“Stop it,” he said to himself. “You have got to stop it.”
He got up from the floor and rinsed his mouth with water cupped from the faucet. He spat until he no longer tasted the hateful bitterness of bile on his tongue. There was a packet of gum in his office and he went to get a couple of sticks to chew since he was sadly lacking a toothbrush. The sound of the mourners had faded away to the old familiar heavy silence of the funeral home and a glance at his watch confirmed what Tobias already knew: the funeral had begun. The doors to the parlor would be closed then and he could sit on one of the couches in the reception area. He was curious to hear what people had to say about his brother; he wanted to be a part of the proceedings, a fellow mourner, albeit one slightly removed from the herd.
“What are you doing out here?” Mr. Greene asked when he walked by and noticed Tobias sitting alone on one of the plush old Victorian-style sofas.
“Listening,” Tobias said.
At the moment, it was his father choking and stumbling his way through his thoughts and words about his son. It made Tobias’s heart twist in his chest to hear his father, usually so together and solid, on the verge of falling apart. He had never doubted that Mitch loved him, but had also always known that Hylas was his favorite and to have lost him so brutally was tearing Mitch Dunwalton apart.
Mr. Greene sat down beside Tobias, his snazzy pork pie hat clasped loosely in his long, dark fingers. He turned it around and around as he nodded.
“Why don’t you go on in there with everybody else?” Mr. Greene asked.
“I don’t—” belong there, Tobias almost said, but stopped himself. “I want to be out here.”
“Bullshit,” Mr. Greene said, not unkindly. “I done talked to Dawn Marie. She was all kinds of mad about you hiding off in your office.”
“I know,” Tobias said. “She thinks I’m doing it just because of the other people, but I’m not.”
“Then why?”
“Because…” Tobias shrugged. “It is kind of them and it’s kind of not. I’ve been with Hylas all week. Let them have their turn for a little while without me there freaking them out.”
“I ain’t never understood that,” Mr. Greene said. “You’re a nice man, Tobias. A good man. People’s just stupid.”
“Hylas said the same thing,” Tobias said.
“Well, that boy was a damn genius, wasn’t he?”
“He was smart,” Tobias agreed. “Smarter than most people probably knew.”
“But you knew,” Mr. Greene said. “And I knew. And your daddy and step-mama knew. Enough people knew.”
Tobias nodded and his shoulders jerked with a tearless sob. Hylas was the only person who could play word games with Tobias. He liked thought exercises and math puzzles. He enjoyed doing crosswords and reading classic literature—aloud, while doing all of the voices and accents. He could almost play the guitar and actually could play the piano, just like Tobias because Callie had taught them how. Hylas didn’t like gardening, but he knew a lot about it because he listened when Tobias talked about fertilizer and root balls and varietals and mulch.
All of that was lost to Tobias now and it really was killing him; he was convinced of it.
Mr. Greene patted Tobias’s shoulder and it was like he knocked some of the weight of his aloneness off with the gesture. In a lot of ways, Mr. Greene had been more like a father to him than his own. At least Mr. Greene could bring himself to offer a comforting touch when even Mitch had trouble doing that much a lot of the time. It made Tobias’s shoulders jerk harder as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hands.
“You’re gonna get through this, boy,” Mr. Greene said. “You mark my words. It’ll get easier.”
“Everybody keeps telling me that and it… it feels like lies,” Tobias said through his teeth.
“But it ain’t,” Mr. Greene said. “I swear to you, it ain’t.”
“I—” Tobias cut off when the sound of someone screaming angrily banged through the silence and startled him and Mr. Greene both.
“You motherfucker! How could you go and die like this? Fuck you, do you hear me?! FUCK YOU!”
There was a ripple of anxious murmuring from inside the parlor and Mr. Greene exchanged a look with Tobias. They both stood at the same time and went to the double doors to crack them open and peek inside.
Aaron Talley stood at the podium in a black-and-white shirt printed to look like a tuxedo. He was red-faced and furious, his face shining and wet with tears as he addressed Hylas’s casket, not the room at large. His golden brown hair was hanging in his eyes and he was shaking with upset as he flipped the coffin the bird.
