Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

They were the words Graves most often heard when he thought of his father. They’d been said softly, trustingly, but Graves had long ago stopped hearing them in that tone. Instead, they returned to him accusingly. And always tied to other words, said with a grunt, in a hard, mocking voice, You didn’t know what you was, did you, boy?

He knew precisely what he’d been. A boy. Just a boy. Twelve years old. You thought you was a man, the voice repeated through the years, Now what you think you are?

“Nothing,” he whispered, then glanced about to see if anyone had heard him. No one had. The people of the village moved through their afternoon obliviously.

Watching them, Graves fought to keep his attention focused on where he was, Britanny Falls, the present. But slowly, like someone drawn into deeper and more dangerous waters, he found his mind returning to the day he’d been left in charge of things, in charge of Gwen, of making sure that nothing happened to her, despite the fact that his sister was four years his senior, along with being far closer to adulthood in other ways time couldn’t measure.

In a sense Gwen had always seemed like a woman, he thought now. Strong. Knowing. With a dignity his father lacked, and a central quietness unknown to his mother. It was Gwen who’d first read to him, taking him with her to a place beside the river where she liked to sit in the shade and watch the green water drift past. She’d begun with short stories from a collection she’d been given by her high school English teacher. It was called Stories for Girls, but Graves had felt that they were for boys too. He had said just that to Gwen on the day she’d read the last of them, and he could stall remember how she’d smiled at him, as if she’d accomplished some goal she’d had in mind when she’d first begun to read.

Only a week later, Graves had begun a story of his own. He’d called it “A Story For A Boy,” and had scribbled its first paragraphs in one of his school notebooks. He’d planned to give it to Gwen on her upcoming birthday, and had nearly finished it by the time his father and mother left for Ellentown that day, his father reminding him that he was “the man of the family” and that he should not let “nothing happen” to his sister.

He could remember that day with extraordinary clarity, how he and Gwen had stood in the yard and watched the old car back out onto the dusty road, then head east, noisily, a slow trail of dust following behind it like a yellow tail. They’d gone about their separate chores after that, Graves feeding the chickens and pigs, Gwen dusting the furniture and sweeping off the porch.

By noon, the summer sun had begun to bake the house and fields. They’d sat down beneath the shade of the thick oak that rose in the front yard, and eaten their lunch together. Gwen had made a fresh pitcher of lemonade, and there were times when Graves could still taste it.

It was the smell of chocolate that returned Graves to that particular day, June 14, 1962, since Gwen had made a chocolate cake for their dessert that evening. They’d taken it outside to escape the heat, sat down on the steps of the front porch, and watched the scores of lightning bugs drift over the yard as night began to settle over them.

They’d expected their parents to return by nightfall, but by nine o’clock, the old gray mare had not yet brought them home. They’d played checkers, then a game of cards, and finally gone out to the road, first to linger beside it, then to wander down it, in the direction toward which their parents had gone that same morning. It was something animals would do, Graves later thought. He and Gwen were like two bear cubs that had waited all day at the mouth of the burrow, then timidly headed down the unfamiliar hillside, silently, hesitantly, sniffing the dying trail of the parents who had abandoned them.

Even now, over thirty years later, sitting on a chipped wooden bench in a town far north of that dusty country road, Graves could easily remember the feel of that evening walk, the ominousness that had gathered around them, the moist touch of Gwen’s hand as she’d taken his, the increasing pressure with which she’d grasped his fingers as their walk lengthened and the darkness and their bewilderment deepened, and still the old gray mare did not come rumbling up the road.

It was a far different car that finally pulled into their driveway. It was nearly midnight by then, but he and Gwen were still awake when Sheriff Sloane brought his car to a halt, got out, and walked toward where they sat together on the front steps.

“Evening, Gwen,” Sloane said when he reached than.

“Evening, Sheriff,” Gwen answered quietly, her voice already fixed in a tone of dark expectation.

“You have any relatives in the area?” Sheriff Sloane asked.

“No, sir.”

“None at all?”

Gwen shook her head.

Sheriff Sloane drew in a loud, weary breath. “Well, why don’t you and your little brother come home with me, then.”

Gwen did not move. “Where’s Daddy and Mama?”

Sloane’s features appeared even darker than the darkness that surrounded him. “Come along, now. You and your brother can stay with me and my wife tonight.

On the way to his house, Sheriff Sloane answered Gwen’s questions one by one, so that by the time they reached it, everything had been revealed. Their parents were dead, killed in a fiery collision with a jackknifed truck. The truck had been hauling wood for the paper mill in Harrisburg, Sheriff Sloane said, and when it overturned, it sent a waterfall of logs tumbling over the embankment. In all of this, he offered only one consoling fact. “It was instant,” he said. “I don’t think your parents suffered.”

They’d stayed the next few days with Sheriff Sloane, then returned to the farmhouse. There seemed no other place to go. Neighbors dropped by, bringing food and hand-me-down clothes, but otherwise the two of them had gone on alone, doing the chores as they always had, then sitting on the steps together, just as they had the night Sheriff Sloane had finally pulled into the dusty driveway, told them of their parents’ deaths. Autumn brought its usual rains, winter its sparse snow. Through it all they remained together, living in the family home, walking to school each day, returning to the house at night, equally determined to continue on their own. After a while, no one pressed them to do otherwise.

When spring came, they leased the fields to other farmers, keeping only a small parcel for themselves, one at the far end of the field, nearly a mile from their farmhouse, but an area of rich, moist earth that was perfect for a large garden.

Graves worked that garden all the next summer, planting, hoeing, weeding, working in the hot sun with the same sort of persistence he’d observed in his father. At noon, he would drop the hoe in the grass beside him, sit under the shade of an old elm, naked to the waist, and wait for Gwen to bring his lunch. It was at those times, sitting alone, waiting, that his mother and father most often returned to him. He saw his father’s face boiling in the flames, his mother’s hair a mane of fire. They melted like candles thrown into a furnace, their features blending into one charred mass. The pain that accompanied these imaginings was the deepest he had ever known. He could not imagine a deeper one, nor that anything in life might ever hurt him more. And yet, for all that, one thought sustained him. That he still had Gwen. That he was charged to love and protect her. And that he always would.

“Are you Paul Graves?”

Graves abruptly returned to Britanny Falls, glancing to the left, where a tall, gray-haired man stood, peering down at him.

“I’m Frank Saunders,” the man said. “I’ve come to take you to Riverwood. The car’s just over here.”