A Song for Issy Bradley (14 page)

“OK.” He tried to think of a song about birds. “ ‘In the Leafy Treetops’ has got some birds in it.”

“No.” Issy smoothed the bird’s grave with the tip of her sneaker. “A good one.”

“I don’t know.” He’d had enough. He was ready to do something else. Then Issy started to sing.

Jacob gave her a brief round of applause.

“Do you think that it was a mummy birdie or a daddy birdie?” Issy asked as they pushed themselves out from behind the hedge and onto the lawn.

“We could have checked for a willy,” he said, “but it’s too late now. Maybe it was a child bird.”

“Oh.” She looked surprised. “That
would
be sad.”

J
ACOB THINKS HE
can remember the spot where they buried the bird. At first he isn’t sure if he will do anything. He stands next to the hedge, daring himself. Then he dashes back to the shed quickly, as if he is worried that something might stop him from fetching the shovel.

Spade in hand, he pushes through the hard and scratchy crisscross weave of branches and into the space between the wall and the hedge. He starts to dig. Nothing at first. He moves along a bit, his elbow grazing the wall. He disturbs more soil and he can suddenly smell clay and damp and he stops digging for a moment as he remembers.

H
E DIDN
’
T WANT
to go to the funeral. Mum was upset when he said this. As he had expected, the funeral was just more church, different from Sundays only in that they had to sit in the front row, except for Dad, who sat up on the stand as usual so he could do the service. There was an opening and a closing prayer, there were some hymns, and Dad did a talk about not being sad while tears coursed down Mum’s face and sprinkled into her lap, watering her hands.

Afterward everyone drove to the cemetery. There was a deep hole in the ground. When Jacob asked about it later, Dad said it had been dug by a mechanical digger. Someone had arranged a fake grass carpet over the pile of earth that had been dug up, and Jacob
stood on a corner of it, scratching the soles of his shoes along its prickles.

Dad, Al, and two of the funeral men carried the coffin from the car to the graveside. When they put it down on two planks of wood that had been placed over the hole, Mum started to make a noise. Zippy rested her hand on Mum’s arm but Mum didn’t stop. Dad moved away from the coffin and went to stand next to Mum. He put his arm around her shoulder and the noise continued. It was a bit like a dog howling and it sent a zigzag of fear from Jacob’s heart to his willy. A squirt of wee leaked into his pants and spread in a warm circle. Dad shushed Mum but she wouldn’t stop so he fished in his suit pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He stuffed it in Mum’s hand. She just stood there, so he lifted her hand and held it over her mouth for her. Eventually he let go and Mum carried on holding the handkerchief over her mouth, but the noise leaked past its edges.

Dad had to say a prayer to dedicate the grave. He said it loudly so people could hear him over Mum. It went on for a while, and Jacob wished he would hurry up. After Dad finally finished, the funeral men made the coffin go down. Someone walked up and threw a handful of soil into the hole and Mum stopped making the noise, moved the handkerchief away from her mouth, and said, “
Don’t
do that.”

People left quickly. Dad said Mum should say thank you to everyone. She said she was going to see them all again in a few minutes for the food, back at the chapel, but she walked with Dad toward the parked cars anyway.

Jacob moved off the plastic grass and onto the real stuff. He edged toward the hole. Issy’s coffin was a long way down and it was spattered with dirt. He knelt at the lip of the grave. The earth was damp, and he could feel wet soaking into the knees of his best trousers.

He had been hoping for a miracle. Sister Anderson was always going on about them on Sundays in Primary lessons. Some miracles
happened a long time ago, like Noah’s Ark. Not many people seem to have thought about it, but once when he couldn’t sleep, Jacob had imagined how much poo the animals must have made and how much trouble it must have been for Noah to stop them all from eating one another. It had made him realize that Noah’s Ark was an ace miracle, right up there with Santa Claus’s flying sleigh. There were other good miracles from the olden days, like the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, and Balaam and the Talking Ass—a miracle with a rude word in it. Dad was always saying that miracles happen all the time. Sister Anderson thought so too. She said that Brother Anderson’s cancer treatment was proving to be a modern-day miracle. Maybe she was right, but Brother Anderson’s head looked like an enormous egg, and Jacob had been imagining a much bigger miracle than that for Issy: one that would see her alive AND with hair.

