Gravedigger's Cottage Read Online Free PDF Page B

little seed shells all over his sandpaper floor, where I found him.
    And it did not matter how much I cried and apologized and overfed and overwatered the other brother, nothing was going to stop her from following along the next day and falling right down to that same sandy, seedy cage floor.
    And who could blame her?
    It was awfully quiet then.
    And the earth was still wet and soft and bald from when we had buried the first one the day before, so at least it was easy to get them back together. At least there was that.
    “Sorry, Sylvia,” Walter said, patting the same ground again with his bare hands. This was mostly his job, the burying. We never quite arranged that, but it became pretty much his job, and he took pride in his job.
    “Don’t get your shirt dirty,” I said.
    “I won’t,” he said, and stood with his hands carefully extended away from his school clothes.
    Dad had gone to work already.
    “Wash up,” I said. “We have to go.”

Bygone
    B Y THE TIME HE was done refiguring, the only part of the house Dad was still satisfied with was the outside.
    We had the trees. We had the one cherry, and the two inedible apple brothers—crab and mutant. We had all manner of evergreen and leafy and baldy. We had the sea grass, the sandy soil paths, and the smell of the ocean everywhere you went, mixed all gorgeously with whatever mad plant life you happened to be standing next to. Even if the scent part did Dad less good than anyone, even if he had to work twice as hard as anyone, to grab hold of the scent part of things.
    It was one of the saddest parts of my dad. It was one of the saddest parts, and on certain days—like especially on the most aromatic-breezy-oceanside-harvesty days—I thought it may have been even the very saddest part of him, beyond even any of the old sadnesses. The fact that he couldn’t smell things the way we could. Just didn’t have it, because of, I don’t know, an infection way back or something, he was never quite sure, or quite clear, other than that it just went on him. Left him flat.
    He worked these days from the memory of scent, from before, from when he was younger, from before it left him. He was always a scent guy, he said, back before. It was his favorite sense, he said, back then.
    “But we won’t dwell on that now,” he would always say, when he caught himself dwelling on it.
    Anyway, it just didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had to work a lot harder than you do or I did or Walter did to smell the apples in his own yard or the roses, for that matter.
    I thought that was a horror. Especially for somebody who wanted so badly to smell the apples and the roses.
    Then again, it might be the other way around. The fact that he had to make so much more effort—and you should have seen him, pressing a fruit or a flower so hard into his face and closing his eyes and squeezing and pulling the whole garden almost all the way into his lungs—that maybe if he still cared that hard, to do it that hard, that he appreciated it all the more than you did or I did or Walter did.
    But, anyway, we had all that and more, all around us. We had the hedge that was our border, our moat, the spotty but more or less continuous twenty hodgepodge varieties of scrubby hedge. We had the big patches of grass, the wild wildflowers, the climbing ivies, the creeping border plants, the tough vines and thorns of our ruffian thistles and rosebushes.
    And at the center of it, we had our fishies. A neat, odd irregular-shaped man-made pond sunk right in the middle of our overgrown secret jungle. Two fat contented lazy giant goldfish and one mustachioed black catfish squigged around in that pond as if they were putting on a slimy fashion show just for us, whenever we came by, any time of day. I named them Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria after Columbus’s boats he used to find the New World because this would sort of be our New World.
    I wondered if they ever stopped for a rest, if they stopped for