The Hawley Book of the Dead (15 page)

“Moody Spring. Most of the trail runs by a stream. It’s very pretty.”

“But next time we’re going to the tavern, right? The haunted one.”

“We could go today, except that you decided on the cemetery, and that’s in the other direction.”

“Okay, okay.”

At the top of the drive I flashed a key card at the unseen electronic eye. The gate swung open and we rode out into forest.

The way we’d chosen dipped us down the wide stretch of Middle Road. It was the longest road in the forest, starting in a golden-arched beech and birch wood, then descending into pines and past a beaver pond. The road leveled out there, covered with soft drifts of pine needles. We had a long trot to the corner of Cemetery Road, and by the time I pulled Zar up, I’d realized that although he was in fine shape, I wasn’t. I knew I’d regret the months I hadn’t ridden and was already thinking of a soak in a hot bath. But the girls were not fazed.

“Let’s canter up the hill!” Grace led the charge, and the horses rolled into a fast canter, blowing and snorting, happy to be given their heads. At the top of the hill, the old graveyard loomed, with its headstones like rows of prehistoric teeth. We pulled the horses up and walked them through the rusty propped-open gate.

Fai threw herself off Rikka and walked her among the stones, reading to us. “ ‘Elijah King. 1792 to 1884.’ Hey, he was over ninety years old. And his wife, Abigail. She was ninety-
five
! But they had a baby and it must have died. It just says ‘King infant.’ ”

Grace had hopped off. “Hey, Mom, listen to this one. ‘Lavinia Hall. 1829 to 1878. Planted in the Realms of Rest.’ Like she’s a petunia or something.”

I had done this same thing with Jolon all those years ago, reading and exclaiming and laughing over the headstones. I remembered one with an open Bible on top, carved from stone. I found it. “ ‘Elizabeth Pool. Improve in the Present and Prepare to Die,’ ” I told the girls.

“That’s pretty gruesome.” Fai was petting a stone lamb.

“Trust Mom to find the creepy ones.”

That had been what Jolon said, too, that I liked the darkest epitaphs best. Probably I did. It was unsettling, how often I’d been thinking of him.
His memory haunted me here, ghostly, and I didn’t know what to do about his present self, over at the Hawley police station filing reports, or trolling the roads for speeders. I still felt a connection to him. That first loss dredged up by all the recent ones, maybe. I tried to shake off those thoughts. I’d hardly considered him in years. Why start again now? He had his own life, as I had mine. It wasn’t likely we’d meet very often.

“Hey, listen,” Grace called. “This girl was just a little older than us. She was only sixteen. We’ll be sixteen soon. ‘So Fades My Last Remaining Flower.’ That’s spooky, too.”

A cloud passed over the sun. The lace of leaves above us faded from a glowing bright lime color. A flat grayness fell over the cemetery. The birds stopped singing, and suddenly I smelled the familiar and troubling scent of lilacs. In a moment it was gone again.

“I feel shivery all of a sudden,” Fai complained.

“Jolon and I spent hours here.”
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
. “We even had picnics. We can go now, though. If you want.”

Another line of the elusive Robert Frost poem came to me.
But I have promises to keep
. Why couldn’t I get that poem out of my head? And what were the rest of the words? I couldn’t think of them.

“You had picnics right on the graves? Mom, that’s
disgusting
.”

“Our mom, the sicko.” They both laughed, and the mood lifted.

“Hey, did you ever call Jolon?” Fai asked me.

“I did run into him at the fair.” Literally.

“And?” Grace pumped me for information, suspicion glinting in her eyes.

“And nothing much. We talked for a few minutes. That’s all.”

“What do you mean, ‘That’s all’? What’s he like now? Is he fat and bald? I bet he’s fat and bald.”

“No. Neither. He’s … the same, I guess. And different.”

“You have to describe things better than that if you’re going to write scripts for other people, Mom,” Fai pointed out.

I thought about Jolon, how I could best describe him if I had to write him down. Synapses sparked in my brain, and I was thrust back into distant memory.

