by Kody Boye
“This is it,” Kevin said, falling to his knees in front of his two youngest children. “Eagle said he’s not gonna make it much longer.”
“Is he awake?” Arnold asked.
“Yes.”
“Daddy, isn’t there anything you can do?” Mark begged, eyes gleaming with tears.
“We’ve tried everything, Mark. There’s nothing more we can do for him.”
The youngest boy nodded. Reaching up, he wiped the tears from his eyes and hardened his face as much as he could, locking his eyes in a way that surprised Kevin. In that moment, he saw a whisper of the boy’s future self in his eyes, on his lips. He saw a man with hollow cheekbones not from frailty, but life, and he saw a strength that rivaled that of the Native American man standing nearby, sadness in his eyes and a frown on his face.
“You can tell him anything you want to,” Kevin said, taking both of his son’s hands, “but I want you to tell him you love him above anything else.”
“Dad,” Arnold started.
Kevin cut him off. “I know you would’ve said that even if I hadn’t have told you, Arnold, Mark. I know that you love your brother more than anything else in the world, but I want you to tell him how much he means to you, that you care about him. He knows this. He knows you love him, but I want him to hear it. He’s not going to live for much longer.”
Standing, Kevin squeezed Arnold and Mark’s hands and looked to Eagle, who set a hand on each of the boys’ shoulders. “When you go in,” the Native said, “you need to be as quiet as you can. Lean down and whisper in his ear, squeeze his hand to let him know you’re there. He might not be able to talk to you, but he can still hear you.”
“Yes sir,” Arnold said.
Kevin opened the door and both of the boys went inside.
As the two stood beside the bed, talking to the brother they would soon not have, an unbearable guilt began to overwhelm Kevin’s mind as he looked at his oldest son. In the pale light that pierced through the curtains—dancing across the room and slicing it in two—the boy’s skin seemed ashen and grey, darkened at the joints and hollows and gleaming like stone long since lost to the earth’s darkest places. Some would have thought he looked like a gem, an unnatural rock formation crafted in the ugliest shades of grey, but to Kevin, he could see nothing but his son, a human being slowly succumbing to a disease that seemed worse than death.
A hand pressed against his back.
Kevin tensed.
Eagle sighed.
Faintly, almost hidden in the shadows of the room, Kevin saw his oldest son reaching out to his brothers.
The hand that greeted him was not that of a seventeen-year-old boy.
No.
No boy’s hand was wracked with age, bent in two like a claw extending to grasp its prey, nor did his joints buckle under the immense pressure of death and swell in the absence of blood. No. No boy looked the way Jessiah did, with his eyes closed and his pupils long gone, and no boy ever would, could, should, as for that to be the case would be to determine that all men are created equal—that age, as long-lasting as it happened to be, was not without distinction, and that life, in its bitter progress, was not rife with challenge.
“Kevin?” Eagle said.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Are you ready?”
Kevin looked down. Eagle held a bowl of soup in his hand.
Is anyone ever really ready?
He whispered, “I am.”
Kevin knocked on the door. “Guys,” he said, “we need to let Jessiah get some rest now.”
“All right,” Arnold said. He looked down at his older brother, took his hand in his, then leaned down to whisper in his ear before pressing a kiss to his cheek. Mark did the same.
Both times, Kevin noticed, he heard three faint words before his sons stepped away from Jessiah’s bed.
I love you.
It broke Kevin’s heart to watch his boys leave the room.
“Jessiah,” he said, stepping up to the bed. “Buddy?”
“It hurts,” the boy whispered.
“I know, baby. I know.” He linked his hand into his son’s and wiped his thinning hair away from his face. “Eagle’s gonna help you eat something, ok?”
“My stomach hurts too, Dad.”
“I’m so sorry, Jessiah.”
“It’s…not…your fault.” Jessiah squeezed Kevin’s hand. The effort felt like nothing more than a child on his first day born. “Dad?” he asked.
“I’m here,” Kevin replied.
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” Kevin said. “More than anything else in the world.”
In the final moments spent at his son’s side, Kevin leaned forward and pressed his lips to the boy’s brow.
I love you, Jessiah.
Eagle stepped forward. “I’m going to help you eat,” he said, pulling up a chair to the bed’s side. “Whenever you’re ready, Jessiah.”
Kevin squeezed his son’s hand one last time.
As he left the room, a scream fighting its way of his chest, he realized that he couldn’t even say goodbye.
An hour later, Eagle came downstairs and stepped into the room. The grim look on his face froze Kevin’s heart, but confirmed what he already knew. “He stopped breathing ten minutes ago,” Eagle said. “He’s gone.”
Mark wailed.
Kevin bowed his head. It’s over.
He tried to contain himself as his sons cried beside him. “It’s ok, guys. He’s not suffering anymore. He’s…he’s in a better place.”
At this, Kevin cried as well.
Is he really? he thought. Is he really in a better place?
He couldn’t possibly know. All he knew was that, in his mind, he’d done the right thing. He’d let his son go, eased his suffering.
Leaning forward, Kevin pushed himself to his feet and looked out the window, toward the sole maple tree that stood at the top of their hill.
