parent as does a small child, as if physical contact, no matter how it is accomplished, will dull the knives.
I reached for her before I knew what I was doing. I withdrew her fingers from the mud and used a palm to wipe grass from her clammy cheek. I felt my heart open to her as it had opened to no one since my mother; I felt a lightness in my chest, releasing me momentarily from the death grip of my current life. Her hands fumbled to my waist, then my shoulders. I felt my lips moving and though I could not hear the words, I knew I told her of Valerie Crouch, also dead and capped with stone like Nathaniel Merriman. I told her of the wonderful arms of my mother, her infinite freckles, the red flip-flops she wore to translucence. I told her of crying on our doorstep when I was ten, afraid that I was going to flunk out of fourth grade, and how my mother had rocked me in her arms like a baby so expertly that I didn’t care about the passersby who saw. I told her of pretending to talk in my sleep so that my mother would hear and peek her head in, allowing me to see her face one more time.
The Woman in Black embraced me and shuddered. We might have cried; there was too much rain to tell. When I stood, her frail body rose with me. When I walked, I felt the unsteady pivot of malnourished legs within oversized sockets. When we passed the mausoleum and the hidden figure holding two gray sacks, I held her tighter and felt the brittle cage of her ribs interlock with mine.
Together we left the cemetery. I pushed open the tavern door with my foot and for some reason was not surprised when both Eileen and Floyd glided toward us with open arms and sympathetic smiles. Eileen took the dripping woman from my arms, while Floyd pulled out a chair for her and went for a towel, clicking the coffee maker on the way. I receded until the holiday glow of the bar lights was replaced with the underwater luminosity of a rainy dusk.
My father was four feet deep by the time I returned. I followed the small rivers of water that fell in waterfalls upon his laboring back. He dug with the Root—somewhat awkwardly, as the tool was not his own—and said nothing as pound after pound of mud fell in place on the unfurled tarp. When the top of the casket was uncovered and breached my father held out a hand, which I took because the ground was slippery. We pored over the two-year-old remains of Nathaniel Merriman, a man Harnett knew everything about but wisely kept from me, only pausing to point out the valuables, which I removed, and the particularities, which I noted, like the PVC piping the morticians had used to replace organ-donated bones so that the body held up better for mourners as well as mortuary staff leery of manipulating a flaccid corpse.
Rain made soup of the coffin. Harnett said we needed to move fast. It was too dark to read his face, but I knew how to decipher his pauses: I had done something good, maybe even impressive enough to tell Knox the next time he came through so that the reverend could pass the story along to Diggers everywhere. I allowed myself only a short moment of pride before holding out my hand for the Root.
36.
MY MAKESHIFT CALENDAR CONTINUED to devour the side of the sink, each groove in the plywood evidencing yet another day of unspeakable things. Horizontal slashes finished off sets of five. I counted them. Today was Halloween.
My path to school took me past lawns ornamented with foam gravestones spray-painted with novelty names like Dr. Acula and D. Ed Corpse. I saw little kids with backpacks and lunch boxes rush out front doors and pause to straighten these memorials and I almost laughed. For one day a year, even children pretended to cozy up to the dead. What everyone forgot was that beneath those fake stones were real graves—maybe eons old, maybe fresh. The dead were below everything and everyone and that fact did not change just because tomorrow these families would whisk these decorations into boxes and put those boxes into attics. They were fooling themselves. Eventually a man with a shovel would wait them out. Last night that man had been