Ruby was sitting very still.
“When exactly did he find this bone?”
“I was ten.”
“You say the sheriff tested it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t trust a thing that man says.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged and looked away. She could see the death contemplation returning.
“I’ll come back soon,” she said.
He gave her a cryptic smile, because soon was the only choice.
Mitchell watched Ruby leave. Now that the bone was talking to him, he could see her through the concrete walls. He was watching Ruby push open the metal door and walk into the sweltering, still day. Then she was sitting in her car, and her eyes were moist. She was planning to return to the airport, fly back to Oregon to learn more about this bone.
The bone was showing him the day his grandfather had found it. He had gone into the woods to hunt rabbits. It wasn’t legal, technically. The woods were owned by the state, just like the poorhouse, which had closed down the year before. It wasn’t a big deal, though, as long as the sheriff didn’t find out. The sheriff said he didn’t want people there because of the feral pigs. They were dangerous. But Grandfather carried a rifle. Grandfather was not scared of anything. He was too sad to be scared, since his daughter had gone missing.
Grandfather had been to the poorhouse before. He had gone everywhere after Charise went missing, calling for her. He had pounded on the door, and it had been answered by a ghostly-looking woman holding her robe closed around an emaciated frame, the last of the residents behind her, all in wheelchairs, their skin pitted and white because they never went outside. It had given Grandfather the chills.No,she told him, in the shadows of the cold door.We have seen no one.
Grandfather had retreated. When he was a child, his mother had told him about the poorhouse—it was not for their kind, which was just as well, she’d said. To live there was like being locked in a velvet coffin, his mother had said. You might be fed, but you will not be free. And the Brown family wanted freedom. It was why his mother had settled in Chinook, though they were the only Black family for miles around. She had escaped a husband who beat her and moved as far away as possiblewith her son, Solemn Brown, and she took in mending and sewing to pay the meager rent on the cabin. Oregon had been created with laws against Black people settling there—the South didn’t have dibs on racism—and even after the laws were finally repealed, there were still plenty of sundown towns. But perhaps because Chinook was so small, they let his mother stay, and Solemn Brown grew up in the shadows of the mountains, by the clear green river. Like Ruby’s mother, he was treated like an imbecile at the rural school. He had never known Desirée, who was younger than him, but he would have understood her.
Now he was back, at the edge of the fields, squinting to see the shadows of the rabbits. The poorhouse was empty now. The last of the residents had been picked up by a van driven by a state worker, and the body of the matron had been removed. What had happened to anyone else was anybody’s guess.
The building was falling apart, the endless wind soughing down the mountains, making the nails in the siding scream as it pulled at the boards, the roof sagging with piles of rotting leaves and fir needles. The door of an empty shed hung open.
Grandfather stood there, feeling sad. His heart was always aching—so much it was like a sickness—and it was an irony, perhaps, that his sight had started going after Charise went missing, as if the loss of his daughter had moved from his heart to his eyes, and was wiping the slate clean.
He could hear something. It was very faint.
It was singing—like Charise singing. She had a lovely voice, and would often sing as she did her chores. She liked to sing Mitchell to sleep at night.
He jerked around, the rifle suddenly cold in his hands. He lost allinterest in rabbits, even the thought of one stewing in the pot. All he cared about in that moment was the very faint sound of that voice. It was real—he knew it was real.
Following the sound, he entered a clearing at the edge of the woods that felt different. Later, the sheriff would say it was the burial ground. But how would Grandfather have known that?
And there it was.
Tucking the rifle under his arm, Grandfather knelt.
The bone lay, long and yellowish white, under the dark leaves. Grandfather’s hands trembled as he picked it up and held it close, and in that moment, the bone spoke to him. Grandfather saw a car parked by trees, smelled exhaust and the rich scent of earth. He felt her fear, her complete sadness. He wanted to know who she was, and he suspected that she could not tell him.
“Charise?” he asked, but the bone did not answer.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay if you can’t tell me.”
He cradled the bone, and his whitening eyes went a little blinder.
Carrying his rifle like it was an afterthought, the bone like it was a weapon and a salve, Grandfather made his way home, and when Mitchell returned from school that day, he walked in to find the old man holding it on his lap.
The sheriff came after they called. He took the bone, promising to return it, which he did. He came back on a day when the rain ran off the eaves. He was wearing a rain slicker, and he looked apologetic. “It’s not her,” he told the grandfather. “You should put it back. You’re disturbing the dead.”
But the bone had disagreed. The bone was not disturbed and didn’twant to be taken back and buried in the dirt. Grandfather put it in the basket in the corner, and there it stayed, clanging and yelling and talking and cursing and doing all the other things bones apparently do.
The bone whispered to Mitchell now, as it had whispered to Grandfather then. It said,Please, please. Please.
