Tunnel Vision

the pain.

Zack moved closer to his father’s ear. “Dad, I saw the deaths of Volker and Gretch.”

His father turned his head a little but said nothing.

“I saw them get killed.”

Still no reaction.

“Was that you?”

After a moment, he nodded. “In the letter to Adam. He’ll know what to do.”

“You killed them.”

“Revenge is the worst evil,” he whispered. “Why I became a brother.”

“You joined because of them?”

“Wanted to find peace. Forgiveness. But couldn’t protect me from myself. Maybe He was angry I abandoned you and Mom.”

“Who?”

“God.”

“Why…”

“Maybe killing them was my penance for not being your father.” Then he added, “Not blaming God. Should have forgiven them. But couldn’t. Also couldn’t forgive myself … abandoning you.”

“I forgive you.”

He nodded as tears ran from the corners of his eyes. “You’re a better man than I ever was.” He struggled to catch his breath. With what little strength he had, he squeezed Zack’s hand.

Zack kissed him on the forehead.

“Love you, sport.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“Take good care of your mother. Good woman.”

Then he nodded at the cigar box in Sarah’s lap. He wanted Zack to flip through the photographs. He did, and when he reached a particular one, Nick stopped him. The shot was of a granite pinnacle in the woods. Zack recognized it—a place he had visited with his brother and father years ago. What he had glimpsed in suspension.

“Where you take me when it’s time.”

Nick again motioned for Sarah to find another photo. When she reached the correct one, he fingered it from her hand. It was a duplicate of one pinned to the cabin wall above his bed—a shot taken in front of their Carleton home. The four of them: Nick, Maggie, Jake, and Zack, who was maybe eight at the time—all beaming from a happier era. With shaking fingers, he slipped the photo into his breast pocket to be buried with him.

Zack kissed his father’s forehead, a great ache racking his heart.

Maybe another hour passed as Nick’s breath became shallow, and he closed his eyes for the last time, his chest laboring for air.

They sat with him in silence, holding his hands, Zack on one side, Sarah on the other. And after several minutes, he fell into a deep sleep.

Maybe an hour before dawn, it was over. His last breath was a gentle Ahhhh—as if he had found something that he’d once lost. Then his chest ceased moving, his heart silenced, and his pulse faded to nothing.

Zack waited several more minutes, still holding his father’s hand. Soon it lost its warmth as his body became something ceremonial.

Then Sarah moved to the other side of the room as Zack washed his father’s body with a towel and water from the dispenser. They redressed him and wrapped him in a blanket. One more time, Sarah read the burial instructions.

Then they opened the cabin door to the chilled gray air.

Somewhere beyond, a loon screamed.

88

Zack was numb as they headed out.

It wasn’t just grief. On some wordless level, he felt abandoned. All the preternatural glimmerings seemed to have vanished in the morning chill. His father had died, and something had left Zack’s soul—a small glow that had burned in the background of his consciousness like a filament.

Overhead, behind the black snarl of trees, the iron gray light began to seep out of the sky.

Zack carried his father, now a swaddled bundle, through the woods, following Sarah with the flashlight. Nick had lost so much weight from dehydration that he felt like a child in Zack’s arms. Probably the way he had felt when his father had carried him so many times up to his bed when he had fallen asleep on the family room couch.

They moved along a vaguely worn path through the brush and fallen tree limbs, guided by Sarah’s flashlight. The air was heavy with predawn moisture and the mustiness of the soggy ground. Out of the mud and muck of decay, new shoots were coming up.

After maybe ten minutes, they arrived at a huge granite outcropping that rose maybe twenty-five feet in the air to a conical peak, looking something like a hooded figure hunched up out of the scrub. He knew this monolith. He had climbed it in his little-kid sneakers. Tabernacle Rock. The name came to him from nowhere. He didn’t know if that was the name given by earlier settlers or his father. But he had brought Zack and Jake here as children.

At the base of the rock was a pile of dead branches and leaves. Beside it sat a pile of dirt covered by a plastic tarp. Zack laid down the body of his father, then he and Sarah removed the covering. Below was the grave hole his father had made—about six feet long, a couple of feet wide, maybe three feet deep. It had been dug with functional intent—roughly squared off, though not lined with rocks or pruned of stray roots.

Zack removed the plastic tarp to reveal the overburden as well as a short-handled military-surplus shovel. With a small shock, Zack realized that his father—a man who had no friends, who had hermitted himself away up here in the middle of nowhere—had dug his own grave with the sole purpose of relieving Zack of the unpleasant task. More than that, its careful planning anticipated Zack’s journey here—maybe even his summoning. There were so many unknowns, so many unseen things.

Before they lowered the body into the hole, Zack folded back the blanket to reveal his father’s face one more time. Perhaps he was imagining it, but it seemed to hold a look of peace.

He kissed him on the forehead again. “Good-bye, Dad.”

Then, with tears blurring his eyes, he folded the blanked over again. Sarah pulled him in a tight embrace. They both were crying now. For a long moment they knelt beside his father’s body, pressed against each other.

Sometime later, Zack picked up the shovel and began to bury his father.

Sarah stood beside him with the flashlight. Overhead, birds were awakening to the dawn. He could hear their chirps and twitters as he covered his father’s feet and legs, part of him in disbelief, another part feeling a strange fulfillment.

He was almost finished when he turned toward the path, half expecting to see something emerge from the cut in the trees.

“What’s wrong?” Sarah said.

“Nothing.” The trees made a dark inert wall. “Just a deer.”

Zack went back to the shovel.

He buried his father while Sarah sat silently on the tarp, her knees pressed to her chest as she watched. Neither of them said anything. The gray light grew steadily brighter.

When he was finished, Zack covered the mound with fieldstones, making a small cairn. According to his father’s wishes, he did not place a cross of sticks on it. Instead, with Sarah by his side, her arm around him, he said a silent prayer.

“Good-bye, Dad. May you find peace wherever you are.”

“How touching.”

Sarah screamed.