the water table on his land, which is to say from a long acquaintance with Bobby and his ground, both of which give their secrets up slow and neither of which has paid me on time in living memory. I parked on the road and walked in with my coffee and stood at the edge of the hole at six fifteen and looked at the mouth, and the mouth breathed, and I thought, all right. All right then.

A man with a thing in his ground tends it. I didn't set out to. The hands take it up before the rest of you signs off on it.

I had a flat-head screwdriver, the wide one, and I got down in the hole and scraped the red clay out from between the teeth. The clay gets in everything. It gets in the teeth the way it gets in the tread of my boots and up under my nails, where twenty-two years of it has gone in and not come out, so my hands look like they belong to a man older than the rest of me. The chipped molar was the hard one. The clay packed down into the chip and wouldn't come loose, and I worked at it with the corner of the screwdriver the way you work a stripped bolt, with patience, because anger doesn't turn a stripped bolt and it won't clean a tooth.

Sandra told me once, on our third date, that I dug myself in everywhere I went. She said it wasn't a bad thing. She said it just meant I'd be hard to get out. We were at the catfish place off 49 and she said it smiling, and I took it for a compliment, and I was right to, and I was also wrong, and it took me about fifteen years to learn the second half.

I poured a little water on the ground beside the mouth every morning. Not in it. Beside it, the way you water the dirt around a tree and not the trunk. I don't know why. It seemed like the thing to do. And I brought out the old transistor radio that lived in the truck door and set it on the clay and turned it to the station out of Jackson that plays the old stuff, and the mouth breathed slower when there was music. I noticed that. I wrote it in my notebook, the one I use for job estimates, in between a fence price for a man in Pelahatchie and a number I owed for a part. Breathes slow w/ music.

She used to wait up when I came in late off a job in the rain. She'd have a towel ready, warm out of the dryer, and she'd put it over my head and dry my hair like I was a dog come in from the yard. I never told her I knew I didn't deserve that. She knew it anyhow. She waited three years for me to deserve it, and then she quit waiting.

On the third morning it talked again.

It used Darnell Pickett's voice this time. Darnell lives two trailers down from me and keeps a garden that has no business being as green as it is on this water table, and the mouth said a thing in Darnell's voice that I didn't follow, a string of words that didn't go together, the back half of a thought with the front half missing. I wrote it down. Then I tore the page out and folded it and put it in my shirt pocket, against the name tag that's coming loose at the corner, and I don't know why I did that either.

The note is in the kitchen drawer with the takeout menus and the dead batteries I keep meaning to throw out. I read it three times the day she left and then I put it in there. I haven't opened that drawer for a battery since. I buy new ones.

I dropped a stone in on the third day. Just to know. I've dropped a thousand stones in a thousand holes and I know what a hole sounds like at the bottom, the way you know a coin's worth by the ring of it on a counter. I counted. Four seconds. Nothing came back up. I waited longer than four seconds, longer than a stone needs to find the bottom of anything I've ever dug, and nothing came, and I wrote it down. Stone. 4 sec. No bottom.

I put the notebook away. The cicadas were going. The heat was coming up brass-colored out of the east, and I had a fence to not get paid for, so I went and dug it.

***

Darnell found me on a Sunday.

He'd seen my truck going out at first light and coming back, and a retired man with a garden and nothing but time will follow a thing like that to the end of it. He came across Bobby Crane's pasture in his slow careful way, a small wiry man the color of the clay itself, like something the ground had made on purpose, and he stood at the edge of my hole with his hands in his pockets and looked down a long while.

The mouth breathed.

That's a mouth, Darnell said.

I said that was what I thought it was.

And that's the whole of what two grown men had to say about a mouth in the ground in Rankin County, Mississippi, and I've thought since that it was about the right amount. Darnell looked at it some more. He asked did it do anything. I said it breathed, and sometimes it talked. He asked what it said. I told him it said things in people's voices, voices of folks still living, and that I didn't know how it picked them. Darnell nodded like I'd quoted him the price of feed.

Then he said we ought to charge.

There was nothing mean in it. He said it the way a man says a thing he's already worked out and is just waiting on you to catch up to. He'd hauled freight forty years and he knew a thing sitting in the ground doing nothing for nobody was a waste, and a thing that talked was worth money to people who wanted to hear it talk. I said I'd think about it. I didn't think about it. Three days later Darnell had told four people.

They came on a Wednesday evening.

I hadn't set a price. Darnell had told them five dollars, so it was five dollars. I stood at the lip of the hole in the last of the light with the cicadas going and took five dollars off my neighbors one at a time and watched them crouch down by the mouth and wait. And I'll tell you, it is a thing to watch a person wait on a hole in the ground to talk. They get patient in a way they're patient about nothing else. They go still. You can watch them decide to believe it.

