The coroner held Darl Moody’s body till Tuesday so that he was buried two days later, nearly a week after Calvin found him. Leading up to the funeral, Calvin didn’t think that he could do it. He couldn’t imagine being able to carry the casket from the front of the church to the hearse, from the back of the hearse to the grave, knowing what he knew. But when Darl’s mother asked him to be a pallbearer, he couldn’t say no.
Strangely, as he carried that shiny black casket up the hill, he hadn’t felt what he’d expected. Truth was, he’d felt nothing at all, merely a sleepy sort of delusion like he’d woken out of a dream. Strange. Unreal. Like he’d woken into a new world having never stepped foot there before.
It had always seemed unnatural for the sun to shine on a funeral. It had always seemed strange to bury bodies on a hill. Graves here were uneven things, one end dug deeper than another. Headstones dotted the slope above Chastine Creek. Some of the markers were so old and worn that the names had been erased by time. Some of the oldest had never held names because those left to the mountains knew who lay beneath them.
Darl Moody’s mother wore a black dress that fit her like a nightgown and a stoic expression that demanded she had no more tears to cry. The plot beside her husband’s grave was dug, a mound of red clay hidden on the other side. It must’ve been so extraordinary to be staring at a piece of ground meant for her, a grave that in time would’ve held her casket. Mothers should not bury their children. That was all Calvin Hooper could think as he stood there in a pair of pleated khakis and the nicest shirt he owned.
Darl Moody’s death ripped Jackson County apart. Things like that didn’t happen here. There were two or three homicides a year, but rarely more than that, and the ones that did happen were usually tied to drugs. Plenty of folks were bad off on meth or gooned out on pills, and folks like that had a tendency of stumbling into dangerous places, but not men like Darl, not families like the Moodys. Everyone in the county knew their family and there wasn’t a cross word to say about a one of them. What happened was a tragedy and the community rallied behind them with hotdog suppers and cakewalks and gun raffles and turkey shoots to help with expenses like any other time something unexpected struck one of their own.
While the preacher read from the book of Corinthians, Calvin stood to the side and watched a murder of crows strut through the churchyard below. Angie leaned against him, her parents standing behind her.
Calvin looked at the family gathered under the shade of the graveside tent. Darl’s sister, Marla, sat beside her mother with mascara running down her cheeks like wetted ink. Her husband was beside her with one hand gripped around his wife’s knee, the other stroking the back of their little girl, who balanced on his leg with her thumb in her mouth. Their three boys were in the seats beside them, their eyes emptied by sorrow and wonder. Marla looked like Darl, the same long face. They had sharp noses and thick eyebrows like their mother, thin lips that always seemed sunk by sadness or anger. Their father had been a short, spindly man with arms that seemed too long for his body. His eyes were the color of sky, and thinking about him right then—how none of his features found their way into his children—Calvin could still see the thick veins that rose from his forearms and ran along his biceps like vines. The old man had been tough as a pine knot, partly because he’d had to be, and maybe that was what carried down, that toughness. And maybe that was enough.
“Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption,” the preacher read. “Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
Changed. That was as good a word as any. Nothing would ever be the same now. It couldn’t be, and maybe that was the only certainty anymore.
A slight movement to his left caught his attention and Calvin turned to see his mother pressing a wadded tissue to the corners of her eyes. She wore black slacks and a dark silk blouse with shoulder pads, her flat silver hair brushed evenly to each side of her face so that it stretched to her stomach. He’d held it together until then, but there was something about looking at his own mother that hit him harder than the rest of it. He started to cry and before long he was weeping. His father turned to face him, his arm at the small of his wife’s back, and Calvin saw his eyes melt with tears, though his old man would not let them fall, could not let them fall, because men didn’t cry, and Calvin understood that. Seeing how close his father came was enough to justify his own tears; and when he felt Angie’s father put a hand on his shoulder, Calvin fell apart. The most complex things said between men were often not spoken at all.
He did not move while the funeral went on and he did not move when it ended. Gradually those who gathered made their way down to their cars, and one by one, they left. In a few minutes, workers came up the narrow gravel road in a beaten cream-colored Ford with shovels loaded in the back. They studied him and Calvin thought he recognized the younger of the two as the brother of a Collins boy he’d worked with one winter at a tree farm in Tuckasegee.
The two men rolled back the fake-grass mat that had hidden the fill dirt from the family. They filled the grave a spade at a time, joking back and forth about something Calvin couldn’t make out from where he stood. It took them a little more than an hour. The men were sticky with sweat, their khaki work shirts dark at their backs. The older one hoisted a jumping jack from the bed of the truck to compact the dirt on the grave. When the job was finished, they watched him as they drove away—incapable of understanding why he’d stayed. There was something inside that told him he had to see it through, that he couldn’t leave until it was finished; but now that it was, he found it hard to walk away.
A hand grazing the back of his arm startled him and Calvin turned to find Angie with sunlight filling her eyes green as bottle glass. Her cheeks and nose were dotted with light orange freckles.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Calvin said. “Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She leaned in to kiss him. “Okay.”
Calvin watched her walk away, the wind blowing her sundress tight to her hip, her blond hair whipping about like licks of fire. A thinly knit navy sweater covered her arms, and her cowboy boots cut Vs on her calves. She was the reason he would bear this secret even if it haunted him the rest of his life. Angie was all he’d ever wanted and all he had now, and somehow he knew that could still be enough, that a man couldn’t ask for anything more than that. Maybe this is the only way the world is even, he thought. Maybe it takes this kind of suffering to have everything you always wanted.
Across the road, a murmuration of starlings rose like a bruise from yellowed field. The birds twisted into the sky, flashed in blooms of black, then disappeared as quickly as they’d shown. Their path blinked against the mountainside and Calvin tried his best to follow them until they were too far away to see. A piece of scripture kept repeating in his mind, something the preacher had read minutes before. Four words played in his head over and over, but he could not remember what came before or after. There were only four words, and he knew not their meaning.
Death is swallowed up.