But he was right; it was spooky. The church was dark, empty; the sky clouded over, its stars hidden, its moon just a vague shimmer above the horizon. What little illumination there was to guide our way drifted in from the surrounding town, entering the cemetery weakly, more glow than light, not strong enough even to pull shadows from our bodies. The darkness among the graves was so complete it was like something liquid; walking through the gate, I felt as if I were descending into a lake. I watched Mary Beth disappear ahead of us, leaving only the sound of the tags on his collar, clinking lightly together whenever he moved, to prove that he was there at all.
We found our parents' graves by memory rather than sight. They'd been buried in the very center of the cemetery, just to the right of the path. When Jacob and I got there, we stepped off into the snow and stood before the tombstone. It was just a simple square of granite, serving as marker for both of them. Etched into it were the words
JACOB HANSEL MITCHELL
JOSEPHINE MCDONNEL MITCHELL
December 31, 1927-
May 5, 1930-
December 2, 1980
December 4, 1980
Below this were two blank spots, sanded smooth. These were for Jacob and me: our father had bought four plots before he died, to ensure that we might all be buried together one day.
I stood perfectly still before the grave, staring intently at the stone, but I wasn't thinking about our parents, wasn't remembering their presence, or grieving for their loss. I was thinking instead about Jacob. I was searching for a way to enlist his aid in our plot against Lou. That was why we were at the cemetery tonight: I was reminding him of the bond we shared as brothers.
I waited several minutes, letting the silence build around us. I was wearing my overcoat, a suit and tie, and the cold bit at me, the wind pressing through my pant legs like an icy hand, firm, insistent, as if it wanted me to step forward. My eyes moved furtively from the stone to the dark shape of the church, then sideways toward Jacob, who stood beside me, swaddled in the tightness of his jacket -- silent, massive, immovable -- a giant red Buddha. I wondered briefly what he was thinking about, standing there so still: perhaps some private memory of our parents, or of Mary Beth Shackleton, or of the mysteries of fate, and the gift it'd brought him, the doors it promised to open now, finally, when his life already seemed so far along. Perhaps he wasn't thinking of anything at all.
'Do you miss them?' I asked.
Jacob answered slowly, as if rousing himself from sleep. 'Who?'
'Mom and Dad.'
There was a brief silence while he thought this over. I could hear the packed snow beneath his boots creaking as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.
'Yes,' he said, his voice sounding flat in the cold air, honest. 'Sometimes.'
When I didn't say anything, he went on, as if to explain himself. 'I miss the house,' he said. 'I miss going over there on the weekends to eat dinner, and then sitting around afterwards to play cards and drink. And I miss talking with Dad. He was someone who listened when I spoke. I don't know anyone like that anymore.'
He fell silent. I could tell that he wasn't quite through, though, so I just stood there, staring up at the sky, waiting for him to go on. Off to the west, above the church's spire, I could see the blinking lights of two planes moving slowly toward each other. For a second it looked like they were about to collide, but then they passed. It was only a trick of perspective; up in the air they were miles apart.
'Dad would've understood what we're doing,' Jacob said. 'He knew the importance of money. 'It's all that matters,' he used to say, 'the blood of life, the root of happiness.''
He glanced toward me. 'Do you remember him saying stuff like that?'
'Only toward the end. When he was losing the farm.'
'I kept hearing him say it, and it seemed so simple that I never really listened. It wasn't until just recently that I began to understand. I thought he was talking about how you can't eat without money, or buy clothes, or keep warm, but that's not it at all. He was talking about how you can't be happy without money. And not a little money either, not just enough to get by; he meant a lot of money. He was talking about being rich.'
'They were never rich,' I said.
'And they were never happy, either.'
'Never?'
'No. Especially not Dad.'
I tried quickly to retrieve an image of my father happy. I could picture him laughing, but it was drunken laughter, shallow, giddy, absurd. I couldn't come up with anything else.
'And they got sadder and sadder as their money ran out,' Jacob said, 'until finally, when it was gone, they killed themselves.'
I glanced at him, startled. Suicide had always been Sarah's theory; I'd never heard my brother even consider it before.
'You don't know that,' I said. 'They were drinking. It was an accident.'
He shook his head. 'The night before it happened, Mom called me on the phone. She said she just wanted to say good night. She was drunk, and she made me promise her that I'd get married someday, that I wouldn't die without having had a family of my own.'
He paused, and I waited, but he didn't go on.
'And?' I asked.
'Don't you see? She'd never called me before. That was the first and only time. Dad was the one who always made the calls. She telephoned me that night because she knew, because they'd just finished planning it out, and she realized she wouldn't see me again.'
I tried quickly to analyze what he'd just told me, to search for holes. I didn't want to believe him. 'They would've done it differently if they were committing suicide,' I said. 'They wouldn't have driven into a truck.'
He shook his head. He'd already thought this through on his own; he could anticipate my questions. 'They had to make it look like an accident. Dad knew we'd need his life insurance to cover all his debts. It was the only way he could think to pay them off. The farm was mortgaged -- they had nothing left of any value except their lives.'
'But they could've killed the truck driver, Jacob. Why wouldn't they just've driven into a tree?'
'Driving into a tree still looks like suicide. They couldn't risk that.'
I tried to imagine our parents sitting in the darkness at the bottom of the exit ramp, waiting for a pair of headlights to appear before them, and then, when they finally did and my father shifted into first, their final hurried words to each other, things they'd planned out earlier that day, assertions of love, the last parts of which would be lost in the rumble of the approaching truck, the horribly impotent screech of brakes before the impact. I balanced this image against another, the one I'd held in my head for the past seven years, that of them drunk, laughing, the radio thumping out music, a window down to let in a cold rush of air and the accompanying illusion of sobriety, the two of them oblivious of their error until that final, irrevocable moment when the truck loomed before them, impossibly large, its huge mass of metal towering over the hood of their car. I tried to decide which I preferred -- their knowledge or their ignorance -- but they both seemed too pitiful, too sad, for me to accept. I didn't know which to choose.
'Why didn't you tell me this before?' I asked.
Jacob took several seconds to search for an answer. 'I didn't think you'd want to know.'
I nodded; he was right. Even now I didn't want to know, didn't want to pick through what he'd just said, to weigh its various particulars and decide if I believed them. An onslaught of conflicting emotions swept over me --
