The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to be proof that he was dead: he had always been hard to convince. The evidence of his senses made him admit that he was indeed buried. His posture – lying flat on his back, with his arms crossed over his stomach and bound with something that could be easily broken without changing the situation – the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and the profound silence made it impossible to collect evidence. question, and he accepted it without question.
But dead, no; he was just very, very unwell. However, he had the apathy of an invalid and was not much concerned about the extraordinary fate that befell him. He was not a philosopher – just an ordinary, common man, endowed with a temporarily pathological indifference: the organ whose consequences he feared was numb. So, without worrying too much about his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was well with Henry Armstrong.
However, something was happening overhead. It was a gloomy summer night, pierced by occasional flashes of lightning that silently cast a cloud lying low in the west, heralding a storm. These compact, stuttering illuminations brought out the monuments and tombstones of the cemetery with eerie clarity and seemed to make them dance. It wasn't a night when any credible witnesses would be wandering around the cemetery, so the three men who were there digging Henry Armstrong's grave felt relatively safe and sound.
Two of them were adolescent students from a medical school a few miles away; the third was a giant black man known as Jess. For many years, Jess was employed at the cemetery as a jack of all trades, and his favorite courtesy was that he knew “every soul in the place.” From the nature of what he was doing now, it seemed that the place was not as populated as the register indicated.
Behind the wall, in the part of the area furthest from the public road, a horse and a airy cart waited.
The excavation work was not hard: the earth that had been loosely filled into the grave a few hours earlier did not offer much resistance and was soon thrown out. Getting the coffin out of the box wasn't that straightforward, but it was managed thanks to Jess carefully unscrewing the lid and setting it aside, revealing a body in black pants and a white shirt. At that moment, the air burst into flames, cracking thunder shook the stunned world, and Henry Armstrong calmly sat down. With mumbling screams, the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. There was no way in hell they could convince two of them to come back. But Jess was a different species.
On a gray morning, two students, pale and haggard with fear, the fear of adventure still pulsing in their blood, met at the medical college.
'Did you see that?' one shouted.
'God! Yes. What are we supposed to do?
They walked around the back of the building, where they saw a horse drawn to a airy cart, tied to a gate post near the door to the mortuary. They entered the room mechanically. The Negro Jess was sitting on a bench in the gloomy. He stood up, smiling, with eyes and teeth.
“I'm waiting for my paycheck,” he said.
Lying naked on a long table was the body of Henry Armstrong, his head tainted with blood and clay from being hit with a shovel.
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