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I slept with Willy-not-William in the middle of the summer, in the garden where we bury the dead. He'd courted me all spring, the way a gentleman would, bringing me pink and yellow roses and walking me places so I wouldn't have to be alone. Maybe he only knew to do all that because Michael had done it the summer before, and when Michael wasn't busy pretending that I wasn't there he was whispering to other boys that he'd had me.

Well, he had, but I preferred to think of it as I'd had him.

Michael'd had it pretty easy, and then he'd turned around and suddenly forgot me the minute it was September, so I figured that if Willy-not-William wanted to sleep with a gravedigger's daughter, he would have to work for it a little bit. That was why I told him I'd only do it in the garden. He'd nodded at that with such a straight face, and I was afraid from his expression that sex with Willy would be something like going to church. He'd worshipped at the idea of it for too long, and the act would only make him scared. Some boys are just that way.

We met late on a Saturday night, on account of my mama believing that after midnight is the Sabbath day and shutting down the whole house. That was the only way I knew no one would be tending the garden.

Willy was waiting for me with his hat in his hands, pinching the brim and rolling it back and forth. I tried to smile to show him how it would go, but in the dark I don't know if he saw anything but teeth.

Papa keeps the gate greased, so it opened real silent, and Willy only took a minute to follow me in.

"Are those them?" he asked, pointing at the flowers that keep the dead down.

"They are. You're lucky they're just buds now, though. Once they bloom they'll smell something awful."

The window in my bedroom faced the garden, so all August I had to smell them flowers. They was big showy things, with a stink like jasmines and gardenias and lilies of the valley all tied up with twine and then tossed in the river to rot. They said it was the smell that warped my family into thinking it was okay to handle the dead, but the truth is it wasn't so bad, and you never had to be warped at all just to dig a hole and put something in it.

Carefully, I gave Willy his first kiss of the night. He looked at me with adoration and fear, both emotions that I could believe in. With his eyes on me like that my fingers even trembled a little bit as I unbuttoned my blouse. I don't know if it was the longing on his face or the garden or the night, but it felt like my first time again, which was good and bad and strange.

Willy broke his eyes from me long enough to look around the garden one more time, and then he stepped close to help me with my buttons. I couldn't tell if his hands was shaking a little bit too, or if it was my own shaking that made his fingers stumble.

I hadn't worn a brassiere, just to make it all easier, and when we pulled my shirt down to my waist Willy stared at my chest for a moment in awe, and then kissed first that bone between my breasts, and then each nipple in turn. I pulled his mouth back up to mine and kissed him with my tongue the way Michael had liked so much. Willy moaned a little bit, and I felt it throat to throat, like we was one.

It was good to be touched, even with Willy's fingers not knowing what to do, and each time my hands guided his to a new place he spent whole minutes exploring the folds of my skin, memorizing. Willy-not-William turned out to be more adventurous than I'd thought, and I knew he'd do himself proud with his next girl after me. There's good things to be said about a boy who's a quick learner.

I had to close my eyes against the faces he made, but in the dark and concentrating just on touch I was happy. The dirt was rough against my back, and I pretended to myself that I was going to pull him all the way inside me so I could keep him there under my skin, and that way I'd never have to be lonely or weird because I'd always have someone who loved me.

That's not to say that I thought for a minute that Willy-not-William actually loved me, but sometimes the moment will carry you away.

Eventually I lost myself in all of it, even so that it felt like Willy had more than two hands, like he had fingers to touch my breasts and my face and my cunt, but also extra ones to stroke along my back. It was wonderful.

Then after we finished it was like church after all, and Willy pulled all his clothes back on full up with shame, and I knew that even though summer was only halfway done our courtship was over.

* * *

On Sunday no one in my family visited the garden, on account of everything we do there being work, but on Monday mama woke me with the sun so we could do our tending before it got too hot out. The sun thought it was August even though it was only July, and we was having the driest summer in memory.

"It must be the heat," said mama. "Laurie Jane, you go in the shed and get our big watering cans."

She was staring at the flowers that keep the dead down. The buds seemed a little smaller than they had when I was with Willy. It must have been a trick of the moonlight that had made them look like they was about to burst open, but now under the sun they was closed up real tight.

"It must be the heat," mama said again. "The dead don't like such things."

My mama would know, on account of sometimes—not often—she hears the whispers, and so she has a peculiar insight into the thoughts of the dead.