“I don’t have any friends now, you son of bitch!” Aaron yelled. “Who’s going to talk to me now? Huh? Who? Fuck you, Hylas! Fuck you so hard!”
“That boy ain’t right,” Mr. Greene said.
“No, he is not,” Tobias said.
Yet for the first time in all the years he had known Aaron Talley, Tobias found he actually understood where he was coming from perfectly. In some ways, Aaron was like Tobias: not well-liked, he spent a lot of time alone aside from his partner, Jason and visits from Hylas. Unlike Tobias, Aaron Talley was volatile and mentally unstable, he cooked meth—it was one of the worst kept secrets in all of Sparrow Falls, with its many secrets—he was paranoid and mean as a damn snake. But Hylas had seen something good in him and stayed friends with him from junior high school right up until the night he died.
“He was my best friend,” Aaron was saying as Jason came up to the podium and put an arm around his shoulders to try and lead him away. “You were my best friend, you whoreson piece of shit!” Aaron kicked at the casket, but Jason, who was thankfully bigger and stronger than Aaron, half-picked him up and dragged him away just as the fight drained out him and he dissolved into the most pathetic mess of tears Tobias thought he had ever seen. “Fuck you, Hylas. Fuck you,” he kept saying as Jason led him through the side door near the podium that led into the hallway that would take them to the refreshment area or the restrooms.
“DICK!” Aaron yelled as the door swung shut behind them. The word was snot-stoppered and wet, but unmistakable.
Tobias ducked his head back out the door and covered his mouth, not sure if he wanted to laugh or cry over the horrible display of grief he’d just witnessed. In the end, he laughed; shoulder-shaking, belly-hurting gales of guilty laughter. It wasn’t appropriate and it wasn’t right, but he wasn’t laughing at Aaron or his sadness either. It was one of those things that hit people sometimes though; hit them and rattled them down to their core at the absurdity of it all. It made everything seem like a farce. Tobias didn’t really know why he was laughing other than knowing he had to do it or else he would start screaming. In one crazy outburst, Aaron Talley had summed up exactly what Tobias felt with surprising neatness and perfect, raw honesty.
“I am a bad person,” Tobias said when his laughter had faded to hiccups and snorfling bursts of giggles that he couldn’t quite tamp down.
“Naw, you’re not,” Mr. Greene said. He’d stood silently by while Tobias had his own version of a hissy fit. “You just needed a break or else you was gonna explode, boy. Laughter, no matter where it comes from, is a good thing. As long as you remember how to do that then you’ll be all right.”
“Jesus,” Tobias said as he sat back down. “Jesus.”
“I’m sure the good man is watching over you even if you don’t much believe in him,” Mr. Greene said.
Tobias had long ago learned not to argue with that kind of logic and he didn’t bother to do so now. He accepted it and let it roll over him, took it as the offer of comfort it was meant to be and didn’t assign any dogmatic truth to it.
“Thank you,” Tobias said.
Lenore, who had been quiet and keeping out of the way most of the time, finally flew down to sit on the sofa beside Tobias. He stroked her silky feathers absently and shrugged at Mr. Greene’s questioning look.
“You don�
��t have to say anything,” Mr. Greene said. “Gary done told me anyhow. He was real upset over her maybe having diseases.”
“I told him he doesn’t have to worry about that,” Tobias said. He realized that Gary had been conspicuously absent from Hylas’s funeral and started to ask where he was at, but Mr. Greene interrupted him.
“Well, you know Gary forgets he’s dead most of the time, so he don’t think like most spooks do,” Mr. Greene said. “I think it’s because he’s so… you know.” Mr. Greene twirled one finger around his ear and Tobias smiled faintly as he nodded.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I think that same you know is the reason he’s got a lot more juice than most of the ghosties around here. Hylas thought so, too, actually.”
“That, too,” Mr. Greene said.
