The Graveyard Book

So Thackeray Porringer had died in a fury, clutching his copy of Robinson Crusoe which was, apart from a silver sixpence with the edges clipped and the clothes he had formerly been standing up in, all that he owned, and, at his mother’s request, he was buried with his book. Death had not improved Thackeray Porringer’s temper, and now he was shouting, “I know you’re here somewhere! Come out and take your punishment, you, you thief!”

Bod closed the book. “I’m not a thief, Thackeray. I’m only borrowing it. I promise I’ll give the book back when I’ve finished it.”

Thackeray looked up, saw Bod nestled behind the statue of Osiris. “I told you not to!”

Bod sighed. “But there are so few books here. It’s just up to a good bit anyway. He’s found a footprint. It’s not his. That means someone else is on the island!”

“It’s my book,” said Thackeray Porringer, obstinately. “Give it back.”

Bod was ready to argue or simply to negotiate, but he saw the hurt look on Thackeray’s face, and he relented. Bod clambered down the side of the arch, jumped the last few feet. He held out the book. “Here.” Thackeray took it gracelessly, and glared.

“I could read it to you,” offered Bod. “I could do that.”

“You could go and boil your fat head,” said Thackeray, and he swung a punch at Bod’s ear. It connected, and it stung, although judging from the look on Thackeray Porringer’s face, Bod realized it must have hurt his fist as much as it hurt Bod.

The bigger boy stomped off down the path, and Bod watched him go, ear hurting, eyes stinging. Then he walked though the rain back down the treacherous ivy-covered path. At one point he slipped and scraped his knee, tearing his jeans.

There was a willow-grove beside the wall, and Bod almost ran into Miss Euphemia Horsfall and Tom Sands, who had been stepping out together for many years. Tom had been buried so long ago that his stone was just a weathered rock, and he had lived and died during the Hundred Years War with France, while Miss Euphemia (1861–1883, She Sleeps, Aye, Yet She Sleeps with Angels) had been buried in Victorian times, after the graveyard had been expanded and extended and became, for some fifty years, a successful commercial enterprise, and she had a whole tomb to herself behind a black door in the Willow Walk. But the couple seemed to have no troubles with the difference in their historical periods.

“You should slow down, young Bod,” said Tom. “You’ll do yourself an injury.”

“You already did,” said Miss Euphemia. “Oh dear, Bod. I have no doubt that your mother will have words with you about that. It’s not as if we can easily repair those pantaloons.”

“Um. Sorry,” said Bod.

“And your guardian was looking for you,” added Tom.

Bod looked up at the grey sky. “But it’s still daylight,” he said.

“He’s up betimes,” said Tom, a word which, Bod knew, meant early, “and said to tell you he wanted you. If we saw you.”

Bod nodded.

“There’s ripe hazel-nuts in the thicket just beyond the Littlejohns’ monument,” said Tom with a smile, as if softening a blow.

“Thank you,” said Bod. He ran on, pell-mell, through the rain and down the winding path into the lower slopes of the graveyard, running until he reached the old chapel.

The chapel door was open and Silas, who had love for neither the rain nor for the remnants of the daylight, was standing inside, in the shadows.

“I heard you were looking for me,” said Bod.

“Yes,” said Silas. Then, “It appears you’ve torn your trousers.”

“I was running,” said Bod. “Um. I got into a bit of a fight with Thackeray Porringer. I wanted to read Robinson Crusoe. It’s a book about a man on a boat—that’s a thing that goes in the sea, which is water like an enormous puddle—and how the ship is wrecked on an island, which is a place on the sea where you can stand, and—”

Silas said, “It has been eleven years, Bod. Eleven years that you have been with us.”

“Right,” said Bod. “If you say so.”

Silas looked down at his charge. The boy was lean, and his mouse-colored hair had darkened slightly with age.

Inside the old chapel, it was all shadows.

“I think,” said Silas, “it is time to talk about where you came from.”

Bod breathed in deeply. He said, “It doesn’t have to be now. Not if you don’t want to.” He said it as easily as he could, but his heart was thudding in his chest.

Silence. Only the patter of the rain and the wash of the water from the drainpipes. A silence that stretched until Bod thought that he would break.

Silas said, “You know you’re different. That you are alive. That we took you in—they took you in here—and that I agreed to be your guardian.”

Bod said nothing.

Silas continued, in his voice like velvet, “You had parents. An older sister. They were killed. I believe that you were to have been killed as well, and that you were not was due to chance, and the intervention of the Owenses.”

“And you,” said Bod, who had had that night described to him over the years by many people, some of whom had even been there. It had been a big night in the graveyard.