We spent most of the day watering the flowers, and tending to the other plants there to make the flowers look nice. Then there was lunch to make for papa and my brothers, and finally prayers at the heads of each of the graves in the garden, especially the Claytons, who we only buried a week or three ago.

When it got dark out I waited just down the road from the house for Willy-not-William to hold my hand and walk around the fields behind our houses, but he didn't come.

* * *

July passed into August, still hotter than it had any right to be. Mama and I tended to the garden, and most of all to the flowers that keep the dead down, but it didn't make no difference. The flower buds just fell off, without even looking like they'd tried to open. We watered them twice a day, but still the leaves went brown and dropped to the dirt.

"Something is wrong," said mama, over and over. "Something is wrong."

She started waking up in the middle of the night, and I'd lay in bed and listen to her pace up and down the hall. We're used to mama pacing through the house at night, because she can't sleep sometimes when the whispers come on, but this was a different kind of pacing. I listened to it back and forth past my door maybe four times, maybe twenty, and then she headed down the stairs, each one with its own special squeak. She went out the back door, and I watched her through my window as she stood in front of the gate to the garden for a long time, and then finally went in and kneeled in the dirt in the middle of it to pray. I watched for a while, and thought about even going outside to keep her company, but my mama don't stop praying 'til she knows that Jesus heard her, and sometimes that takes longer than other times. When I lay back down in bed she was still out there. A fear began to grow in me, that this was me and Willy's doing, but there was no one I could tell.

* * *

At breakfast the next morning it was papa instead of mama standing at the stove frying sausage, and usually he don't do such a thing unless mama's sick or it's her birthday. She was just sitting there, and the truth is she did look a little unwell. I peeked under the table, and there was still dirt on her knees.

"We're gonna have to move the dead," she said, not so much to me or papa or my brothers as to the kitchen walls.

Papa shook his head, shaking the frying pan with one hand and squeezing the spatula too tight with the other.

"We won't. Them flowers have always bloomed before, and they'll bloom again. It's just the drought. Ain't no plants doing well in this heat and this drought."

"If we don't move the bodies," said mama, speaking real slow and real tough, "then the dead are gonna rise. They ain't risen since our grandparents time, Horace, and if you want that on you then so be it, but I'll take Laurie Jane and the boys and we'll dig them bodies up ourselves."

Papa didn't say something for a long time, and we just listened to the sausage grease popping in the pan. It smelled real good.

"Give it a week," he said finally. "Give it one more week, and if the flowers still ain't bloomed then we'll dig up the bodies. But that'd be a blow, and it'd be a lot of work. We'd have to call in the whole town to help dig, and there's no guarantee them bodies wouldn't rise as soon as they got in the moonlight anyway."

"One week might be too late," said mama. "They might save you a lot of work and dig themselves out."

"One week," said papa.

"We'll have to salt all around the garden," said mama. "If we have to wait a whole week, I want us to bury iron nails every three feet. If those dead claw their way up, I don't want them to get out."

"One week," said papa again, which wasn't a yes or a no, but after he'd passed out all the sausage he went down to the basement and pulled out one of the bags of winter salt.

* * *

If mama's one week finished, after that it would only be another one week 'til September and school. And if we did have to dig everyone up, then probably all the folk who live around here would have to help, and if everybody was helping dig up the dead so we could stake them down, then probably they'd put off school for a week or two 'cause nobody could go.

I would never hope that all the dead would rise up just to put off school, but something like that would be terrible exciting.

Willy was still avoiding me, and I figured he figured he could get away free with it, just like Michael did, but I didn't want for that this time. So I went into the back garden in the heat of the day, when even mama hid indoors drinking lemonade, and I picked a few of the flowers that had bloomed on their own, like goldenrods and yellow wood sorrels and spiderlillies. It didn't look nothing like his pretty rose bouquets, but I figured that since Willy was a boy it wouldn't matter as much.

I went straight up and knocked on his family's front door, which I'd never done before, since neither of us was much for wanting our parents to know our business. One of his brothers—Willy had even more brothers than I did—answered the door.

"Yeah?" he asked, looking at me all weird. I wished that when I was on business just for me I could take my face off and wear someone else's, so then when people looked at me they wouldn't think about the garden and all them dead.

"Is Willy home?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Probably. I dunno where, though. Do your people need him?"

I nodded, even though it was ridiculous that my family would need Willy-not-William for pretty much anything.

