As they finally departed and left the church behind, Elton John on the radio sang “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” and within a couple of minutes, Finton was watching the Laughing Woods roll past his window in a grey blur. Father and son didn’t speak until they zipped past the Battenhatch house.
Finton noticed the car was straddling the yellow dividing line.
“You’re over the line,” he said, and the car seemed to right itself, spitting rocks on the passenger side. The blinker came on and the car turned right, up Moon’s Lane. “Miss Bridie says you knows something about what happened to Sawyer.”
The car came to a halt at the top of the lane. The radio clicked to silence, and the two Moon males sat quietly, peering out through the splattered windshield that was becoming obscured by snow and rain.
“Why would she say that?” Tom placed a hand on the door handle, but seemed reluctant to pull it.
“Do you?” Finton gripped the passenger handle, squeezing.
Tom looked sharply at his son, his dark blue eyes appearing… what? Hurt? Angry? Afraid?
“What do you think, Finton?”
“I don’t…”
“I’m your father, b’y.” He looked straight ahead at the falling rain. “What’n hell do you think?” Eyes closed, his head slumped forward.
Finton mumbled, “I don’t know,” and pulled the handle. He slid out of the car and slammed the door behind him, though he hadn’t meant to close it quite that hard.
Before he stepped inside the house, he looked back. His father was still sitting there, gripping the wheel with both hands, forehead leaning on the wheel. Finton felt a pang of regret and considered running back to the car to apologize. But he couldn’t.
“Did your father take you to mass or to the tavern?” Elsie didn’t even look up from the floor, but kept sweeping, slowly, to take the strain from her aching back.
“Mass.”
“Yeah, sure he did. What was the sermon?”
“Liars and drunks and people who don’t go to church.”
“What about them?”
“They’re bad.” Rather than look her in the eye, he watched the sweeping motion of the long-straw broom. Elsie was almost religious in her ritualistic gathering of dust, hair, furballs, and bits of lostness to her dustpan, which she had placed on the floor. On the stove, pots boiled with their lids clamped down. “Can I go?” He was already inching away from the kitchen, towards the hallway to the bedroom.
She eyed him warily. “Go on—but don’t you be tellin’ lies on account of yer father no more, no matter what he tells ya.” She banged the dustpan against the side of the garbage can, then pulled hairballs from the broom’s mouldy straw. “God sees ya.”
He was already shutting the bedroom door behind him in order to throw off his good clothes and climb into his traipsing garments.
“Where are you off to now?” his mother asked as he flew from the bedroom and tiptoed around the perimeter of the linoleum, clinging for support to the kitchen countertop. She didn’t look up at him, but remained focused on her purification ritual.
“Out.”
“Sunday dinner’s in an hour.”
He pretended not to have heard her, but closed the door behind him and pulled on his parka as he went. The image of the steaming pots had already begun to fade from his mind. Sunday dinner meant all of the foods he disliked were gathered on one plate once a week. There’d be overdone roast, boiled-to-mush potatoes, and gloppy brown gravy that made him gag. But the worst was the slimy green cabbage that smelled like his father’s farts, and the bland parsnips and carrots with turnip greens. The only part he liked was the enormous amount of salt his mother poured onto every food that she cooked to satisfy her husband’s dead taste buds. Finton usually managed to force down some of this gunk only if he forsook the gravy and drowned the works in ketchup.
His father was still sitting in the car, staring ahead, an unlit cigarette protruding from his emotionless face. Fighting his guilt, Finton ran for the woods.
The path to the foxhole offered thorny passage, narrowed and cluttered with chaotic brambles and gnarled roots concealed by a thin sheet of snow, already threadbare from the morning’s rain. Brown limbs and grey forest flesh poked their way up through the shroud like victims of a mass premature burial. While rabbits and field mice shivered beneath fresh-frosted bushes, juncos, robins and chickadees called from snow-tipped branches. The air was calm, but a ghostly fog had nestled in the woods, requiring the voyageur to recall the details hidden in the mist.
