Grazing the Dead - Part IV

copyright 2005 by Blake Lamar

He sat in his room for a while longer, but he kept glancing at the door, thinking his mother might poke her head in and try to make him be strong again. Finally he ran from the house and headed up the street. He didn’t know where he might go. Everywhere he went there were people milling about. Mostly kids, some of them his classmates.

“Hey, Benny,” his best friend Christopher said from across the street.

Chris was standing on his front lawn with a football tucked under one arm. Any normal evening he would be right there with him, tossing the ball back and forth, wondering if they would have enough players to have their own seventh grade team, or if they would have to play up with the junior high and most likely ride the bench all season. But nothing had been normal for the last week.

Benjamin gave Chris a small wave and continued past him. Chris stood and watched him for a moment before tossing the ball back up into the air and catching it.

The houses began to thin until he was walking past Mrs. Simpson’s house at the edge of town. He could see the fields beyond and just kept walking, ignoring Mrs. Simpson’s toy poodle as he growled and barked and nipped at Benjamin’s heels.

When he could see the arched stone gateways and the American flag flapping in the breeze, it didn’t come as any surprise to realize that his body had instinctively led him towards the cemetery. It was the last place that he ever thought he would want to go. This was the place where those men had lowered his grandpa’s casket into the ground and made it final. There was no turning back once they lowered the casket to the bottom of the grave and pushed that impossibly large mound of red dirt over the top of it. During the viewing and later as he walked by the open casket at the end of the funeral before the pallbearers loaded it into that old, black hearse, he kept thinking his grandpa’s body might suddenly come to life. Benjamin could see him sitting up and staring at the astonished crowd before letting out a long gale of hearty laughter. Like his mother said, Grandpa was a quiet type and not one for telling or playing jokes, but if he ever had the perfect chance to pull a fast one, this was it. Benjamin didn’t cry during the funeral until the tractor was dumping it’s first load of dirt over the casket. Until that point he had been preparing himself to laugh with his grandpa when the jig was up. He tried to hide his smile behind a handkerchief, pretending to wipe his nose or daub his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what someone would think if they saw him smiling at his grandpa’s funeral. They would think the wrong things, like maybe there was a giant inheritance waiting for him and maybe it wasn’t a heart attack that had made him fall off that ladder. Maybe the heart attack came later after someone pushed him off or shook him off. It was horrible the way people thought about these things, but he had to hide his smile. He couldn’t give them a chance to think it.