Morning

The state police came at dawn.

They came up the hill in a convoy, with sirens off and lights turning, behind two fire engines from the county and a third from Hollis Creek, and they found the Academy standing in the gray light with its walls blackened and its chapel a heap of smoking stone. Three hundred boys sat in ranks on the lawn, wrapped in blankets. Nobody had been killed. A priest from the village was going from child to child with a flask of tea. At the front of the line, an unshaven man in a torn dinner jacket, with a bandage round his head, was telling a sergeant, in a flat clear voice, that he wished to make a statement, and that it would take a long time.

It took eleven hours.

Gregory Vance told them everything. He told them about the Society, and the fund, and the men in the state house who sat on its board. He told them about the Rector's study, and the book, and the nine children in his notebook. He gave them the names. He gave them the dates. He gave them, in the end, a small brass key to a filing cabinet in his office that no one had suspected was there. He did it with no change of expression, like a man reciting a long poem he had memorized years ago and never once been allowed to say.

Nobody was sure they believed the part about the thing under the chapel.

They believed the rest.

…

The fire had not reached the lowest vault.

That was the first piece of luck. The Society's papers, which for a hundred and thirty years had been kept in a steel strongroom behind the Ledger chamber, lay in a drift of water and soot beneath six feet of fallen stone. When the diggers broke through on the third day, the paper inside was wet and scorched, but it could be read. Account books. Letters. Cancelled checks. A neat ledger in the Rector's own hand, running back to the nineteen-seventies, of monies paid to certain persons for certain services.

Burnell, R. — Sheriff's dept. — 1,200 monthly.

Dobbs, H. — Retained. — 800 monthly, plus.

Hale, E. — Per head. See file.

They arrested Deputy Roy Burnell in his kitchen in Ottley at six in the morning, in front of his wife. They found Hank Dobbs two days later at a motel off Interstate 80, with a gun in the nightstand and a suitcase half packed. They took Edward Hale at the plant, in the middle of a shift, with his rubber apron still on, and he walked out between two deputies without a word.

He said nothing. He looked at his hands.

There were others. A state senator. A judge. The superintendent of a school district in the next county. Twenty-three men and four women, in all, by the end of the spring. Their names were in the newspapers for weeks, and the word Blackthorne, which had been an honorable one, became a word that decent people did not say.

In the lowest vault, behind a bricked-up arch, the diggers found the bones.

…

There were forty-one sets.

They had been laid in niches along the wall, wrapped in the remnants of gray cloaks, each in a small niche of its own, as one lays out the dead in a catacomb. The oldest was dated 1893. The youngest wore the remains of a wool sweater, green with mold, with a hole in the elbow, and a scrap of paper in the breast pocket, folded small, the ink gone brown.

It was a letter. It began, Dear Mom.

A woman flew in from Tulsa to claim him.

She was sixty, small, gray-haired, with the pointed chin of her son. She stood in the county morgue for a long time with a policeman's hand under her elbow and did not weep. When they gave her the letter, she read it standing. Then she folded it and put it in her purse.

"He always said he'd write," she said, in a perfectly ordinary voice. "I thought he'd forgotten."

…

Ronald Fisk came back by degrees.

It took most of a year. He spent the winter in a clinic in Dubuque, in a room with a window, where a woman in a white coat sat with him every afternoon and asked him questions, and he hummed, and smiled, and looked at the wall. In the spring, he began to look at her. In May, he said a word. It was window. In June, he said bird, and then, one morning in July, quite clearly, with his eyes fixed on the door, Cassian.

Cassian came every Saturday.

He took the bus from Illinois, a four-hour ride, with a paper bag of sandwiches on his knee, and sat in the chair by the bed. He did not ask Ronald to talk. He told him about the hardware store. He told him about Jamie and his comics. Once, he brought a pen, a cheap blue ballpoint, and laid it on the blanket, and Ronald looked at it a long time and then picked it up and held it, and did not let go.

"Thanks for the pen," said Ronald, in September.

It was the first thing he had said in nine months that was a whole sentence.

Cassian looked out the window so that he would not have to be seen.

…

Leo sat for three weeks at his father's bedside.

Gregory Vance lay in a white room at St. Luke's with a drip in his arm and a heavy bandage round his skull. He had been struck harder than anyone knew. For a long while the doctors were afraid for him. But he woke on the nineteenth day, and turned his head on the pillow, and found his son sitting there with a book on his knee, and neither of them said anything for a very long time.

"You're taller," Vance said at last.

"A little."

"You look like your mother."

"I know."

"She's coming. She's on a flight. She, I wrote to her. I told her everything." His voice shook. "I should have told her fifteen years ago."

"Yes," said Leo.

"I should have done a great many things."

Leo did not answer. He closed his book and laid it on the sheet and put out his hand. His father looked at it. Then, with a great effort, he lifted his own from the blanket, and took it. They held each other's hands. Neither spoke.

Out in the corridor, a nurse walked by and glanced in, and walked on, and did not disturb them.

…

His mother left the hospital in January.

She went to Illinois, to the white house with the fence, and Daniel carried her bags up the walk. The foundation that had once paid her bills was gone, dissolved by order of a judge, but the state, in a fit of conscience, had found a program, and the program had found a caseworker, and the caseworker had found Cassian, a quiet boy of sixteen with a record of excellent marks and no apparent family, and put him on a list.

He lived with her. He lived with them both. He went to the public high school, and sat at the back, and in time sat in the middle.

In April, he took the bus to Hollis Creek.

The village lay in a fold of the hills, small and neat, with a white steeple and a general store. The cemetery was behind the church. It was a plain place, a green slope with a stone wall and a few old maples, and in one corner, under a yew, there was a grave with a new marker. Abner Pike. 1941–2026. He had been laid out beside his wife. The earth had settled.

Cassian laid a bunch of daffodils on the grass.

He stood a while with his hat in his hands. He did not speak. After a time, he said, Thank you, aloud, and felt foolish, and said it again.

Then he walked to the other side of the yard, to a patch of bare ground under the wall, where nothing had been planted. A flat stone lay there. It was gray, unmarked, the size of a hymnal. He had paid for it himself, with the money from the hardware store, and the stonemason had asked what to cut, and he had said, nothing. He knelt and set a second bunch of flowers on it.

For Albert, he thought. For Elias. For all of them.

The wind came over the wall. It rustled the maples. A bird sang somewhere, once, and was silent.

He stayed a long time on his knees in the grass, in the spring light. He had a mother who was learning to walk. He had a friend who was learning to speak. He had two hands, scarred across the palms, and a body that slept at night and woke in the morning, and a life that was not, any longer, anyone's to take.

He had been chosen from the beginning, by a man who sold him, and a thing that wanted him, and a school that fed on his hands.

And for the first time, he chose again.