The Eyes of a King (29 page)

I did not speak again. That night Stirling was laid out in an open coffin and carried to the church so that we could keep the vigil there. There was nothing between him and the stars as we
processed across the quiet square. At the church, we all stood about him in silence. Almost the whole congregation was there. Maria cried all evening—I could see her at the other side of the room—and I hated her for it, because I couldn’t cry. I just stood and looked at Stirling and did not speak and thought of nothing.

I had to look at Stirling. Otherwise, it didn’t seem real. I felt as if there was someone missing, and he would come running in and reach up to catch my arm and grin at me. But how could he while he lay there so still in the coffin?

For a moment, when I looked at Stirling’s face, I saw myself lying there. I thought I was losing my mind. But it was only that he looked like me. A part of him was the same as me. A part of me was dead. But it didn’t feel like part. It felt like the whole of me. What did I have without Stirling?

At dawn we returned to the house to put on our clothes for the burial. He had to be buried between five o’clock and sunrise. I thought we should refuse and give him a proper morning burial, but I did not speak. “Stirling’s soul is already in heaven,” said Father Dunstan. “He is at God’s right hand whether we bury him before dawn or after; I am certain of it.”

“Wear your army uniform,” said Grandmother to me. She was still crying, and her nose was running like a baby’s. I almost spoke then; I almost shouted that Stirling would hate it if I wore my army uniform, but I clamped my mouth shut and went and put on ordinary black clothes. “Please, Leo,” she said. “Stirling would have liked to see you looking smart—not like that. Anyone who sees you will think you do not care.” I dug my fingernails into my hands until they bled, and remained silent.
“Please speak to me, Leo,” she said. “Why so quiet? I’m so alone, Leo. I feel so alone, and my heart is breaking.” I turned away; it was time to leave, anyway.

When I had tried to bring Stirling back, everything had slipped away from me, and it was still distant. My brain wasn’t working well enough to tell me to feel anything at all. I felt dull, like I wasn’t real. Like nothing was real. I wanted to cry so badly, but I couldn’t. Outside in the alley I crashed my head against the wall. For a second I was aware of nothing but the pain in my head and the darkness that veiled my eyes.

“Leo, what are you doing?” Grandmother exclaimed, trying to stop me. I had not seen her come out the door. “Leo! Stop!” I put my hand up to my head and fell back against the wall. “You will harm yourself.” She tried to look into my eyes. “Don’t do that.” I shut them.

She held my hand as we walked to the church. I wished that she wouldn’t. It held me down in reality. But still I didn’t cry. The longer you go without crying, the harder it is to do.

I felt as if maybe this was a joke. Or a dream. Or maybe we’d all made a mistake, and he was still breathing. Or maybe I was only imagining that he was dead, and he’d run along the street and put his hand in mine, and we’d walk to Mass together—me, Grandmother, and Stirling. But he didn’t. And every second that he didn’t, I felt as if something important was out of its place, and I could not rest until I had brought it back. Stirling wasn’t where he belonged. He was alone in a coffin, in the darkness of the church, not here with Grandmother and me.

We stood at the side of the coffin when it was closed for the last time. When the coffin bearers picked up the lid to put it on again, I raised my hand and they held it. I had not had time to
say goodbye to him forever. I went on looking at his face, desperately, but Father Dunstan gestured to them and they put the lid down anyway. “You will not forget him, Leo,” he said. But already I was.

We processed to the graveyard as the gray light of dawn diffused into the indigo sky in front of us. Father Dunstan went first; then the servers from the church, in procession; then the deadpan coffin bearers with Stirling; then Grandmother and me—which was all the family party. There should have been relatives, but there were only us two. Mother and Father were far away, maybe dead, Aldebaran dead, Grandmother’s parents dead; Great-uncle Harold dead; and if Great-uncle Harold had any relatives, they were in England, if it really existed. Or dead.

