Braveheart Read Free Page A

left hand where more of this fingers ere now missing, studied the back to the ox as if it could tell him how to break such news. The butt of the ox seemed to tell him to be matter-of-fact.
    “William… Come down here, lad,” Campbell said.
    William looked away, he took quick breaths, he looked back, but the bodies were still there.
     
     
    4
     
    THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE WAS NOW SURROUNDED BY horses, wagons, and neighbors. The undertaker arrived in his hearse, preloaded with coffins.
    William sat at the kitchen table, weeping holding the bowls of stew, hugging them as if they were his family. A neighbor woman moved up beside him. “Poor dear. That’s cold,” she said. “Let me get you something hot.”
    She reached for the bowls, but he held tightly to them.
    “ There now darlin’….”
    “ Get away from me!” William said.
    “ Now, now.” Suddenly he was fighting her for the bowls; the stew spilled over her skirt, and the crockery bowls shattered. William burst from the room and rushed out into the year, where all neighbors had gathered. His wild grief disrupted the solemnity; they gawked at him. He looked everywhere, instinctively trying to find his father and brother. He spotted the ox cart, empty now, standing beside the shed, and ran towards its open door. Campbell saw him going and yelled, “William!” but it was too late; the boy disappeared inside the shed.
    There on a makeshift table lay the bodies of Malcolm and John Wallace. As William watched, the undertaker wrapped a cloth strip around his brother’s lower jaw and tied the ends of the strip into a knot at the top of his head. William’s father had already been bound for death this way.
    Old Campbell, the big grizzled redhead, stepped into the door, following William – but what could he say now? The undertaker went on with his work. William approached the table; the bodies didn’t look real to him, certainly not like his father and brother. He saw the wounds the dried blood. The undertaker poured water from a bowl and scrubbed off the blood. But the wounds remained.
     
    Campbell, MacClannough, and several other who had been gathered around the kitchen table in the Wallace house only two night before now carried the bodies of William’s father and brother to the two new graves, dug into the rocky soil beside the grave of Mary Wallace, its cairn weathered and overgrown with moss. The mourners were gathered in a circle around the three graves as the parish priest droned in Latin, and they tried to hold onto expressions of stoic grief, but the sight of the boy, standing alone in front of the graves of his dead mother as the bodies of his father and brother were lowered with ropes into the ground beside her, had all the neighbors shaken. He stood alone, and they seemed afraid even to look at him.
    At the foot of the graves, and just outside the circle of mourners, three of the farmers were whispering. “We gotta do somethin’ with the boy,” MacClannough said.
    “ He’s got an uncle in Dunipace,” Campbell told him.
    “ Malcolm had a brother?” MacClannough asked.
    “ A cleric. Don’t think they got along. I sent a lad to fetch him.”
    “ What if the uncle don’t come?” Stewart asked.
    They all thought about that question for a moment.
    “ You don’t have a son, MacClannough, how about you?” Campbell asked.
    But no one was anxious to adopt a grieving, rebellious boy. MacClannough looked at his wife and two daughters. His youngest daughter was five; she was a beautiful girl with long auburn hair, and she clung to her own mother’s hands as if the open graves were the mouths of death and might suck her parents in, too.
    Then the girl did what no one else there had thought to do; she moved to the softly weeping William and held out to him the thistle follower that she had carried to the graveside.
    William looked up at her and their young eyes met – children encountering grief for the first time. Everybody at the funeral had