Bone Fire by Mark Spragg

could have dug something smaller, but what he intended was in fact a kind of burial, and beyond that he’d wanted to see what it was like lying downin the cool, dry ground. So he’d have an idea of what was coming next.
    He dragged the garbage bag to the soft mound of earth he’d shoveled up out of the hole, working his butt back into the loose soil and lifting the bag by its bottom. He gave it a shake and it emptied in an instant: all the letters he’d written Ella from Korea, most of the family photographs, wedding rings, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, everything he could put his hands on that authenticated his eighty years of using up a body. Now it all lay three feet down in the earth and hadn’t made more of a sound than a curtain lifting in the breeze. He dropped the bag on top and rummaged through the backpack for the can of lighter fluid and the box of matches.
    He stood listening to the crackle of it burning, and when there was just the faint odor of smoke he shoveled the hole full and sat in the chair. The day had gone exactly as he’d planned.
    He’d kept back a cigar box of mementos for Griff, to provide some offering, because he doesn’t imagine she’ll understand what he’s done. He expects her to be pissed off.
    He kept a single wedding picture of Griffin and Jean, so she could always know what her young parents looked like, as well as one of himself and Ella. Two photographs of Mitch: one taken when he was twenty, wearing his Army uniform, the other of him middle-aged and riding a dappled gray gelding they called Ford. The first trophy buckle her dad won on a saddle bronc at a little show in Greybull. A brooch of Ella’s she’s long favored and the Silver Star he never felt he deserved, but it’s how he wants to be held in her heart, as a man who performed his life’s duties with at least some gallantry. And the Norsk Bibel, which he thinks of as a poorly rendered novel, but he hadn’t burned his other books either. He sat up straighter in the chair, reviewing his decisions.
    He’s dug the hole and made the fire because when he dies he doesn’t want her to have to deal with anything but the disposal of his body. That’s fair, he thinks. There’s no getting around a deadbody, and he’s already spoken to Sid Farnsworth, the undertaker down in Sheridan, about the arrangements. He’s already paid. She’ll have to dial 911, and that’s it, maybe drive a box or two of his clothes in to the Goodwill, and they agreed a year ago that the Nature Conservancy gets the land just as soon as there isn’t a Gilkyson to care for it. So she’ll have the ranch without it going to taxes, and if she has a kid it’ll have a place to live. He wants her to move forward, and wants it to be easy for her. He doesn’t want her history to limit her, as he believes his history has limited him. And if Marin’s here he wants it to be easy for her too.
    “I’m not crazy,” he said, remembering how he’d searched her room for an hour, finding her diary, her school pictures and some papers, almost packing it all up here with the rest. But he hadn’t. He’d caught himself in time, and that was getting harder to do. No, he’d put her things aside, sitting there with his eyes closed and waiting until he was able to distinguish what was reasonable and what wasn’t, and the fact that he’d succeeded was reassuring. He didn’t think a crazy man could have.
    “A crazy man would have burned it all,” he said aloud, then he napped again, and when he woke the heat was gone from the day. He gathered up the tools and the backpack and started back down to the house to eat his cold supper.

Ten
    T HE BISQUE KILN was still warmer than her body, but just barely, and Griff was leaning over into its barrel with a small whiskbroom, sweeping the powdery grit from the last firing into the slightly flattened mouth of a tomato-sauce can. In spite of her cotton mask the dust made her sneeze, and when she