“Come on,” he said, looking back at his two sons.
“Where, Dad?” Arnold said through his tears.
“We need to go dig the hole, guys. Before it gets dark.”
Neither boy said a word.
In the brief moment that followed, Kevin thought they hadn’t heard him, or were too paralyzed by their grief to move. Then they both stood and followed him out the door.
In the fading light of the cold afternoon, Kevin thrust the blade of his spade into the ground and tried not to think that it was his son’s grave he was now digging. Brow furrowed and eyes halfway shut due to the glare that hovered over the trees, he slammed his foot onto the flat edge of the blade and grimaced when he met resistance, but quickly shook it off when he threw the rock into the pile. Nearby, bent double and shivering, his two sons repeated the process, first thrusting, then tugging, then depositing the soil into the slowly-growing pile of dirt.
It seemed completely unlike them, to be digging a hole for a person. People weren’t buried by people—they were buried by machines, mechanical gods created only to serve those who created them. People were supposed to sit back and watch as the events of death unfolded before them, as first the viewing was presented, then the funeral. Afterward, when they stood at the foot of death, that of which Kevin and his sons were now digging, they were supposed to pay their final respects, to say goodbye in the presence of wake to the person they would not see again until they themselves died.
Will we though? Kevin thought. Will we?
Unnerved by his doubt, he straightened his posture and traced the cross over his heart, desperately wishing for the crystal beads his father had passed down to him at his thirteenth birthday. They would be in his bedroom, he knew, locked away in a little wooden box inscribed with everything he would ever need to know.
In that very moment of weakness, where he thought his legs would give out and he would scream, he caught Eagle tracing the crown of the hill, waving a stick of incense and muttering something under his breath.
A prayer?
> The smell of lavender and bark drifted on the wind as the air shifted and a slight breeze crested the curve of the hilltop.
“Dad?” Arnold asked.
“What?” he asked.
“That smell…”
“It’s Eagle,” Kevin explained, looking down at the hole before them. Though not deep enough, they couldn’t keep going. The maple’s old roots had already stopped them once before. “I think we’re done, guys. It’s not deep, but it’ll work.” Kevin raised his hand and waved at Eagle, beckoning him.
Eagle stepped forward just as the last of the incense began to burn down. “I need you to help me get him,” he said. “I don’t want the boys to have to do this.”
“Nor do I,” Eagle said, turning his eyes on the boys. “Arnold, Mark, would you go to the edge of the woods and gather any bark and stones you can find?”
“Yes sir,” Arnold said. “But bark?”
“We’re going to use it to cover your brother. It’s an old tradition.”
“Ok,” the boy said. “Come on, Mark.”
“Daddy?”
“Go with your brother,” Kevin said. “Be careful. Don’t go into the woods.”
Before Mark could speak any further, Arnold grabbed his arm and began to lead him down the hill.
“Your boys are stronger than I thought they would be,” Eagle said, turning to start toward the house with Kevin.
“They’re stronger than I am,” Kevin sighed, reaching up to brush tears away. “Thank you, Eagle.”
“For what?”
“Incensing the hill.”
“It’s not something my people did, but I know it’s important to you.”
“I haven’t practiced for years.”
“Don’t fault yourself. He is with us no matter what anyone says.”
Kevin pushed the door open and waited for Eagle to enter before starting up the stairs. As they ascended, Kevin stared at the photos that lined the walls. Before, when they were still together, his wife used to say that for every year of their children’s lives, they would place a photo slightly higher on the wall, to commemorate their lives, to mark for the world and family and friends to see their triumphs through adolescence and their conquest for the future. It seemed funny that his wife had wanted to do such a thing—to adorn the walls with images of the past. In hindsight, however, Jack found each and every image a cruel contrast to his horrific suffering.
When they came to the final stair, Kevin looked at the picture of Jessiah on his seventeenth birthday and broke down into sobs.
Eagle pressed his hand against Kevin’s lower back. “Come. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Taking a moment to console himself, Kevin closed his eyes, stepped off the final stair, then made his way into the room in which Jessiah had spent the last week of his life. It took him a moment to compose himself, to prepare for what he might see, but when he looked up at the bed, he felt a startling sense of peace at the sight that lay before him.
Eagle was right; Jessiah had simply gone to sleep.
“We’ll wrap him in the blankets,” Eagle said, stepping forward to pull the sheets free from the mattress. “You don’t have to help if you don’t want to.”
“I do,” Kevin said, stepping around the other side of the bed. He looked down at his son and pressed a hand to his face, tracing his cheekbone with the curve of his thumb. When he came to the boy’s ear, where his hairline began to recede to his sideburn, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to the boy’s cheek.
I love you, he thought, more at peace than he could have possibly been. I’m sorry it had to end this way.
No father deserved to outlive his son.
With that knowledge in mind, Kevin bent down, freed the sheets, then pulled them over his son’s body.
When Eagle tied the sheets together, Kevin lifted his son into his arms and pressed Jessiah’s head against his shoulder.
He turned, walked toward the door, and made his way down the stairs.
By the time they stepped up to the tree, Arnold and Mark had returned with the rocks and bark.