The trouble is the mouth doesn't perform.

That was the whole comedy of it and the whole horror, which around the Gullet turned out to be the same thing wearing two hats. It wouldn't talk on command. A man could crouch there twenty minutes in the heat with his five dollars already spent and hear nothing but his own knees and the cicadas, and then the next one would settle down and the mouth would say a thing in a voice that stood the hair up on every arm at the hole.

Bobby Crane came. Of course he came, it was his pasture, and he crouched and waited and got nothing, not one breath that sounded like a word, and he stood up and put his hand out for his five dollars back. I gave it to him. I didn't decide to. My hand gave it to him, the way it had learned across twenty-two years to hand Bobby Crane things and get nothing back, and that was the only five dollars I gave back the whole time the Gullet ran.

Pam Sykes came down from the double-wide at the end of the road. She crouched and waited, and then she heard her daughter. I don't know what the daughter said. Pam stood up fast, like the ground had bit her, and she wouldn't say it, wouldn't say a word of it, and she paid me another five on her way out and said she'd be back. She was.

Jerome Watts heard his own voice. I watched it happen. He went down on his heels and waited and then a thing came up out of the hole in Jerome's exact voice and Jerome went pale under his tan, which I had not seen a man do, and he stood and walked to his truck and drove off and didn't say one word to me. Not goodnight. Nothing.

Darnell waited longest of anybody. He crouched at that hole past full dark with the rest of them gone home, and I stood off a ways and let him, because a man who's followed a thing all the way to the end has earned his time at it. Something came up out of the ground for Darnell. I saw him hear it. I didn't hear it and he didn't tell me, and after that night Darnell didn't come around the Gullet again.

That night, after they'd all gone home, I sat on my back step with a beer and thought about Sandra's sister's place up in Tupelo. Whether Sandra had a garden up there. Whether she dried her clothes on a line the way she did here or used the machine in her sister's wash room. It was a fool thing to wonder about. I wondered about it till the beer went warm and then I went in.

***

In the third week the mouth said Sandra's name.

I was alone with it at six fifteen in the morning. Nobody else came that early anymore. It said her name and it said it in my own voice, the way it had said I got tired, my voice coming up out of the salmon-colored mouth in the red clay, saying Sandra. Just the one word. Just her name.

Which is a word I say sometimes in the house when there's no one to hear it. I didn't know I said it till the ground said it back. A man will do a thing three years running in an empty house and not know he does it, say a name into a room with nothing in it, and then one morning the ground he's dug his whole life opens up and hands it back to him, in his own voice, to let him know it's been listening the entire time.

I sat down in the clay by the hole. I put my hands on my knees. I looked at the mouth the way you look at a piece of equipment that's done the thing you always knew it would do. The manifold that cracks all the way through. The cable that goes. You're not surprised. You're just sitting there with the fact of it, and the heat is coming up brass-colored, and the cicadas don't stop for you. They don't stop for anything.

Then it got worse, because around the Gullet it always got worse, and the way it got worse was Jerome Watts came back.

He found me at the hole on a Thursday with the look of a man who hadn't slept, and he told me what he'd heard the first night, which he hadn't told a soul. He'd heard his own voice say a number. A dollar amount. He said it was the exact figure he'd been putting away in an account his wife didn't know about, been putting away eleven years, a little at a time, and the number the mouth said in his own voice was the number in that account down to the dollar. He wanted to know could I fix it. Could I make it quit. I told him I couldn't fix it. I dig holes. I don't unfix what comes up out of them. Jerome stood there a while and then he left.

Two days after that his wife came to my door.

She stood on my step in the evening with the porch light off, because I hadn't turned it on, and she looked at me. Something happened, she said. I told her nothing happened. She kept looking, with the patient terrible look of a woman who's already counted the money. Something happened, she said again. Then she went back to her car and drove off, and I stood in the door and watched her taillights go down the road, and I thought about Jerome's eleven years and his little account, and how a man saves a secret the same careful way he saves money. A little at a time. Thinking the whole while he's found somewhere private to keep it.

Word got around after that, the way it does.

It got around that the mouth had been saying things people didn't want said. Not secrets, exactly. The things a person says out loud when the only one listening is the room. The thing you mutter at the sink. The name you say to an empty house. People quit coming to crouch at the hole. Then they quit coming near that end of the pasture at all, and then they quit coming near me, because I was the man who kept the mouth, and a man who keeps a thing like that is a man who knows what it's heard. Pam Sykes crossed the road when she saw me coming. She'd heard her daughter, and whatever the daughter said, she didn't want to stand close to the man who owned the hole it came out of.

