The Adventures of Flash Jackson by William Kowalski

Author:William Kowalski
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

7

Epilogue to Part One

Just like that, the entire Grunveldt family had been wiped off the face of the earth, all three of them gone in a matter of days. Their house was dark and cold, the For Sale sign that Mr. Grunveldt had never gotten around to taking out of the yard standing like a coded message telling the world what had happened. You never could tell what a For Sale sign really meant when you saw one. It might mean We Hate It Here and We’re Going Back to Where We Came From, or possibly There Was a Terrible Divorce, or even, as in this case, Everyone Here Is Dead. It never just means For Sale.

Funerals are the worst of life, boiled down and condensed into a ceremony. I’ll never forget old Fireball’s service, though I’ve tried to many times. We cremated those bits of him we could find and put them in an urn. I was not allowed to touch the urn itself, but I put my ear close to it to listen. He was a big man, but I knew they had squeezed my father in there somehow. For years I had nightmares, imagining him trapped inside that little container, pleading to be let out and nobody listening.

A triple funeral is more than three times worse than a single one. It’s three to the power of ten times worse, maybe three million to the power of ten million times. No—it’s three lives ended, no more and no less, and that is plenty bad enough. So let me not dwell on the end of things but rather on the beginnings.

A few weeks after Frankie was buried, my thigh cast was taken off and replaced with one that only came up to my knee. I felt like a whole new person. My leg had gotten skinny, and hair was growing on it like I’d never seen before, but it was my leg, my old leg returned to me. It would take me a long while to get the thigh muscles back. I would have to exercise it a lot. I would have to make a point of moving around.

The good thing about the new cast was that it finally made it possible for me to ride Brother again. I saddled him up and rode out into the countryside, a knapsack on my back, a cane strapped to the saddle, and my bad foot wrapped in a plastic bag to keep the mud out. I’d given up my crutches, and the pain was considerably less now. It felt good to have all that horseflesh moving under me, indescribably good. You never realize how much you love to move until you can’t do it anymore. I’d forgotten about wind in the face, about certain sounds that were accessible only when away from other humans: bird arias, for example, and the secret songs of trees, rubbing against each other in the wind.

I spent hours perusing the landscape on Brother, remembering how much I loved it in the woods.

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