Lost Souls

chapter 67

In the rusting shed, breathing the faint odor of something dead and desiccated, the boy could no longer tolerate the sight of the cottage across the street, its only light a porch light, its windows black with portent.

“Let’s go,” Travis said.

His words came in the pitch of a child’s voice, but in some way not easy to define, his voice wasn’t that of a child anymore.

“There’s no urgency,” Bryce Walker assured him.

“You’re cold.”

“Not that cold. And I’ve been cold before.”

“There’s no use waiting anyway.”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“We know.”

“No, son, we don’t.”

“I know.”

“There are some advantages to being an old fart like me,” Bryce said. “One of them is experience. I’ve had maybe a thousand times more experience than you have. No offense. And one thing experience has taught me is that life can hammer you hard just when everything seems to be so fine, but life can also drop the most amazing moments of grace on you just when you thought nothing good would ever happen again.”

“Let’s go,” the boy interrupted.

“In a moment. What you have to do somehow is be grateful for what good you’ve known and for what good will come, in spite of the bad times, because you come to see that you can’t have one without the other. I’m not saying that it’s always easy to be grateful when the pattern of things so often doesn’t make sense. But by the time you’re my age, you realize it all does make sense, even if you can’t quite say how.”

“Let’s go, all right?”

“We might,” Bryce said. “But not until you tell me what I just said to you.”

Travis shuffled his feet in place. “Never give up.”

“That’s part of it. What else?”

An old Chevrolet passed in the street, briefly whirling autumn leaves in its wake.

“Nothing’s over till it’s over,” Travis said.

“That too. What else?”

From some perch on a roof elsewhere in the Lowers, an owl called out, and a more distant owl responded.

Travis said, “Maybe we don’t ever really die.”

Bryce wanted to fold his arms around the boy and hold him very tight, but he knew that such an expression of sympathy was not wanted yet. Because in spite of what Travis had first said, he had not given up all hope. While there was hope, there need not be consolation.

“All right,” Bryce said. “Let’s go. My ass is half frozen off.”