I lay under the irises in my mother’s garden. The shimmering blooms, the sword-shaped leaves enclosed me, the scent like heaven drifted in the air. I was six years old, tracing out animals in the big puffy clouds of June. A dog’s head, barking and snarling, an elephant raising its trunk. I laughed at the elephant, then heard a rustling at my feet, saw the leaves shift. I lay very still, thinking it might be a snake. Not that I was afraid of snakes, only curious to see the diamond head and flicking tongue. But instead of a snake, a boy’s head peered through the foliage. A head with shining long black hair.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Shhh!” The boy slithered up on his belly, very like the snake I had thought he was, and clamped a hand over my mouth. “There’s an owl just above us. A barred owl,” he whispered urgently. “You’ll scare it away.”

I looked up and saw something big and brownly gray on a branch. It didn’t look alive. Then it swiveled its head and gazed down at us with disapproving golden eyes. It shook itself, unfolded sweeps of wings. With a flap and a puff of warm air, it plunged through the trees and was gone.

The boy rolled onto his back. “Now you’ve done it.”

I scrambled up. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t do anything but ask who you are.”

“The owl thought you meant to ask
it
. They don’t like to tell. Keep themselves to themselves.”

I absorbed that news about owls, then said, “Well, now you might as well tell me your name. Unless you don’t like to tell, either.”

“Jolon.”

“Jolon what?”

“Jolon the groundskeeper’s son. And see, I’ve got a mind to keep after that owl.”

An only child, I was lonely. I had a mind to keep after the boy. But I
didn’t tell him that. Instead I said, “I’m Reve Dyer and I’m six. And I know where there’s snapping turtles.” That began our adventures.

Jolon’s father worked at planting and weeding and shoveling on the college grounds. A tall man with a deep voice, cigarette always clamped between his lips. I often saw him from a distance, from my perch on the garden wall overlooking the college. When he saw me on the grounds with my dad, he always pulled pretty things out of his pocket for me—a tiny bird’s nest, a piece of pink quartz, a jay’s feather. Jolon’s mother stayed at home, in their little house on the edge of the forest. When he wasn’t in school, Jolon stayed with her and all their animals until the summer we met, when three days a week she had a new job baking scones and muffins and breads at the tea shop in town. Then Jolon accompanied his father and roamed the streets and fields and woods around the campus.

On that first midsummer morning we went to the pond at the bottom of the garden, where we splashed somberly, looking warily for snappers, finding only a big wrinkly box turtle and armies of delicate green frogs. Jolon didn’t think them any replacement for the owl, but when I asked him to come to lunch, he shrugged and followed me when I ran up the hill to the house.

I thumped onto the porch, leaving black footprints. Jolon stopped in the yard. The screen door banged behind me, and I turned.

“Well, come on,” I called through the screen. “Don’t you want to?”

He looked down at his legs, caked with mud, dripping pond water.

“Come
on
.” And he did.

Before he met me, Jolon spent most of his time alone, too, following birds to their nests, tracking foxes and other wild creatures. When he came upon me in the garden that day, though, things changed. As soon as he got to the campus, he’d kick off his sneakers, crawl through a culvert, skin his knee, and fight his way through brambles—always arriving at my house in a dire state of disrepair. He never would knock on the door. Instead he stood in the garden, out of sight of the house. All he had to do was think of me, he said, and I would always then skim around the wall in a flowered cotton dress, shining like a bright penny, only for him.

“Hey,” I’d say, and tap him, touch his arm, then run from him, not looking back. To the meadow, the snack bar, to the sculpture garden, or the ice cream parlor at the edge of the campus. And he would follow, hanging back until I’d reached the morning’s destination. He’d help me pick flowers for a crown, take the hot dog or the pistachio double scoop I offered. Mostly, we did not speak. Mostly, we knew everything we needed to without speaking, as if we were young animals playing together.

Jolon lived on the border of Hawley Forest, with his parents and fairy-tale goats and pinto ponies, one red and white, one gold and white. The first horses I’d ever ridden, bouncing on their backs while Jolon laughed. The riding was like flying. It was our magic.

We grew up together, inseparable. By the time we were ten, we knew we’d be married. We talked about where we’d live, what the names of our children would be, names from the books we loved. Aladdin and Crusoe, Lucy and Aravis. But when we were adolescents, the cough that troubled his father became worse. It turned out to be lung cancer, advanced and so virulent he was dead in three months. After that, everything seemed to fall apart, in the slow-motion drift that accompanies sudden disaster.