There was silence in the procession, except for our hushed footfalls, and Grandmother’s soft crying like rain, and the rhythmic clink as the burning incense swung from side to side on its chain. It rose in claws about us. Its strong perfume was sharp in the back of my throat, and in my eyes and my nostrils. The two flames of the acolytes’ candles blushed feebly through the mist and the darkness ahead of us. Occasionally someone coughed or let out a breath tentatively, and the silence would fall all the more oppressively after that.

I was angry with myself for being so slow to realize what had happened. Stirling’s dead, I kept repeating, over and over in my head. Stirling’s dead. Stirling’s dead. But I repeated it like a rhyme and forgot its meaning. And I kept looking for him in the procession. Maybe he’d just marched ahead, humming to himself. Maybe we’d catch him up.

The coffin bearers slowed when we reached the steep hill that led down to the Victoire Bridge. The coffin slanted, and I
thought of Stirling, in the dark inside it, sliding down. I wished I could tell them to be careful.

At the bottom of the hill, beside the Zenithar Armaments factory, two young soldiers stood talking and laughing. They stopped abruptly, taking off their hats and pressing them to their chests, casting their eyes down as we passed. I suddenly hated them so much, because they were like me but their brothers were not dead, and they could laugh like that as though the world was still ordinary.

One of the soldiers looked up, the smile still fading from his face, and I realized that it was Seth Blackwood from school. It was another five minutes before I wondered why he was dressed in a private’s uniform, on guard duty for the army, but by then we were far past them.

Stirling was buried farther round the outside ring of the graveyard than the other coffin that we had seen buried before. I thought of that day, when he had spelled out “Aldebaran” and stamped on the grave to hear a coffin echo. And when he asked me if I was scared, and pressed close behind me when the priest came through the arch, like I could protect him because I was his big brother. That was Stirling. That was who we were burying. Not the peaceful, dead Stirling, who looked like he was sleeping, but the living, breathing, laughing Stirling—the one who wanted to be a priest and tried to teach himself to read from the newspaper.

At the head of the pit, there was already a small wooden cross, marked
Stirling Gabriel North.
That’s his middle name. Gabriel. Was his middle name. And the dates below it—only eight years, and already in the past. This was the end. His life was cut off here, like a story that stopped in the middle, and it
would never continue, and Stirling North would never be on this earth again.

I wanted to cry like I had out in the hills, uncontrolled and wild. I wanted to cry so hard that I could not think, until all the sadness was out, but I could not. I just stared silently, dry-eyed, while Father Dunstan spoke a prayer over the coffin, and Grandmother and I stood alone at the side of the grave. He read from the scriptures, but I did not listen to the words. Then the coffin was lowered into the ground. Grandmother cast a handful of earth into the grave and motioned to me, and I did the same. The lumps of soil burst and scattered on the new wood of the coffin, and the grave was filled in swiftly as the procession returned to the church and dawn rose. But I remained where I was.

“Come, Leo,” said Grandmother as the rain started. It began suddenly, without warning. The grave digger had left, the grave was compacted and covered with turf, and everyone had gone. I was thinking of nothing, just staring at the grave and the cross with Stirling’s name on it. “Come, let us go home.” But there was no home without Stirling; there was nothing without him; he was the only one I cared about in this world.

I could stay here beside the grave forever. Until I died of tiredness or thirst or starvation, and then I could be buried here too, in the next grave, and I would never have to leave Stirling. But all flesh rots away, and graves are sometimes moved, and who could tell what would happen to this graveyard in the future? And even if I was buried in the cold, dark earth beside him, he was not here. I could never reach him. But still, I felt as if he was. And I didn’t want to leave him here in the dark by himself.

An ache that was too much to bear was rising in my chest. I looked around, and Nothing was coming up over the walls, like the hands of ghosts, and the rain in the air was shivering, and the ground was tipping so that there was nothing that could stop me from falling off. I dropped down onto the grave and began scrabbling in the earth, as if to dig it up.

Then Grandmother had hold of me, trying to pull me to my feet. “Leo! Leo, please. I need you. Don’t lose your mind.” The ghosts vanished, and the earth righted itself, and the rain fell so hard that it hurt. I turned and followed her.

