Gemini Summer Read Online Free

bones, had been a hamster or a mouse. In the middle was a cat, set down in the ground all curled round itself, the way cats always curled when they slept. The big one had to be a dog, because it wore the loop of a red collar, now dark and moldy. The bits of a brass buckle were there, and a name tag shaped like a bone.
    The Old Man glanced up and saw Danny. “You don’t want to look at this,” he said, shuffling sideways to stand between Danny and the bones. “Me and Beau, we’ll deal with it, son.”
    “I
want
to see,” said Danny, and he went down and crouched beside the dead dog. He didn’t mind at all that it was now only bones. It was interesting to see the insides of a dog.
    “How long have they been here?” asked Beau.
    “I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “Thirty years if a day, I guess.”
    Danny pulled the name tag from the dirt. He could see that it had once been painted yellow, but now it was almost all rust. He rubbed it on his sleeve, then read the name—Billy Bear—and it made him deeply sad. He could imagine what Billy Bear had looked like; he saw him, in his mind, covered in reddish brown fur, much fatter than he seemed now that he was only bones. He could picture Billy Bear playing with sticks, or reaching up a paw, asking to be stroked. Then he started crying, and kept his head down so that no one would see, because he was very ashamed to be crying twice in one day.
    Beau and the Old Man were talking about the tiniest body, trying to figure out what the mushy stuff around it was. “I bet it’s cardboard,” said Beau. “I bet they buried him in a little cardboard box. See, Dad, that dog was laying on a blanket.”
    Danny hadn’t noticed that, but now he did. Only a shred of cloth was showing, but there were scraps here and there that had been torn away by the Old Man’s shovel. It had been a yellow blanket, just the same color as the name tag. Yellow must have been Billy Bear’s favorite color, Danny thought, and this his favorite blanket, where he’d slept each night for all his life, beside a bed or beside a chair, and now for thirty years in the ground.
    It was clear then to the Old Man and to Beau that Danny was crying. His shoulders were shaking, and a tear fell from his face to land on the little name tag. Danny thought Beau might laugh, but he didn’t. And the Old Man picked him up, lifting him right from the ground the way he hadn’t lifted him in two or three years. The Old Man pressed him to his chest, and Danny smelled the dirt and the sweat, and he shuddered in his father’s strong arms.
    “It’s okay. It’s all right,” said the Old Man, holding him tightly. “Danny, I knew you shouldn’t have looked. Beau, go get the trash can, will you?”
    “No!” said Danny. “He isn’t garbage, Dad. He had a name—it was Billy Bear. What if he’s sleeping here? What if he wants to be petted again?”
    “Oh, Danny, that’s not how it is,” said the Old Man. He eased down to the earth, so that he was kneeling and Danny was standing beside him, still wrapped in his arms. “These are just bones, Danny. They’re no more or less than what’s left on your plate when you finish a pork chop. There’s no feeling in bones, son. The part that was a dog, that’s long gone.”
    “Where did it go?” asked Danny.
    “I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “It’s just
gone
. Like his heart and his brains and all that. See, Danny, they’re gone. It’s just dirt now, nothing but dirt. The bits that made him up, they make up something else now. A part of Billy Bear could be in a tree, or in the grass over there by Highland Creek. He could even be in you.”
    Old Man River rubbed Danny’s chest with one hand, his back with the other. “I don’t know much about it, Danny. But Billy Bear isn’t down here in the ground anymore, I’ll tell you that.”
    Beau was standing nearby. “Do you still want the garbage can, Dad?” he asked.
    “Well, that’s up to Danny, I guess,”