He had not realized his own fatigue. Coming out of a restless sleep, he checked his watch and found that an hour and a half had passed. The sight of the minister still bent over the Bible in his lap gave William such a feeling of annoyance that he had to look elsewhere. Stretching out flat, his fingers interlocked under his head, he gazed up into the overhead limbs. After a few moments, his eyes got used to the dark and he searched out star patterns in the sky. He tried to find Virgil the sky bear but could only see scattered stars against a backdrop of eternal blackness.
And yards away from him, Hannah lay under the earth, just as isolated as any star overhead, her coffin nailed shut tight, another world of eternal darkness. Knowing the preacher was still reading, wasting the light of a lantern to study the meaningless ancient words, William felt his blood begin to run a little faster, his mind become a little sharper. He sat up and stretched his legs.
“Mark,” he said, still with difficulty because the existence of a Christian name made the man harder to hold at arm’s length.
The preacher stopped reading and looked over at him. “Yes?”
“How old are you?”
He closed the Bible, leaving a twig to hold his place. “Twenty-four.”
“You don’t have a wife, do you? Or children?”
The younger man smiled. “Hard to have one without the other.”
“But you don’t have either.”
“No, I don’t. Hope to, someday.”
“You hope to,” William repeated, feeling that some blister in his soul was about to burst and it would kill him if it did and kill him if it didn’t. The preacher’s face was earnest, interested, innocent of life as it really was. William knew now his goal was to erase that look on the younger man’s face and replace it with one that reflected life on earth.
“So,” William continued, pausing briefly as they both heard a horse coming down the road. The hoofbeats rose and then fell away into the night. After a moment the spring peepers, who had hushed for the disturbance, started their chorus again.
“So,” William repeated, “you don’t have a wife. If you did, would you love her?”
“I hope so,” the younger man said, and laid the Bible on the ground beside him. “That is the main idea on entering into marriage, I think. At least, in most cases.” His tone was still conversational, jocular; it was a lighthearted chat with a parishioner.
Around them the forest was teeming with life, with the singing of frogs and the stealthy movements of animals who lived their lives after dark and crept about the forest floor unseen. Even the treetops swayed gently in the night breezes, stoic and silent but alive nonetheless, the stream of life flowing into them from the dark earth below. This was the land of the living.
Twenty feet away was the land of the dead, where Hannah lay, now and forever.
“Ever see anybody bleed to death, Reverend Brown?” William said abruptly, and felt a rush of pleasure as the complacent face on the man of God melted away.
“I can’t say that I have,” he answered. “I’ve been at the bedside of the dying—”
“Ever seen someone you love bleed to death, regardless of what you did, ever watched the life seep out of them until their heart stopped and they lay staring at you, cold and dead? Ever put them away in the ground, Reverend, under six feet of earth and left them there and gone home alone?”
The minister’s face was somber now. William feared the man would reach for the Bible and start flipping pages, but he didn’t.
“No, I haven’t, William. I’ve lost loved ones, of course. Who hasn’t?”
“Of course,” William said, but in truth he had no mind for other folks’ loved ones at the moment. “I’ll tell you something, Reverend. I do appreciate you trying to help me catch these boys. I don’t know if they’ll even come or not, but at least we did what we could and maybe the Grant boy can rest in peace knowing that. But I can’t say I want the Almighty here too, in the form of that book you keep reading. I don’t have much use for the book or its subject.”
William felt a strange sense of liberation, as if he had just had words with God himself, expressing an anger that had existed since time began. He waited for the preacher to sermonize, but the blasted man just kept looking at him, waiting. William decided to give him what he was waiting for.
“You said at Hannah’s funeral that we’d see her again. Well, it doesn’t make me feel any better that I’ll see her in fifty years or ten years. I want to see her tonight. I want to see her now.” He stopped and thought of her just thirty yards away and forever beyond his grasp, and the cruelty of it enraged him. “Can you show me,” he said, nearly choking on his own anger, “can you show me one verse in that damned Bible of yours that justifies a mother being taken from two daughters who need her? One reason that makes sense, why God allowed her to bleed to death when he could have spared her?” By the last sentence he was shouting. He couldn’t help himself.
“No, I can’t, William,” the preacher said. “There’s absolutely nothing in the Bible to make sense of it, and no one could truthfully say that there is.”
William waited for the next part, for the list of buts — but our Heavenly Father knows what’s best; but we have to rely on faith alone; but Hannah was called by God to be an angel; but we’ll all understand one day. Instead the minister was finished. A fountain of rage that had been building for weeks and would have erupted if the man had said more suddenly eased off and dissipated. William slumped against a tree trunk and took a deep breath. The blister had burst at last and had not killed him.
He was still catching his breath when they heard more hoofbeats. The minister held up one hand for silence as the animals slowed and then stopped in front of the church. Around them the spring peepers abruptly fell silent.
“It’s them all right,” Mark whispered into the darkness. He had extinguished the lantern on hearing the horses being led around to the back of the church.
Lying low, silent and motionless, they heard intermittent talking and a loud nervous giggle coming from behind the church. After a pause of several moments, a light sprang to life near the building. While William watched, it diminished slightly and then began moving from the back of the church to the lower end of the cemetery.
“They’ve got a lantern,” he whispered from where he lay stretched on his belly. “They just turned it down because they don’t want to be seen back there at work. I did the same thing when I dug the boy up last night.”
Finally the lantern stopped moving and appeared to hover in the air for several moments. Then they set it down and William heard the sound he had been hoping for since a row of shiny gold teeth had popped into his mind like a dream. They were digging in the earth, lifting the soil away from a boy they had robbed once and now a corpse that they hoped to rob again. William smiled.
A half hour passed and then another and William thought his soul would burst from the flesh, he was so impatient for the final scene to begin. At last, when the boys were waist deep, he whispered to the preacher, “Let’s move up now. They’re about halfway down and concentrating on the dirt under their feet. They’re not going to look up for another half hour at least. I’ll go first and find us a good spot. When you hear me stop, count to ten slow, then feel your way up till you find me.”
William moved forward on his hands and knees, putting his weight down silently like a cat stalking his prey. He stopped once, when they did, and waited for them to rest. After a moment he realized he might be missing just the thing he’d come to hear and so began moving forward again, an inch at a time. By the time he had gotten close enough to understand their words, they had taken up the shovels and gone back to work.