After Finton had trudged for half an hour, the trail halted at a clearing where the forest sunk into a spoon-shaped hollow. Perhaps the foxhole had once served as fortification for soldiers. Or maybe, as was occasionally conjectured by Finton and Skeet on hot summer days as flies buzzed around their heads, the hole was the resulting crater from a meteorite that had struck the earth a million years ago and killed tons of dinosaurs. Right now, however, it posed as a gravesite.
Finton’s breath caught in his chest as he shuffled forward to view the corpse. Sawyer Moon lay on his stomach in the foxhole, his pants and jacket frozen solid and caked in snow. The small patch of blood on the visible side of Sawyer’s skull was congealed like refrigerated partridgeberry jam. His petrified face angled towards the ground and rested in a shallow cavity filled with frozen rainwater and snow.
Finton called out through the fog, his breath billowing, but the clammy air deadened his voice. Even when his foot buckled a soggy branch, the corpse didn’t stir. Somewhere above, a robin redbreast offered a long, chirpy song while the boy stood over the body, watching, and Sawyer just lay in the muck with his head down a hole.
Finton lowered himself to one knee and, with the tip of a red mitten, touched one of the corpse’s shoulders. It barely moved. As he whispered the dead man’s name, Finton caught a whiff of motor oil. For a long time, he held his breath, punctuated by the caw of a crow overhead. Then the silence shifted towards expectation, the feeling that Sawyer would suddenly awaken.
Rain plinked the ragged snow and the corpse alike. Finton felt only a conscious detachment as if he were looking down on himself kneeling by a dead body. He heard the dancing raindrops, the cries of birds, and the world’s silence. He thought of his mother preparing Sunday dinner. He saw his father looking lost behind the wheel, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
He stirred himself and focused on the body face down in the foxhole. Not so long ago, he’d wished that Sawyer was dead. Even dreamt about it. Shame and horror coursed through him while, above him, the robin continued to sing, its joyful noise bordering on sacrilege.
Who killed Cock Robin?
I killed Cock Robin. With my wicked thoughts.
His gaze fell upon a stiffened hand sprawled in the snow. If he stared at it long enough, it might even move. Live, he thought. But then he whispered, “Stay dead.”
A finger twitched. Finton blinked. Opened his eyes. All was still.
He took a deep breath, then swiveled around and darted into the woods. He kept on running until he reached the bungalow. Without even stopping to beat the snow from his boots, he burst inside to tell the news.
His mother was draining potatoes at the sink while Nanny Moon was setting the table. “About time,” said his grandmother. “We almost had to send out a search party.”
“I found him,” Finton blurted.
“Who?” she asked. But if the colour draining from her face was any indication, she already knew.
Elsie glanced at him over her shoulder, as steam rose up from the colander. “What did you find?”
“Sawyer—in the foxhole. Dead.”
The room seemed to spin. But there wasn’t time to sit down. His father came out from the living room and studied Finton’s face. “Well, that’s that.”
Nanny Moon blessed herself and said, “Lord have mercy on the poor man’s soul.”
“Amen,” said Elsie, who astonished Finton by likewise casting the sign of the cross and han
ging her head. “Rest in peace.”
It was Clancy who insisted they immediately call the police. While Tom seemed confused into silence, neither Nanny Moon nor Elsie doubted it was the right course of action. Homer, on the other hand, had slipped down the hall and back into the bedroom. While Clancy took charge, Finton observed, feeling as if he had landed in a dream.
Within twenty minutes, a police car had parked in front of the Moon bungalow. With the afternoon growing dark, Finton, Tom, Clancy, and Elsie, led the two officers to the foxhole. While the policemen tread carefully and marked off the area, Finton stared at the corpse and tried to guess Sawyer’s last thoughts. Maybe he’d thought of his mother or the bone-chilling cold. Perhaps he’d thought about bigger things—about God and the devil, or about heaven or hell. There was so much he didn’t know.
