Epitaph Road Page 5

  Next to me Tia and Sunday slowed. I followed them to the curb, where they stopped, straddling their bikes. What stretched out in front of us must have been impressive to the girls from small-town Nebraska: a wide expanse of grassy fields and playgrounds and trees and gardens, and to the left of all that another vast span of green, this one scattered with tall white crosses and punctuated by a soaring black monolith.

  “What is this place?” Sunday asked.

  I tried not to smile. At last I knew something they didn’t. This bit of local history wouldn’t have been covered in their test prep. “I had to do some research on it once,” I said, “but it ain’t going to be included in your trials. I don’t think so anyway.”

  “You’re Kellen me, professor,” Sunday said. I ignored her.

  “We don’t care if it’s included,” Tia said. “We want to know.”

  “I can talk and ride at the same time,” I said, and pushed off, coasting down the slight hill. The girls moved up next to me.

  “This was a military base during World War Two,” I said. “Then it was converted to a combination government facility and park toward the end of the last century. After Elisha, a big part of it was converted again, into the site for a graveyard.”

  “The crosses,” Sunday said.

  “Yeah, but they’re not just markers,” I said. “I’ll start at the beginning, though.”

  I felt their eyes on me. Even Sunday was quiet. All I could hear was an occasional chirp of a bird and the distant soft noise of gas-fed flames, real or imagined. “A giant hole, ten stories deep and as big as three soccer stadiums, was bulldozed out. For days, dump trucks and garbage trucks, draped in black, arrived at the gravesite, weaving through crowds of mourners, dumping tens of thousands of bodies, some cremated but most not, into the hole. Cremation took too long.”

  “What about the crosses?” Sunday said.

  “Did she take her pill today?” I asked Tia.

  “You’re getting under my skin, Kellen,” Sunday said.

  “Go on with the story,” Tia, the adult in the group, said.

  “Other trucks had other destinations,” I said, taking my time. The field of crosses and the monolith were growing closer. “Barges at the waterfront, desolate areas in eastern Washington and neighboring states where holes had been dug, freight trains heading east, north, south.”

  “We had burial sites in Nebraska,” Sunday said. “Outside Lincoln there’s a huge one where a cornfield used to be.”

  “Maybe some Seattle dead ended up there,” I said, trying to be civil and adultlike, before going on.

  “After nearly a week, this grave was almost filled. I’ve seen photos showing a lake of bodies. The workers — almost all women — stopped with ten feet to go and topped off the hole with dirt. More dirt was added over the years as the bodies decomposed and settled.”

  I glanced at Sunday, giving her a clue: Here comes the part you’re so interested in. “Work crews sank white metal pipes deep below the surface to collect and burn the methane gas from the decaying. If you stand near the pipes, you can see that they extend above the grass fifteen feet or so.”

  “But they look like crosses,” Tia said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea to attach a horizontal bar to each of them. So now we’ve got flaming grave markers.”

  We reached the monolith. It stood at the closest edge of the field, next to a walkway into the graveyard. Now I could hear the gas burning for sure. I stopped to give the girls a better look. “It’s a monument,” I said. “Thirty feet tall. Carved from black granite, smooth on all five surfaces. Weatherproof displays are imbedded in the stone at eye level, one on each side.”

  “Displays?” Sunday said.

  “The monolith is the one tombstone for the whole gravesite,” I said. “Touch the screen and you can get to the entire list, the names of every person identified before the trucks started rolling — men, boys, infants, a few women.”

  Many of the names were followed by words of remembrance — epitaphs — written by loved ones. My grandfather’s name — Joshua Winters — was on the list. I’d found it many times. After it my grandmother and her children — Dad and Aunt Paige — wrote:

  We watched for you, every breath a prayer,

  while days became shorter and nights became colder

  and hope became heartbreak.

  But only the bear came.

