took two steps more till my body twisted between them, my arms flung wide. She stopped and turned to father, who was squinting down upon me.
“He ought to know, Abicca,” he said.
“David—”
“Hush. I can’t let him wonder.” Father stood before me, enormous against the gray sky. His jaw looked heavy and thick. He said nothing as some townsfolk lumbered by us up the hill. His breath plumed white, paisleys somersaulting from his face, vanishing. At last he spoke low. “Edward was a breaker boy,” he said. “He climbed up to the breaker’s gears because he wanted to clog em. The boys do it now and then to choke the machine a while. But the grinders took his scrap of wood and his arm too and pulled him in.”
“Pulled him in?”
“Crushed him.” Father laid a hand at my cap. “A boy’s bones are like driftwood to a machine of that size.”
“David,” said mother, “please.”
That morning I stood on Rose Hill, encompassed by a solemn party of townsfolk, and felt death draw close quietly, like a cat at my legs. I watched nine blue flowers unfurl just above the icy grass, watched the frozen blades themselves grow warm, a deep green circle expanding about my feet.
No one seemed to notice it but me. The several adults around me stared grayly at their knees and mouthed silent prayers for the dead. A few children dawdled among the headstones, lunging and clutching at their own fuming breath.
So here is death, I thought. It’s a place where we stand. And I thought I must have died. But all those folk about me—they hadn’t died yet themselves. The grass remained frosted at their feet. I didn’t understand that. But I had died, that was clear.
Reverend Parry stood at the head of the grave, bundled to his chin in a frock coat, his hat squashed under one arm. His baldpate steamed as he read aloud from his little book. He spoke to the infinite charity of the Lord’s embrace. At Parry’s side stood his protégé of the time. A seminary scholar of about seventeen, he had a peaked look like a revenant: dark hair and pale eyes and a face of angular, jittering features. He bowed his head, his two sinewy hands folded before him. After a moment Parry turned and passed his small book to the apprentice, whispered something near his ear, and drew back.
The apprentice stepped to the lip of the grave. He knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt and sprinkled the coffin. Then he smiled broadly. “Whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.”
After the funeral the mourners mingled a few minutes, then dispersed and started drifting over the ridge toward Nortonville. I stayed with father and some other men who had volunteered to fill the grave, wandering among the white headstones while they set to work. Mother walked back to town with a number of women.
The sun had not yet appeared. The sky was a slate of cloud above our hills. I went up to the ridge-top and looked down over Nortonville. Houses breathed in that darkness below, thin chimneys respiring smoke. A few silhouettes of persons moved in the streets. The works stood very still.
From the Somersville valley at my back, a freezing wind barreled past me down the hill. Then a dark figure moved through the headstones, opened and shut the cemetery gate, and I saw Reverend Parry’s apprentice coming up the road. He had both his hands driven deep in the pockets of his frock coat. His head was down, face obscured under his derbyshire hat, and he seemed to move cautiously, as if the blighting wind at his back threatened to pick him up and fling him forward over the ridge. Then he stood beside me.
“You’re young Witherow, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve heard a great deal about your mother. She’s a woman of much prayer, they say. A good woman—as your father’s a good man.” He glanced back to the grave, where father stood shoveling dirt over Edward Leam, then turned again to our view of the village. A ribbon of white breath spilled from his nose. “Did you know young Leam?”
I nodded silently.
“Does his death trouble you?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. It didn’t seem to.” He withdrew his pasty hands from his coat and rubbed them briskly. “You’re a strong lad, aren’t you? What do you make of this ashes to ashes business?”
I kept silent, shrugged a little. He bore my reticence without any comment of his own, standing a long moment by my side, as though hesitant to leave me unattended on the ridge. We listened to the scrape and slap of the men’s shovels, the soft thump of thrown dirt. He laid his light hand on my shoulder and said: “Do you know why we bury our dead? Because they disappear from us that way. It’s in keeping with the Apostle’s teaching: We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” His pallid eyes coursed my face. Then he started down the hill. “Peace to you, young Witherow.”
I first learned the apprentice’s name that evening at supper, when father questioned me.
“What did Josiah Lyte have to say to you this morning, Asher?”
Mother paused from her coleslaw. “The apprentice? He spoke to you?”
“Yes,” said father, “they talked whilst I filled the grave.”
“He asked me if I knew Edward Leam,” I said.
Mother shot a glance at father, stared a minute at the fork in her hand as if remembering its use, then prodded the slaw about her plate. Father touched his beard.
“He said why we bury our dead,” I told them. “He said something the Apostle said.”
Mother’s fork fell still again. She and father seemed to take up a silent dispute. Father pushed his plate away. “There’s little to fear in a man of God, Abicca.”
“A boy of God, more like. He’s unordained yet, and talking with a lad of five about death and the grave.”
Father waved his hand. “I think he meant well. He just doesn’t know better. He’s just unsure—still an apprentice and all.”
“I don’t want unsure scripture spoken to our boy. That Josiah Lyte smiled this morning where he should not have done.”
“Yes,” said father. For a moment he worked his mouth glumly, as though mulling the image of that smile between his teeth, tasting it. “Well, who knows how God’s grace can fall on a man?”
“But to smile over the very grave? Who smiles over a grave, David?”
Father lifted his palms, the skin still splotched in places where the day’s filth would not come off. “I don’t know.”
“Mr. Lyte told me you’re a woman of prayer,” I said to mother, hoping to please her.
She gazed blankly at me, then cast another look at father as she rose. She cleared our plates in silence.
{2}
LATE EVERY AUTUMN THE RAINS CAME AND CAST A RICH BLUSH OF green over our
