“Hey, Henry.” Henry looked
up from his shoes to see a young girl walking up to him. She wore a black gown,
with a small necklace of white pearls; her hair was done up as fancy as he’d
ever seen it.
“Hey, Cecilia.” He glanced
at her eyes, then sheepishly looked away. She wrung her hands together for a
moment—it was oddly adult and juvenile at the same time.
“I’m sorry about your
grandpa.” He’d died a week ago, in his sleep, at the ripe old age of 94. Henry,
of course, didn’t realize quite how long 94 years was, and in his youth only
knew that his grandpa was gone forever, before they even really got a chance to
know each other. Of course, that feeling had as much chance of intensifying
with age as it did of diminishing.
“Thanks.” She didn’t seem
genuinely sorry, really, to Henry; but he appreciated the words even if there
was no sentiment behind them. Cecilia leaned onto her front foot, tapping her
left toe on the ground a couple of times.
“Everybody’s so sad. I don’t
like it.” She did mean that.
“Well…maybe we can cheer
them up.”
Cecilia shook her head. “How?”
“I don’t know. When I play a
prank on somebody it cheers me up.” Cecilia punched him in the shoulder.
“You always play them on me,
and they never cheer me up.”
Henry shrugged. “Grownups
are weird. Maybe they’ll like it. They like it when kids do stuff, anyway.”
“You’re weird,” she said, shaking her head, but he already knew she
was on board with the idea. “What are you gonna do?” He pointed toward the
building at the top of a small hill within the graveyard.
“I was looking around in
there earlier. Somebody left some buttermilk on the counter inside. It smells
really bad, I think it expired.” Cecilia looked baffled.
“What can you do with that?”
“I heard my mom talking; she
said the car that carried grandpa’s coffin is leaving for another funeral at a
different church soon. I’m gonna put it under one of the wheels, so it gets run
over when the car leaves, and goes everywhere.”
He mimed a large splash in the air with his hands.
“That’s not funny!” Cecilia
shoved him. “That’s gross!”
“It’s funny because it’s gross. None of it’ll get on
you anyway.” Henry certainly didn’t understand the potential for a release of
all the nervousness and negative feelings that had accumulated around the
funeral as a result of just enough
unpleasant things happening to be absurd, inciting laughter—or perhaps he
understood it intuitively.
“I’ll sneak in and get it,”
Henry said. “You stay out here and make sure nobody comes in and catches me.”
Before she could reply, he’d disappeared behind some shrubbery.
Cecilia started walking
toward the hill. The building was isolated in the middle of several large
sections of the graveyard filled with tombstones and other memorials; a single
gravel road ran to it up the hill, but she couldn’t see anyone else in that
direction. All of the adults and the other children were gathered further away,
near where Henry’s grandfather had been interred, talking to family and
friends.
As she began to climb the
hill, walking between the rows of tombstones, she noticed that none of them
were particularly interested in her, although one person would occasionally
steal a glance in her direction. Most likely they thought she was off
wandering, as children of any age are wont to do; but it was not really a concern
to anyone until she threatened to disappear from their line of sight.
She reached the top of the
hill and waited. The leisurely pace she’d taken meant that Henry’d had a few
minutes already to get the carton of buttermilk, so she simply stood in place,
shoved her hands in her pockets, and made sure that no one was approaching the
building. Her wait was uneventful; eventually she saw Henry sneaking back down
to the bottom of the hill with the carton in hand. She took a slightly quicker
pace to meet him.
He whispered around the bush
when she’d reached the bottom: “I got it, it was easy. Somebody moved it
though, but they didn’t throw it away.” He shook the carton; she heard the
buttermilk sloshing around inside.
“What do we do now?”
“You stay here.” He pointed
at another row of bushes on the other side of the road. “I’m going to sneak
along behind those, and then put the milk underneath the hearse.” The bushes
would take him all the way there.
“What about me?”
“I don’t know. Hide by the
bushes, but make sure you can watch me.” He headed off again. Cecilia crouched
where she was, next to the bushes, and watched silently.
Henry carried the expired
milk carton in one hand, sneaking stealthily (or so he thought) up to the
parked hearse. The smell of rancid buttermilk would almost certainly disgust
everyone in attendance at the outdoor reception when the hearse pulled away and
smashed the carton.
He was almost there when
Cecilia noticed Henry’s mother strolling over. It had been her father-in-law
that had passed; her husband was managing the rest of the family at the moment,
and providing directions to the reception. She saw a man in a flat cap smoking
a cigarette; he tossed it on the ground and ground it out, beginning to walk
toward the hearse.
“Hi, Cecilia,” Henry’s
mother said, and crouched next to her, pushing a stray bang away from her face.
“Are you OK?” Cecilia nodded. “Listen—why don’t you stand up, and I’ll take you
back to your parents,” she said, and Cecilia complied, still tracking Henry’s
progress.
He had reached the car now. He
looked back at Cecilia, standing near the bushes now, next to his mother—despite
herself, she gave him a thumbs up and grinned.
His mother saw Cecilia’s
gesture, and followed her line of sight to Henry, crouched in front of the automobile.
He met her eyes for a moment; she stretched her arm out toward her son and
cried out: “Henry! Don’t put the quart before the hearse!”
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