A note: I tend to write very confusing stories, and this is the worst of the batch. Please don't worry if you don't get it; just take from it what you will.
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"You said that you wanted a tour of the town." The child leaned against a shovel that was wider than his awkward little shoulders, his fingers stained with the same hot red earth and his eyes rebelliously blue. He motioned to the cracked, barren land all around them, without any of the flinch or shudder that the outsider would have been afflicted with.
"I thought we'd take a walk through your town," said a man with an imported kind of soft and gentle eyes. The child did not trust him yet, but the old man could not bear to take it personally; in a land like his, it might have been impossible to have faith in anything. "We could see your neighbors, or perhaps visit your shops."
"No." The shovel crunched into the earth as the child turned away from the man. He still had the chubbiness of youth to make his cheeks heavy, but worried lines a thousand years old made hoary creases beneath his eyes. "This place is all that we have that's worth anything."
The vagrant had never in his life seen a bigger cemetery. In the past it may have been a part of the mines as well. He could imagine someone burying a loved one up at the top of the bald knoll, lovingly dressing the site with starved branches from the dying trees. It must have grown since then, enveloping the land in stooping tombstones, each of them hastily made, as if there were a thousand more to make afterwards. When he arrived in the morning, he had been surprised to see a child, desert-roasted tan, skipping through the headstones. He stepped so carefully that he might have been a mirage, but one of the old men in town, who was just as knarled and sloped as the crude crosses on the hill, said, "No, that's just the gravedigger."
The vagrant thought that he must have been the youngest one in the town. The child said, "Yeah, as of last week." There was a sense of finality to it, an eventuality looming in the words unspoken. The child wasn't alive, not as much as he was waiting for his turn.
So the wanderer followed the child through the graveyard and let him point out crooked graves, his fingers blotted with the same pungent sand that laid them to rest. "This was one of the first," he said in the same kind of awe that the vagrant's son described train sets or his little brother. When the child knelt, he wrapped his tiny arms around the splintering, rain-soggy wood and closed his eyes as if he could hear the fading sighs of the interred. "What do you think?"
"I've never seen finer," said the wanderer because he was polite, and though it pained him to his very core to smile, still he made a heroic effort. The child could not answer with a smile in return, but he nodded his head very slowly and held the marker until it creaked.
"Kasimir Ackermann," he whispered like a slow oath, watching the wanderer very carefully for his reaction. It was the tilt of the vagrant's head that must have done it, because when he spoke again, every detail came pouring out like flooding rains from a pregnant black stormcloud. "They said he fought in every war, in every land in history. He met every king and he took his wife from a tribe that no one had ever heard of, and kept on wandering until the day he died."
The vagrant knelt, careful not to disturb the mound of thorny twigs at the foot of the marker. "He touched thousands of lives."
The child averted his eyes and let the shadow of the storm gathering in the sky wash out the color in his face. "He rode a horse all the way to the eastlands and back again. They say when he returned, they found his wife in the stables, right next to her dressed horse. She'd almost escaped." The vagrant did not miss the sudden pressure in the child's jaw, as he bit back a sob and summoned the stubborn courage to continue. "His children were tossed all over the floor, like smashed dolls. I don't think he ever smiled again after that."
"Was he nice to you?" the vagrant asked, and a waning thing that tried to be a smile fought its way to the child's lips.
"He said that when we were allowed to go home, he'd take me back with him. He'd give me the spices and silks and toys that he meant to give to his children." The silk on the headstone was unmistakably foreign, a precious commodity that was not rare but unheard of in these parts. When the child ran his fingers through it, he looked as if he couldn't bear to part with it a second time. The vagrant's heart clenched at the thought of a child so well accustomed to letting go.
"I was wondering about this one." There was only one grave in the entire area that had flowers on it. They were beautiful, a swollen blue that nicely cured the overwhelming redness of the earth. Golden ink was scribbled over the chapped drywood and the vagrant did not have to wonder why the ink was in near-perfect condition. The child did not have the courage to approach, which drove the vagrant to take a step back, unsure of whether or not he was disgracing the place by stepping closer.
"Sören," said the child, gasping the name like he was afraid someone would overhear. The vagrant could do naught but bow his heavy head, waiting for the deluge of excited details and mournfully recalled nuances. The child spoke of everything, from the way that he would smile at him through the musty window, to the sound he made when he snored.
"Nobody smiled more," said the little boy, but from the way that he imitated it, the wanderer thought that Sören's smiles must have run dry by the time that they met. "He could sing like a bird – I don't remember what they are, but I know what they sound like." To his credit, he quite accurately mimicked the trilling wail of a dove as he lovingly rearranged the wilting petals on Sören's grave. "They said he was in love with the greatest aristocrat in the kingdom. Sören walked him to the tribunals and sat with him at the raising of the flag, with gold in his hair and wearing velvet and all that kind of stuff." The excitement in the boy's eyes was painfully real, and the vagrant imagined him briefly with pleated gold pressed into his sun-bright copper curls. "When they found out what he was, the aristocrat ran all the way to the edge of the land to meet him by the cliffs. They were going to jump to freedom together, but Sören never made it." The child's fingers drew away from the petals as if he'd suddenly realized they were too hot to touch, and he said, "He came here instead. I've never seen the aristocrat deliver the flowers, but I find them every morning. I think they're from the mountain."