  Dad had told me the story of this bear — the huge tracks through their campsite, the stare-down — or smell-down — across the water, the gift of fish. I sometimes wondered if that same bear was still alive and wandering the hills of the Olympic Peninsula. But I never looked up any facts on bears. I’d rather not know their life expectancy; I’d rather imagine the bear, gray-muzzled now, maybe, cruising the shoreline of that lake for berries, searching along the water’s edge for another free and easy meal.

  The lesson was over. We moved on. Beyond the tombstone, and the wide but low hill of crosses, lay a grass field, fir trees here and there. We circled around the graveyard on our bikes to a spot where there weren’t many people, where a small backstop stood and patches of dirt loosely defined an infield.

  Under one nearby tree, five women and three little girls shared a picnic lunch. Closer to the lake, a dozen or so girls about my age and one boy, probably younger, played soccer. They’d set up red cones on both ends of their little field and arranged brightly colored pieces of clothing to mark the sidelines. Ordinarily, I would have gone over and asked them if I could join in. But I had a challenge to meet.

  I stared at the flames licking out of the tips of the crosses, remembering the times I’d ridden my bike to Epitaph Road at night just to watch the flames light up the sky. They were harder to see in the bright sunlight. “My grandpa’s down there somewhere,” I said. “I like to think those flames are his. Part of them anyway.”

  “The brightest part, probably,” Tia said, and I gave her a look, figuring she was giving me crap. But she smiled, shiny-white against her brown skin. And I got this sudden warm feeling.

  I got off my bike. “You guys ready to show me what you’ve got?”

  Sunday pointed at her impressive bicep. “Say your prayers.” I was thankful for my long-sleeved T-shirt.

  She and Tia carried the bats and two gloves to the backstop. I took my glove and the bag of balls to the mound, fifty or sixty feet out from home plate. While Tia and I played catch, tossing the ball back and forth harder and harder, Sunday took practice swings, timing my throws. She looked like she knew how to swing a bat; Tia could definitely throw a ball.

  Tia crouched down behind the circle of dirt that represented home plate. Sunday stepped in, the bigger bat perched on her shoulder.

  “You should be wearing a mask,” I told Tia. “You’ll catch one in the teeth.” Beauteous teeth, I thought to myself.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “You’re sure?” Sunday said.

  “No worries,” Tia said.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to throw easy just because Tia was back there. I toed the dusty ground, looking for a decent place to set up. Finally, I faced the batter, wound up, and let one go. It was a little outside. Sunday watched, uninterested, as it flew by. I threw another, almost in the dirt. She wasn’t tempted. I was trying too hard.

  I backed off on my third one, and it was going to be a strike. I watched it heading for the heart of the plate.

  It didn’t get there. Sunday squinted and jumped all over it. The ball screamed over the shortstop spot and well into left field. She didn’t smile. She stood there, poised for my next one.

  I picked up another ball and fired it hard. She swung, harder, but missed this time. The ball plopped into Tia’s mitt.

  I kept throwing, Sunday kept swinging. Sometimes she connected, sometimes she didn’t. Finally, I blew three in a row past her and she gave Tia the bat and headed for the outfield to retrieve balls. She wasn’t ready to sacrifice her teeth. />
  Not choosy, Tia took cuts at just about everything I threw her — high, low, outside, in — so I did better against her, the misses slamming against the weathered wood of the backstop. But she connected from time to time. She hit the last one deep, over Sunday’s head, and raced around the bases, laughing. She beat the throw home, but I tagged her anyway. As she squealed and squirmed away, I caught sight of the smooth coppery skin of her stomach. The tiny external tip of her PAC-mandated birth-control implant protruded from her belly button like a piece of silvery jewelry.

  They let me hit, taking turns pitching. I was rusty at first but then started nailing some. Sunday threw hard; Tia was more accurate.

  We quit, finally. All in all, we were pretty even. They’d proven they could hit me, could throw a ball past me; I didn’t know what I’d proven. Maybe that my league should allow me to pitch, that I was nothing special, not even in baseball.

