Baby Joseph

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Nathan Poole Shannon

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Carter stepped out of his car for the funeral, wishing he’d bought an umbrella. It was gray
and drizzling in the cemetery, the scent of snow in the air. He hated April funerals, it always
seemed like a bad trade- a life for the renewal of spring.

There was a crowd already gathered around the open grave, and he could see the casket
sitting suspended over the hole. It’s so small, he thought with a pang of sadness. The coffin was white with brass trim and polished wood handles and a spray of bright flowers sagging under the cold drizzle.

When Carter came from Brownsville to write about the missing boy he hadn’t brought his
suit. He hadn’t counted on attending the funeral, and he’d had to buy a black blazer and white
shirt. He had bought them at a menswear store on the main street of Greenville on another wet
day, and in the store had been three or four other men with long faces buying black clothes.

Joseph Lee Rook was five. Was, past tense, because now he was without any age. He
disappeared from the family farm out on Bent Finger Road in the morning when he should have gotten on the school bus. The school had called about nine o’clock when he was marked absent, and the phone rang unanswered. Dad had been working on the tractor and mom in town with the station wagon, buying groceries. The flashing light on the answering machine had gone unnoticed until noon, and then the panic hit.

The police had given Carter a printout of Joseph Lee Rook’s information when he’d first
arrived in town. It had a smiling picture of the boy, the same one standing much larger next to
his grave. Grade One, his parents told him, forcing hard smiles. There was a sheet with details-
three feet nine inches tall, forty-five pounds. Dirty blond hair and hazel eyes. Last seen wearing a red snowsuit with black shoulders and the word Ice stitched in yellow.

Carter had interviewed the parents, stricken people who trembled through speaking with
him. Are you the police, they wanted to know. Are you here to help look for our boy? He
explained patiently that he was here from the Brownsville Bee paper to write about the missing
boy. Joseph Lee had been missing four days by then, and the Bee had sent him to raise awareness with an article. Lines of men tramped through the half-frozen mud of the fields, dogs sniffed the grounds, and the police spoke with all the neighbors anywhere near the Rook farm. One officer with chapped red cheeks stood outside the Rooks’ front door when Carter arrived, greeting him with a nod and a mist of breath.

Joseph’s mother Karen sat absolutely still in the interview, holding a fuzzy teddy bear
wearing a Brownsville baseball jersey. His favorite, she told Carter with a terribly blank look. He
loved the Tigers. She looked distrustfully at the small tape recorder on the coffee table. Joseph’s father Douglas said that he hadn’t slept since the boy disappeared and Carter believed it. He smelled of damp hay and fear. The parents showed Carter the boy’s room, with colorful posters and baseball pennants on the walls and a tumble of action figures by the foot of the bed. They showed him his cereal bowl, still unwashed and crusted with dried milk from the morning he’d vanished.

Carter had spoken to the officer with the chapped cheeks on the way out, asking him for a
comment. He refused to say anything on the record but said they were treating the boy’s
disappearance as suspicious. Some sick freak into kids, you know how it is, he’d said. Carter
didn’t answer.

The cemetery, as they are, was a miserable place that struggled not to be. He looked at
the lines of cars parked haphazardly and the people coming to the grave in loose knots, clutching at each other. Carter stood under a tree that had only the barest spring buds so as not to take up a seat, leaving them for the family. At the graveside there was a blown-up, framed school picture of Baby Joseph. Carter himself had come up with the name Baby Joseph, thinking it might emphasize just how young and vulnerable the boy was. The drizzle, which was starting to mix with wet snow, beaded on the glass and obscured Baby Joseph’s smile. There were beautiful bouquets of flowers on green stands, trying to shine the brightness of spring, but the day would not have it.

Carter felt the wet chill crawling on him. He saw the Rooks sitting in the front row,
Douglas holding his umbrella over himself and Karen. He’d met them just days earlier, but they
already looked horribly aged. People, respectfully silent, filled the rows of cheap white folding
chairs by the grave. Carter had seen the chairs stacked at the funeral home the previous night at Baby Joseph’s wake, where he had gone to offer his condolences. There, he kept getting pulled aside by people who wanted to talk about the boy. You that reporter? he heard over and over. They wanted to tell him what a good kid Joseph was, how he loved baseball and his green bike that he’d only ridden once this year because the cold wouldn’t lift. How he was always helping daddy with the chores, how he was a good student and had won a class award for participating in school. He was such a nice boy, was the consensus. It’s a damn shame.

He’d called his editor at the Bee and told him that he wanted to stay a few days. Nothing
ever happened in sleepy Greenville, but Carter wanted to follow the story. A real human interest angle, his editor thought. Maybe we have a tragedy on our hands out there in the sticks. He agreed and told Carter to keep his receipts for everything so he could expense them. Make sure there’s drama, the editor told him. I don’t want you out there for a week with nothing to show for it.

