The dead boy’s brothers pulled the planks from under the coffin and Elmer and several others lowered the box on ropes into the dry yellow earth.

“Let this soul cross over into campground,” the old preacher said.

Sometimes at funerals in these carefully discharged final moments there seemed to be a promised land after all. But for most of those standing on the sun-warmed, fire-heated pebbly ground, Delvin among them, not today. A sudden swell of grief overtook Delvin and he burst into tears. Tears like a sudden wind that shakes and releases a tree.

Before the first water was hardly out of him the wind had passed. Oliver pressed his hand. Delvin pressed back, glad to have somebody close who knew who he was, knew his name. He thought of the Ghost and wondered where he might be. A flock of crows raced westward as if they were trying to catch the dying sun. Close up he could smell the rich scent of the cedar trees. And he could smell the turned earth of the grave, a scent that always made him think of farming, of himself as part of a life of sowing seeds in a field, a promise or memory that was not even his, come back to him.

Those nearby, the poorly outfitted mournful members of the killed boy’s family, to speak of them, were crammed up with grief. It was nearly impossible to move in any part of their bodies. As if the organs themselves had solidified and the muscles and streaks of ligament and tissue hardened and, too, even the heretofore streaming blood congealed. They felt leathery and stiff and mired. When they did move, and they did, under the peeling sky with its bulging veils of smoke, it was as if a peculiar narcotized influence had taken them over, as if the hand raised to push back the air, the shoulder lifted in shuddering refusal, the lips licked to soothe the dry cracked skin, the twitch, the wave, the brush, were kineticized by some airy unregulated pointless dissipate energy. The world was a mist of shadows and smothering floods. They were drowning without dying. The mother was an empty corn shuck tossed into the corner of a rained-in house. No one would ever come back to look for such as her. She wanted to cry out, to scream, to yell for help — for anyone, anyone who might remember her, to find her — she had to go get her child — but her voice was too weak to carry. She was stricken with remorse. The father, for the only time in his life as a man, in a flicked on and off vision, saw himself as a small boy, a boy dumbly chasing a rusty windblown handkerchief into the dark under some trees. His face looked as if it had been bitten mercilessly by insects.

After a while the Rev Munch shambled off and stood by himself before the remains of his church, crying helpless tears. No one appeared to be seriously hurt, not physically.

6

Carrying his old single-shot.410 shotgun Onely swung the creaky screen door open, grinning as usual like he was the sly one when he wasn’t at all, and they walked up Constable street to where it became a path rising into laurel scrub. They climbed through Virginia pines and young oaks to the ridge and crossed over into the cove where Hoppy Butler had been shot in his underwear by sheriff’s deputies, a spot marked by a hickory slab upon which were burned with a hot nail the words SON O MAN, and climbed transversely along the far ridge and crossed the summit of Bald Face mountain and descended laterally, following a deer trail through a grassy meadow filled with blossoming Joe Pye weed, the pink shaggy flowers nodding in a cool breeze, and entered a flat area of hardwoods.

The trees in this place, mostly white oaks and tulip poplars and chestnuts, were the largest he had ever seen. Onely said they were the oldest leafy trees east of the Mississippi river, a fact passed on by his grandfather and confirmed, he said, in Collier’s Encyclopedia. They had brought chicken and gravy sandwiches and a chunk of hoop cheese wrapped in wax paper and an apple that Onely cut up into chunks with his single-blade Barlow knife. The flesh was mushy and hardly worth eating. They were hunting turkeys. Delvin thought he heard a gobbler as they entered these woods, but he was not sure. The trees, some of them, were ten feet through the base and soared up a hundred feet or more. The tulip poplars had bark that had whitened almost like the peeled places on a sycamore. The leaf tops were sparse in a way that made Delvin think of old wispy-haired men, white men. The oaks were more fulsome, fully decorated with leaves so dark green they were almost black, and the chestnuts had what he thought of as an aristocratic look. There was hardly any undergrowth. Only a carpet of fallen leaves on the rocky floor. It was a hushed place and even the wind was stately and mindful, striding in sockfeet high up through the insubstantial leaves.

When they finished eating, the boys made little beds for themselves among the big tree roots and took a nap.