  We were leaving the park when a long procession of women and girls paraded through the entrance on foot, moving toward the burial mound, humming something familiar and mournful that hovered above their heads like a dripping gray cloud. They all wore long crimson gowns; they all held tall, unlit white candles and candlesticks in front of them like altar girls. Their leader, an older woman, barefoot, carried a big wooden cross with a candle mounted in the top, stepping out by herself, her long gray hair flowing behind her.

  We stopped our bikes to let them cross the street. The women ignored Tia and Sunday but smiled at me. The younger girls waved.

  “Fratheists?” Tia said once we were back on our bikes and moving.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ve heard about them,” she said, “but I’ve never seen any before today.”

  “Not exactly mainstream,” I said. “But what is, anyway?”

  “PAC,” Sunday said. “Apportionment.”

  Tia got this strange look on her face, but instead of commenting on Sunday’s remark, she launched into something kind of unrelated, as if she was trying to cover up her thoughts. “Right after Elisha, mainstream churches did well,” she said. “Some people believed a kind of half-baked Rapture had occurred. Nothing else happened, though, and there was almost no clergy to hold things together. Before long, faith in traditional stuff cooled. Church attendance spiraled down. Buildings stood empty.”

  “Omaha has Fratheists,” Sunday said. “My mom has a friend who lost her dad, granddad, brother, and two uncles to Elisha. She drives three hours one way to go to the Fratheist service.” Which made sense to me. I’d come across this local group before today, and I’d been curious enough to do some research. What I’d found out was that Fratheists worshipped God, but they did it through prayers to the souls of the men and boys who had perished in Elisha. Friends, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, nephews, husbands, sons, grandsons.

  Brothers.

  According to the Fratheists, all of the dead were our brothers, and now messengers to God.

  Several times a week, Fratheists made a pilgrimage from neighboring churches to Epitaph Road, where they lingered among the crosses until darkness came. They reached high to light their candles from the flames and then marched away, chanting hymns with candlelight playing on their mournful, radiant faces.

  Some people believed they were responsible for ghoulish acts involving the mass gravesite. From time to time, walkers crossing the burial field early in the morning would find signs of grave disturbances: big squares or rounds of cut turf, loose soil below, as deep as the layer of dirt and perhaps beyond, into the bodies themselves. But no one had ever caught the Fratheists doing anything creepier than just hanging around and lighting their candles.

  “They like you,” Sunday said.

  “Because I’m a guy,” I said. “Someone has to.”

  Woe to you who long for judgment day…

  That day of the Lord will be darkness, not light.

  It will be as if a man fled the fury of a lion,

  only to encounter the wrath of a bear.

  — AMOS, 5:18–19

  — EPITAPH FOR NATHAN GRIGSBY (JULY 12, 2002–AUGUST 8, 2067),

  BY CHELSEA GRIGSBY, HIS WIFE,

  NOVEMBER 16, 2068

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the way back, Tia wanted to stop at the library. Sunday and I went along with it. I pretended I was doing Tia a favor, but I’d had a long attraction to libraries. And I needed some books for required reading.

  We left our bikes and baseball gear at the door, but as usual, even though we were in library-visit mode now, the female patrons — almost everyone — gave me unswerving stares as soon as we got inside.

  It was a big structure, converted from an old police station and jail. Since Elisha’s arrival, governments had been able to shut down most station houses and lockups, converting them to libraries, schools, residences, office buildings, and storage. Tia headed for the research room; I headed for fiction. Sunday surprised me by following along.

  “What’s Tia up to?” I asked as we began meandering through the stacks of books. I made mental notes, titles I wanted to come back to on another day, to read for myself.

  “Hush-hush,” Sunday said. “She’s checking out some kind of theory she’s dreamed up, but she won’t even tell me what it is.”

  “A theory?” I said. “You don’t have any idea what it’s about?”

  “We were just looking at the junkyarddog stuff and she got all serious. Then quiet.” She shrugged. “Be right back.” She headed for a nearby lav. A silhouette of a toilet — no woman, no man — on its door.

