When the funeral pyre of Charlie went out, the rest of us went to sleep for a few hours. We'd been up all night, literally. I woke mid-afternoon and found that most of the people who had come to campus specially for the service had gone. Either they had declined our offer to camp on our grounds or they and woken before I did--of course many had gone to sleep, or even left, before the service was over. I found campus quiet, lonely, almost normal and yet so very not.
I walked out to where the fire had been and found a great pile of ash and a few pieces of charred wood that hadn't burned completely, as well as the little iron tables Charlie's body had lain on. The fire had rendered them empty.
I found Rick there.
He was down on the ground with his hands in the ashes, head bowed. I watch the angle of his head shift as he heard me walk up. He knew who he was without looking--either he recognized my step or he could smell me, like an animal. Rick is aware of his surroundings the same way Charlie was.
"Damn bastard," he said, his voice thick, "this wouldn't hurt so much if he hadn't made me care."
As you may recall, Charlie's assignment to Rick was to learn to love, so Charlie had not made him care, as in the love song, by being so lovable, nor by any form of seduction, but by an entirely prosaic form of benign force; Rick wouldn't have earned his ring otherwise.
"Do you regret it?" I asked.
"No." Rick sat up a little and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He got ash on his face, wood-ash, mostly, but maybe some Charlie-ash, too. "I'm not...distant from you humans because I'm trying to hide from feelings. Mostly I just don't have the feelings you people do. Today, I have some of them. Regretting that would...undo my commitment to him, and my vow is either permanent or it was never real in the first place. Even now that he's dead it holds. I will spend my life fighting for the things, people, places that were important to him. I don't mind--my life is deeper because I care about something other than myself. But God dammit, I wish it didn't have to hurt so much."
I knelt beside him. Rick wouldn't look at me but I could see his face, see his tears making clean tracks through the ash on his skin. I wondered, not for the first time whether Charlie had anticipated that the assignment would work quite as deeply as it did, and whether Rick had not only learned to love but had actually fallen in love with the man. Does the fact that Rick is gay have anything to do with his devotion? Does the fact that I'm not have anything to do with mine?
I put my hand out, palm flat against the ash. It was still warm.
Before Rick and I could speak further, Raven G. arrived with several members of the grounds keeping team. Rick and I stood up to give them room to work, but before any of the others did anything, Raven moved the tables out of the way and combed through the ashes with a rake.
The pieces of wood she set aside, but she also found a few recognizable pieces of charred bone.
"I thought so," she said. "Jason, hand me the brick, please?" and, with us standing there, she pounded those bones to unrecognizable splinters. I heard somewhere that professional crematoria also crush any surviving bones to powder in order to produce less obviously macabre ashes to scatter, but avoiding the macabre had never been Charlie's thing, and it wasn't ours. We had a different reason. We had to make sure that no outsider would ever find human remains and start asking questions.
Bones crushed, Raven returned the resulting powder to the pile and stirred it in to the rest with her rake. Then she and the others raked up the ash and shoveled most of it into wooden buckets--there was a lot of it, mostly from the wood we'd burned, and I knew she planned to dig it into the soil elsewhere and plant trees in it. The rest they raked out flat across the burn area and into the grass, breaking up the burned, bare soil where the fire had been so they could mix in the ash a little there, make it less obvious. Soon, with rain and growth and the tracks of humans and other animals, Charlie's ashes, already indistinguishable from that of the wood, would become indivisible from the ground of campus, consummating a marriage he'd made long ago.
All of this shoveling and raking looked very utilitarian, just a work crew doing their thing.
Later that week, we re-started classes, with me teaching the full load that Charlie traditionally had. I had to fight against the urge to try to mimic him, to repeat the phrases I remembered him using, even to grumble and growl like he did, which isn't really my thing at all. I had to fight the urge to try to replace him, not only because it was hard not to feel like someone should, but because I could almost do it. I'd seen him teach the same things over and over enough times to know he didn't vary his classes much. He used the same phrases, the same trick questions, even the same jokes, quips, and grumbles almost every time. He stuck to what worked. And I remember what worked for him, to the point that I could enact those memories, play them with my voice and body like a recording, show these new students who had never known him the way it was supposed to be.
But my job was not to keep the school from changing; my job was to be the agent of change. My job was not to be a pale imitation of Charlie but to be Daniel and to find out what that meant and would mean.
