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“I’ll never leave you, Mitch.”
     
     
     

 
     
     
    THE RESURRECTION PIT
     
     
    I like peanut butter and maggot sandwiches
.
    Christian didn’t care if his little brother did like peanut butter and maggot sandwiches, as long as he came back to him.
    The first time Christian was consciously aware of the resurrection pit he was twelve years old and it was three days after Stevie disappeared.
    He knew folks died. He knew they went away. That was life in Somerville. Everybody went away eventually. And he knew about wakes and funerals and folks hanging out in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes crying and eating bland food and toasting the dead with cheap wine and stale beer. Hell, he’d been to enough of them, too many to count.
    What he didn’t understand was why they came back.
    And why they were never quite the same after they did.
    And nobody could ever give him a good answer about any of it. Shhh, you’re not supposed to talk about these things.
    And so he stopped talking about it, but he could never stop thinking about it. They could not make him do that.
    His little brother Stevie was ten. They shared a room. They were close.
    One night he heard footsteps and loud whispers out in the hallway and Stevie crying, and then it was silent and he knew.
    And in the morning Stevie was gone.
    Waylon, their father, was making a racket over breakfast, banging pots and pans together. Like he was angry.
    Christian’s mother took off when he was five and Stevie was three. Nobody ever said why but Christian thought he knew. When she went away she wanted to stay gone.
    Christian carefully searched the house but found no trace of his little brother. Returning finally to the kitchen he stood and watched his father.
    “ Where is he?”
    “ Gone,” Waylon said.
    “ Like Mama?”
    “ No.”
    “ Where then?”
    Waylon did not answer him. He smiled at the boy but Christian saw that it was a false smile, that his eyes were somewhere else, like they had turned over in his head and only seemed to be looking inward, as if they had been forced to gaze upon something too terrible to confide. Waylon wobbled around the kitchen, whistling tunelessly to himself and making small talk, but Christian was no fool. He knew what had happened to his little brother and he hated his father for not telling him.
    “ When’s he coming back?”
    “ Oh, a day or two.”
    Christian had friends whose mothers and fathers had died, and he knew kids who’d died in car crashes. They all came back eventually. He had a friend named Leroy Starks who had fallen off a tractor into the blades of a corn harvester. He didn’t see Leroy’s body but those who did said it was a mess. Three days later Leroy was back at school. His skin looked different; yellow, like puss, and he talked slower, and he walked slower, like he had shit in his pants, and his eyes were dull, like they weren’t really seeing you, and he dug around in his nostrils all the time as if he was trying to scratch an itch in his brain. And he would say stupid things such as: I like peanut butter and maggot sandwiches? Or: I’m gonna play with my dead puppy when I get home?
    Christian supposed it was good to have Leroy back, even if he did say stupid things.
    Three days passed and Stevie still hadn’t returned. When he asked his father about it Waylon said, “There must have been a problem. Be patient. Things will play out eventually.”
    “ What sort of things?” Christian asked.
    Waylon looked long and hard at his son before answering. “I suppose it’s time you knew about it,” he said. “You’re old enough.”
    “ Knew about what?”
    “ The resurrection pit.”
    Christian nodded in understanding. He knew. Somehow he’d always known.
    “ During the nineteenth century something happened in the woods out behind old man Doggett’s farm,” Waylon explained. “Something hit the ground, made a pretty big crater. Nobody knows what it was but it burned away part of the forest and it