His underpants and knees were wet and cold, and a damp, sticky smell was wafting out of the hole in the ground. It reminded him of the bag of modeling clay that Mrs. Slade kept on the side, next to the sink, in the school classroom. He looked at the soil speckles on the coffin’s little silver plaque. It read,
Isabel Rachael Bradley
. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to throw dirt on Issy.

Sister Anderson crouched down next to him. “It’s very sad, isn’t it?” she said.

“It was meningitis,” he told her.

Mum had made him say the word again and again.

“People will ask, so you must learn how to say it,” she said.

He practiced until it stopped sounding like a sticky-eye infection—“mengy-eye-tus”—and started to sound more like “men-ingiantis,” a band of giants who had magicked Issy into the Celestial Kingdom.

“Are you all right, dear?” Sister Anderson asked.

He wanted to say he was fine, he wanted to tell her to go away, but his bottom lip began to wobble and it wouldn’t stop, even when he bit it quite hard. Sister Anderson helped him to his feet. She
folded her arms around him and pulled him into her squashy tummy. Her dress was dark and velvety. His tears soaked into its softness as she patted his head gently and said, “It’s such a shame.”

When he had finished crying he stepped away from her and a rope of snot stretched from his nose to the front of her dress, like a bridge.

J
ACOB UNEARTHS A
feather and knows that he is in the right spot. The feather is matted and patchy, which is disappointing, but he keeps digging. As he digs he thinks about the apples, hiding in old shoeboxes in the cupboard under the stairs. He knows that like the apples, the bird will look different when it is uncovered and he hopes the transformation will be a good one.

There are more feathers, though most of them are not feathery anymore. He digs especially carefully now. He has seen an enormous book on Egypt in the school library. There is a section about digging stuff up. There are pictures of the tiny brushes people use so as not to damage anything. The corner of his spade grazes something hard. Jacob puts it down and begins to move the soil away with his fingers. Here is the bird’s back—he follows its knobbles, brushing the dirt away. The bird is mostly bones. This is not the transformation he has been hoping for. The bird’s insides, and most of its outsides, have melted into the soil. Its skeleton is a browny-gray color. It’s hard, but brittle, like crisps. He wipes soil from the bird’s wing-twigs, which, stripped of feathers, look like dirty icicles. Lastly, he moves the soil away from the bird’s skull. The eye has gone. In its place is a hole that seems far too big. His finger may even fit inside. It does.

B
EFORE
I
SSY DIED
, Mum used to read a fairy tale each night from the old, fat book that she had been given as a present when she was a little girl. Afterward she would get the Bible and the Book of Mormon picture books out and read a story from one of them too. Jacob’s favorite fairy tale used to be “The Wolf and the Seven Goats.”
The best bit was the part where the mother goat opened up the wolf, and her kids tumbled out of his big furry belly. “The Wolf and the Seven Goats” is just made up. But the story of Jonah and the Whale is a real-life miracle. Jonah got stuck in a whale and survived. In the Bible and the Book of Mormon there are even better stories than Jonah’s, stories about people who died and came back to life, like the story of Lazarus. Jacob remembers it because there’s a bit where Lazarus is
so
dead Martha says, “He stinketh,” and after they read it, Mum occasionally said, “Who stinketh?” when someone farted. There’s the story of Jairus’s daughter too. Everyone thought she was dead and people were crying but Jesus told Jairus to believe; and when they reached the house there’d been a miracle and the girl wasn’t dead anymore, she was just sleeping.
“With God all things are possible”
—that’s what it says on Mum’s painting of a bird with its wings spread wide in flight on the kitchen wall. Miracles are like birds, they zip through the gap between heaven and earth on hollow-boned wings. You can’t catch them with traps or nets or special glue, you have to use words.

Before the funeral, the men brought Issy home in their special car. They put her in the living room and Mum sat with her for hours and hours. When Mum went to the bathroom, Jacob snuck in all by himself and stood on the arm of the sofa to have a proper look. Issy didn’t look as much like herself as he had expected; she seemed smaller and a different color. He kissed her, whispered, “Wake up,” and waited, but nothing happened.

