(November 1995)
CONNIE GRIFFIN SAT IN THE FRONT ROW OF THE SMALL ASSEMBLY of funeral-goers gathered at Wolf Point Cemetery. They sat by the burial site, facing west, and even though it was only two-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was already low on the horizon in front of them. Connie focused her eyes on the grass and tried to concentrate on the words of Pastor Kimble’s eulogy. He’s talking about my son, she thought, but it wasn’t real yet, the grief trapped beneath the sudden shock of losing him. Two kids had come across his body floating in the reeds along the northern bank of the river four days after Miles had gone missing. His neck had been broken, and Chief Ward suspected that it was the injury that had killed him, not the river. “The broken neck and a bump on the back of his head were the only signs of trauma,” he said. “The medical examiner is ruling this an accidental death.”
“An accidental death,” she repeated. They were sitting in her kitchen, and she reached out and touched the side of the ceramic teacup in front of her. It was cold, she noted, and she tried to remember whether she had made the tea or if Chief Ward had prepared it for her.
“I suspect he fell off the bridge. You know how the kids are always playing there.” The chief cleared his throat. “If he struck one of the girders on the way down, chances are he was rendered unconscious before he even hit the water.”
“He was sixteen,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied. “I understand he was at a party the night he went missing?”
“That’s right. He was at Charlie Husker’s house.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s not too far from the river. If he was intoxicated when he walked down to the water . . .”
“What about the fire? The barn on the Turner property burned to the ground on the night my Miles went missing.”
“Thankfully, there was no one inside. The firefighters searched the place thoroughly, both during and after the fire.”
“Why did it burn?”
He shrugged. “There are lots of possibilities. An electrical short. A spark from one of the machines. Oily rags left sitting around can spontaneously combust under the right conditions. There was hay in the loft.” The chief sighed and shook his head. “All it would’ve taken is a small flame to get things started.”
“My Miles didn’t drown. Someone killed him and threw his body in the river.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s no evidence of that.”
“They did it to my father,” she said. “He was left in the bed of his pickup and was found dead the next morning.”
“That,” the chief said, “was a long time ago. Your father was in a bar fight. There’s nothing linking the two.”
“Miles Griffin was a kind and generous boy,” Pastor Kimble told the small congregation gathered at the graveside. “He was loved and admired by all who knew him.”
Connie let the words wash over her. She wanted to believe the things the pastor was saying, but she’d been hard on her son, charging him with responsibilities that should’ve been those of his father.
It wasn’t fair, really. Their father had been a fifteen-year-old boy. Connie had seen him in school but met him only once herself, and at first it was sweet, the way he said nice things to her and listened when she told him about the death of her father eight years before. She had cried a little, and when she was finished, he had leaned over and kissed her, a soft brush of the lips that sent tingles down her spine. It had never happened before, a kiss like that. And even at fourteen years old, Connie knew that it was something she’d remember forever. He had stood up and taken her by the hand then, leading her beneath the bleachers, and her heart had raced at the idea of it, how you could fall in love with someone in a single afternoon and then lie down beside them in the grass and let them hold you. This was the thing the older kids talked about, and it was happening to her just when she least expected it.
She didn’t understand the way it was supposed to work, and Connie flinched and put her arm in front of her when he reached up and touched her breast. “It’s what makes it special,” he said, and Connie wanted this to be special, so she moved her arm and let him reach under her shirt where there was only a bra between them. He traced his fingers along the fabric, and he was breathing faster now. She could feel his body changing, becoming excited and urgent. He undid the button of her pants and pulled down on the zipper. “Wait,” she said, and grabbed at his hand as she tried to squirm out from under him. He was bigger and heavier than she was, even though some of the kids called her piggy, and before she knew it her pants were down around her knees and he was pressing himself against her, shoving at the hips.
She didn’t remember much of what happened next, but she remembered the sound of laughter, and when she looked up, she saw people’s faces peering down on them from between the slats of the bleachers. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you porked her!” someone yelled. “How did you get in there with all that fat?”
“He porked the pork chop!” someone else said, and there was more laughter and a few piggy snorts as the boy rolled off her and pulled up his pants.