“This is it,” Kevin said, looking up at his boys. “This is where we say goodbye to your brother.”
Mark sniffled, tears coursing down his face. Arnold reached down and took his little brother’s hand in his own.
Stepping forward, Kevin lifted his leg, then pressed his foot into the bottom of the hole before maneuvering himself down into it. Once inside, he gently laid his son’s body into the natural part in the roots, all the while taking extra care to ensure that his head would not fall to the dirt.
“Goodbye, son,” he whispered.
After crawling out of the hole, Eagle bent down, took a piece of bark, then began to set it over Jessiah’s body.
“Dear God,” Kevin said, taking his own piece of bark and setting it over his boy as his sons and Eagle continued to do the same. “Please, hear my plea. Please take my son into your arms and take care of him until we meet again. I could not save him in life, but I know you can in death. Please, watch over both him and my family and guide us to the path you think is right. Amen.”
“I need you to help me with one last thing,” Kevin said.
“Anything,” Eagle replied.
“The barn. She’s still there.”
“Who?”
“Diana.”
He stood in the darkened space within the barn. Trembling, the gun in his hand, he stared at the single enclosed stall and tried to imagine the horror that stood behind the stable door. He knew, in essence, what was there—with its perfect hooves and its bashful eyes, it had once been nothing more than a horse, a beautiful creature Jessiah had fallen in love with when he was only thirteen years old. She’d been a foal then, still awkward on her too-long legs and her too-heavy body, but she had been beautiful, so beautiful, in fact, that she had captured his son’s heart with a single look and made it her own. Maybe it was that beauty that had ended his son’s life. Maybe it was her eyes that had sealed his fate.
“I don’t know what’s in here,” he said, looking up at Eagle, who stood in the open entryway. “If something happens, I want you to take the kids and go.”
“Where?”
“Idaho. It’s on the map. I marked it down.”
“I understand.”
“She killed him,” Kevin said. “She killed my son, Eagle, and I’ll be damned if I let her get away with it.”
Reaching forward, Kevin lifted the nail out of place and watched as the wooden plank swung out of view.
A snout appeared from the darkness, then her eyes.
Is this it? he thought. Is this really her?
The creature inside Diana’s stall opened her mouth.
When the sound came out of her throat—when it entered Kevin’s ears and killed every ounce of happiness that could have ever possibly existed within his heart—he knew that the thing that stood before him, no matter how changed or decayed, was Diana.
Kevin raised his gun.
And fired.
CHAPTER 12
A week later, after a complicated series of supply runs and waiting for the rain to bestow them with a necessary supply of water, the first part of the wall was up. Situated behind the three houses on the ground that separated the farm from the yards, it stood an astounding fifteen feet tall and looked exactly the way Jamie had initially envisioned it—sloped toward the ground and capped with an impressive display of miniaturized stakes which stood like sentinels to guard their eternal wasteland.
Standing at the foot of the wall and trying desperately not to breathe in the concrete dust, Dakota watched as Jamie nailed the final corner in place.
He did it. He really fuckin’ did it.
“Hey!” Jamie called down, waving the hammer in his hand. “Look at it!”
“It looks awesome!” Dakota laughed. “I can’t believe it worked.”
“‘Course it did! Why wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Dakota chuckled, smiling as Ja
mie descended the ladder. “What about the other walls?”
“All they need is concrete and they’ll be done too.”
“How much longer will it take?”
“We could probably be done today if we’re lucky,” Jamie said. He slipped the hammer into his tool belt and ran a hand through his sweaty hair, turning his head to look toward where Steve and Ian continued to mix concrete. “I just wish we had some kind of pulley system. It sucks having to do it by hand.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Dakota offered.
“Not particularly. I mean, if we had more than one ladder, sure, you could help pour the shit. Right now though, there’s not much anyone can do. I’ve already got Steve and Ian mixing and passing the stuff up to me. Nothing much anyone can do other than watch.”
“Yeah,” Dakota sighed. “I know.”
“Can you do me a favor, if you don’t mind? Get me a bottle of water and check on Erik. I think he’s getting another headache.”
“Again?”
Jamie sighed. “It fucking sucks, especially since he can’t really treat himself in the state he’s in.”
“I’ll check on him,” Dakota nodded, pressing a hand against Jamie’s upper arm. “Don’t overwork yourself, ‘k? Let Steve and Ian pour the stuff if they offer.”
“I will,” Jamie said.
Inside, Dakota poured some pretzels into a small bowl, retrieved a bottle of water from one of the lower cupboards and rummaged through the medicine cabinet until he found the migraine medicine. Once sure he had everything Erik could possibly need, he made his way out into the living room, then down the hall, toward Jamie’s old room where Erik was now staying.
At the door, Dakota knocked, leaned forward, then asked, “Erik? You awake?”
The bedspring creaked and Erik mumbled something under his breath. A brief moment later the door opened to reveal Erik, naked, save for his boxer shorts and a look of complete misery.
“Hey,” Dakota smiled, hoping to push past the initial discomfort of Erik’s appearance. “How are you feeling?”
“I still feel like shit,” Erik said.