Wilde Fire

Chapter 28: November 2011

There was a small cemetery in Kala, but after a flooding incident in the nineties, many residents chose to bury their loved ones in the larger cemetery across the river in Grant City. My parents had made that same decision for Ben, though I wondered if it was simply because they were scared to death of their son's body someday washing back up and appearing on their doorstep again, ready to finish the job he didn't quite execute. I wondered if they knew that he could still haunt them until the day they died, even if his body stayed secured in the mahogany casket underground.

I wasn't involved in the funeral arrangements. They wouldn't let me have a say, even when I insisted that he would absolutely despise the yellow roses that they chose to place on the casket. He would roll his eyes at that stupid velvet lining they had put inside instead of the normal silk that everyone else used. I didn't even know why that part mattered, anyway. He wanted to be cremated, I knew this because for some reason, we had that conversation before. He wanted his body to be turned to ash so that I could spread those ashes into the ocean while fireworks went off in the sky. That was how he wanted it, but my parents refused to listen to me.

I stared at the line of vehicles that encircled us at the cemetery and thought about where he was now. If Heaven or Hell existed, I knew which one he would be in without a doubt. But then I found myself laughing, because how ironic that he would end up in the eternal flames of damnation when that is exactly the type of thing he would enjoy. A pyromaniac in Hell. What a perfect contradiction.

"Sidney?" My mother said my name hesitantly, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion. She put a firm hand on my shoulder until I looked at her. "Why are you laughing?" she hissed out those last few words, frantically looking around to see if anyone else could see me, her crazy daughter, laughing at her brother's funeral service. No one had been watching. No one cared about me. All they could do was stare at that gaping hole in the ground and wonder why in the world someone would have chosen to do what Ben did, and why they were even dumb enough to attend his funeral and pretend they weren't appalled by it.

I pointed at the ugly yellow flowers tied to the posts of the canopy tent by the burial plot, which matched the ones my parents had chosen for the casket. "He hates yellow," I said. I had already told them that, but I didn't know what other excuse I could make at that moment that would get her to leave me alone and grieve in my own dysfunctional way.

She shrugged it off. Because she didn't care. Neither of them did. If it was up to them, we wouldn't have had a funeral at all; they would have left his body in the hospital morgue until the rest of him decayed into nothing. I was the one who finally convinced them to have a proper funeral for him. They agreed reluctantly, but told me there was no possibility of having a visitation. They told me, in the lightest way possible, that his body was too badly burned to be on display.

I didn't know if this was true or not, because I couldn't look at him. I had been in the front seat of a police cruiser, waiting to be driven to a safe haven when they rolled my brother out of the house that was still smoldering. I had known it was him, because it was an ambulance gurney and there was a white sheet covering his entire body and my parents were on the ground screaming at the sky and Kelby ran across the road and threw herself on top of him while the medical responders tried to pull her off. And I watched.

I knew he was dead, because if he was alive, he would have already come to find me and tell me about the awesome prank he pulled on us. I waited for a few hours for that, thinking surely, he couldn't really be gone. It wasn't until my parents found me in the hospital lobby and told me, "there was nothing they could have done" that I realized what had actually happened. They told me I could come in to see him, but that it would be hard because his face was burned and his body was burned and he had lit an extra fire in his bedroom to make sure he didn't make it out alive. I told them no, and I asked my grandparents to take me home. Wherever home would be for the time being.

The days following were a blur. I was numb. I was still numb as I stood beside my mother surrounded by all of those other people that were ashamed to even be at Ben's funeral in the first place. I had laughed because I didn't know what else to do. I had cried so many tears that I wasn't sure there was anything left in me anymore. I was a shell. I had turned into a shell the second I was pulled out of our house and realized that Ben had set the entire place on fire and that it wasn't an accident at all.

I followed my mother's orders and I turned around to face the hole in the ground and I stopped laughing so that my father, my grandfather, and the other four pallbearers that the funeral home had found because there was no one else willing to do it slowly lowered the ugly mahogany casket with the ugly velvet lining and the ugly yellow roses onto the lowering device that hovered above the Earth.

I held my breath as long as I could because breathing felt too hard. My father wiped his hands on his pants and stood beside us under the canopy, and he grabbed my mother's hand and then she grabbed mine. She squeezed it so tight that I thought my fingers were going to break as the pastor spoke kind words about my brother, words that didn't make sense and didn't sound true.

My mother cried the whole time, but my father stood still as a statue, like he thought that the world would look at him differently if he felt any sort of sympathy toward the boy who tried to kill him.

When the pastor finally stopped talking, he stepped aside and let the funeral directors grab the yellow roses from the casket and pass them around. I watched out of the corner of my eyes as several people declined the flowers, as if it was okay for them to be there and pretend to care about Ben but it was way too much for them to partake in anything more. They ended up handing my mother most of them, and I took one, even though I had something else in my pocket that was much better suited for him.

We watched in silence as the pulley system lowered my brother into the ground below. It took so long, long enough that if he was actually still alive in there he would have had plenty of time to bust out of the casket and climb back out of the hole.

The pastor finished the service with words that swam in my head and tangled with the thoughts and memories that poked at my brain like acupuncture.

People began to leave because the worst of it was over. Some stopped by the hole and dropped their flowers back inside before stepping away, others turned around and didn't give him a second glance. I watched and waited as one-by-one, the crowd began to dissipate until it was just me standing there alone.

My parents had stepped to the side and were silently engaging in adult conversation with people I didn't recognize. The gravedigger was nearby, because it was his job to fill the hole back up and cover Ben with enough dirt that he would never be able to get oxygen if his lungs decided to start working again.

I stepped forward, crossing the short distance between the canopy and the hole. I looked down inside, at the casket that was far away from me now. Although I had known that Ben was in there somewhere, I still couldn't come to the realization that since he was under the ground, I would never be able to see him above it again. I felt my chest tighten because it hurt so much.

My hand shook as I reached into the pocket of the black sweater I wore over my black dress, and my fingers grasped the silky pale pink petals of the dogwood flower. I picked it for him, for this purpose. I knew that he would hate every last detail that our parents planned for him, but this one miniscule thing was something that at least I had control over.

I dropped the dogwood flower into the hole and watched as it floated downward, until it landed on the part of wood that covered his heart. I smiled and hoped that he knew it was there.

A few moments later, I sat down in the grass on the edge of the cemetery with my knees pulled to my chest and watched as the gravedigger filled the hole back up with dirt and finished the job of burying Ben--the best brother I ever had.

I let my tears fall and ignored my parents, who sat in the car and waited for me because they were too ashamed and embarrassed to pretend like they cared about him any longer. As the man shoveled the last mound of dirt and wiped the sweat from his brow, a noise from behind me made me jump.

I turned around, startled. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I saw her, clear as day. It was Kelby Blackwood, her blonde hair laying in loose curls across her shoulders. She sniffled and wiped at her blue eyes. Just before she climbed into the backseat of the black car that idled behind her, she looked at me. She held my gaze for a fleeting moment, but it was just long enough for me to feel every bit of her pain.