The Red Fox

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I was to learn that all the real secrets are buried and that only ghosts speak the truth. So it was fitting: even for me, all this began in a graveyard, among mysteries, memories, and lies.

That year, the twenty-eighth of October was cold and threatened rain, and as I walked away from the little frame church with Father Delaney, our breath misted in front of us. It was autumn; but autumn already cringed before winter. The three tall oaks that screened off the graveyard were stripped bare as old bones and the summer's grass had died down between the headstones, falling into the brown, tangled surf of a fossilized sea. We walked slowly, in silence. I came here only one day a year, but it was as if I'd never been away. Every step brought a rush of memory: the flick-flick of the old priest's heavy trousers as he walked beside me; the smell of wet leaves under our feet; a rusted iron cross glimpsed in the undergrowth: Jennifer, age three weeks, 1917. Year after year, none of this changed, and when we finally stopped before my father's stone, it could have been five years ago, or ten, or fifteen. All the old emotions welled up the shock, the grief, the fundamental disbelief but they were now so expected, so customary, that even their melancholy was comforting. Gently, I looked down at the slab of polished red granite, and the old priest murmured a prayer under his breath, saying the words in Latin as he knew my mother always liked. I bent forward. Half kneeling, I placed the usual bouquet of cornflowers against the smooth stone, then drew myself up and raised my eyes. My father's grave was right on the crest of the hill; from where I was standing, you could see for miles across a spur of the Tuscarora Mountains, northwest of Harris-burg, Pennsylvania.

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