After the funeral, Jacob asked Dad why he hadn’t tried to resurrect Issy. Dad said that priesthood holders can’t just go around resurrecting everyone. He said Heavenly Father decides if people live or die. Jacob replied that it wasn’t always like that—sometimes people believed and then miracles happened. Dad said it was true, but not in Issy’s case. He said, “Ours is not to question why.” He said, “Sometimes believing things will turn out all right in the end is a better kind of faith than the faith that raises people from the dead.”

Jacob felt cross. “So it’s
all right in the end
for Issy to be dead?”
he asked. “Didn’t you even try to make a miracle happen? What’s the point of being in charge at church if you can’t do miracles?”

Dad said he would understand it better when he was older. But Jacob understood something right then. If he wanted Issy back, he was going to have to make it happen himself.

T
HE BIRD
’
S EYE
socket rings the tip of Jacob’s finger. He has been praying for the bird to come back to life for a whole week. It seemed sensible to start with something little, with a small miracle, for practice.

Sister Anderson once said that faith can be as small as a seed. She brought some mustard seeds to Primary for everyone to see. They were tiny. Jacob knows that his faith is bigger than a mustard seed; it’s at least as big as a toffee bonbon, maybe bigger.

He lifts his finger away from the bird’s eye socket and picks up the spade to rebury it. Then he thinks. He needs to check on the bird again, maybe more than once. Each time he will have to dig it up and, if nothing has changed, bury it. As the autumn sets into winter there will be days when it is raining and days when the ground is stiff with frost. It will be much easier if he can find a safe place to put the bird.

He pushes his fingers into the soil on each side of the bird’s chest and lifts gently. The head is the first thing to fall off, followed by the wing that the cat didn’t damage. He is left holding a little cage of ribs and as he lifts a finger to support the spindly, dangling legs, they break off too. He thinks he might cry as a rush of salty prickles gather at the top of his nose, but he doesn’t. He puts the ribs down and pulls the bottom of his T-shirt out with one hand. Then he picks the little pieces of bird up, one at a time, and drops them into his makeshift pocket. He bends to sniff the soily bones. They smell of earth. They definitely don’t stinketh.

He doesn’t kick any apples on his way back up the garden. If he is lucky, he will get up to his room without being noticed. Dad, Zippy, and Alma have gone to Liverpool to get the chapel ready for
General Conference. It’s Mum he needs to watch out for. On Saturdays she usually cleans. According to the song they sing in Primary, “Saturday is the day we get ready for Sunday,” and Mum always says that Sundays are easier to face with a clean house. But today she might just be sitting at the table in the kitchen, wet-cheeked and dribbly-nosed, staring at nothing.

Jacob approaches stealthily, ready to duck if necessary, but he can see through the window that the kitchen is empty. He opens the door, then sneaks past the kitchen table and past all the vases and jam jars stuffed with smelly flowers. He tiptoes down the hall and turns to climb the stairs. He is halfway up when he hears the toilet flush. He has to pass the bathroom door to reach his bedroom. He starts to run. The bird pieces jiggle in his T-shirt. He hears the rush of the taps and the clink of the towel ring as Mum dries her hands. He is quick. His door closes as the bathroom door opens, and he listens to Mum pad slowly down the stairs as he kneels on the carpet, behind the door, his heart jumping.

He isn’t sure where to put the bird. Mum will be certain to find it if he puts it in the wardrobe. He could hide it in the bottom of Issy’s toy box, but touching her stuff makes him sad. He shuffles across the carpet on his knees until he reaches the bed. He places the bird pieces on the floor and then lies down on his tummy and commando-crawls under the bottom bunk. Under the bed he discovers a couple of plastic soldiers who have deserted and one of Issy’s books that must have slipped down the side of her bunk. He moves the book and the soldiers out from under the bed, and then he carefully deposits the bird bits in the far corner.

After he crawls out from under the bed, he kneels again. He folds his arms, bows his head, and says a prayer.