As we got farther and farther away from the graveyard, I felt that a cord was being stretched taut—a cord that ran between my heart and Stirling’s grave. The farther away we got, the tighter it grew, and the more painful. I could actually feel it—real pain aching in my chest. I never understood until then what people meant when they said their heart was breaking.

W
hen I came upstairs from the bathroom later that morning, Grandmother looked up from her sewing and called out, “Stirling?” I walked into the range of her searching eyes. “Oh, Leo,” she said. “But where is my little one? Where is my Stirling?” I wouldn’t talk. I just looked at her. But she wasn’t looking at me. “Dead and buried?” she said, though I had said nothing. “What—has it been six years?” She was talking to someone in the space between me and her, but there was no one there.

Then her eyes caught me, and she came back from wherever she had been. “It’s barely three hours,” she murmured. Tears
brimmed from her eyes. “Oh, Leo, I forgot—how could I forget? I don’t know what happened.”

She was clutching at something that was lying across the arm of the chair. I went to her side and looked at it. “For little Stirling’s First Communion,” she said, holding it up. It was a patchwork quilt, nearly finished, and she was sewing in the last square. The outside squares were embroidered with a pattern of birds and leaves, and the central ones with stars. That was what the squares of material had been, the ones I had seen her sewing all this while. “Oh, Leo!” she wailed. “How will we survive? How can we go on without him? How can we?” She crushed the quilt down in her lap and sobbed, rocking back and forth, her eyes unfocused. I walked around the room. I walked in circles, holding my breath each lap. That was all I had done since we had returned from the graveyard. I was losing my mind; I knew it. We both were.

Father Dunstan found us that way later: Grandmother still rocking and crying, me still pacing, though I broke off to open the door for him. The rain sheeted down behind the broken window. He’d had to leave to attend the service; it was the twenty-first of July, the day on which Stirling should have made his First Communion but instead was buried.

Father Dunstan arrived about one o’clock, and he cooked us some soup. Neither of us ate any. He spoke quietly with Grandmother, and I went on walking about the apartment. I could not concentrate on anything. I tried to look at the clock, but I couldn’t tell what time it was from it. I tried to sit and look out the window, but I started up again and went on pacing. I couldn’t do anything else.

I had been avoiding the bedroom, but I didn’t want to talk to Father Dunstan, so I marched in there. Grandmother had laid the patchwork quilt on Stirling’s too-neat bed. His Bible was on the cupboard next to it, and his army uniform was folded on the chair, next to mine. And his boots, at the end of his bed, stood exactly in line with each other, with the laces trailed out so that they didn’t touch. His things looked just the same. But all their life had flown away with Stirling’s spirit. The boots would not be worn, and the uniform would stay neat and folded, and the Bible would never be opened.

I sat down on my bed, picked up Stirling’s gold christening bracelet, and traced the letters with my finger:
Stirling Gabriel North.
Stirling Gabriel North, eight years, eight months, a week, and two days. That was it. He could never be anything more than what he was then. As if he was frozen where his life ended. I cried then, for who he would never be. But I didn’t cry for long. I couldn’t. I lay on my bed and turned the bracelet around in my hands. And then I could not stay in the apartment any longer.

Grandmother called after me as I went down the stairs, and Father Dunstan said quietly, “Margaret, let him go.” I did not know where I was going. I met no one on the stairs. The yard was deserted, except for the falling rain. I crossed to the bathroom and bolted the door behind me.

It was half dark already in there. I sat down on the grimy edge of the shower and rested my head against my knees. The rain outside was like a mournful tune, sounding different notes as it fell on the roofs and the mud and the rusted water pump and the old window ledges with the paint peeling. I could hear the baby from down here; he was repeating the
same angry wail over and over. I shut my eyes. I sat there and wished with all my soul to be somewhere else. I could not stand any longer being Leo North; it was too much. I was scared that my heart would break, really break, if I thought again about Stirling.