Crossing Purgatory Read Online Free

interaction between one person and another transcended the bounds of decency. To rob, to whore, to ignore common civility on the street? He realized he could never be a part of this place. He’d fled his farm, but the city would provide no sanctuary. So, then, where?
    He turned on his side and attempted to doze. His arm hot to the touch, he shivered with fever.
    C OMING ONTO HIS FARM IN Deep Woods, he noticed immediately. The un-tethered horse grazing on dandelions along the irrigation ditch, the empty hog trough. A chimney free of smoke. Thompson jumped from the cart without reining the mule and threw open the door, calling. Dim indoor light, shadows only. A stench. Rancid meat from a cold pot hanging over dead coals. More, more than that.
    â€œRachel?”
    Looking up from her bed, eyes shining, focused but unseeing. Face a mask of red sores, skin split and oozing. She did not answer, but turned back to Matthew, whimpering at her breast. Her finger weakly tickling his cheek, enticing cracked lips to suckle.
    Thompson sat at the edge of the bed and put his hand to her forehead and could not believe the heat. At his touch her chin rose to him and her eyes grew wild. “Gabriel?” she asked, and then, inexplicitly, a line from a song, “Oh, my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away.” Then she returned to Matthew, “Take,” she said, offering her breast.
    â€œDaniel?” Gently, the question. No reply, she coaxing the baby with incoherent muttering. Thompson looked about. The sleeping mat. He rose and approached. A stiff, bloated thing, the stench. An overstuffed sausage. He dropped to his knees, retched into the hearth, a great heaving expulsion. He could not bear to look at what days before had been his son. Could not bear to touch it. No choice. He dragged the mat on which his son lay from the house to a patch of ground beneath a persimmon tree and there he dug his son’s pit, the mat his winding sheet. He packed tight the crumbled earth. Later, stones to shield him from beasts. He went back into the house with a bucket of water and sat with Rachel and Matthew, a cool cloth to one forehead and then the other, squeezing a drop or two onto tongues swollen and coated white with mucus. He sat with them into the night. Toward sunrise, Matthew’s breathing grew shallow. Thinner, the breathing, and then nothing at all. The baby paled. Thompson had no prayer to offer up. Rachel woke just as he finished changing Matthew into his white baptismal gown. She sat straight up in bed and the look in her eyes told Thompson that this, she understood. That, for an instant, the veil of fever lifted. She opened her mouth but remained mute, as if there were no sounds for her grief.
    Another grave dug, another son lowered into the ground. He kept his eyes shut as he scooped the dirt back into the hole. He returned to Rachel and sat at her side, holding her hand. She could not talk, a gurgling sound only, rapid breaths, and then she opened her eyes and stared at Thompson, stared through him. Eyes glazed. Unseeing in this world. He wondered if she saw into the next. He held a cup to her lips. “Try.” He hummed a lullaby, or some tune that reminded him of something like a lullaby. He smoothed her damp and matted hair. Her beautiful hair.
    He sat through the day. Light moved across the room. Against his will, he dozed. At some point during the afternoon he thought he heard voices outside, a horse sniggering. And then silence and then night came on again. He nodded in and out. He dreamed the precise words to console Rachel, the correct prayers to summon his boys from the grave. But when he awoke he could not remember them. Rachel’s hand, cold, her stiff fingers intertwined with his.
    T HOMPSON AWOKE IN THE DARK of early morning, sweating, chest heaving. The memories would not leave him, would not permit rest. Awake and moving, he sometimes could distract himself, temporarily inhabit the