The Burning and the Burned

Family Portrait II

They had wanted to bury their father under cover of darkness, but the moon was full that night, and would be, more or less, for many nights to come. Wren stared up into her face, the moon, and she almost winked at him, reaching out for him and tousling his hair in her moonlit rays. Finch tugged at his sleeve and they both looked down into the hole they'd begun the night previous.

"Let's get t' work," Finch said solemnly. "T'ain't good to have 'im in the house two days. The rot'll get 'im."

Wren nodded and they set to digging solemnly. Finch had an expression of intense focus—eyes almost closed, nose wrinkled, jaw clenched. Wren watched him wonderingly as they worked.

This time, they had finished digging the grave with the moon still high in the sky. It's an odd thing, the end of a task as gradual as grave-digging. Wren worked quietly with no real grasp on their progress; sure, he saw the hole get deeper and deeper, but there was no point that he could say, well, it isn't done now, and one more shovelful, and there, now it's done. But Finch declared it suddenly, after pausing to watch as Wren's shovel emerged empty from the heap they'd made.

"S'finished," he said, and Wren nodded, and glanced toward the house. Finch's jaw clicked and Wren thought he saw his older brother's fingers dig deeper into the handle of his shovel, but after a moment, the effect was gone, and Finch's face relaxed into a warm smile.

"Well then," he said, "Let's do 't, then."

They returned to the house. Their father had only one pair of work gloves, but Finch let Wren have both of them.

"I figure, what with your gift, you'll need 'em more'n me."

Wren just looked at him and accepted them, slipped them on. A song filled his ears, then, but it wasn't the overwhelming, anguished song that he'd heard when he'd briefly touched his father's body the previous afternoon; instead, it was a song of work in the backyard, chopping firewood over and over—angrily, dutifully, sadly, chop chop chop. It was almost comforting in its monotony, and, Wren thought, it was supposed to be.

Finch grabbed their father under the arms and Wren grabbed him under the knees and they stood slowly and lumbered out to the hole. Finch was walking backwards, but somehow Wren knew he wouldn't trip; and somehow, sure enough, he walked along the edge of the grave until one boy stood at its head and the other at its foot.

"Three, two, one."

And then they were shoveling frantically, hiding their father from the light of the moon shovelful by shovelful. By dawn they'd patted down the grave and gone inside, taking refuge from all the prying eyes of neighbors and from the steady rays of the sun.

They still slept in their small bedroom, hidden away from the world and from the rest of the house and from all the spirits inside. No one who lived in this room had ever died, not since their father had built this house from the ground up. And that made it a safe place, at least until they had to leave for school, their muscles sore and their stomachs rumbling. As he shut the front door, Wren was overcome by a sense that somehow they weren't finished, that the grave should have been deeper or they should have patted it down harder, to keep their father's corpse from rising up and telling the whole town what they'd done, or, more dangerous still, what they were.

But Wren brushed the thought aside. Through all the years, no matter how deep their father's grief and anger had grown, he'd at least never once told the town their secret. That wouldn't change with his death. Maybe some things would change, but that wouldn't, he knew, because somewhere in his father's soul he had harbored love for them, or at least, he hadn't wanted them to burn.

"You 'right for school?" Finch asked him, for the second morning in a row.

"'Course," Wren said, and smiled. "I'm strong in th' head, Finch, jus' like you."