Standing in the cemetery in the rain with his shoulders bunched around his ears, Carter
noticed Mike Harper walking up towards the bulging crowd around the bright grave. Harper also lived on Bent Finger Road, a few farms over from the Rooks, and he had been the one who
found Baby Joseph. It seemed that the whole town had participated in the search, wading through fields and calling out tirelessly. Harper had gone home for lunch after spending the morning part of a search team, his hands chapped raw by the leash of another man’s bloodhound. Before returning to the search he’d checked in on his goats in the barn to find their water trough was low. In the extended April grip of winter, he checked his pipes, then the well behind the barn.

When Carter had interviewed Mike, the man hadn’t said much, but the haunted look on
his face spoke loudly. He had looked down the well and there in the water, lightly crusted with
ice, was Baby Joseph. Mike’s wife Dee had heard him scream. She looked out back and saw her
husband sprinting across the yard, and he skidded into the house in his muddy boots and
immediately dialed the police from the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. The line rang and
rang as there was almost no one at the detachment, and when someone finally picked up Mike
had screamed oh God oh Christ I found him, send everyone before sagging to the floor and
crying wretchedly. The bright red of the boy’s snowpants was what caught his eye as he checked his well.

Tragedy In Greenville, Carter had written on his laptop, and sat staring at the words. He
deleted and re-wrote it over and over. Young Boy Dead. Deleted. Missing Boy Located. No.
He’d published three articles since arriving in Greenville and also walked through three muddy
fields, doing his part.

Carter watched the Harpers take seats at the gathering and saw Father McKenna step out
of a nearby car. It had been parked demurely off to the side, next to the hearse that had lead the procession to the cemetery from the small church. People had been lined up outside and the doors left open despite the cold to hear McKenna’s service, Carter among them. It didn’t seem right to take a seat in the overflowing church. Now those same people were lined up at the graveside. Carter had followed the endless procession of cars to the cemetery and noticed people attentively standing on their stoops, and even old Ken Travis in his field, standing next to his tractor, hat over his heart. Every car they came across was pulled to the shoulder, four-way flashers on.

McKenna walked to the grave and made the sign of the cross over the tiny coffin, then
paused in front of the picture of Baby Joseph. He wiped his coat sleeve over it and a clear swatch appeared, free of the beaded raindrops. Again, the sign of the cross, and he gently laid his hand on the protective glass.

Funeral Attended By Many, Carter thought. Bad title. Whole Town Turns Out For Baby
Joseph. Maybe.

Carter shifted his feet, hearing the wet ground squelch under his muddied shoes. He
pulled his tape recorder out of his pocket and thumbed the slider to Record as the priest began to speak. He thought again of the as yet untitled article that sat unfinished on his laptop back in the car, and how he wasn’t sure how it would end. He only knew how it ended for Baby Joseph.

Within minutes of Mike Harper calling the police, his yard was quickly overwhelmed
with people. The well was wide enough that one of the volunteer firemen was able to be lowered in a harness and pull the body out. Carter had elbowed his way through the loose circle of people to the front and took a series of pictures with his phone as a winch drew the fireman and the body, in its mud-caked red snowsuit, out of the well. Dark water trailed off the heel of one of the boy’s snow boots. The fireman was grimacing and crying as he held the tiny body in his arms. Carter sent the six pictures of that, plus snapshots of the Rooks watching their son being removed from the well, to the Bee. Later, his editor had replied, great shots! Front page tomorrow in a short note.

There was a stretcher waiting nearby and Joseph Lee Rook was covered in a sheet and
solemnly rolled to a waiting ambulance. The crowd of onlookers parted respectfully, the men
taking off their hats as the boy passed by. No resuscitation was attempted- he was long dead and whiter than the remnants of snow in the Harpers’ yard. The ambulance departed with no lights or siren, which struck Carter as uniquely sad. The police ushered everyone out of the yard, and the crowd of pickup trucks slowly departed as they taped off the area. One of the only remaining cars had a sign in the windshield that read Visiting Clergy.

The first article Carter wrote about Baby Joseph was the interview with his parents and
the police chief. The others were updates on the search, where he inserted quotes of the people marching in the fields, checking the creek, and handing out fliers with the boy’s photo on it. Cars would stop to take them. The school gym, where Joseph had attended, set out cots for searchers. Everyone Carter spoke to wanted to be quoted and said that he was such a sweet kid, always helping. Wanted to be an astronaut. Loved baseball and would listen to the Tigers games on the radio with his dad. Always smiling. The name Baby Joseph was starting to catch on. Before the boy was found Carter had seen a handmade sign on stakes driven into the still half-frozen ground by the edge of the road, Pray For Baby Joseph.

