Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

The sun was up, and the color of their surroundings had ripened into lush forest green. Yellow wildflowers peppered the meadow.

And the jawbone had a reddish cast.

A flock of crows rose up from a nearby tree, screeching. Khaa! Khaa! Cowp-cowp-cowp! His father watched their flight. "Damn birds. I never did need an alarm clock." With the same nonchalance, the old man said, "So you've come home."

"Well, yeah." Oren sipped his coffee. "I thought you were dying."

"What?" The judge turned to face his son. "Hannah told you that?"

"No, sir. She never spelled it out in her letters." Yet she had left him with the impression that a funeral was pending-just a crazy inference drawn from her line about shopping for coffins.

The judge waved one hand, dismissing this notion. "I'll outlive her. She drinks more than I do." He flicked a ladybug off the rim of his coffee mug, proof that he was not blind-except to the skeletal remains of a human being only inches from his elbow.

The door opened, and Hannah rushed out onto the porch in a racket of wooden clogs. Bending low, she covered her employer's shoulders with a woolen afghan.

"Stop fussing over me," said the judge, though he snuggled into the wool, grateful for the warmth. When his housekeeper had gone back inside and the door had banged shut behind her, he turned to his son. "Damn, she's in a state this morning."

Oren lightly tapped the fleshless body part that perched between them on the edge of the porch-just a hint that this might be the cause of Hannah's distress.

"Well," said the old man, oh so casually, "it's not like she hasn't seen that kind of thing before."

That much Oren had already surmised, but he would not take the bait and ask an obvious question. Lessons of boyhood had made him into a patient man. In a contest of sorts, he sipped the dregs of his coffee- slowly -then looked up to the sky and said, "I heard the dog died."

The judge nodded. "Horatio was lame and half blind when he chased down his last squirrel." He drained his coffee mug and set it down beside the jawbone. "Never heard a car pull up. How'd you get here, boy?"

"Planes and taxicabs." Even if he had waited another twenty years for this reunion, his name would still be Boy. "I got out of the cab on the highway and walked for a while." Last night, he had thought it best to sneak up on this place of profound pain and night terrors and the best times of his life. Oren smiled somewhat insincerely. "It was late. I thought the noise of a car might disturb a sick old man on his deathbed."

Judge Hobbs laughed. Approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, he could pass for ten years younger. There was no sign of illness in his rosy flesh, nor had age slowed his brain. He announced every thought with the flicker of bright blue eyes, quick to note everything, missing nothing, not even what went on behind his back, for now he turned to catch Hannah watching from the window.

Reaching down to a lower step, Oren plucked a small clump of yellow hair from the splintered wood before the next breeze could take it. There was no need of a microscope, no doubt that this was fur recently shed by the barking dog.

"I thought you'd be wearing your uniform, boy."

Oren stuffed the fur ball into the watch pocket of his jeans. "I left the Army."

Finding human bones on the porch seemed to be an everyday thing with the judge, but this news from his son was clearly unsettling. "You quit? Not on my account."

"No, sir. It was time for a change." Years ago, he had ceased to define himself as a soldier. He was a man in search of a second act, and Hannah's most recent letters had pried him loose from the inertia of military life. The mail from his father had always been returned unopened, twenty years of letters, and yet the old man had remained a constant correspondent all that time. The silent war of father and son was a one-sided thing.

Oren, formerly Warrant Officer Hobbs of the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigations Division, picked up the jawbone and pondered the rust-colored stain. "So… this happens a lot?"

The door opened wide, and Hannah stood there, hands on hips, wearing a shapeless denim dress. Her hair was massed on top of her head and magically held in place by two wooden sticks. The new day had officially begun, and the balance of power shifted to her side of the porch. "Oren, I need you to carry that bag of yours upstairs. It's too heavy for me."

In times past, the housekeeper had used this voice of authority only for special offenses, such as the grimy rings of a boy's life left on the porcelain sides of the bathtub. Smiling, he rose from the steps and followed her into the house. Closing the door behind him, he paused to stare at the dead bolts. Once, there had been a quaint keyhole lock-only one-and there had never been a key. Now there were three heavy-duty bolts, and each one required a key to unlock it from the inside.

The parlor of the old Victorian was flooded with sunlight, and Oren had his first look at what time had done to this room. It was disturbing. The shabbiness was not a symptom of apathy; it was worse-a conscientious thing. A broken vase of no value, sentimental or otherwise, had been glued back together so that it could remain a fixture of the mantelpiece. The rug was faded and near bald in places, evidence of scrubbing spills or maybe the accidents of an old dog in its dotage. And though Henry Hobbs had bags of money, the old man had kept the same furniture. Rips in the massive red sofa had been carefully mended, as had the cracks in the old brown-leather club chairs and the recliner. This was no act of preservation, but more like hard-core denial that two decades had passed since the loss of Josh.

An Irish setter lay on the floor near the fireplace. The dog was posed in sleep, but nothing could be so still as death. "Horatio?"

"Your father had him stuffed twelve years ago," said the housekeeper.

Not the brightest of animals, Horatio had never learned to do tricks or obey commands; he had only known how to slime his family with kisses and wet them down with drool. So happy was he to love and be loved, his tail had wagged in his sleep.

This stuffed- thing -was nothing like Horatio.

Hannah squinted, as if to see the lifeless carcass more clearly. "I suppose it is a bad joke on a dead dog." She gestured by hand signals that he should follow her upstairs, where they would not be overheard.

He picked up his duffel bag, his socks and cowboy boots, and then he climbed the steps behind her, noting the rut worn into the center of the staircase carpet-the same old carpet. Up to the second-floor landing and down the hall they went. The housekeeper led the way, and Oren spoke to her back. "So, Hannah, you mentioned a coffin in your last letter."

Surprised, she stopped mid-stride. "The judge didn't tell you?" She continued on her way down the hall, saying over one shoulder, "Your brother's been coming home-bone by bone."

Oren dropped his bag and boots. Grabbing the housekeeper by the shoulders, he turned the tiny woman around to face him. "The judge thinks that jawbone belongs to Josh?"

"Well, yes. But that's not the crazy part." She rolled her eyes and sighed. "It never ends." By her tone, she might be describing a long parade of ants in the kitchen instead of his younger brother's strange homecoming, one bone at a time. Hannah turned solemn as she studied his face. She must have seen that he was stalled somehow. The wiry little woman scooped up his belongings from the floor, as if the heavy bag and boots weighed nothing, and she carried them to the bedroom at the end of the hall.