Boys in the Valley(25)

David thinks, sitting near the back of the small chapel, eyes heavy with boredom, desperately waiting for the sermon to be over.

All the boys are present, squirming and elbowing and pulling at their ears, picking their noses and shifting their asses on the hardwood benches they’re forced to sit on. Poole drones on as usual, and it’s all David can do not to lie down on the bench and close his eyes.

The oddness of the previous day, and the night which preceded it, seems to have thrown everybody out-of-sorts. Including the priests. As it turned out, none of the orphans were put to work in the fields yesterday, nor did they go to any classes. David can’t remember the last time he had a free day—was able to do nothing but lounge around the dorm, read his magazine, take a mid-afternoon nap. It was wonderful, but at the same time disorienting. The schedule was thrown and it was like a cracked gear in a motor, screwing up the timing of the machine and making everything seem just a little bit . . . broken.

It doesn’t help that half the boys are acting like lunatics. The way some of their personalities have seemingly changed overnight makes no sense to him at all, and trying to talk to Peter about it, on-and-off-again all day yesterday, didn’t get him far. The poor sap keeps looking for rational explanations—even after David told him about the grave.

David had gone for a stroll in the early afternoon, relishing the freedom to do so, and decided to have a look at—somewhat morbidly, he’d admit—the freshly-dug grave of the mysterious dead man. The recent snowfall had mostly melted, and the cemetery was, for the most part, uncovered. The fresh sod which had been lain over the new grave was easy to spot.

The sight of it made David’s breath catch in his throat.

“What about it?” Peter asked, the two of them sitting at the dinner table, when David brought it up.

“The grass, where they buried him? It’s dead, Peter. Not withered, not browned from the cold . . . but dead. Like, crispy and black.” He paused, hunting for the right word. “Burned.”

Peter scoffed, as did the other boys around the table. Despite his annoyance at their disbelief, he was comforted sitting with boys he still trusted. Boys who didn’t have their heads up their asses, who still acted like their normal selves. Basil, for one. The little shitter was a nuisance, but David liked him okay. He was a helpless little guy and, probably wouldn’t survive if David didn’t come to his aid now and then. Too sickly, too skinny. Smart, though. He showed promise as a future ne’er-do-well, and David figured the old henhouse needed another fox or two.

Also seated with them were fragile Ben, soft as bread dough, seemingly always on the verge of tears about something or other. James, who was a good kid, loyal, and always willing to pitch in. And Timothy of course, who David thought was a nuisance, but the kid kept his stuttering mouth shut most of the time, which he appreciated.

For some reason, he felt it was important to keep his thoughts confined to a small, reliable group. Byron, seated at the next table over, was obviously trying to listen in, but David didn’t mind that. The rough-edged kid was as stalwart a protector of Saint Peter that you could ask for.

He probably wants to be sure nobody is upsetting his holiness.

“I’m telling you,” David continued, “I was out there this afternoon while you lot were wanking in the privy.” Peter gave him a glare, which he ignored. “I wanted to, you know, see it.”

“Who’d want to look at a dirt-bath?” Basil said, giggling at his turn of phrase.

“What do you mean, burned?” Ben asked, ignoring Basil’s comment, eyes wide.

David told them what he’d seen. “It was easy to see the sod they cut and removed, then laid back over the grave. Black as oil, I’m telling you. Like it had been poisoned.” When he finished, the table grew quiet, each of them lost in their own nervous thoughts.

After dinner, things didn’t get much better. Once Bartholomew got himself cleaned up and had a long nap, he started acting even stranger than the rest of them put together. Out of nowhere he was talking to the other boys as if he were the newly appointed mayor of St. Vincent’s, all smiles and handshakes. A child politician if there ever was one.

But he’d never been that way. Not in all the years since he’d arrived. He’d been quiet, reclusive. David had always thought of him as distant and, quite frankly, strange. Consciously or unconsciously, he’d kept a wide berth of the boy, as had most of the others. A wallflower, yeah, but poisonous to the touch.

Now, however, he’d apparently come out of his shell.

At one point, during a game of after-dinner cards, even Basil had noticed. “What’s he so happy about, anyway?” he asked, shooting careful glances past David’s shoulder at the group gathered in the rear of the dorm, Bartholomew right in the middle of them, as if holding court. David didn’t have a good answer then, and doesn’t have one now.

Maybe a night in the hole did the boy some good.

Still, David can’t help but find the whole thing bizarre. Unnerving. Boys are chumming together that had always kept their distance. Even at supper, David noted that Bartholomew’s table was filled to capacity.

But the strangest thing of all is Simon’s newfound affinity for the oily-haired ghoul. Suddenly the two kids are inseparable, when only a couple days ago you’d have needed a sharp knife to remove Simon from Peter’s hip.