Hide Me Among the Graves Read Online Free PDF Page A

sound more resolute than she felt. “For saving me.”
    â€œIf I’m not damning us both.”
    Maria clambered over the wall herself and immediately crouched to begin pulling up clumps of long grass and then scooping out the warm black loam underneath. “You watch him!” she said in a shrill whisper. “If he comes this way, run for the chapel!” She glanced up at her sister, and then hissed, “Jesus save us, are you smiling at him?”
    â€œI’m the last sight he’ll see, God willing.”
    â€œThat’s right, that’s right. Kneel down here—and let down your hair. We’re supposed to be mourning.”
    â€œI think,” said Christina, reaching behind her head as she knelt in the grass, “I am.”
    Maria pulled clips from her own black hair and shook it out. Both girls were shivering. “I can mourn for our uncle,” Maria said, “dead these twenty-four years.”
    Christina kissed the stone before laying it into the shallow hole Maria had dug. Maria frowned but didn’t say anything and began piling the damp earth onto it.
    â€œMore,” she said. “We want a mound.”
    Christina pulled up some more sheaves of grass and gouged up handfuls of dirt from underneath and added them to the pile.
    From her pocket Maria pulled three black ribbons, and after a moment’s hesitation she laid them crossed in a star pattern over the little mound.
    Then she shook the jar she’d brought from the house—“It’s supposed to be foaming,” she said—and poured milk over the mound. In the gathering darkness the milk hardly showed on the black mound, and in a moment it had disappeared.
    â€œNow the blood,” she said.
    Christina reached behind her and lifted the chalice from the wall top and handed it to Maria.
    â€œRest in peace, Uncle John,” said Maria softly as she poured the wine over the dirt. “Please.”
    Christina nodded and managed to say, “Go.”
    She glanced up quickly, and Maria flinched back with a gasp, for a deeper shadow had seemed to fall across them from only a yard away—and then it was gone, and the grass was rippling in waves away from the raw mound.
    Christina was reminded of having once at twilight walked through a field of tall grass and disturbed sleeping birds, who darted short distances away without appearing above the grass tops, so that her passage had seemed to cause ripples, as if she were wading through a pond instead of grass.
    She thought she caught a whiff of the sea, or gunpowder, and the metallic smell of blood.
    She rubbed her hand over her face, and there was no more sensation of clinging spiderwebs. “He’s gone,” she whispered, feeling empty.
    â€œThank God.” Maria got laboriously to her feet, brushing off the front of her riding habit. “We must return the chalice.”
    â€œTomorrow I’ll dig the statue up again,” said Christina. “Papa will be relieved to have it back, even inert.”
    Maria started to speak, then just shook her head.
    The two girls led the horses back across the road, and within minutes they were mounted and trotting away through the deepening gloom toward the lights of the Read house.
    THE WIND FROM THE north swept the grass in even waves across the slope in the darkness, but in the patch of grass by the wall, the waves converged in on the mounded pile of fresh-turned dirt and combed the grass into a spiral, and then the grass blades and the mound flattened, as if under a weight.
    By morning the grass had straightened up again, as if the weight had joined the milk and wine in soaking into the ground, or as if it had risen and moved away.

CHAPTER ONE

    I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
    Fill the days of my daily breath
    With fugitive things not good to treasure…
    â€” Algernon Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time”
    W YCH STREET WAS two rows of tall old houses facing