the marker to remind him of the date of death, it was carved on his own
memory far deeper than the numbers were cut into the granite before
him.
Since they’d arrived Tuesday morning, after staying the night with Paul
and Carolyn Youngblood, Jack had been too busy to inspect the private
cemetery.
Furthermore, he’d not been eager to stand in front of Tommy’s grave,
where memories of blood and loss and despair were certain to assail
him.
To the left of Tommy’s marker was a double stone. It bore the names of
his parents–EDUARDO and MARGARITE. Though Eduardo had been in the
ground only a few months, Tommy for a year, and Margaret for three
years, all of their graves looked freshly dug. The dirt was mounded
unevenly, and no grass grew on it, which seemed odd, because the fourth
grave was flat and covered with silky brown grass. He could understand
that gravediggers might have disturbed the surface of Margarite’s plot
in order to bury Eduardo’s coffin beside hers, but that didn’t explain
the condition of Tommy’s site. Jack made a mental note to ask Paul
Youngblood about it.
The last monument, at the head of the only grassy llot, belonged to
Stanley Quartermass, patron of them. An inscription in the weathered
black stone surprised a chuckle out of Jack when he least expected
it.
Here lies Stanley Quartermass dead before his time because he had to
work with so damned many actors and writers.
Toby had not moved.
“What’re you up to?” Jack asked.
No answer.
He put one hand on Toby’s shoulder.
“Son?”
Without shifting his gaze from the tombstone, the boy said, “What’re
they doing down there?”
“Who? Where?”
“In the ground.”
“You mean Tommy and his folks, Mr. Quartermass?”
“What’re they doing down there?”
There was nothing odd about a child wanting to fully understand
death.
It was no less a mystery to the young than to the old. What seemed
strange to Jack was the way the question had been phrased.
“Well,” he said, “Tommy, his folks, Stanley Quartermass . . .
they aren’t really here.”
“Yes, they are.”
“No, only their bodies are here,” Jack said, gently massaging the boy’s
shoulder.
“Why?”
“Because they were finished with them.”
The boy was silent, brooding.
Was he thinking about how close his own father had come to being
planted under a similar stone? Maybe enough time had passed since the
shooting for Toby to be able to confront things that he’d been
repressing.
The mild breeze from out of the northwest stiffened slightly. Jack’s
hands were cold. He put them in his jacket pockets and said, “Their
bodies weren’t them, anyway, not the real them.”
The conversation took an even stranger turn: “You mean, these weren’t
their original bodies? These were puppets?”
Frowning, Jack dropped to his knees beside the boy.
“Puppets? That’s a peculiar thing to say.”
As if in a trance, the boy focused on Tommy’s headstone. His gray-blue
eyes stared unblinking.
“Toby, are you okay?”
Toby still didn’t look at him but said, “Surrogates?”
Jack blinked in surprise.
“Surrogates?”
“Were they?”
“That’s a pretty big word. Where’d you hear that?”
Instead of answering him, Toby said, “Why don’t they need these bodies
any more?”
Jack hesitated, then shrugged.
“Well, son, you know why–they were finished with their work in this
world.”
“This world?”
“They’ve gone on.”
“Wwhere?”
“You’ve been to Sunday school. You know where.”
“No.”
“Sure you do.”
“No.”
“They’ve gone on to heaven.”
“They went on?”
“Yes.”
“In what bodies?”
Jack removed his right hand from his jacket pocket and cupped his son’s
chin.
He turned the boy’s head away from the gravestone, so they were
eye-to-eye.
“What’s wrong, Toby?”
They were face-to-face, inches apart, yet Toby seemed to be looking
into the distance, through Jack at some far horizon.
“Toby?”
“In what bodies?”
Jack released the boy’s chin, moved one hand back – and forth in front
of his face. Not a blink.
His eyes didn’t follow the movement of the hand.
“In what bodies?” Toby repeated impatiently.
Something was wrong with the boy. Sudden psychological ailment.
With a catatonic aspect.
Toby said, “In what bodies?”
Jack’s heart began to pump hard and fast as he stared into his son’s