Inside the parlor, they could still hear people murmuring to each other as one of the songs Tobias had chosen for Hylas’s funeral played. It was “Passenger” by Deftones, which was not “funeral appropriate” music, but it had been one of Hylas’s favorite songs. His funeral was not about what was considered appropriate, but about what Hylas had liked; a small-scale celebration of the things that had made him happiest. It didn’t matter that one of those things was a song that had always sounded to Tobias like it was about fucking in a car. Of course that was probably why Hylas had liked it, too.
When the song ended, Tobias stood up and straightened his lapels, he smoothed back his hair and made sure the elastic was snug. “That’s my cue,” he said to Mr. Greene.
“I’ll be right there in the back on Kleenex patrol with my girl,” Mr. Greene said. “I shoulda done that anyway, but you needed a friend more than they did.”
That pulled Tobias up short and he turned to look at Mr. Greene, gobsmacked by the kindness of what he’d said. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” Mr. Greene said, waving one elegant hand at him. “Now go on, do your thing and don’t let them bastards get you down.”
Tobias nodded and smiled quickly when Lenore lit upon his shoulder to provide her own form of support. Then he opened the double doors to the packed funeral parlor; it was so full there wasn’t room for everyone to sit and many people stood against the walls all around the room, two deep, shoulder-to-shoulder. Every head turned to look at Tobias when the door opened and he stared straight ahead, meeting Dawn Marie’s eyes as she made her way down the aisle with the intention of coming to get him. She saw him and smiled, a little sliver of a thing then turned and went back to her seat beside Nancy Lange.
The walk to the podium felt like it took forever, the soft rustle of clothes deafening in the close confines of the crowded room as people tried to shift farther away from him. He passed the pew holding his Great Aunt Peggy who suffered from dementia and pretended he didn’t hear her whispering to her daughter, his Aunt Leigh.
“Devil,” Great Aunt Peggy hissed in a frightened whisper. “He’s the Devil.” She glared at Tobias, chin quivering. “Devil,” she snarled at him as he walked by. She started to cry then, her soft old lady sobs even worse than those of a lost, frightened child.
Two months, seven days, four hours. Massive coronary in her sleep.
Tobias blinked and took a steadying breath as he pushed the intrusive thought away. He couldn’t process that crap at the moment, though he was surprised it was going to take that long. Great Aunt Peggy had been ill for a very long time; high blood pressure and diabetes on top of the dementia that was rotting her mind away.
At last, he reached the podium and stood there gazing out at all of the people gathered there. Not many of those people gazed back at him, but that was nothing new. In the front pew were his father and Callie, Nancy and Nick, Dawn Marie and Wes. Nick was pale beneath his tan, faded looking with grief and exhaustion; he was shaking faintly as he sat there. Wes’s eyes were wet and bloodshot, a crumpled black handkerchief on his knee, his fingers laced fiercely tight with Nick’s. On the other side of Nick, Nancy had a similar grip on his right hand. Dawn Marie was on Nancy’s other side doing the same. Beside Dawn Marie was Callie, then Mitch and on it went. It was a chain, human flesh meeting at the joints to give strength and offer comfort, each letting the other know, You are not alone.
Tobias stood beside his brother’s casket and there was no one there to hold his hand. He thought that was the way it ought to be, that it made sense that nothing should have changed, that he should always be the one standing by himself. If Hylas had been there, he would have held Tobias’s hand if he’d wanted him to. Up there though it was only him and Lenore who looked out at the crowd with the glass-sharp eyes of a judging angel.
He cleared his throat and began to speak.
“Hylas loved words,” Tobias said. “His favorite word was ‘sagacious’ though he always said he would never manage to be that. He liked writing words, drawing words, speaking words—as many of you know very well, I am sure. What he loved to do most with words though was read them; anything he could get his hands on, Hylas devoured words like they were food. For Hylas, I think, maybe words did nourish him. That’s why I have decided to read you all a poem instead of retelling you all the things that made Hylas so wonderful. Instead, I am going to give you some of the words Hylas loved so much. It took me a while to decide which ones to choose, but in the end, I think I made the right choice. It’s a poem by Dylan Thomas, who Hylas said was hit-or-miss, but when he hit, it was always a home run.”
