Epilogue
FIVE YEARS LATER
On the last day of October and the first day of his fortieth year, Will arrives, six-pack in hand, at the cemetery.
It’s an awkward place to be on Halloween, to be sure—Will passes several clusters of uncomfortable-looking teens, who scatter like cockroaches at the approach of a card-carrying adult.
It reminds him, with a pang, of Noel, off at college for a few years now, replaced by an equally bizarre youth called Dakota of whom Will has, in the end, also grown quite fond, and who he will be sad to replace in her turn when the time comes in a few months.
Time keeps rolling on, no matter how much you might like to catch it between your palms like a firefly and keep it still—nothing says that quite so succinctly as teens in a cemetery on Halloween.
Will smiles wanly at them, the passive, “Please, God, let’s not interact, I’m trying to be polite, but for the love of all that is holy, do not attempt to speak to me,” message seeming to land every time, and keeps his distance.
He’s relieved to find the corner of the cemetery he’s headed for empty when he gets there; it would have been a bummer, honestly, to have to shoo children away from the area.
On theme for the errand, certainly, but a bummer just the same .
Will sits down, at last, in front of a headstone that reads William “Bill” Josiah Robertson III .
It’s buttressed on either side by headstones that also read William “Bill” Josiah Robertson , jammed in between the other two when it was obviously intended to be the third in the line—Will asked about it, a few years ago, and was told the cemetery had done it to save space.
They’d offered to alter it for a fee, but Will had told them to leave it; it was fitting, really.
The whole thing was fitting, down to the fact that the three of them were stuck with each other in the end; Will had always found it telling that none of the Robertson wives had wanted to be buried here in the family plot.
His own mother, who had done her hard, complicated, miserable best at least some of the time, had started telling him when he was only ten or eleven, her voice very serious: “When I die, don’t you let them bury me here, Willy.
You make sure they take me back home to Willow Brook, and put me with my own parents, and Grandma Dottie, and Aunt Grace. ”
He had, too. He’d made sure; he hadn’t spoken to his father, but he’d called, and double-checked the arrangements, and confirmed that his mother’s burial was exactly as she’d wanted it.
He’d felt he owed her that much. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here, this odd, macabre little birthday tradition: Will doesn’t feel he owes his father anything, necessarily, but a little part of him can’t quite let go of the idea that coming here feels…
good. That, paradoxically enough, it feels like letting something go.
Will cracks the bottle cap off his beer on the top of Original Bill’s headstone and, smiling slightly, says, “Hello, boys.”
None of them answer him, which in a way makes these meetings the best conversations he’s ever had with at least two of the three deceased participants.
He never actually spoke with Original Bill, who was dead long before Will showed up, but he does feel he met the man in absentia.
His ghost did its haunting somewhere in the ways Old Bill hurt Will’s father, in the ways Will’s father hurt him, although Will does understand that maybe he hasn’t seen the man’s best side.
“Farm’s good,” he tells Bill’s headstone, taking a long pull from his own beer and sprawling out as comfortably as he can amongst the somewhat unkempt grass.
“Turning a nice profit this year. Casey’s ice cider’s really taking off, and the tourist traffic has been higher than ever, so.
And the lab’s doing well, too, not that you’d care.
I know all you ever wanted was for me to put the books down and be more like you, but we’re making breakthroughs that a normal parent would have been proud of. ”
He sighs, and then frowns, just slightly, at the carved lettering of Bill’s name.
Of course, in this form, in this place, it reads very nearly as Will’s might have one day: just that old yolk of a name, with no other inscription besides the years of his birth and death.
“I couldn’t think of what to put,” Casey had admitted, clearly embarrassed, when Will asked why there wasn’t an epigraph.
“I asked him once and he said, ‘Guess you might as well put, “Here lies Bill, who was over the hill.”’ It was just about the only time I ever heard him tell a joke, but still. Didn’t feel tasteful. ”
Of course, Will is Will Reeves now. He sold Selma the rights to decide what words go on his grave more than fifteen years ago, in exchange for her never again mentioning a particular incident involving a risqué costume party, a very ambitious and ill-thought-out outfit choice, and the sentence, “Well, how hard could it be to shave my legs,” so.
Maybe he’s never been at that much risk of a sparse tombstone; after all, setting the name aside, it’s not as though he and his father were ever much alike.
In any case, Will can’t blame Casey for being unable to come up with an epigraph for the man.
Will wouldn’t have been able to, either, despite sharing his DNA and spending most of his childhood with Bill.
The situation is too complex to explain on a headstone, and, anyway, Bill wouldn’t have wanted it explained.
Bill would have preferred, Will thinks, this blank rock to one that revealed too much, or that made him look like a different man, softer or warmer than his reality.
For all his flaws, for all his problems, he was—Will has to give it to him—who he was. Subterfuge had never been his style.
Sipping his beer, Will lets his gaze unfocus for a minute, staring out into the middle distance.
After a while, motion catches at the corner of his eye, and he looks over to see three cardinals swoop down into a nearby tree.
It appears, to Will’s surprise, to be something that could pass for a family grouping—a showy, bright red male, a more demure brown female, and a juvenile male, still growing in his crimson plumage, and looking a little awkward next to the splendor of the older birds.
They’re probably not a family—just three separate, unrelated animals who have landed here together by coincidence—but Will still finds himself staring, oddly transfixed.
All three are silent for a moment; then the older male trills sharply at the juvenile, who balks at once and flits away, vanishing into the nearby tree line.
The remaining male, smug, hops closer to the female, trilling at her too; she ruffles her feathers, annoyed, and takes flight, leaving the small red bird to puff up in victory and then, at least to Will’s eyes, deflate a little, as though realizing that, through his own familiar folly, he has found himself alone.
That’s not what’s happening, Will knows.
Really those birds were having a conversation of their own, probably on the topic of hunger, territory, or mating, in a language Will would be a fool to imagine he could begin to understand.
He could call up maybe a dozen former classmates or colleagues who broke towards fauna instead of flora, and they’d all confirm that the state bird of Ohio probably was not inclined towards playing out intricate family dramas to mirror Will’s own.
Still, he can’t help but smile at the cardinal, who stares back at him, fixed and unblinking, and doesn’t fly off even when Will stands up, stretches, finishes his beer, and cracks open a second one.
“Here lies Bill,” he intones, in his most serious voice, “who was over the hill,” and slowly, he pours the beer out onto the grass, staring at the bird all the while.
He’d like to tell himself he doesn’t know why he does this every year—it’s not as though he owes his father anything, after all—but he can’t.
Every time he tries, his mind crowds up with images of the last five years, of Casey and the life they’ve built together, of his work and his lab and his beloved grove of testing trees, of the friends who have become like family, of the farm that’s become something more than it was when Will was a child.
None of it would have happened if Bill hadn’t left Will the property, even though he’d promised years before, in no uncertain terms, that he’d do no such thing.
That choice, if it had even been a choice, as opposed to decades of the sort of inertia that might motivate someone to fill up a room with junk—that action , whether Bill meant to take it or not, changed Will’s life.
It brought him to love and happiness; it brought him home, to a version of this place that could be a home for him, instead of a trap, or a cage, or a millstone.
Smiling up at the cardinal, as the last drop of beer lands, Will adds, “I can’t say much about the old bastard, but he got one thing right.”
The cardinal trills and, at last, takes flight, its bright red plumage a streak of crimson through the air before it’s gone. Will sighs, and smiles, and shakes his head, and starts the long walk home.