Boys of Blur by N. D. Wilson Read Free Book Online

loudly as ever when the door swung open.
    Two steps into the sanctuary Pastor Beaux stopped, his heavy feet on the rough board patching the hole where the old church bell was buried. The place was empty. Andsomething was wrong with the light. It was slanting into the room through a row of white windows as it always did, warming dust motes and pews. But there were shadows. He walked slowly down the aisle, looking at the windows. Dark stripes had been painted across every pane of glass.
    Pastor Beaux ran out of the church, and puffed around the building and into the graveyard. His feet and his breath stopped at the same time.
    Old men and women were standing among the tombstones, staring and whispering. Beaux hardly noticed. A huge symbol—crescents and circles and swooping lines—had been painted on the side of the white church, crossing windows and stretching from near the ground all the way up to the roof. The paint was dark red, almost black, the color of dried blood.
    Pastor Beaux turned slowly, moving his eyes from the wall down into the graveyard, to the grave where he had been standing yesterday, to the grave that should have been holding the body of the old man who had taught him just about everything he thought he knew.
    Dirt mounds lined the sides of the open grave. The fresh headstone had been knocked back onto its granite heel.
    Reaching up out of the grave, sinewy and knotted like a serpentine muscle, a black ironwood tree was growing.
    It couldn’t be. But it was.
    Pastor Beaux walked toward the grave like a dreamer.He looked down into the hole at the splinters of the very empty coffin. The tree had somehow grown up through the coffin’s bottom. Threads from torn white satin cushions were tangled around the trunk and snagged on the rough bark. Ironwood leaves fluttered level with the pastor’s head.
    Coach had been replaced with a tree.
    A live tree. Pastor Beaux leaned out over the grave and grabbed the trunk. The wood was rock hard and cool against his palm. He tugged. It was rooted. And iron solid.

Charlie sat on the grass with his legs spread out, his back pressed against the red cinder block wall of the locker room. Most of his body managed to be in the shade. He was tired. He was hungry. And his mind wouldn’t turn off.
    On the field in front of him, high school boys yelled. Whistles chirped. Pads crunched. And Mack’s voice bellowed above all the rest. A few people were scattered through the bleachers, sitting in the full sun, there to watch the great Prester Mack run his first practice. Small groups of men huddled along the edges of the field for the same reason. At first, Charlie had cared what they were saying. But it had all been the same.
    Boy’s been struggling. He turn it around?
    Dunno
.
    He just might turn things around
.
    Sure enough. If he don’t, who could?
    Dunno
.
    Think he’ll turn it around?
    Charlie’s eyes shut slowly. The sun had simmered down his energy. And all the walking. No, not so much the walking. It was all the stopping and talking. They’d walked from the motel to a grimy little diner with just a few customers and a flock of flies so slow and heavy that Charlie figured Molly could have rounded them all up in five minutes. Charlie had wanted to tell his stepfather about Cotton, about the grave, about what he had seen. But it wasn’t an easy story to start, and once Mack was in the diner, customers had packed in after him and all of them had been loaded with questions. Charlie had eaten his pancakes and watched Mack prod his waffle for more than an hour without five minutes to chew sprinkled through it. When they had walked to the little gravel lot to look at the used cars the town of Taper had to offer, at least half the crowd had followed them.
    There had been only five cars for sale, all of them battered, all with huge bright yellow price stickers followed by exclamation marks. The two saddest were minivans bedecked with sagging balloons on each side