people.”
Colin handed me a duffel bag filled with clothes, canned food, blankets, and other gear. “This is all we could find for backpacks. Can you do your trick to make them light?” Quentin held a second duffel bag. A third was on the ground.
Two canvas potato sacks were also on the ground. From the way the folds fell, it looked as if two thin children were curled up in fetal positions inside.
Victor came up. “I thought you were burying those.”
Colin replied, “You said ten minutes. Do you know how much of a hole I can dig in ten minutes in the ice-cold ground?
Let me tell you—not deep enough to prevent Mr. Glum’s dog from rooting them out.”
I said, “Give me your duffels. Both of you. I can carry more.”
Quentin said, “What do we do, Victor? I hate to leave… dead people… just lying here unburied. That would be horrible.” He passed me his duffel.
Victor told Colin to take one corpse; he picked up the other. I shouldered three huge duffel bags filled with stuff.
Colin said dubiously, “Can you carry all that, Aim?”
I said, “I’ll make it to the edge of the woods before you, slowpoke.”
And I did.
4.
Because the trees had begun to lose their leaves, the woods were less cover than we hoped. We could still see the buildings and folly towers of the estate behind us for many minutes as we walked.
The trees got taller as we went deeper. At first, we were guiding our steps in the direction of the sun, but when the clouds grew thick, the sky turned into a dull, dirty gray the same color as the ground.
“If they haven’t plowed the highway yet, we’ll miss it,” I said.
Victor said, “We can estimate distances by counting paces; if we come across a clearing between two parallel rows of trees, lined with telephone poles and metal guard rails, that will be the highway.”
We jogged and walked, jogged and walked. An hour went by, maybe two. The snow became patchy in places, and croppings of rock and gray grass began giving the ground texture, like the dappling on a white whale.
The trees deeper in the forest were utterly leafless, as if the seasons here were not quite synchronized with those back on campus. Tall and skeletal, the trees spread icy branches against the sky. Each twig was coated and limed with transparent ice and, even in the gray light, they caught points of brightness in them, gemlike.
The air was still and utterly without wind. The nets and angles of branches and twigs overhead grew thicker. Whenever a flake of snow fell from an upper twig, it fell plumb straight.
It looked like fairyland. We were free, and getting freer every step. I have never known the air to taste more sweet.
Eventually we slowed, and stopped.
By the roots of a huge oak tree, Victor and Colin put down their burden.
The boys took turns digging a grave.
After a full minute of argument, I convinced them to give me a turn digging. Colin timed it with his watch, and I piled my dirt into a pile separate from the one the boys had been making. When, in the same amount of time digging, my pile was bigger than their combined piles, Victor put me in charge of the burial detail.
They wouldn’t let me touch the canvas potato sacks the corpses were in, though. Digging a grave was woman’s work, but only manly men can touch a sack with remains in it, I guess. Go figure.
Now it was Quentin who argued. He was much quieter in his voice than I was, but more insistent. He wanted to bury them right, and say a few words. For different reasons, Vanity and I both backed him up.
Colin scoffed at us, saying, “You three are being silly. If you close your eyes, the sun doesn’t go out. Spirits can move from place to place, but they can’t ‘die.’ Can a concept die? Can a god? It’s all the same substance. There is no reason to make a ceremony out of it.”
Victor’s face showed less emotion but he scoffed, too: “These bodies are composed of the same amount of atoms before and after vital functions ceased. There is no quantitative difference, no reason to get sentimental about it. Quentin, say whatever words you want to say and make it quick.”
At Quentin’s polite request, Colin chopped down four branches, and we used a hank of twine from one of our bags to make two crude crosses to mark the graves. Colin drove the crosses into the frozen earth with blows from the back of his hammer. He must have been angry, or “putting energy” into the blows, for he drove the uprights nine inches or so into the ground with one blow each.
Quentin said a few words over the bodies. “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord, Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God those whom we have carried to this place, their names unknown to us; and we commit their bodies to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” That sort of thing. Simple and moving. I did not know who these people were or how they got into Boggin’s clock. I did not know if they were children or if they had just shrunk because they were mummies. I did not even know if they were human beings. But I felt sorry for them.
Then, after praying like a proper church-going Christian, Quentin took one of the kitchen knives we had stolen, cut an unsightly hunk of hair from his head, and tossed some of it into either grave, as if he were suddenly a pagan again, and he threw in four tuppence from his pocket change, two into either grave. He took out one of the bottles of pop we had taken from the kitchen, shook it, and sprayed it against the roots of the tree, asking the Meliad Nymph of the tree to kindly guard the remains, in return for the libation he poured out.
I had only shoveled about four great spadefuls into the first grave, when there was a motion in the near distance, and Mr. Glum’s dog, Lelaps, trotted into the clearing.
We all stood motionless, staring at the huge hound.
The dog sat on his haunches, tilted his head to one side, and let his tongue hang out.
Vanity pointed away South. “That way. We’re going that way.”
The dog barked once, and immediately trotted off the other direction.
“Nice doggy…” said Vanity softly. Then she said, “I am beginning to get a good feeling about our chances.”
A few minutes later, and we were under way again. I shouldered one duffel bag, Victor carried one, and Colin and Quentin flipped a coin to see who would take the third.
Because Lelaps was likely to lead any pursuit astray, we shared Vanity’s confidence, and did not set too hard a pace. We talked as we walked, and some of us, envious of Quentin’s walking stick, had asked Colin to cut staves for us from the branches around. Colin used the axe handle as a cane, and leaned on the axe head, in a fashion I thought most unsafe. He had also been running with it in his hands. I thought it was only a matter of time before someone got cut with it.
I said to Quentin, “What was all that ‘Lord make his face to shine upon you’ stuff back there at the grave? You’re not a Christian anymore. You told me so.”
“I’m still English,” he said mildly.
Vanity said, “Are you going to tell us what happened to you last night?”
Colin agreed, “Let’s have the tale, Quentin. Do tell, do!”
We trudged along beneath gray skies as he spoke, in the crisp air beneath the woven white lace canopy of frost-touched trees, and in the highest spirits we had ever known.
14
