pounding my seat along with everyone else. She was our queen, ours, which meant, in some little way, she was partly mine, too.
Afterward Ted gave us our mission: bleachers, seven o’clock, fully zipped and buttoned and capped. He looked at me when he said this. I thought about that as I walked back home to grab some dinner and fetch my trumpet—his strange belief in me, his patience. Thirty minutes later I stared out the window and saw a peculiar thing, a man standing in the river.
I carried my sandwich to the riverbank. Harnett was shirtless and waist-deep, his arms floating at his sides, his face turned to the water as if meditating. Suddenly he swiped, his arm cutting through the surface and lifting two razors of spray. I stood transfixed as the fish escaped. Harnett watched it dart away through the depths.
He spoke without looking up. “You’ve got about two hours.”
It was then I noticed the shovel rising diagonally from the rocky bank. I felt a flutter of something in my gut—not despair but the thrill of accepting a challenge. Always a step ahead, my father had buried my trumpet.
It was my first dig on slanted ground. The top of the hole gave way constantly. Rocks fought back against my entry. Principles I’d learned had to be rotated and adapted. I succumbed to the authority of my arms.
“Tell me about her funeral,” he said.
“It was small,” I said instantly. I wondered how long the two of us had been readying this question and answer.
“How small?”
“My friend Boris and his parents. Some of her work friends. Couple neighbors. I can hardly remember it now.” In fact, most of what I remembered involved a spider dangling in the ceiling corner above the casket.
“Why aren’t you digging? Keep digging.”
I lifted the shovel and jabbed. Roots held possessively to the earth. I frowned and twisted the handle, my palm and fingers tingling with the sensitivity of a safecracker.
“We didn’t know a lot of people,” I continued. “We hardly ever went out. She had like a thing about going out. She never once crossed the state border, did you know that?”
I heard the glissando of another swipe through water.
“She made me promise,” Harnett said when the music faded. “When we went our separate ways, she made me swear never to set foot in Chicago. Despite its value as a territory, I agreed.” There was a pause. “I was being shut out, I knew that. I didn’t know she was shutting herself in, too—shutting in both of you. Believe me. I had no idea.”
Nothing was going right. The hole was eating itself so that I couldn’t gain entry. I took to my knees and probed with the shovel and muttered bad words. Mud soaked through my pants, bird shit was all over my arms, and I was in danger of being late to the game. A flash of resentment shot through me. I sent a prayer to Two-Fingered Jesus and spoke.
“The cuts in her ear. That’s why she wanted you to stay away. Right? When you said you killed her, that’s what you meant. She couldn’t hear well and that’s why she got hit by the bus.” I swallowed. “That’s what I figure.”
“Don’t start figuring too much,” he growled. “You’ve got it in your little head that I pushed her around? Or what? Slashed her with a knife? What happened to her ear—” He cut himself off and I heard a slow intake of breath. “She was right to leave me. I accept that. And I’ll take responsibility for all of it. But I never laid a hand on her. You try to remember that, kid.”
A light haze of rain began scattering pinpricks into the surface of the river. The impending twilight made him look cut off at the waist, and I thought of the old reverend and his missing leg.
“How do you know Knox?” I asked.
Harnett’s dark eyes searched even darker waters.
“We all know Knox,” he said after a while.
“But how?”
“He’s an old friend of Lionel’s.”
“Who’s Lionel?”
“Lionel taught the trade to me and Boggs.”
Now we were getting somewhere. I explored with the shovel but kept an eye on my father. “And who’s Boggs?”
Harnett shrugged off the rain.
“No movement can exist entirely in secret,” he said. “Knox was a preacher in North Carolina when Lionel was just getting started, before I was born. They grew up together. Knox knows us, all of us, and he travels around, passes word, acts as a messenger of sorts.