Jolon gripped my hand all through his father’s wake and funeral, as if he’d never let me go, as if I could save him from a sea of grief that would drown him. We were both thirteen, the years overlapping. Soon he would be fourteen and pass me again. Although I knew he was sad, knew to tread lightly, I was certain nothing had really changed.

Two months later, just before the Fourth with its extravagance of sparklers and corn on the cob and staying up way past our bedtimes, Jolon came over for a tenting sleepover. Nan’s idea, to give him a respite from his mother’s stony sadness. I overheard my parents and Nan talking. “They’re getting older,” my dad said. “It might not be such a great idea.”

“Are you afraid for your daughter’s virtue?” asked Nan. “She’s just a child.”

“But children grow up so suddenly now, Mother,” my own mother said.

“Are you telling me she could have a baby?”

My mother hadn’t been squeamish about telling me the facts of life,
but this embarrassed me. I felt myself turning lobster red, even though I was hidden in the coat closet I’d whisked myself into when I realized they were talking about Jolon and me.

“No. Not yet. But maybe it’s better that at least they don’t have sleepovers anymore.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous. The boy’s just lost his father. They’re together every day, anyway. You can’t stop a moving train, is what I say.”

Then the talk turned to Jolon’s mother. How she might go to her sister in Fitchburg for a while, or stay and work for the college, cooking in the student center, but no one really knew. She spoke so rarely. When Nan had stopped by their house to ask about the sleepover, she’d merely nodded. Nodded and walked away into another room.

So Jolon rode over on his bike, with his tent and his flashlight bound behind him, and a sack of wild strawberries he’d picked. Nan helped us set up the tent on the porch, in the mosquito-filled late afternoon, as the sky roiled and darkened above us.

At dusk, Nan brought us ham sandwiches and iced tea just as the first drops started to fall. Thunder rolled over us slowly, lingering like church bells on a Sunday morning. The sky turned the color of the crayon in the box I used to mispronounce “violent.” And violent is what it seemed to me, purple-gray and threatening. I didn’t want to admit I was afraid in front of Jolon, who was calmly making bird and rabbit shadows on the tent walls. Lightning streaked white hot, made spangles behind my eyelids, and that decided me.

“Nan!” I yelled. Jolon flashed me his what-a-baby look, but I called until I heard the whoosh of wings that accompanied my Nan everywhere, then the thump of one of her hawks landing on the porch railing. My grandmother thrust her head between the flaps of the tent, her eyes keen, her braid swinging like a pendulum.

“Climb in and tell us a story.”

Jolon scrutinized me as if he could smell my fear, then said, “Yeah, Mrs. Dyer. Good night for a story. Tell us a scary one.” Nan was a terrific storyteller, and he knew it. I’d heard most of her stories, maybe all of them. I’d heard all the Revelation stories, and knew they were reserved
for family. That night I thought Nan would tell “The Hook,” or “Spanish Tom,” one of her scary non-family stories. The thunder cracked and boomed in our chests. She placed the flashlight under her chin. Her bony, disembodied face, just like mine but with wrinkles and spots, was thrown into harsh relief. “A long, long time ago, a family lived in Mount Holly, Pennsylvania,” she began and I gasped, dropped my sandwich. No one outside the family, not ever, was told the story of the first Revelation.

“What is it, Reve? You’ve heard this all before.”

“But …”

“We’re entertaining your guest, young Jolon, here.” Nan gave me a stern look, one she usually saved for misbehaving hawks. “As I was saying. They lived in Mount Holly. A mother, a father, and two daughters, twins with long, long hair. They owned a spread of land by a river, grew turnips and corn and winter wheat. Planted a row of heady lilacs before the cabin, which bloomed from spring until autumn. Their cows were penny red and milk white, maiden white. The girls wore white everywhere, even when they dug in the garden. The mother grew herbs, dyed her own clothes a heavenly blue never before seen in Mount Holly. When she was asked which plants she used for her dyes, especially that color like sky, she just smiled. Only the father made his way in the world with forthrightness, selling his cheese and grain, meeting the other men in the tavern of an evening. He, at least, was liked generally. But it wasn’t enough to save them.”

A ragged bolt of lightning cracked above our heads, slashing through the darkened sky. Nan’s hawk flapped and cried its alarm. It was her Swainson’s hawk, I could tell by the long, piercing
kree
. Suddenly rain sluiced down in silvery curtains beyond the porch rail.