lived in the boy, even in the final terrifying moment of his life.
GRIZZ HAD LIED TO get the pastor out here, and the man seemed to know right off. Still, it hadn’t stopped him from following Grizz up the ridge to the burial mounds at the base of the mountain where Grizz buried the boy the night before, a rose-colored stone marking the spot.
Under the round, rolling hummocks of grass all around them rested many bodies. Dakota. Fox and Sauk Indians. Before them, the Cheyenne. Before them, a thousand nameless generations. This was an ancient, spooky place, and Grizz didn’t usually come here. A man from the university had walked this property and wanted to come back with a group of students and do a dig, but Grizz refused. Such an act seemed a violation.
And now Seth had a place among them. In the dark, he’d unzipped the bag he’d dragged up through the woods and let the body spill into the deep grave he’d dug. Skin touching earth. Not looking, grateful for the cover of darkness, covering his child with warm black dirt. Seth hadn’t belonged in this century, and Grizz hoped he might find rest here in the wildest place left in the valley. And if the sheriff did ever try to follow through with his threats and send out the cadaver dogs, they might never find this body among so many others.
A tumbling of leaves rushed up from the woods and spilled past them, and the twilight quickened with swift clouds. “If Seth had lived this is where he would have come. There’s a cave behind the spot where’s he buried. He would have hid here. There’s a limestone spring close by. He would have had food and water. Maybe that’s what all the shells were for. The ones in his pockets.”
These last few nights Grizz had dreamed of fire. Fire licking up from dead leaves and the underbrush on the forest floor, cracking and spitting as it ate twigs and leaves and branches, growing into the very trees. The oaks and maples blazing from within, as though they had been given inner beings of light. They were transfigured. The fire grew and grew until it made its own wind, a living thing, hungry for flesh, and it moved on toward his farm and the sleeping town, drifting under a pall of ashes. In the dream he saw his son running just ahead of it, his long coat fanning out, saw him stop in the grove, out of breath among the statues, and turn toward the flames.
The pastor took off his glasses. He seemed angry to have been brought out here under false pretenses. “Let’s get this over with, then.” He chewed on his lower lip. “And I want to make this clear. I believe your boy intended evil. All that ammunition wasn’t just to kill one man. It wasn’t for hunting out here. Seth went into town knowing he was going to die, by his hand or others.”
Fire in a dry season, in desperate days. Fire consuming them all so that the world could start fresh again. He woke with the taste of ashes on his tongue. He woke thinking of his son.
“I know you loved Seth,” Pastor Logan said when Grizz didn’t respond.
“I would give my life to have him back.”
“You blame yourself for his death?”
He nodded, his eyes stinging. He had not meant to cry. It unsettled him to cry in front of another man, but once the tears started he was powerless to stop them.
“Do you believe that you can be forgiven?”
Grizz settled himself by looking out over the woods, the parched trees stretching all the way to his farm and town beyond it, dusky in the fading light. “Let’s not talk about me anymore. I want you to do the funeral rites. That’s why we’re here.”
The pastor took out his Bible, and Grizz came toward him with the lantern. Here were two men on a high hill that passed for a mountain in these parts, one carrying a light, the other a holy book. The risen moon hiding behind shreds of cloud and then reappearing once more and touching everything with silver. Something silvery moving in the woods below, among the stone statues that lined the driveway. Something unquiet where there should have been only peace. Something near calling out when the moon appeared. One man crying, one afraid. A secret ceremony, as grass closes over a body like a green wound.