Although he couldn’t erase the image from his mind, he was no longer certain Sawyer’s finger had twitched. It was all too easy to convince himself it had moved, just as it was easy to believe it hadn’t. But the corpse, he noted with relief, didn’t seem to have budged an inch.
As the police conducted their business, the entire scene was all a blur. They asked Tom a few questions, but he was bewildered and appeared to know nothing of how his friend had died. One of them came over to where the boy was standing and asked him if he was okay. Finton nodded, but he felt awful. His world had been turned inside out, and he suspected he would never get past this moment. He didn’t like staring at a corpse. Didn’t like that someone he knew was dead. Didn’t like being surrounded by serious faces and worried eyes. Didn’t like that there were questions no one could answer.
“It must have been scary, finding a body.” The officer spoke softly while Finton nodded and stared at the ground.
“Why’d you come up here anyway?”
The question made Finton queasy, like he was being accused of something. “I always come here.”
“Did you know Sawyer?”
“I guess.”
The officer smiled grimly. “Did you like him?”
“Not really. Nobody liked Sawyer.”
“Did anyone hate him enough to kill him?”
“Almost everyone.”
“Did you?”
Finton looked at him. The officer had a dark complexion and kind eyes, the kind of face he felt he could trust. “I didn’t hate him,” he said and, as the officer looked perplexed, Finton added, “I was just afraid of him.”
The officer asked him only a few more questions, and Finton was left feeling that he had done something wrong. His father came over and said, “That’s enough, Kieran. He’s only a boy,” and it was only then that the officer nodded and said, “Sure.”
Finton suddenly realized who the officer was. He’d overheard his mother and grandmother discussing how the oldest Dredge boy had gone away to the police academy. So this must be him. Officer Kieran Dredge. Alicia’s big brother.
“Can we go now?” asked Tom.
“Sure, go on and take the boy home. But we’ll be in touch.”
That night, when things had calmed down and he had gone to bed, his heart still pounded. He couldn’t erase the images from his mind. The frozen body. The twitching finger. “I think it moved,” he whispered to Jesus, who stared back at him from the picture on the wall. Wind-driven raindrops lashed the side of the house, making it shudder.
Finton’s head throbbed.
Ordinary Days
“No,” he said when his mother asked if he’d slept well. He’d struggled waking up but somehow finally managed to pry himself out of bed. His brothers were already up, as evidenced by their empty, unmade beds. For the first time since he could remember, Finton neglected to turn back the covers and smooth them over on his own bed. There was no time even to comb his hair or wash his face. It was all he could do to get dressed and drag himself to the kitchen.
The place still looked the same as when he’d gone to bed last night, but somehow it was different. Although the fire was lit, the linoleum was cold. The brown-stained wallpaper with the pattern of red-combed roosters still looked as though it would peel from the walls if he gave it a tug. The black top wood stove with the chipped enamel still squat like an errant spaceship against the back wall, and the hulking, white refrigerator hummed and groaned, its left side hugging the cupboards so that several of the drawers were permanently shut. His father sat at the kitchen table, but as soon as he saw Finton, he stood up, pulled on his coat, muttering about needing to bring in some firewood before going to work.
Despite the sameness, the world looked out of order, sharper than usual. It was more than just the fact that he’d seen a dead body—something bigger was wrong. The difference he saw and felt came from within his own mind. Finton suddenly was more in tune to the edges of things, more observant of the simple, clear lines that separated the floor from the stove, his father from his chair, his mother from the air around her, keeping her upright and present. The oatmeal in his bowl was lumpy and pasty, with bitter, brown flecks. He pushed the bowl away, practically untouched.
