Sorrow's Crown Read Free

usual, blinking in the bright lights, shivering in the freeze.
    Bus boys went running. The maitre d' threw menus on the floor, and a young waitress grabbed a fire extinguisher, ready to douse the edgy stranger if she needed to—which I thought was extremely level-headed of her.
    " Crummler ," Katie told him. "You're freezing. Come sit by the fire."
    He jitterbugged and snapped his fingers, following her dolefully. He trembled as much from the night as from his own fiery, burning nerve-endings. "I have been in battle with forces," he moaned. "I have been in battle."
    He still wore the same pair of work boots I'd bought him a couple months back. Odd to realize that he'd been there when I'd first met Katie in the flower shop, like the living embodiment of the excitement I felt for her, his eyes blazing with love and madness. He glared at the wild boar's head on the wall, then down at our table and especially at my plate, and I got the unsettling feeling that he was thinking the same things I was.
    "I am here, Jon!"
    "Want some lasagna?" I asked.
    Katie said, "He probably eats neater than you."
    "Well, his elbows are clean, anyway."
    Melting rime rolled off his neck, and despite the shuddering he actually did manage to eat more neatly than I had, carefully cutting up the pasta and forking it into his mouth with a trained and cautious maneuvering. I could tell a hundred hours of harsh training had probably gone into that conduct, someone at the orphanage forcing him to repeat the action until he got it down perfectly.
    "Armadas roared across the roiling waves," Crummler continued. "Met at the shore by the infernal war devices of ancient beasts, pyres burning in the antediluvian skies."
    Anna loved listening to his impressive vocabulary that only filtered out when he told tales of ocher nights and ancient empires of other galaxies. It seemed that about a fifth of the patrons in the place recognized him and tried their best not to be bothered. The rest gaped, whispered in a near panic, or hid their faces behind the centerpieces.
    I heard the manager in the alcove hissing loudly into the phone. "Don't give me that jurisdiction crap, he's your loony, you come get him out of here. Yeah, we've heard about this gravekeeper you got. What, if he's three feet over the county line you're going to let him ruin my business?" I could just imagine Sheriff Broghin lumbering to his feet, the gun belt angled into his belly rolls and leaving ugly welts.
    Everything seemed to catch Crummler's interest, so that he spun and wheeled, wet hair whipping like shaggy fur. Brown water dripped off his soaking clothes. He broke from the table and waved to people, some of whom fondly waved back. Forever ignited, Crummler moved and reached. He started dancing with somebody's veal piccata .
    "That son of a bitch has my dinner!"
    I wrestled the plate away from him and put it back in front of a guy with big teeth, who sputtered and glared at the veal as if it might infect him with lunacy or rabies.
    "I'll take him to his shack," I said. "I'll be back in forty-five minutes."
    "Jon, be careful," Anna told me. "Something's wrong.”
    â€œI know."
    "Maybe I should go with you," Oscar offered. "He's sorta the overactive type, ain't he?"
    "I have been in battle," Crummler said. "I have been in battle ... with myself. "
    "Come on," I told him. "I'll take you home."
    His mouth fell in on itself and the reckless energy drained from his face. He shivered as though all the cold had finally caught up with him. He stood straight and idle, squinting into the distance, blind to me, his voice thickening with lucidity. "Not to Maggie's."
    "Back to the cemetery," I said.
    "Huh?"
    "Where you take care of our families."
    "Yes."
    "Where you watch over my parents."
    "Yes, Jon!" His eyes re-lit and held their fervor, the wire on fire once more. "They say hello, Jon. They say they love you, Anna." He reached down and embraced my grandmother, rocking gently. She brought the back of