So that’s the thing. No one told me I was dead. Just like no one told Red and no one told Sarah and no one told the Man from Manchester who died beneath a baler. I just knew. Worse still, I knew what we were and how we came to be that way before most of the people around me knew and that, oh that, is the most annoying thing in the world. In this life or any of the ones that come before. Having people around you galloping about in circles thinking the things they do matter when, really, it’s all just a way to pass the time.

Silas somethin-or-other was his name. But they called him Poor Boy. I forget why. Ever’body was poor back then so him not having no money wouldn’t been the reason. Anyway, they say it was Poor Boy what done it. That he just walked in one day and yoked her up side the head with his grandma’s skillet.

Later, and this is just what they say…me, I ain’t never been one for gossip myself…..but them what are say he drug her back on that mountain and dropped her in a well somebody’d went and dug and forgot about. Covered it up with whatever there was to cover it up with and left her there.

Whether she died in that house or down in that hole, I guess only Poor Boy knows.

Edward Darling decided five years ago that he didn’t want to be anymore. Life was meaningless; God, a trick of the mind; and that soul he made such fuss about, nothing but empty space.

And if it was all just empty space, which he now knew it was, and squashed up organs, which any doctor would tell him was so, then that thing..that one single thing that separated him from everything else that wasn’t…him…wasn’t much of anything at all.

Edward Darling was a tree. He was a dog. He was an algae growing on the underside of a water tank. He was a dandelion.

He was all these things because they were just…things…that got on with living without worrying about life.

Edward Darling, was a frog.

I may as well begin with the latest bit of drama. Cousin Bedford tried to kill himself today.

It’s no surprise really. That he tried it, or that no one in the family took notice. Because that’s the thing about Cousin Bedford. No one really cares.

It’s his fault. He’s been stoned for eighteen years and doesn’t open his eyes when he talks. The family have a habit of forgetting about him until his mother, my father’s sister, points out that she does, in fact, still have a son. That he’s a bit of a loser but that he wont be any more because she had a prayer session at church and “God’s gonna deliver him from his idleness”.

There are worse things to be than idle and I’ve got other cousins who prove it, but Bedford does it in such a way that makes everyone around him think there isn’t. Anything worse.

It’s a shadow at the back of the mind. Just on the verge of being.

A heavy cloud that settles at the base of who and what we are before flying off, upward and onward. Taking our breath away just as sure as it put it there in the first place.

A vague, willowy figure that almost isn’t.

It’s where the whole reaper image comes from.

The evening was a strange one. Darcy danced on her two sore feet to an out of tune fiddle played by the neighbor’s cat. Her brother slid across the floor on his belly making hissing noises and laughing out loud. I got scared and started writing a story about Old Lady Filmore and how she was blind. And smelled of turpentine.

Men aint meant to bare their souls. For better or for worse or for none of that stuff that comes in between. It’s what we got wives for. To put enough nonsense out in the air, so there aint no room or expectation for nothin else. Nothin from us no how. And I’m fine with that. Generally. I like it. Leaves me alone to get on with things I know need gettin on with.

I been doin that for a while now. Gettin on. Knowin. Makin decisions no real man has a right to make. But I don’t call myself that. Only half that. And I aint claimed or wanted to be anything else - anything more than half a man, half a real man - ever since my leg left me …

When or how I knew is still something of a mystery because it all came at once and with such force, the way knowing sometimes does, I wasn’t sure I knew at all.

I looked at the napkin, yellowed with age the same shade as Sarah’s skin; and at the silverware, Edwardian and platinum; and at the box, the coffin that held it all together, and thought about how it wasn’t really empty so much as full.

With Sarah and her full flouncy skirt sitting upright in it and leaning over the lip to chat with the girls in theirs, like you’d lean out of the bath to reach for a robe or a towel or just to have a word with someone on the other side of the door.

The other side…

I wanted to cry. Not the kind of full-on-everyone-can-see-and-hear-you type of cry that had never been my sort of cry anyway. But the kind that fills your insides in a low hot simmer and threatens to boil out your eyeballs and through the tips of your ears and nose and fingers and toes - if you’re not careful.

I looked at one of the other girls, looking at me, and saw she was about to spill over too. Those big watery eyes - more like an anime than any plain girl from Palo Alto. (She wore a badge that said said ‘I’m from…’) She held out her hand - Sarah and the other girls still chattering away like a barnyard full of chickens - and said without saying ‘Give it. I’ll tell her’. And I was happy for her to do it; but heart-hurt too because, who was there to tell me?

I sat in the doorway with a pistol I bought from one uncle and a pint of moonshine I stole from another. Thinkin for the first time, those first bits of thought that would turn into what I think now.

“She had that baby yet Lawrence?”

I heard my mother before I saw her. Coming up the holler. That long piece of road that didn’t lead to nowhere but me. Walkin like she does, with her shoulders as square as her head and her eyes fixed on nothin. People always said she had a sense for showin up when things weren’t right. Like she had some second way of seein ever since she lost the first kind…

Summer faded into fall and the leaves began to drop. To rot by the road and on the mountain side.

Old Man Bishop killed a hog. Invited the whole town out for pulled pork and revival. The place needed a soul cleaning and a man from Alabama was coming to do just that. In a tent down by the river.

We left Hutchinson Holler at the end of October. When the ladies auxiliary came out to decry the devil on his holy day. Momma tore up roots that never took and carried us back down to the railroad. Back to what she knew before she knew nothing.

The air lost its thickness when the gossip died down and the cool began to come.

Life went on. For most. But for me there was nothing left in the whole wide world but a boy and a grave and the man who put him there.