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“I’ll find your surprise later. I promise.” Jeffrey was smiling again when he came out of the room.
“I know you will, Jeffrey,” I said with confidence. “Just be patient.”
Still, we waited a long time for Esra, becoming impatient.
“We probably shouldn’t have let him try to do it himself,” I said, growing concerned by Esra’s absence.
Atticus shook his head, nibbled a cracker. “No, the man wanted to bury his wife. We have to respect that, no matter how much help he might need.”
“How’d he get her in the casket to that spot anyway?” I wondered.
“Grandma June died down there,” Jeffrey spoke up. “Grandpa said she knowed she was gonna die, said she went down there in the night when Grandpa was sleeping and she died on the ground by the tree.” He stopped to chew and swallow a cracker, wiping stray crumbs from his lips with the edge of his hand. “I miss my Grandma June.”
Then he cried again, out of the blue—his emotions often came and went like summertime popup showers. I started to set my plate aside and go over to comfort him, but before the bottom of the plate touched the table, Jeffrey’s tears had already dried up. He stuffed another cracker in his mouth and chewed cheerily, as if he’d never been crying.
Esra finally made his way back to the treehouse, and it was dark when Atticus and I finally headed for home.
“I’ll come tomorrow on Tuesday. Sorry I missed today.”
“It’s okay, Jeffrey.” I bent to place a kiss to his cheek. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Esra gave Atticus another baggie of bullets before we set out.
“I never want to be buried in a box,” I told Atticus when we were home. I was lying atop his chest; he squeezed me in the fold of his arm.
I raised my head, leaving the lulling sound of his heartbeat for a moment so he could see the gravity in my eyes.
ATTICUS
“When I die, Atticus,” she went on, “I want you to wrap me in a sheet—(I flinched)—from head to toe, front to back, and maybe tie a flowered vine around my head. But promise me you won’t put me in a box like June.”
“Why’s that?” I stroked her hair.
“I want to be laid right into the cold ground so that I can feel the soil all around me, suffocating me, taking my breath from me and the pain from my heart, the same way your arms do when you hold me at night.” She looked into my eyes, and I looked back into hers; I brought up my other arm and wrapped them both tightly around her; I kissed her chin, her lips, her soul. “When I die,” she continued, “I want to feel like you’re still there with me, holding me, just like you are now.”
My hands smoothed across her back, up her arms and over her shoulders until they found her cheeks where I stopped and held them. I peered deeply into Thais’ eyes.
“When you die,” I whispered, “you won’t need the soil to hold you, Thais, because I’ll be right there next to you holding you myself.”
54
THAIS
I woke unexpectedly in the night, alone in the bed, so I left the bedroom in search of Atticus. He was nowhere inside. I gazed out the front window first, but only saw Mr. Graham sitting on the porch in his rocking chair.
Atticus was not on the back porch, either.
I called out to him from the top step, peered through the black trees, but there was no sign of him, and so I headed straight for the pond.
He was sitting on the bank, his form silhouetted against the dark.
I sat down beside him on the grass, drew my legs up like his, our knees touching. For a long time, it seemed he never blinked. Shards of light danced on the surface of the pond; the gentle lapping of water against the shore was soothing and lyrical, but I sensed Atticus probably took no comfort from it. Something was bothering him. I wanted to talk to him, to touch his shoulder, but instead, I continued to gaze at the glittering water with him, instead.
After a while, Atticus spoke in a composed voice, “My sisters and my mother were raped and murdered by men I thought I could trust.”
I gasped quietly.
“Two years after The Fall,” he began, “on a cold night in November—that was when my life changed forever; that was when I lost my faith in God. It wasn’t the chaos in the streets after The Fever hit, or the collapse of society, or even when my brother died—it was the day that God killed my family.”
