July stepped off the road, behind a stand of honeysuck le. He’d become accustomed to his own company again and did not wish to share it with anyone or explain where he was going when he didn’t know himself.
After he had been walking for another half-hour, the faint yellow glow of a town in the near distance cautioned him to wait for morning before going further. He began looking for a place to pass the night.
Beyond the Words Cemetery a collection of old-growth trees ran downhill away from the road. He walked between several dozen gravestones, climbed the woven wire fence, picked his way through mulberry and hazelnut bushes, and found a small hollow of land covered with long grass, sheltered by an overhanging maple. In places, the moonlight fell through the branches and spotted the ground. The thick underbrush he hoped would announce the movement of any large intruders, and the rising slope of the cemetery blocked the view from the road. A short distance further down the hill, the rhythmic burbles of a stream could be heard.
July unrolled his sleeping bag. He folded his denim jacket for use as a pillow and ate one of the sandwiches from the paper sack. Then he drank from the water bottle, took off his boots, put his socks inside them, lay down, and zipped himself inside. He loosened the money belt that contained his savings from the past five or six years. Somewhere in the distance a barred owl loosed its mocking cry, “Who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-aaaaallllll.” The light from an occasional star found its way through the tree above him, blinking on and off with the shuttered movement of leaves in the wind.
Closing his eyes, he tried to place the experiences of the past several days in a reasonable perspective: the drive from Wyoming, the wandering conversation with the old man, the walk down the mostly deserted road. The dark foliage above him seemed to draw nearer and a spirit of fatigue invaded his senses, disrupting his review of recent events. Blocking it out, he focused his attention and struggled for several long minutes to keep the images in his mind from sliding through the cellar door of nonsensical stories, and fell asleep.
Hours later, he woke up with sudden, blunt finality. He knew why four stop signs had been placed on a remote intersection: there had been an accident. Some time ago, people had died at the crossing and two extra stop signs had been put there. They were erected as memorials.
And so it was: the dead forever change the living. Even those unknown to the dead are required to stop.
The sky was still mostly dark, but morning stirred beneath the horizon and birds rustled about in their lofts in the trees and bushes, conversing through murmured chirping.
Climbing from the sleeping bag, he put on his socks and boots, unfolded his jacket, and siphoned his arms through the sleeves.
Why had he come here, he wondered, and walked down the hill. At the stream, he sat on the bank and stared into the dark water.
The air—warm and thick—filled with noises, and mingled with burbling water, rustling birds, and the dry ruckus of squirrels came the distant sounds of humans. Doors slammed, vehicles started, and an occasional, indecipherable, barking voice could be heard. A heavy truck moved along the road beyond the cemetery.
Why had he come here?
Not everything has a reason, he told himself. His arrival amounted to a whim of circumstance, a living accident. In the same random manner he had arrived in Chicago, Sioux Falls, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Moose Jaw, and many other places. There was no reason.
At least this is what he’d been telling himself for years, but he could no longer quite believe it. He now suspected that somewhere between his actions and what he knew about them—in that vast chasm of burgeoning silence—grew a nameless need, pushing him from one place to the next.
Something shiny near the water’s edge caught his attention and he investigated.
A rusty flashlight, half covered in dead grass and dried mud. Most of the chrome had been chipped or worn off, the cylinder dented in several places.
He wondered to whom it belonged. Had it been intentionally discarded or simply lost? But the artifact refused to divulge any information about its owner. Yet someone had obviously occupied the same space that July currently inhabited, and this coincidence begged for explanation.
He absently rubbed the dirt from the glass lens with his thumb and pushed the corroded switch forward. To his astonishment, a beam of light leaped out.
It seemed impossible, or at least highly improbable, and he experienced an unexpectedly good feeling over having a valuable object in his hands. The dead had come alive. A personal connection grew up between the previous owner and himself: I have something of yours, something worth having.
But as soon as this cheerful happenstance had been announced, the light dimmed to faint orange. It flickered as though trying to communicate, glowed feebly, and went out.
He shook the flashlight and worked the switch forward and back several more times. Nothing.
He tossed it on the bank beside him, then picked it up and tried again. Nope.
Loneliness soon visited him, and though he had learned to cherish his own private loneliness, this particular feeling had a more universal character. The previous owner of the useless flashlight somehow participated in it. I have something of yours, and it is worthless.
July looked back at the dark water and understood that he had gone as far as he could. His life had grown too thin, and he was nearing the end of himself. He was living but didn’t feel alive. He knew no one in the sense of understanding them from the inside—feeling the center of their life—and no one knew him.
He had come here, he knew then, as a last stand—to either become in some way connected to other people or to die. He could no longer live as a hungry ghost.
He retrieved his duffel bag, climbed the woven wire fence, crossed through the cemetery, and began walking into Words. Whatever people he found there would occupy him in one way or another for the rest of his life. For better or worse, this place would become his home.
All of these memories visited July as he watched the panther pacing along the fence in the fog. To show the animal that he too knew how to play the game, he stepped out of the barn and walked toward it.
The animal stopped pacing, leaped effortlessly over the fence, and disappeared.
A NATION OF FAMILIES
VIOLET BRASSO HAD A PROBLEM THAT GREW BIGGER EACH TIME she visited it, and she visited it often. The familiar pains in her chest and back were coalescing into a single, clarified anguish: What was she going to do about Olivia? What would happen when she could no longer take care of her younger sister?
It was hard for Violet to imagine two people more different than she and Olivia. If archaeologists dug up the Words Cemetery thousands of years in the future, after all the tombstones had washed away, they would assume she and Olivia were from different subspecies. It would never occur to them that such variation issued from the same family.
Everything about Violet was large, not fat, but big. Though she was feminine to the core, her bones were twice the size of Olivia’s, her shoulders wide. Her brown eyes nestled deep beneath a sloping brow, lending her facial expressions the proclamation plain. Her hair, which she usually gathered into a bun, grew out straight and thin. Her hands were bigger than her father’s had been; she was tall and moved slowly. People had always
