Chapter 4

That Saturday morning, while Sarah and her father were settling into their new home, the township of Feller's Glen gathered for Frankie Nesbit's funeral.  Billy, Rachel and Charlie were all there, dressed in their Sunday's best, with their parents.  A crowd of about a hundred souls gathered there for the ceremony, half of the township's population.  The valley that hid Feller's Glen from the rest of the world was home to a few other towns, remote, quiet places home to mostly retired folk and vacationing families during the summer.

Feller's Glen, or 'The Glen' as the surrounding populace knew it, was the only township that had a substantial population year-round.  Between the snowfall and the lack of entertainment, the only people left up in the high mountains were the ones that had a reason to be left alone.  And left alone they were.  

219 American souls and the Sierra Nevada highlands would have drawn a gruesome scene for any onlooker, had there been one to look upon the valley that day.  The one general store, owned and ran by Rachel's father, was closed.  Everyone Rachel knew was at the funeral.  Everyone in Feller’s Glen was there. 

            Frankie’s mother, who looked like a dirty, lumpy oil slick in her black dress, couldn’t take it anymore when she passed the body of her beloved Frankie.
            “Oh Lord,” she said as she belly-flopped onto the casket, “please don’t make it so.  Please.  Please Jesus, let my baby boy live again. Please!”  Her wretched cries were heard throughout the valley by every living thing, echoing off the hills and cliffs and mountains that surrounded the funeral.

            Matthew Nesbit, Frankie’s father, stood and watched as his wife plunged onto the casket, disrupting the priest’s monologue with her desperate pleas. 

            “The Lord giveth.”

He watched as his two friends, Jack Brown and Henry Levitt pulled the sobbing woman off her sons’ casket.

            “And the Lord taketh away. Amen.”

            Matt stood there, dumbfounded, without a single thought as to what to do with himself going through his head. 

            That’s when his thoughts finally broke through the wall he had built up inside his mind when he had found out his boy was dead.  It was like waking up or like someone had finally slapped him in the face and knocked him out of it. It was then that Matt Nesbit realized his son was dead.

            No, he thought, his son wasn’t dead.  No, not Frankie, Frankie was going to play soccer like he did every Saturday.  That wasn’t his boy down there.   Way down there in the muck and the wet weeds and the wriggling things, no, that couldn’t be him.  No, no, no, no!
            “Nooooooooooooo!””

            Matt snapped back to reality as he screamed, startling the rest of the attendants of his son’s funeral.  His wife continued to mourn, bellowing and moaning in sorrow.  He pushed the two men aside and grabbed his sobbing wife, cradling her head against his chest as she wailed.

            “He’s gone, love,” he whispered into her ear, rocking her head against his chest.
            “Frankie’s dead.”