Innocence

I knew the number of rungs from top to base of the sixty-foot shaft, and I counted them as I went down to where Father lay tumbled and broken. When I drew near the bottom, I stopped, took a flashlight from a coat pocket, and searched below. At my back, the last four feet on the farther side of the shaft formed an open arch to the larger drain, providing a four-by-four curved opening, through which the momentum of the falling body had carried it feet-first. He had turned on his side, and only the hooded, scarf-wrapped head remained within the vertical shaft.

At the bottom, I knelt, pushed him all the way out into the larger drain, and crawled after him. I struggled to focus on what needed to be done, the physical work, while striving not to dwell too much upon the nature of this package that I needed to convey across a great length of the city.

I had to leave him there for a while in the dark, and hope that no rats found him in my absence. Fewer rats scurried the storm drains than you might think, because those tunnels contained little to feed upon and because, in a Hamelin cleansing, the rushing walls of water from every major rain drowned them, washed them out into the river.

I troll-walked through the tributary drain, where the once-smooth water-struck brick was now pitted and eroded, set in a common bond with headers every sixth course. The next drain, larger in diameter, had been crafted of random-rubble stone with uniform mortar joints; though newer than the brick section, it appeared ancient.

When I came to a modern concrete culvert in which I could stand erect, I ran. A milky trickle of water eased along the center of the floor, glistering like melted fat in the flashlight beam that jostled through the dark. I needed to change tunnels a few times, but in twenty-five minutes, I came to the louvered steel panel that opened to the corridor leading to our windowless rooms.

This warren of passageways beneath the city was not a catacomb in which we of the hidden could be interred in wall niches to work our way to bones. We had to be consigned to water, to the riverbed where we would become significant silt that might nourish all things for which the river served as home.

After my arrival at the age of eight, my father realized the necessity of assembling a burial kit to be used by whoever of us survived the other. Fortunately, I had lived to be strong enough for the task, as daunting now as it was urgent.

The gear was piled in a corner of our book room. A canvas tarp found in a Dumpster had been sprayed on one side with a silicon lubricant supplied on request by the one friend who had given Father a key to St. Sebastian’s food bank. Father sewed eyelets into two ends of the tarp and strung draw cords through them. He folded it with the untreated surface and the cords on the inside. There were, as well, two buckets containing nails and bolts and washers and rusted iron fittings of various kinds and the heads of a couple of hammers and all manner of small things, heavy for their size, that we had found on our night rambles and had collected over the years to serve as sufficient weight to sink a body and keep it sunk.

I carried the buckets out of our secret rooms and put them on the elevated service walkway outside the louvered panel. With the folded tarp, I set out at a run to the tributary drain in which I had left the body.

We don’t know what those of the aboveground world would do to our cadavers. But considering the violence that most of them visit upon us on sight, we assume they might commit abominations beyond our imagining. We stand and die with courage when cornered, but we do not—must never—let them take our dignity in death.

My gold Rolex marked an hour and ten minutes since I had left Father. He lay as before, unattended by rats, in a stillness that the surface world will never know, not even in this hushed day of windless snow.

I spread the tarp across the drain floor, the lubricant-treated side against the bricks. When I rolled him into the tarp, he jiggled in his clothes, like a mass of odds and ends, shattered and torn not just by bullets and truncheons but also by the long drop through the shaft.

The ends were not difficult to cinch and tie securely, because Father had done good work in the construction of his shroud. The draw cords at one end were longer than those at the other, and fitted with a two-grip wooden handle that he had carved himself.