A Winter Grave

Chapter Thirty-Four

Addie walked with Cameron through the old Cathcart Cemetery, fallen leaves crackling underfoot in the frost. Here stood the graves of the good and the great. Impressive headstones and mausoleums. Wonderful old trees bowed in reverence by time and death, witness to the passing of generations.

It was deserted on this icy December day, a pale disc of winter sun barely rising above the southern hills of the city.

The little boy clutched his mother’s hand, swaddled in clothes to keep him warm, red nose in a bright face beneath his yellow woollen bunnet, talking almost incessantly about his day out in Pollock Park just yesterday with Uncle Tony and Auntie Sheila. They had taken him horse riding, and then to a café for ice cream, in spite of the cold. He wasn’t complaining. And they, Addie reflected, seemed almost reborn. Happy to take on responsibility for a family they’d never had. Not, she knew, just out of Tiny’s loyalty to her dad, but because they wanted to.

Addie led Cameron down the path to Netherlee Road and they crossed to where the cemetery had been extended into the Linn Park. It was more open here. Less mature. And they found her dad’s grave easily among the rows of recent headstones. Placed in the ground close to where he had buried his wife ten years earlier.

There was a wooden bench on the edge of the path, and after she had laid her flowers on the grave, she lifted Cameron on to it and sat down beside him, staring at the simple inscription on the headstone.

The time for tears was long gone, but the regret would linger a lifetime.

Cameron said, ‘I don’t know why my grampa had to die? Just when we found him.’ He thought about it. ‘Everyone else has a grampa. Some of the boys at school even have two.’ His sense of wonder at this was expressed in the emphasis he placed on the word. ‘You know what I wish, Mum?’

‘No, Cammie, what do you wish?’

‘I wish Grampa didn’t have to go to heaven.’

Addie pressed her lips together to contain her emotion. ‘Me too, Cammie. Me too.’