Darnell came to my door on a Thursday night.

He stood on the step the way Jerome's wife had stood on it, porch light off. He said, you know what I heard down in that thing. It wasn't a question and I didn't answer it. Evelyn, he said. His wife. She passed in 2021, a stroke, quick, in the kitchen, and Darnell had crouched at my hole hoping for her voice the way Pam wanted her daughter and Jerome got his own self instead. Evelyn, he said. She was talking to a man. Using a name I never heard her use. A name for him, the soft kind. He looked down at the porch boards in the dark. I was married to that woman thirty-eight years, he said.

Then he walked back across the road to his trailer, small and clay-colored under no moon, and he went inside, and he didn't turn his porch light on either, and I shut my door. I sat at the kitchen table for a while. The drawer was right there. I didn't open it.

***

I tried to fill it in.

I filled it for the same reason I dig anything. The work has an arc to it. You dig a hole, you fill a hole, and a hole that won't fill is a hole that's quit being a hole and started being a thing you have to think about. I didn't want to think about it anymore. I had a truck with a bed full of the same red clay it came out of, so I backed up to Bobby Crane's fence line and shoveled the clay in on top of the mouth, a full load, and watched it go down.

It didn't spit it back. Half of me thought it would, the way a thing in a picture show throws off the dirt and roars. It didn't roar. It took the clay. It went quiet a moment, like a man taking a swallow, and then it breathed again at its regular rate, slow and wet and patient, like the clay hadn't been clay at all but air.

I tried gravel. Same.

I tried concrete mix, the dry kind, straight out of the bag, figuring the damp down in the ground would set it. It took the concrete the way it took the clay and the gravel, and it breathed. I stood over it in ninety-seven degrees with an empty bag in my hand and I understood, the way I understand ground, which is the one thing I have ever truly understood, that this particular hole wasn't going to be filled. Not by me. Not by a truck bed of clay or a bag of crete or anything else I could put in it. It had a bottom I couldn't reach and a hunger that wasn't hunger.

I took out my notebook.

I turned to the page from the first morning, where I'd written the size of it and the stone and the four seconds and the no bottom. I looked at that page a while. My hands, the cracked old hands of a man older than his own face, the hands Sandra said would be hard to get out of anything they dug into, tore the page out. I tore it into four pieces. I dropped the four pieces in the mouth, one and then the next, and the mouth took them the way it took everything, and it breathed.

On the last morning it was quiet.

Not dead. It still breathed. But it didn't talk. I crouched by it at six fifteen the way I'd crouched by it every morning for three weeks, and I waited, and the cicadas were the whole sky, and the brass heat came up out of the east, and nothing came up out of the ground. I waited twenty minutes. It breathed and it breathed and it didn't say my name or her name or anybody's. And I'll tell you that the quiet was worse than the talking. It was.

I drove out to Bobby Crane's fence line. The first one. The one I'd been digging the morning I found it.

Another crew had finished it. The posts were in and the wire was strung and the gate was hung, and Bobby Crane had himself a fence at last, paid for or not, I didn't know and it wasn't mine to know anymore. I parked the truck on the road outside the line and left it running and sat and looked at the posts.

I counted them. Fourteen.

I'd have set sixteen. You set them closer on that ground, because the clay heaves in the wet and a post set wide will walk on you in a season or two. They'd set fourteen. And the fourteenth one, the last before the corner, stood two inches out of plumb. I could see it from the truck. Nobody else would. Not Bobby, not the crew that set it, not a soul who ever leaned on that fence. But I saw it, because seeing it is the one thing I've always been able to do. In six years that post will lean. The wire will go slack on that run and the gate will hang wrong and Bobby will cuss the crew that's long gone, and the post will go on leaning, a little more each wet season, and no one will ever know it was wrong from the first day. I knew. I have always known. It has never once made me get up and do a thing about it.

I didn't get out of the truck.

I drove back to the Gullet.

I parked and walked out to the end of the pasture in the last of the day. The mouth was there in the red clay, breathing at its regular rate, slow and wet and patient. The sun was going down and the heat was still coming, that brass color laid over everything, and the cicadas were working. They're always working. They'll outlast all of us and the Gullet too.

I stood beside it and looked out at the tree line. Then I looked down at the mouth. Then I looked at the tree line again.

I thought about going home. I thought about Tupelo. The fourteen posts came into it too, the one that was wrong and how nobody had noticed it yet, and how nobody was going to.

The Gullet breathed.

I sat down in the red clay beside it and took off my cap and held it in my two hands and waited to see what it was going to say.

It said nothing. It breathed. The heat came down.

I was still there when the sun went behind the tree line. I was still there when it came back up.

♢

October 26, 2026