Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter Page B

around her back and nestling it in her sister’s arms. They half carried, half dragged the deadweight a few feet at a time until, as they passed into the hallway and neared the front door, his mother gave up trying to carry the body at all. Instead, she grabbed whole ripping handfuls of the woman’s gown and heaved her over the threshold and down the porch stairs each step punctuated by the dragging
rat-tat
thump of the boots. At last the body rested in the dirt at the Colonel’s feet. She bent and pulled the rifle from her sister’s embrace.
    “You haven’t got a box, have you?”
    The Colonel stood erect and did not reply, so she cocked the rifle and handed it back to Henry, who pointed it at the man while she climbed into the shallow grave and pulled the body in after her.
    She took a long time arranging her sister in the narrow hole, brushing the dust as best she could off the gown, combing her hair once more with the ivory comb. The arms, which had twisted in their joints from being dragged, did not look right. She tucked them behind the body, so that the dead woman appeared to be clasping her hands behind her as she walked through a doorway from one world into the next.
    Finally, she closed her sister’s eyes, climbed out of the grave, and, after taking the rifle back from Henry, allowed her gaze to rove the house and the overgrown craze of bramble and crab-grass that lived in its shadow. She put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “We’re going now,” she said to the Colonel. “She was my sister but she was your wife, and I’ll not be the one to bury her. That’s for you to do, and I know you know how to do that at least,” she said. “It didn’t take you long to get my father in the ground. If he’d known what kind of a man you really were, he’d have shot you down like a sick horse. He might not have been a colonel, like you claimed to be, but he fought in a war too, and when he came home he held his head high.” She spat on the ground. “Look at you,” she said to the uniformed figure, “
Colonel
Morse.” She said the name as if it were a bad taste. “They were all so proud of you. She was so proud of you. A colonel. The last man to know my brother.” She snorted once with derisive finality. “To think anyone was ever worried about the family name because I married a coal miner.”
    The Colonel’s eyes raked across her face, but he said nothing.
    “Rachel,” she said to the small girl in the doorway. “I wantyou to come live with Henry and me now. Just leave your things and come along. This isn’t the place for you to live anymore.”
    “Leave her be,” the Colonel said quietly. “That is my daughter.”
    The girl in the threshold curled her neck around the door frame like a little swan, her body still subsumed by the interior shadows behind her.
    Henry’s mother raised the rifle with one hand until it was pointing at the Colonel. With the other hand she beckoned to the girl. “Rachel? Just come along now, all right? You’re going to come and live with us.”
    The girl wavered, looking in confusion between the face of Henry’s mother and the Colonel. The man did not turn to his daughter but continued to regard Henry’s mother.
    “It’s all right, girl,” his mother said. “He isn’t gonna hurt you. He knows this is no place for little girls. You know that too, don’t you? Come along now.”
    The girl’s dirty face flickered. She unfolded herself from the door frame and came walking slowly down off the porch. The Colonel lunged and grabbed her as she was about to pass. He pulled her close to him, and the girl did not resist, appeared in fact to relax into the surety of her father’s grip.
    “She is my daughter,” the Colonel said. “You dare insult a grieving man.”
    “Rachel,” Henry’s mother said. “Little girl, if you ever need anything, if anything ever happens to you, I want you to come find me, do you hear? You know where we live.”
    All the way back to the