  I’d seen old photos taken at a time, PE, when there were separate restrooms for women and men in public places. Now that was no longer practical. Everyone was expected to make do with locks and floor-length stalls and respect for everyone else’s privacy. The urinals still in existence attracted curiosity and giggles and occasionally flowers, but not a lot of urine.

  I spotted a book I needed and pulled it from its shelf and leafed absentmindedly through it, letting my fingers get a feel for the pages. It was an old story, written more than a hundred years ago. But a mandatory read before we got through the summer and took the trials. Slaughterhouse-Five, by a guy — a guy— named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It was skinny. I decided I should get it read soon. I had to show Mom or Aunt Paige or whoever was in charge of me when the time came to visit Dad that I was ahead on my assignments.

  Sunday returned, wiping her hands on her shorts. “No towels,” she explained.

  “Does Tia think she’s some kind of professor, too?” I asked her.

  “She really could be,” Sunday said. “She’s curious. She wants to figure out how we got to where we are.”

  “You and Tia?”

  “Society. All of us.”

  “Don’t you want to know?” I asked.

  “I’m learning. This is our second time through some of this stuff. I can be patient. Tia, she’s hungry. She’s like you, with an extra load of history riding on her shoulders — a real dad somewhere, and a gramps. The two of them were sailing the South Pacific together in a small sailboat when Elisha hit.”

  “She sees them?”

  “Never. They’re loners, living up north. Outside of Fairbanks someplace. She was excited to move out here and get closer to them.”

  A couple of aisles over I found another book on my list: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. For an old book it looked interesting. This copy had been printed in 2074 — twenty-three years ago — but it was still in good condition, probably because most people checked out the electronic versions of books. I preferred the real thing. I liked the way I could fold over the oversized cover flap on this one to mark a place. I liked the way I could fan through the pages and create a small breeze that smelled of paper and ink and an old brick building with tall streaked windows and polished dark wood floors and worn oval rugs.

  Sunday was still just shadowing me, not picking up anything. I decided not to ask her if she had already read all the required stuff. I didn’t want to get
discouraged. And humiliated.

  We moved to the shadowy corner of the library where nonfiction was shelved, where I located one of the two titles I was still looking for: William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I’d still be reading this one when I started shaving. Beyond thick, it felt like it weighed five pounds, minimum, enough to give me an instant hernia. Traditionalist or not, I was tempted to see if there was an e-version.

  Next I found Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The only woman among this assignment’s authors, and another ancient book, but several copies of this title sat on the shelf. Sunday took one finally.

  “What about Tia?” I said.

  “She’s read it,” she said. “Over and over.”

  I felt myself smiling.

  Sunday looked around us. The dim and airless space between the stacks was empty. “You ever make out with a girl, Kellen?”

  Talk about a change of subject. I swallowed. “I’m afraid of girls.”

  “No, really. Have you? That girl at The Groundskeeper, maybe?”

  I was torn between a smart-ass answer and an honest one. The second choice won out. “A year or so ago. This older girl named Merri lived in our house for a while. She tried out some things on me.”

  Merri Nuyen. My first love. Or something like that. She moved into our house with her mother, a brilliant scientist with lungs that didn’t work so well but eyes and ears that always did, especially when it came to Merri and me. Merri and her mom took off abruptly after just a few weeks, leaving me with a temporarily broken heart. Semi-reliable buzz around the house was that they’d gone to the hinterlands.

  “How did it make you feel?”

  I didn’t have to think for long. Those feelings hung on for months after Merri left. “Excited. Nervous. But she — and her mom — didn’t stay. They left in a hurry.”

  “Do I make you nervous?”

  I glanced around, trying to look casual and unembarrassed, wondering if there was a graceful way I could make an escape.

  “I wouldn’t leave,” she added, and her eyes — the color of brand-new fir needles, I suddenly noticed — told me she meant it.