The River of No Return

How old must I be before you tell me?”
    He had frowned at her words. But then he had winked, again as if she were a child. And he recited the nursery rhyme that used to freeze her blood when she was little. “‘Whither old woman, oh whither so high?’” He used a creaky voice and opened his eyes wide, so that white showed all around the brown iris. “‘To brush the cobwebs off the sky! Shall I go with thee? Aye, by and by!’”
    She had smiled to please him, but she wasn’t pleased.
    After that she stopped asking anything about the stones he continued to bring back and leave in piles around the house.
    Aye, by and by. Julia squeezed the tooth in her hand until she could feel it almost bite into her skin. He was gone, like that old woman they had tossed up in a basket, seventeen times as high as the moon. He had never taken her with him, on any of his journeys. Now he was brushing the cobwebs off the sky all by himself, and she was here in his lonely house, a house that no longer loved her.
    Once, just once, when she was nine, he had brought back something that wasn’t a stone. It was a brightly colored, tiled lacquered box, and he had tossed it to her as he climbed down out of the carriage. “See what you make of that,” he’d said. She’d caught it in her hand. It was much lighter than it looked.
    She examined the pretty thing. She knew there must be a trick to opening it. She had heard about such puzzles. Oriental boxes with secret hinges and buttons. She found that this one could be twisted, but it never seemed to want to open. The lacquer was very fine. “Is it a Chinese box, Grandfather?”
    “Yes, it was made in China. See if you can discover its trick.”
    She quickly twisted it, matching colors until each side was fully one shade, thinking that then it might open. But it remained closed. “I can’t do it. Show me.” She glanced up to find him looking at his pocket watch, and then at her, a gleam in his eye. She held the box out to him, and he took it, tucking it away in his pocket. “Another time,” he’d said. But he never brought it out again. He just piled up more and more stones, with their strange captive bones and insects and bits of leaf.
    Julia came back to herself and realized she was staring blindly from an upstairs window, down over the fields toward the village, the enormous tooth still clutched in her hand. The men were returning from the funeral. She could see them coming from a long way off, picking their way back across the fields in a straggly line. Eamon was the last. He wore his hat crammed down over his ears and he strutted along with a curiously rolling yet elbowy gait that made him look much like a pompous crow. Julia set the tooth on the sill, took a deep breath, and went back down to the hallway to meet them.
    The men came in quietly, bobbing their heads to her. Mr. Pringle, the butler, stopped and said a few words to her. The sermon was affecting, though not necessarily suited to Grandfather’s personality. There was a great deal of talk about lambs and meekness. But all the village men had turned out, dressed very neatly, and there were quite a few fine London and even foreign gentlemen in attendance as well, whom Pringle hadn’t recognized. Pringle dropped his voice. And one lady. Yes, a woman had attended. She arrived at the last minute in a shiny black coach drawn by a team of matched blacks. Travel stained, mind you; she had come from afar. Her gown was magnificent—sewn all over with jet beads—and she wore a matching veil that shielded her face and hair entirely. She didn’t stay to see the coffin put into the vault; they all heard her coach pull away soon after the end of the sermon.
    Eamon came up while Pringle was talking. “Move along, man,” he said, and shoved his way in. Mr. Pringle stood aside, and took Eamon’s disreputable hat and threadbare coat with obvious distaste. The poor butler was an admirer of fine tailoring, and Grandfather had been, among many other things, a dandy. Pringle felt the loss acutely. “Will that be all, my lord?”
    “Brandy in my study,” Eamon said, and set off for that room.
    “Cousin?” Julia walked after him. “Will you tell me about the funeral?”
    Eamon turned and fixed her with his fishy eye. “A dead man lay at the front of the church, and some forty living men muttered over his corpse. Then he was bundled into a hole beneath the floor.”
    Julia stared and he stared back, his nostrils wide and