Tobias reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out the folded sheet of printer paper he had put there after he’d dressed. He cleared his throat again then began to read, barely glancing at the paper because he had much of it memorized already from reading it time and again in the days since he’d picked it.
“And death shall have no dominion,” Tobias read. “Dead man naked they shall be one/ With the man in the wind and the west moon;/ When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,/ They shall have stars at elbow and foot;/ Though they go mad, they shall be sane,/ Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again;/ Though lovers be lost, love shall not;/ And death shall have no dominion.”
He read through the entire poem to its very end, concluding with, “Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,/ And death shall have no dominion.”
When he finished reading, Tobias nodded to the room, some people sitting quietly—stunned or confused, he did not know—others still weeping openly. Callie had her head on Mitch’s shoulder and he pressed his lips to her temple.
“Thank you,” Tobias said. He stepped down from the podium and nodded at Helen for her to play the final song, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings, Op. 11a” as performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was another of Hylas’s favorite pieces; his tastes had been wildly varied and while he and Tobias hadn’t always agreed, “Adagio for Strings, Op. 11a” was one they both loved.
He grazed the tips of his fingers lightly along the edge of Hylas’s coffin as he went past on his way back down the aisle where he stood at the back of the room with Mr. Greene. Halfway through the piece of music, Dawn Marie got up and came to stand beside him and put her arm around his waist, head leaning against his arm. For just a little while, Tobias allowed himself the comfort of taking her hand and letting himself be glad to feel her squeeze back.
After the song, it was time to take Hylas outside to the waiting hearse that Mr. Greene would drive back to Gallagher House as close to the small cemetery on the property where the pallbearers would carry him the rest of the way. Tobias and his father took one side, Nick and Aaron took the other and Lenore perched on the casket. They walked Hylas, heavy as lead in his pretty blue box, out to the car. Aaron had calmed down considerably from his outburst earlier, but Tobias could still hear him muttering curses under his breath as they went until Nick told him to cut it out.
Aaron hushed, but he wasn’t happy about it and Tobias didn’t think he should have been shushed anyway. Everyone dealt with loss in their own way, some people in a more insane manner than others, but
it was all the same in the end. Seven stages, pit stops on the way to acceptance and moving on. Of course, some people got stuck at one stage or another and Aaron currently seemed to be firmly stuck on “anger”.
Tobias didn’t know where he was at in the seven stages, but he did know he didn’t feel stuck. He felt adrift.
They stepped outside with the casket and every one of them froze at the sight before them. Crows were in the trees around the funeral home, a horde of them; more crows than Tobias had ever seen in any one place before. The limbs of the oaks and mock pears were laden with glistening black bodies, all of them still. All of them silent. Every one of them watching the proceedings.
“What the fucking shit is this?” Aaron asked.
“A lot of damn birds,” Nick answered.
The silence of the crows was eerie; they were noisy, raucous animals, rarely quiet especially when gathered together as they were. Crows talked back and forth with one another, speaking their black crow tongue and scolding anyone or anything that got too near their territory. The crows gathered in the trees were silent, the gleam of their eyes glittering like jewels from the shadows of the tree limbs they rested on.
“Motherfuckers are staring at us,” Aaron said.
“At least they aren’t trespassing,” Nick said.
“Eat me, Lange,” Aaron snapped.
“Let’s move this along,” Tobias said.
“Yeah, guys, get the lead out,” Mitch said though he didn’t sound as sure about it as Tobias did. “We need to get this done.”
“But the goddamn crows,” Aaron said.
“Worry about the crows later,” Tobias said, calm as ever. “Right now, Hylas is important. So move, please.”
Aaron glared at him then glanced at Lenore who looked back and tipped her head to the side, studying him.
“Ugh,” Aaron said. “What the fuck, man?”
“Dunno,” Nick said. “Weirdness is afoot.”
“Shut up,” Aaron said.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 19