I didn't expect that it would mean I'd have a full-time job at the school forever. There was a vacancy in the Six, and it would be filled eventually. While there was no guarantee Charlie's successor would teach all the same classes (our staff positions have always been defined by those who occupy them, not the other way around), I thought it overwhelmingly likely he or she would take some of them. Natural history, and particularly ecology, were too central to our community's overall identity not to be represented within the Six.
I thought perhaps Raven would get the nod. Of our six areas of mastery, Charlie had been primarily responsible for craft, so unless the Six reorganized their responsibilities entirely, the new member would be the new Craft Master, and Raven had the skill to not only take that position but to take over as chief groundskeeper, too. I didn't say so to her, though. Maybe I was afraid she'd say I should get it, though the thought never surfaced consciously. I did ask Rick if he thought perhaps he might get it, since he, too, could take on craft, and his dedication made him ideally suited to look after Charlie's legacy. He just laughed and said "Kretzman, you keep forgetting; I don't like people." For a while I thought Breathwalker might get it. I wasn't sure he could be Craft Master, but since meeting him I'd been impressed by his depth--he had an inner peace combined with a grumpy exterior that I thought suitably masterly, and anyway he seemed more like a real grown-up, being much older than Raven, Rick, and I.
The actual Six (all five of them) did not meet to discuss filling the vacancy, so far as I knew. I asked Allen about it once and he said it was too soon, that they'd probably figure it out over the winter break in time for the new person to start at Brigid. Kit would not talk about it with me at all, and Greg said only that it was time to wait and listen. Perhaps they felt the need to find out more about what the school would be without Charlie, before they could determine what it might need to go forward.
I thought about the history of the school, which I had learned in some detail while seeking my own green ring. People tend to stay in the Six a long time, so not many had ever held the honor and not many vacancies had needed to be filled, but there had been departures and arrivals--the original Six were long gone. I met some of them at Charlie's service, an odd experience to meet people whose names and stories I had already learned but only as part of history. Sally, the original Magic Master, and Ray, the original Athletics Master, who had helped found the community but then decided they didn't want to live inside a counterculture their lives long. Once the school got accredited, they left, and the others quickly hired Charlie and Greg to round out the Six. Of course, that still left the positions of magic and athletics open, so the following year they hired a witch named Maggie and a rock climber named Jane Spider. Maggie left only a few years later, and Allen talked himself into a job in her absence. Tom, the original Craft Master, had a debilitating stroke and retired, living in the Herbarium because he couldn't manage the stairs, as Charlie did so many years later. When Tom died, Ruby, the last of the originals, left. She had been in love with him, and he was never interested. Free at last, she and Jane Spider became a couple and left to explore the world. Shrimp and Jim had already been killed together in a car accident, as I've described.
I met some of those people. I met Sally and Ray. Ray looked like an aging hippy and Sally wears heavy eye make-up and lots of crystals. Ruby is a tiny woman originally from Barbados, with deeply wrinkled blackish skin soft as velvet and a fluid physical grace. Jane could not come, but they are still together. Nobody has heard from Maggie in years, but Sally thinks she would hear if Maggie died. These people are still alive. They left by design, and gave proper notice. Even Tom, who isn't, resigned. He didn't die in the saddle, so to speak, and he was around to supervise the transition away from himself. Before Charlie, only Jim and Shrimp died while in office, and they died together a generation ago. I thought a lot about what that must have been like, to suddenly lose a third of the school's core faculty, what an awful morning announcement that must have been, and how the community put itself back together then, hiring both Kit and Joy. And I thought about how Charlie's choice to stay on the job literally until he died left the rest of us to make it up as we went along.
Beltane had been somewhat neglected--we were distracted by the beginning of Charlie's final decline and danced the Maypole without much conviction--but when Litha rolled around we threw ourselves into it, hosting our traditional giant picnic and dancing all night as the wicker figure burned.A week later, Rick succeeded in sourcing the trees we'd hoped to plant in the soil enriched with Charlie's ashes--a small group of blight-resistant American chestnuts saplings. We arranged for a small plaque bearing Charlie's name and dates to sit beneath what we hoped would become a nut orchard, and more than a nut orchard, in time.
A shift had occurred. We were all looking toward the future, if not necessarily forward to it. I, at least, expected the future to more or less resemble the past--it would be a warped and altered normal, but a normal none-the-less. Charlie was a big part of the school, but he wasn't the whole thing, and we would go on.
I was wrong.
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