Gravedigger's Cottage Read Online Free PDF

that’s all.”
    “Did I hear somebody say shut up?” Dad called from someplace far, far away. I swear, sometimes he calls home from work, sensing that we have said something from his never list.
    “How old are you, Carmine?” I asked as politely as I was ever probably going to be to him again.
    “Almost eleven.”
    I shrugged. “Oh, now you see there, I’m already past fourteen, so that wouldn’t work. But later on, when we’re the same age, we’ll talk about it again. Okay?”
    He hugged himself so hard, he was unable to talk until Walter went up and forcibly released him from his own grip.
    “Pah,” he gasped. Then started backing hastily away. “Wait till I tell everyone…” he said, and bounded away like a happy, demented jackrabbit.
    When we had the door safely bolted, I turned to my brother, whose flickering, dancing smile expressed both hysterics and just a wee bit of apprehension.
    “Do you suppose they’re all like that around here?” I said. I noticed I had my hand on his arm in a very serious gesture, and we were standing close against the front door the way they do in horror films when a madman comes chopping his way in with an ax. I took a step farther into the house.
    He was about to respond like a normal person, to sort of agree and to say something helpful and reassuring. Then he remembered to be Walter.
    “What are you talking about? The only one acting weird was you. You could treat people better, Sylvia. And you better try a little harder before you get us all a reputation.”
    I stood, aghast, waiting for him to give, to laugh at his own absurdity.
    But he held his pose of rotten seriousness.
    “Hey,” Dad called from the far tip of the house, “come here. Come, let me show you what the toilet’s doing now.”
    “I have to go,” Walter said, turning into the queen of England or something. “My father would like me to see what the toilet is doing.”
    And off he marched.
    Right, I’d better be careful not to get the family a reputation.

The Brothers Grim
    T HE THING ABOUT FINCHES is, they can do an awful lot of chattering without ever telling you much about what’s bothering them, or even if anything is bothering them at all. Their little songs are so cute, coming from their round little bodies and their serious little faces, that you always think everything is going okay, just from the sound.
    They weren’t brothers, of course, since they were married, but Walter and I decided to name them the Brothers Grim when we realized after the first several hours of staring at them that they were very grim characters indeed. If we got too close to the cage, the bigger one, Mr. Grim, would open his bright orange beak as wide as possible—which was a whole quarter-inch wide—and threaten us to keep a distance from Mrs. Grim. They were very much in love, the Brothers Grim.
    So, with their habit of singing the same song come what may, tweeting and twittering away, you just might not notice if you forgot to fill the water dish for them one or two or three days straight when you were really busy with tests and life and things. You might not notice that, and they might not help things any by singing away and flapping away, much like they did any other day.
    And it sounded just as beautiful. Just as beautiful, thrilling, sweet, and comical as all the other too few days they sang and filled our house before.
    But their wee bodies couldn’t take it. They couldn’t go for very long, not the way a polar bear or an alligator could go very long between meals because they could store up great reserves of energy with their big meals and because they conserved their energy by not doing anything for anybody.
    They couldn’t go for very long without a bite or a drink, finches couldn’t. Because they kept singing. Because they kept singing and kept burning it up, and who knew, what with all the business of life.
    And so when he ran down, one Brother Grim just fell over and lay there among the tiny