Finch will run to him. Throw her arms around his waist and nearly knock him over and he’ll throw his head back and laugh and carry on about how big she’s gotten since he last saw her.
Finch and me will unpack the supplies, load after load. Up the steps, across the porch, into the cabin. We’ll have venison stew, open the front of the woodstove, listen to the fire crack and spit. Once Finch can’t stay awake any longer, we’ll lean into the night and sit in the living room and Jake will ask about our year, and I’ll ask about his health, and we’ll laugh and for a week everything will feel good, almost.
Jake will be here and we’ll be all right.
“You got your gifts all ready?” I ask Finch, although I know she does. They’ve been ready for weeks.
“Yep. A bone knife, some pressed violets from last spring.” She nods toward a pile on the countertop. “And,” she adds. “My cardinal.” Finch is quite the artist, and her sketch of a cardinal perched on a branch is one of her best pieces yet.
“Good,” I say. “What do you say we bury Susanna after breakfast, then we’ll split some firewood and stack it out back? Snow will be here before you know it. Less than a month, I bet.”
Finch looks up, her eyes brimming with excitement. “My sled.”
I split the eggs down the middle and scoop half onto Finch’s plate and half onto mine. “Your sled.”
Last year, Jake brought one, but we had a light winter, weeks and weeks of sleet and ice but not one good snow.
I grab an apple from the bowl and pull my pocketknife out and slice it down the middle. I set the plates on the table. “Breakfast.”
Finch climbs onto her chair. “I’m gonna make a cross for Susanna, to put at her grave.”
“There’s some twine in the chest.”
“I’ll need my hatchet. And can I use your pocketknife?”
“If you’re careful.”
Finch pushes the egg around her plate. “You think this one was hers?”
Finch and her impossible questions. Why does lichen grow on trees in this part of the woods but not in the other parts? Why do chickens have round eyes? Do you think Emily Dickinson was lonely?
We have four chickens. Three, now. Twenty-five percent chance it was Susanna’s. “We can say it was hers if you’d like.”
Finch nods and scoops a bite of egg onto her fork. “Her last gift to us.”
“Thank you, Susanna,” I say.
“Thank you, Susanna.”
After breakfast we head out back with the same shovel that ended poor Susanna’s life, blood still on the bottom of it. I try to wipe it off in the grass but it’s already dry. We go about digging a small grave. I place Susanna in gently, with reverence for Finch’s sake, then scoop the dirt over her body and pat it down. Finch recites a poem that she has recently committed to memory. This is on account of the bookshelf in the main room of the cabin being chock-full of books. Some are almost two inches thick and thus provide quite a bit of reading. Hans Christian Andersen, Walt Whitman, Ovid. She has read them all. Jake’s father was a literature professor, so I guess you could say what we read here at the cabin is rather highbrow. Which for some reason strikes me as funny since that’s the last word anyone would ever use to describe the life we live out here, let alone me. Finch reads and rereads and learns and memorizes, and the truth is, she is now quite a wealth of information regarding American Literature Before 1900, which is the book she waded into last spring. Two thousand five hundred sixty-four pages and the print is so small it gives me a headache if I read for too long. Anyhow, I suspect it’s not normal for most eight-year-olds to be reciting Emily Dickinson or Anne Bradstreet or Walt Whitman, but that’s what Finch has been doing for half a year now.
“‘Nothing can happen more beautiful than death,’” Finch says. Whitman. Believe me, I love Whitman, but this is unbearably morbid from the mouth of a little kid. “Susanna, you were brave and beautiful and you gave us eggs.”
“Amen.”
“Say something, Cooper. Something besides amen.”
Finch doesn’t remember, but this is not the first time the two of us have stood graveside together, and even though it’s a chicken this time, I can’t help thinking about it. About her. Cindy, who, if things had turned out different, should’ve been my wife, who nearly was. I tilt my head to the sky, sun up now, no clouds at all, nothing but blue and the white streak of one jet, inching across the expanse. “Susanna, you were a good chicken, and I’m sorry you had to go like this, and I’m sorry for hitting you with the shovel, but it was better than a long and painful death.” I glance at Finch, who has her eyes pressed tight, and who wrinkles her nose at the last part, still doubting my decision. “Amen.”