The boy grew restless. “I ain’t got all day, mister.”
When the coffin was at last on the cart hitched to Ridley, the boy lingered.
George wagged his finger. “You will not receive a penny from me. Skedaddle.”
The boy rolled his eyes as though George had ended his world and spasms were coursing through him, then turned and was gone in a blink.
George collected himself and climbed upon Ridley. How was it, he wondered, that he might accomplish one single errand yet already be so done with the day? He could make it a task to sit in bed for ten hours straight, without moving a single toe, yet he would still somehow exhaust himself by the work. It was unbelievable, yet it was so.
“Git,” he said to Ridley with a nudge of his boot.
The donkey made no move.
“Go on,” he said.
Still nothing. Ridley flicked his ears about as if bouncing the commands away. George gave him a kick for good measure. This, too, produced no effect.
“Move your fat ass!” George cried. “Go, go, go! Goddamn it.”
Ridley did not stir in the slightest. He was looking off—at the long road, at the great stretch of forest in the distance, perhaps at an oblivion only he could see.
George leaned down to the donkey’s ear, his voice furious.
“There is nothing there,” he hissed. “That road goes to another town just like this one, and then to another, and there is nothing in any of them but the same thing repeated, different yet identical, the same stores with different fronts, the same simpletons with different faces, and absolutely none of it should interest you at all because you are a goddamned brainless donkey who has ruined my day.”
George slid off Ridley in a fit of rage, ready to come to blows with the creature, but the moment his feet touched the ground Ridley began trotting forward.
“I see,” George said, huffing. “Very well.” They walked beside each other then. He concealed himself in Ridley’s shadow and his mood was one of conciliation. “If the load was too much you only needed to say so,” he whispered. “You can’t just sit there in silence.”
As if the donkey might speak. Still—it was the only apology George could manage. He put his hand upon the base of Ridley’s mane and it gave him comfort just to feel the beast, to be in the presence of another warm-blooded animal with no greater wants than to take the step that followed the last one toward home.
*
There had been little time to prepare for the burial, but Isabelle had collected roses from the garden, the few of any quality, and tied them together in a bouquet. Prentiss, George, and Caleb carried the coffin, Prentiss at the front and George and Caleb side by side together at the rear. George told them of a clearing in the woods, one he’d shown Landry some time ago, and where he’d seen him on numerous occasions since. He guessed it to be his favorite place in the woods, untouched by human life except for him—and what better place for a burial.
“Do you want any words said?” George asked Prentiss. “I know a few verses by heart.”
Prentiss was focused on the coffin so intently that George thought he’d gone unheard, but then Prentiss looked up at him and said, “Let him go as he lived.”
So they dug in silence, the three of them taking turns, Isabelle standing alongside. It took nearly an hour to make the hole large enough.
When the coffin was interred, Caleb turned to Prentiss and spoke for the first time. “If you don’t want me here for this…”
Prentiss once again kept his eyes on the coffin.
“You ain’t killed my brother,” he said. “I won’t stop you from saying your goodbyes.”
All four of them stood silent beneath the canopy of sunlight that had begun to close like a lid, encircled by the limbs of the trees reaching toward one another in the slanting wind.
“Isabelle,” George said.
She stepped forward and from the bag at her side retrieved a wooden stake, no taller than the leg of a child, and stuck it into the ground at the head of the coffin. She then pulled forth another item from the bag, a sock, the same blue as the one Landry had knitted her, yet large enough for a grown man—for Landry himself.
“I knew if you two went north,” she said to Prentiss, “eventually the weather would be chilly, and seeing as your brother was so kind as to knit some socks for me, I thought I might return the favor. At the very least it might commemorate his kindness, to mark where he found some peace after all.”
She hooded the top of the stake with the sock and fastened it with a length of twine. When the sunlight touched it, the blue was intensely bright amid the expanse of green grass, such that it could be glimpsed from any angle at the edge of the entire forest.