Free Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Page A

a chaotic beard. He attempted his prayer but the words would not come to him, so completely had he lost them, so surely was he numbered among the damned. He stayed there at the open window until the night’s cold turned to novocaine, until he found exhaustion enough to sleep again.
    * * *
    Behind the hills of Keelut, Slone and Cheeon dug at the rear of a graveyard hidden in a clearing between two expanses of wood. A wolf keened from deep in the valley beyond, and from low branches of cedar, owls watched this midnight’s work. They dug sideways into the embankment of snow with shovels and pickaxes, clearing a temporary tomb. Without equipment the ground was impossible to pierce now. Their labor was illuminated by the truck’s headlights, snow swirling in the beams as if insects at a lamp in summer. The dark beyond seemed more than night, seemed a deliberate negation of day.
    As boys they’d hunted here in autumn and winter, lynx and grouse, even though they’d been forbidden by their fathers to take game where the dead lay. Proper burial for the boy would have to wait till after breakup when the ground softened. For now Slone’s son belonged in this ancient earth of the village with his forebears. The boy’s grandfather, Slone’s own father, was buried just yards from here, in a hole chiseled down into the earth by these same two men. All the graves and gravestones concealed now by drifts of new fall.
    They swung the pickaxes into the bank of snow. Side by side they seemed railway workers who have absorbed each other’s rhythm. They did not stop for water or smoke. Slone’s neck and shoulder wounds ached with each swing. The boy lay on the snow in his bag, in hushed witness to his father’s work.
    Halfway through the thickest layer, Cheeon left the grave to Slone and went to the truck’s bed to carpenter the boy’s coffin. Three sheets of plywood, a handsaw and hammer, a tape measure and a score of tenpenny nails, pencil behind his ear, lantern perched on a toolbox giving some light. What he fashioned so quickly was just a box. But it was even and tight and all they could offer till they had more light and time, till the thaw came.
    Slone stopped five feet into the bank. Out of the hole, he drank from the thermos Cheeon had taken from the cab and tossed to him.
    They unzipped the boy from the bag and placed him in the box. Slone touched his face, turned away, and could not resist a second time. He then hammered on the lid, twenty-two nails. Over the coffin Cheeon grabbed for Slone’s left arm, rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and slid a pocketknife blade diagonal across his forearm. He squeezed until globs of blood pooled like wax at the head of the box, then with a naked finger inscribed a glyph that looked part wolf, part raven—a symbol taught to him by his Yup’ik mother. Slone did not ask what the marking was meant to ward off or welcome, but trusted his boy was protected beneath it.
    They carried and slid the box into the cubby they’d made, then took up shovels again to conceal what lay within.
    * * *
    His home, the cabin he’d built, was girdled in police tape. Slone stood at the front door and looked. The boy’s sneakers by the portable heater, his tiny snow boots. Winter coat on a hook. The lightbulb above him blinked and dimmed. He stepped in, the bones of the cabin made taut by cold, by the absence of human warmth. They creaked beneath his feet. He clicked on the electric heater, pulled wood from under the tarp on the rear porch, stacked it thick and high in the hearth. Then he started kindling in the stove, blew the flame to life until he could no longer see his breath.
    He stepped toward the sofa still in his coat. A whirling, a rocking on feet half numb. The black snap of the bulb above him. Then Slone was falling, asleep before he could feel the sofa catch his weight.
    Awake before dawn, he poured boiling water on freeze-dried coffee. He knew that at first light the dead men behind the morgue