The vagrant, who knew flowers well, was impressed that the child would know such a thing. The vagrant assured him that Sören would not mind if they borrowed a petal from one of the heavy-headed daffodils and tucked a gathered bunch into his hair. They moved on, the child carefully pressing a hand to the petals to make sure that they did not come undone, smiling all the way.
"There she is," he said, kneeling beside a marker painted with sprawling, dried cactus pulp. It was covered in juvenile drawings of blue skies and crudely-drawn children clutching hands in the rain, and by the way that the child traced their smiles, the vagrant knew that he had etched them there. "Amelie," he whispered, as if he was trying to rouse her from sleep. "She was the best."
The vagrant realized that Amelie must have been the youngest just a week before. The earth beneath the child's feet was freshly disturbed and stained his knees dark like fresh blood. "Was she a good friend?" asked the wanderer, and the child could not nod quickly enough.
"She taught me games from her home. We'd play Three's Pairs or Clap-Snap-Stomp. O-Or even Run, Billy, Run. Have you ever played?" The child was eager to have someone share in these sacred rituals like he had with Amelie; the majority of the town probably never heard of them.
"I have," the wanderer said, tucking his hat into his back pocket, just like he'd done when he was the child's age. He'd never seen a brightness quite so dazzling as the one in the child's eyes at that, but the wanderer's companion looked regretfully at the small hat slung across the grave marker.
"We'll have to play another time," he said mournfully, reaching out but too afraid to touch it. "I gave my hat to her when she lost hers. Her father only left her with one." Quiet in that mystified way that children could be, he said, "When the conflicts started, Amelie said that men came to her town and told her father that she wasn't right. They sent her mother to another place, and her father took her here. He'd always said that he would come back." Faithfully, the child glanced down at the town gate. "I'm still waiting for him, you know."
"So I've heard," said the wanderer, shifting uncomfortably on his weary feet. He could feel the toll of the road burning painfully in his joints and was lucky that the child knew what ailed him. His companion smiled kindly and led him further up the hill, to the very, very peak of it. There was a good place to sit up against a crackling dead oak, where the earth was softer and smelled richly of iron. The wanderer could see two little heelprints there in the sand, where the child must have wiled away his afternoons in vigilant watch over the three nearest headstones.
There could not have been bodies beneath, because the hill here was all rock starting from about a foot under. Possibly because the graves had come to mean something different to him, or possibly because there were never any bodies to be buried in the first place, the child had not a single regret about them, and illustrated how grand they were with wide, looping motions. He rubbed at his arms like they still hurt from all of the hammering and bending and breaking, and detailed the process of the wood burning and how far he had to walk for the wood in his mother's marker.
"It's the best of the lot," said the wanderer, but the child was already sure that he knew. His guide was a little quieter as he spoke of his father's marker, a little ashamed when he spoke of showing it to his mother and her torturous response.
"She looked down at it," said the child, "and she kept lookin' and lookin' until she stopped moving at all. I couldn't get to her in time, but I think she'd want to rest next to him anyway." The same staleness that overcame the yard worked its way into his grin, and it was not long before it was so far faded that the wanderer could not make it out at all.
The wanderer frowned at the third and last of the markers. It was made in obvious haste and so unlike the rest of the child's work. The child could not bring himself to look at it, and he cringed when the wanderer read the name aloud. "Jonas," he said. "He was only six years old."
"Yeah," said the child, embarrassed. He found a comfortable place beside the wanderer and let his head hang against his dirty hands, gazing mournfully at the setting sun. "He didn't think he ought to stick around after his mother left."
"While I don't necessarily agree," said the wanderer as the child fought not to meet his eyes, "I am glad that I can come to pay my respects. They were a beautiful family, weren't they?"
"The best one," the child insisted. "There'll never be one better, not in a million years."
"It would make sense, then," the wanderer said, smiling, "that a kind boy like Jonas would understand if you wanted to move on."
"I couldn't," said the boy, but the wanderer kept on speaking.
"He would understand if you wanted a new name. He'd even understand if you wanted to move to a brand new village, and if you wanted to make new friends and go to school." The wanderer knew that the child wanted to protest, but he could do nothing but hesitate hopefully.
"I don't think I could ever find a name better than 'Jonas'."
"I'm here to help." The wanderer, feeling like an old man as he cracked his back and waited for his legs to catch up with him, offered a hand down to the boy. "We'll go through every name in the world together if we have to, but we'll do it together."
The child smiled and looked down at the town at the bottom of the hill. There was a little boy there – the wanderer's son – who looked up at the child by his father's side and saw tag and snacktime and rolling in the green, green grass that he knew from home. The wanderer knew that the child saw his son and thought of nailing a cross into the ground, lovingly waiting as it crisped and turned to gray. But one day, he hoped, and one day soon, all that would change.