Connie put her hands over her face and rolled onto her side so she couldn’t see them. There was pain in her belly and blood on the grass and on the inside of her thighs. She could still smell the sweaty animal scent of him on her body, and when she touched her lower lip with her tongue she found that it was cracked and bleeding.
They dropped pebbles down at her from above. The tiny stones landed on the white flesh of her buttock with a soft plop because it hurt too much for her to bend at the waist and rake up her pants to cover herself. Eventually they went away—even the one who’d told her that it would be special—but Connie lay there for another hour until the pain subsided and she felt strong enough to stand.
Mother will be angry, she thought, and when she got home, she was relieved that her mother hadn’t returned yet from her job at the deli. Connie took a shower and put her clothes in a trash bag. She left her house and carried them to the dumpster behind the gas station.
No one has to know, she thought, but by the next day it seemed that everyone in school had heard the news. “Jason Fisher porked the pork chop!” someone had scrawled on the bathroom stall, and there was a picture to go with it. In this depiction of the event Connie was drawn as the pig that she was, with a snout, floppy ears, and a curly tail sticking straight up into the air. “Oink, oink,” they had written in a word bubble coming from Connie’s snout, and that was the last time she ventured into the girls’ bathroom. If she had to pee, she would hold it until she got home.
She wore baggy clothes and tried to keep the baby from coming, but six months later it was obvious that she had gotten herself “knocked up,” as her mother put it, and Connie dropped out of school and stayed with her mother’s cousin in Minnesota until she gave birth to not just one boy but twins, whom she named Miles and Abel.
Pastor Kimble lifted his right hand in the air, his palm facing the huddled cluster of attendees. “We surrender this body to the earth,” he said, “but Miles Griffin has already risen into heaven and dwells in the house of the Lord our Father. It is there that he will live out the promise of life eternal, and each of us, in our own time, will someday join him.”
Life eternal, she thought, and she glanced at Abel, who sat next to her, rocking in his chair.
“He’s slow,” her mother said when Connie returned to Wolf Point with the children. They were toddlers then, far enough along to tell that there was something wrong with Abel, who had gotten turned around in the womb and had to be delivered by C-section, forty-five minutes after the birth of his brother.
Abigail Griffin folded her arms across her chest as she watched them from the living room doorway. “They look the same,” she said, “but the second one doesn’t act like his brother.”
The second one, Connie thought. That’s what her mother called him.
“This is what I warned you about,” her mother told her. “‘If you don’t give the child away for adoption, nothing good will come of it.’ Isn’t that what I told you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Connie had countered, but as the years went on, it became obvious that her mother was right. Abel was a sweet child, quiet and obedient, but broken just the same.
And you decided to keep the broken one, her mother would have said if she hadn’t died of a stroke two years ago. And it was strange, Connie thought, how people kept right on talking, even after they were gone.
“Please stand,” Pastor Kimble said, and they all stood up but Connie, the mother of the fallen one.
“Mom. Mom, we’re supposed to stand.”
“I know. I can’t. Leave me alone.”
“But the man said. We’ve got to. He’s talking about Jesus.”
Tug on her sleeve. A hand in her armpit, lifting her upward.
“Stop it. Leave me alone. Can’t you leave me alone for just this once?”
He let go of her, and she slumped back into the chair.
(“This is what I warned you about. ‘If you don’t give the child away for adoption, nothing good will come of it.’ Isn’t that what I told you?”)
Stop it.
(“Do you wish it was the second one? If it had to be one of them, wouldn’t it be better if it was him lying there in the . . .”)
No. It wouldn’t. She loved them both the same.
Connie got to her feet. At thirty-one, she was still a young woman, but today she felt old, worn down by all of the things that could’ve been but weren’t. She cupped her hand around her son’s arm for support.
“In the name of God the Father, we commit the body of Miles Griffin to the earth and his soul to everlasting life.”
They watched as Pastor Kimble let three handfuls of dirt sift through his fingers. The soil struck the lid of the coffin with a soft and hollow sound that reminded her of the patter of a child’s footsteps in the hallway.
“I invite each of you to step forward,” he said, and the funeral-goers did, one after the other, letting the dirt fall from their hands as they filled the grave in tiny increments.