He went to school that day with a sense of being different from everyone else. On the bus, he heard Skeet talking about the police finding Sawyer, but was too preoccupied to care, watching his friend’s lips mouthing words, a particle of spit forming before he rubbed his lips together and got rid of it. His eyes contained a hilarity that disgusted Finton slightly. No one should be so overjoyed when someone died. When Mary got on board, he watched her eyes for a sign that they now had a bond, but, among the crowd, she didn’t seem to notice him. And yet he saw everything about her—that her boot laces were tied too tight, that the front of her slacks had been ironed to a sharp crease, that each of her eyelashes curved gently upwards, that one of her cheeks had six freckles while the other had five, and her small nose pointed slightly upwards. And she seemed sad.
When he lined up behind the other children for entry into the school, he found himself noticing every loose button on every coat, every speck of salt on a pant leg, each individual smile and frown, every emotion in every eye. He sensed a melancholy in Miss Woolfred as she stood on the top step, clanging the handbell. He knew she’d argued with her boyfriend that morning about whether she should take a teaching job in the city. The information caught Finton by surprise; he hadn’t even known she had a boyfriend. But he wished there was something he could say to make her feel better.
When Mary and Dolly stepped in front of him in the lineup, he was startled as if jolted from a daydream, but the hyper-reality still pulsated within him. Mary turned and said, “Hi, Finton.” But his concentration was divided, and he could only manage to say, “Hey.” The thoughts came quickly: Dolly was menstruating, and Mary was anxiously awaiting the beginning of her first time. Someday. She was aware of him standing behind her, smelling the No More Tangles shampoo in her hair as the breeze riffled through it. He felt her anxiety and suddenly remembered the math test.
His first thought was to run away. But he resisted the urge, believing that if he departed now, he might find it too easy to perform the same disappearing act every day that followed. No, it was important to stay here today, to remain grounded in this existence. Otherwise, he might never feel rooted again.
As he sat at his desk, staring at the test paper, he doodled some pictures, toyed with writing his name backwards, diagonally and horizontally, and stared out the window from time to time. He wondered what the police were doing with Sawyer’s body. He suddenly got the urge to start writing a story, and he jotted the first line: I’ll never forget the day I found the dead body of my sworn enemy.
“Finton?” His head jerked at the sound of his name. Miss Woolfred stood over him, a disgruntled look on her face. She was still upset after her fight with Garnett… yeah, Garnett, and was in no mood for a challenge. Her eyes were stormy green, and she had a tiny pimple on the side of her nose, which she had squeezed before coming to work, but its redness hadn’t altogether faded. Realizing the gravity of the situation, he quickly put
the story away, figuring he would finish it later.
“Are you going to do your test?” she asked.
“Sorry,” he said and tried to focus on the paper in front of him.
“Sit up straight,” she said, setting her hands on her hips. “And don’t give me that tone.”
“I never used a tone.”
“One more word…” she closed her eyes, inhaled and exhaled, then opened them again. “Just do your test, Finton.”
He drew a deep breath of his own and straightened up in the desk, heels clanging against its metal base. He grasped the pen, set his eyes on the exam. He didn’t look at his teacher again until the test was done. It was too much to expect that he would figure out the problems, so he just filled in the blanks with made-up answers. Meanwhile, he kept thinking about how to finish the story he’d started.
He didn’t relax until the bell rang, ending the first period, and he was able to breathe. Skeet’s leg reached over and kicked Finton’s heel.
“You okay, Moon?”
“Leave me alone.”
“It’s just not like you to talk back to a teacher—especially ol’ Woolfie. I thought you were her pet.” His sarcastic grin was irritating. “What’s eating you?”
“You, okay?” Finton stood up and jammed his books under his arm, then stomped away and left Skeet with his jaw hanging. From the center of the room, Mary turned her head and watched him leave, her brown eyes filled with concern.
Rain fell to the pavement as Finton fled the classroom and then ran from school. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas holidays, but it felt like Doomsday. It was usually a three-mile walk back to the house, but Finton knew a shortcut through the woods. About a quarter mile from the school, he left the road and veered into the trees, slowing his pace only when he’d reached the thicket. He could hear the occasional car zipping by on the wet pavement, but he couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see him.
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