He was tired and hot under the moonlight when he reached the stone that marked Agata’s grave. He laid the torso down gently on the dry ground and began to dig.
* * *
*
After his dream of Agata vanished, the smell of Klim’s dead body on Jude’s hands separated from the heady fragrance of flowers, and he realized that he was lying in dry dirt, not a single flower about. His pants were down. What a dream, he thought: Agata dressed like a nun, trudging across the clearing. Her small body had squirmed and bucked under him, just as it did when she had lived with him so long ago. He shook the dream away and felt sick. He turned his head and his body pulsed, his throat and guts cramping as he regurgitated Klim’s pinky toe, small and roasted, its little nail sticking out. If he died there in the dirt, all the better. ‘Let the birds come and pick my flesh apart. Let them start now,’ he thought, ‘while I wait to die.’ Whether it was real or not, he didn’t care. He felt it was real enough. ‘Come and take me,’ he said to God.
But God wasn’t listening. God didn’t care about Jude. God was busy lifting the sun for another day.
And so the sun rose on Lapvona.
Marek was nearly done digging. He had measured the length of the torso—it seemed smaller than he remembered Jude, but this was only a piece of him, after all. Jude, herding with his staff, had cast such a long shadow at noon across the pasture. Marek recalled how his father lilted through the heat last summer. ‘It will break soon,’ he had said. His sweaty throat, the tight cords in his neck and shoulders, all the sores and scars from self-flagellation, Marek remembered all of it. This torso here was so dirty, he could only see the outline of the protruding rib cage, the shocking white of bone at the spine and neck, the haggard entrails. The sun was already burning hot on the horizon.
Marek had dug the hole just where Agata lay, below the chipped rock. He prayed, pushed by the mania of his effort, that he would not find his mother’s bones. If God were good, He would have taken her, he thought, recounting what Jude had said. ‘The Devil leaves you to rot, but God takes you, flesh and bone.’ Ought he still believe that? Would Jude’s torso disappear, too, once it was buried? Could Marek drop it into the hole, cover it up, say a prayer, and then dig it back up to see if God had saved him? Of course he could, though he was already tired, and digging up corpses was a sacrilege. Probably. He had heard tales from Ina of bandits unearthing the dead to steal their garments and whatever relics were buried with them. But no bandits would do such a thing in Lapvona: it was known only for its fruits and wheat and honey. All the wealth was what could grow in its dirt, not in what was buried in it.
He had cleared several feet of packed dirt, then pushed the shovel down hard, and the dirt below crumbled easily. The blade of the shovel hit the roots of the tree. He could dig no further. Agata’s bones weren’t there. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Marek whispered. He remembered the song Ina sang while she nursed him sometimes. ‘I’ll be dead and you’ll be dead,’ a cheery song meant to soothe Marek into the lull of a certain infinity. He sang the song in his head now and kicked the torso into the hole. Now his parents were together, ‘thanks to me,’ he told himself. They’ll be happy. It was remarkable how easy it was to fill the hole. He just pushed the dirt in with his shoe. After hours of digging, it was laughably simple. And so was death. A simple transit from Lapvona to heaven. He knelt on the grave and kissed the dirt. When he lifted his head, his thirst and exhaustion suddenly hit him and nearly blew him over, like a gale before a storm. He got to his feet and let the feeling take him away. He supposed this was God’s wind, the rush of air sucking his father’s soul from its dead flesh, up and away. He ran, light on his feet, up the hill now lit golden and red with the dawn, back home to the manor.
* * *
*
Lispeth was asleep in Marek’s bed. She had spent hours in the chair, dozing, waiting for Marek to return, wishing he wouldn’t, hoping he would fall prey to the ghouls of Lapvona, and then, in the haze of her exhaustion, she had crawled onto the bed. She slept deeply and dreamt about Jacob. She dreamt of him whenever she could. Most often her dreams were relived experiences of the past: sitting by Jacob’s bed, watching him sleep. His face was not something she had studied, but something that acted upon her. Like wine, it took hold of her mind and drew it into a golden light, the dawn of heaven, and her body tingled and relaxed. She felt more alive in these dreams, but woke up wishing that she, too, were dead.