“And I also wanted to say, for the record—you did the right thing. For Peter. There was nothing we could have done for him. Except . . . wait. I can’t begin to imagine how awful it must have been, Joni, but it was brave. Merciful, even.”
Joni heaved herself over to face my way. I reached out to deliver a gesture, a hand on the shoulder or some other expression of support like she might offer. But her eyes burnt red, and my hand hung in the air between us.
“The angel of death,” she said, her voice bumping along the ground to reach me. “Get out of my tent and keep your fricking kids out, too.”
The ashes were sodden from the downpour. We dropped them in sloppy, gray lumps as we trod the path from the camp to the field. The sun streamed down. For a second, it graced our heads while the green grass washed our feet. But then the tender moment passed, and we trudged to the hole in the earth, next to the lumpy soil of the first grave, which had been washed away into a cowpatty mess. The new grave was knee-deep in rainwater.
I stood and stared into it. Lifted my hand to Charlie, his grip in mine.
“We can’t use that,” I said at last.
We walked back to the camp, with Billy lying, at his own request, like a baby in my throbbing arms. Wracked and tender. His eyes were fixed on the backlit leaves of the canopy, as he used to do as a baby in the pram. “What the hell does he see?” Julian had asked me once on a park bench. “What’s he thinking?” The blue gaze had been unrelenting. The leaves danced for him. Do they still dance? Is that what he sees now? I studied his passive face, inches below mine. His eyes were different now, though: glassy and rigid, like a fish’s. I hoisted him into a different hold and pressed him flat against my chest, his legs instinctively clamping my waist. I turned his head on my shoulder so his face tucked under my chin. While we walked, Charlie outlined the details of a Viking funeral. It was all burning boats and floating pyres and sacrificial maidens.
“But it was raining all night, Charlie. We won’t find enough wood for a fire.”
“We could use the charcoal?”
“It won’t burn long enough.”
He chewed on his finger. “It would burn inside that tree. The hollow one at the Bury Ditches? All the leaves inside would still be dry, and there were bits of wood and sticks and that. It would be like an upside-down boat.” He looked up at me with hopeful eyes. “Peter loved Vikings.”
“No fires,” I said, “no way.” But we had to do something with him. And there wasn’t time to waste. We had to take care of Peter, but there were also the living to think about: Lola, Joni. “No fires, Charlie. But we could use that tree.”
My early childhood didn’t include funerals. People died, of course. There were parental tears behind closed doors, hushed outbursts. But I never attended church. “Too upsetting,” they said. “You wouldn’t understand.” Instead, I stayed home with the nanny, eating cake, and when everyone got back from the funeral they kissed me too hard and pressed coins into my hand. As is so often the case with parenting matters, I’d only realized my mother’s true motivations once I had children of my own: she didn’t want me at the funeral because she didn’t want to be constrained by my presence. She didn’t want to hold back her emotions to avoid upsetting her child. But times change. As Joni had said, we make the rituals now. Not that I had a lot of choice; I couldn’t leave the kids with an aunt who had put herself into a voluntary coma. So they had to come with me. But I could also see that it was best for them. To learn how to grieve, to honor a friend. Pay their respects. I had to show them how to take care of themselves, and not just their physical requirements.
So I made the kids get in the car and not look back while I carried Peter’s body down the slope. I had already searched the tent, trying to find a favorite object, something to leave beside him in the grave. But he had nothing. Even his shoes were still on his feet. As I laid him onto the filthy carpet of the Beast’s boot, I remembered that back in the city I had promised to check on his mother and get his Star Wars Lego. But I never did. I never did anything for him. I never even spoke to him about his mother. I just assumed Joni had taken care of all that emotional stuff.
Shame sideswiped me, and I sunk to my haunches behind the car. I laid my palms on the ground and pressed my forehead down, too, grinding my face into the sticks and stones. A feral cry burst from me like vomit. All the things I had never felt, buried in the deep, seemed to surge up, catching me in the barrel of the wave. Squeezing the air out of me. Leaving me gasping. I pushed myself up from the ground and drew in a long breath, the sound of waves retreating over riprap, and slumped again. Then I thought of the silver Burmese Nat, my house guardian, one of the few things I had salvaged from home. I got up and dug him out from under the driver’s seat, placing him next to Peter before we set off.
There was little dignity for Peter while he was being shoved inside a tree. None of the formality and solemnity I had imagined. I still felt washed out, as though by salt water, flushed and stinging. Empty. The kids were restless, nervy. I pushed on with the plan. The fronds I wanted to lay across Peter’s body clung with every resolute fiber to their branches, refusing to be torn or twisted away. I left them broken, hanging from moist gashes. Sharp tang of sap. The sense of waste angered me. The tree will die now! I stamped at the mud that clagged my boots. We gathered fallen branches instead. Thick as antlers, dried leaves curled fetal. Back at the hollow tree, I tried to arrange Peter in a ceremonial way under the cover of the wood. But Maggie kept throwing in handfuls of grass, and Billy contributed bits of rubbish that he’d found in the field—a polystyrene cup, a miniature plastic horseshoe, a bent feather—and I lost my temper and told them they were being disrespectful. They wheeled away, pushing and pinching, taking it out on each other.
Above me, a buzzard screeched. I stopped and looked around for Charlie. Over toward the bulk of the hill fort, he was trudging back from the car park, holding out the bottom of his shirt to carry stones. The Lost Boy did the same. I captured the other two with a firm hand on the shoulder and directed them to gather more rocks. While they were busy, I settled Peter and placed the silver Burmese Nat at his feet. Facing out, spear high. I loved its fierce gaze, the way its back arched in an ecstasy of sacrifice. Defender of home and hearth. “Look after him,” I pleaded, and had one last stroke of its smooth back.
The children piled their stones around the entrance to the tree. Nothing elaborate—there weren’t enough rocks for a wall—but we made a little threshold that sort of defined the place as his. Once we were finished, we stepped back and looked at the overall effect in silence. I put my hand on Charlie’s shoulder, but he was too mesmerized to notice.