"Just a second," he said, and disappeared inside the house. I decided it probably wasn't as nice on the inside as it was on the out. It couldn't be, with so many boys running around. I looked at the flowers in my hand. Had they already started to wilt?

It seemed like a long time before Willy showed up, coming around from behind the house instead of through the front door. He stopped short when he saw me, then started walking again.

"Oh," he said out loud. "Hi, Laurie Jane."

"Hi, Willy," I licked my lips, started to offer the flowers, then brought my hand down again. "I could use your help," I said instead. "Walk with me?"

Willy shrugged. "Sure."

I waited until we was far enough down the road from his house that nobody could see, and then I held out my flowers. Willy looked at me with an expression like pity. I wanted to tell him, to explain that it must have been our sin that killed them flowers, but I didn't know how to make the words so far from the garden.

"Laurie Jane . . ." he started to say, and then trailed off. "It's just—"

"It's just you got what you wanted, right? So now I should go away?"

I watched for any flash of agreement on his face, but his pity turned to guilt. "It's just, I thought it would be okay," he said. "I thought you wouldn't mind."

I swallowed. "I didn't mind. I just want you to stick around a little longer."

". . . What do you mean?"

"It's not even September yet, Willy. Give me one more week." I held out the flowers again. His expression was a mess I couldn't read, but he took the flowers.

"Sure, Laurie. I'll be your friend for a week."

Him saying it like that made me seem so pathetic. I wanted a better way to make him like me than just asking; I wanted him to like me without me having to do anything for it. Most of all I wanted not to have to tell him about the dead coming up because of us, since then he'd never like me at all.

"Come see me tonight," I said, asked, ordered, pleaded.

Willy held the flowers so tight in his hands. "Sure," he said. "Sure."

* * *

When I got back my brothers had the salt out, going round and round the garden leaving a thick trail of white. Mama was burying the nails, each one nine inches long and with the heads just poking out over the grass.

"Laurie Jane," said mama. "Where you been?"

"Nowhere, mama." I wondered if she could see the goldenrod dust on my fingers. I bent down and helped her pound the nails into the dirt.

* * *

I snuck outside to wait for Willy the minute my family went to bed. The night air was still too hot, but the sky felt beautiful and alive. I was careful to stand outside the salt circle, but it was hard to keep my eyes off the flowers inside, each of them brown and wilted and dead.

I wondered if Willy would bring me flowers from his mama's yard, to help prove that this summer was the real world and everything else was just pretend.

There was movement from behind me in the garden.

I heard it before I saw it, not like digging but like the slow shift of earth. It hadn't been papa's week yet, and I knew that mama'd been right all along.

I should have run inside to wake everybody up, or at least walked around the garden fence and made sure that the salt circle hadn't been broken nowhere. I should have checked each iron nail and I should have prayed, but I was afraid that if I left my exact spot Willy would come and go, and my precious last week would be lost just like papa's. I wanted to watch the garden and the road both, so I stood facing neither and trying to keep on eye on each.

That made it very difficult to concentrate.

Mr. Clayton's fingers came up first, like white earthworms sloughing their first layer of skin, each pale fingernail rimmed with dark dirt.

I waited for the sound of Willy's footsteps down the road.

Mr. Clayton's whole hands came next, not swelled up like they had been when we'd buried him, but thin and in some places showing bone.

The insects in the fields around the house and the garden was quiet.

Watching Mr. Clayton come up was like watching a baby chick fight its way out of the shell, and I wanted to help him but I knew that if I did it would be wrong for every reason.

Without meaning to, I turned more and more away from the road, to watch him come up better. Before he had even finished there was other places in the garden where the dirt was shifting. I wondered how many of the dead would come up today, and how many would come up tomorrow, and if we dug them up and staked them out for the sun if we could bury them again without being afraid that they'd just keep on rising.

There was so many dead. It was hard, knowing this was my fault, but I knew I had to try to fix it.

Mr. Clayton didn't say nothing, just stood there in the garden, watching me. I stepped over the salt circle, careful not to disturb it, and climbed the fence into the garden. He took a few tentative steps forwards. Willy might not have come, but the dead had, and, carefully, I gave Mr. Clayton his first kiss of the night.

Caspian Gray currently lives and works in Central Ohio, and is pursuing an MFA at the Stonecoast Program. His work has previously appeared in Odyssey, Sybil's Garage, and The Full Spectrum.