of flowers and beneath the flowers, in his closed coffin, looking exactly as he had looked this morning, lay his father. Only it was dark, so he could not be seen. It would always be dark there. Dark as the inside of a cow.
The sun’s agonna shine, and the wind’s agonna blow.
The charcoal scraping of the needle against the record was in his ears and he saw the many sharp, grinning teeth in Buster Brown’s dog.
“If anything ever makes me believe in God,” his uncle said.
Rufus looked up at him quickly. He was still looking straight ahead, and he still looked angry but his voice was not angry. “Or life after death,” his uncle said.
They were working and breathing rather hard, for they were walking westward up the steep hill towards Fort Sanders. The sky ahead of them was bright and they walked among the bright, moving shadows of trees.
“It’ll be what happened this afternoon.”
Rufus looked up at him carefully.
“There were a lot of clouds,” his uncle said, and continued to look straight before him, “but they were blowing fast, so there was a lot of sunshine too. Right when they began to lower your father into the ground, into his grave, a cloud came over and there was a shadow just like iron, and a perfectly magnificent butterfly settled on the-coffin, just rested there, right over the breast, and stayed there, just barely making his wings breathe, like a heart.”
Andrew stopped and for the first time looked at Rufus. His eyes were desperate. “He stayed there all the way down, Rufus,” he said. “He never stirred, except just to move his wings that way, until it grated against the bottom like a-rowboat. And just when it did the sun came out just dazzling