A couple of hours after Mike Harper had seen the red snowpants in his well and Baby
Joseph had been taken away in that sadly silent ambulance, Carter called the morgue. With no
hospital in Greenville, Joseph’s body was taken to War Memorial in Brownsville, an hour away.
There was no autopsy yet, but were no signs of foul play and it seemed the boy had drowned.
The full report would be available later, Carter was told.

Foul Play Ruled Out. No, not a good title. Drowning In Greenville? No.

At the funeral, the rain finally began to subside. Nickel-sized snowflakes still drifted
lazily down, speckling the white coffin as Father McKenna spoke. Carter moved quietly around
the edge of the gathering until he could see their faces. He leaned against a tree, trying not to
draw attention to himself. He looked from person to person, half of whom he’d spoken to in the last few days as they hunted for Baby Joseph. Men stared and women dabbed at their eyes with wadded tissues, but Carter noted how everyone just looked… empty. As if when Baby Joseph was found, a piece of each of them disappeared alongside the boy.

Father, we commend the soul of this beloved innocent to You, McKenna said. Carter
stared at Douglas and Karen Rook, seated in the front row of chairs. Surrounded by their
families, the entire town and people from all over the area, they still looked lost. As lost as Baby
Joseph had been.

McKenna held up a sprinkler of holy water and shook it over the white coffin. The water
mixed with the miserable snowy drizzle as he intoned ashes to ashes, dust to dust and the small coffin slowly began to lower. The small boombox behind him, set up by one of the funeral assistants, began to play Amazing Grace, masking the whirring sound of the small motor lowering Baby Joseph into the cold, half frozen ground. The green tarp covering the mound of excavated dirt, meant to mimic grass, stood out harshly against the brittle muddy and snowy landscape, rippling in the wind.

Carter watched Douglas Rook, the father of Baby Joseph, burst into tears as his boy was
being lowered. He stood, crying out please don’t take my boy! He lunged forward and his
brother, Rob, seated directly behind him leapt to his feet and wrapped Douglas in a tight bear
hug. The bereft father sobbed into his brother’s shoulder as Karen, Joseph Lee’s mother, stared
blankly as the coffin slowly droned out of sight. Douglas sank limply down, screaming into the
sky with a rawness Carter hoped never to know.

Carter had pulled his phone out when Douglas had jumped toward the grave, and snapped
pictures of the ruined man. Make sure there’s drama, his editor echoed in his head. He got
photos of him half-laying in the cemetery mud, his hand reaching futilely out for his lost boy. He got photos of Rob’s thick arm in a suit that was too tight for him, holding his brother back.
Another of Douglas limp against his brother with Father McKenna, mud on the bottom of his
robes, squatting next to him.

He flicked through the pictures while his tape recorder kept rolling. The agony in the
photos was almost too much to bear, and Carter stopped trying to convince himself that the
wetness on his cheeks was snow. He chose the best and sent them to the Bee, putting the phone away in the back pocket of his pants. His new blazer that almost matched his slacks was soaking through.

He gazed around the group of mourners. No one had left. Father McKenna was still in the
mud with Douglas, holding the man’s trembling hand. The priest spoke calmly and soothingly
but Douglas’ eyes were still frantic. My son, my son, Carter heard them both saying. Rob
continued to hold his brother tightly.

There was a thunk as the coffin came to its resting place, six feet down. The motor
stopped whirring, but the strains of Amazing Grace still pealed out of the small, silvery
boombox. Father McKenna stood, his arthritic knees paining, and with Rob helped Douglas to
his feet. He looked embarrassed, but took his seat next to Karen. She absently twined her fingers through his.

Go in peace, McKenna said to the gathering. Keep the memory of Joseph Lee Rook,
known around the world as Baby Joseph, in your hearts. And keep the family of our dear son,
Douglas and Karen Rook, in your prayers.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen, chorused the mourners with
McKenna, and slowly they began to head toward their cars. Few people approached Douglas and Karen, Carter noticed. He thought of saying something to them, but waited. He knew he would be leaving town in the morning after finishing his last article tonight. He would speak to them then. His phone buzzed in his pocket and it was a response to his photos from his editor at the Bee. Just a thumbs up emoji. He shook his head.

Terrible End For Much-Loved Youth. No, not quite. Almost.

He waited respectfully as the crowd began to thin and a line of cars slowly began to
trundle up the narrow cemetery roads to the highway. Soon, Carter left himself. As he walked, he noticed a bright robin in one of the trees, with tiny green buds poking out of the branch it stood on. The small bird cocked its head at Carter.

A life for the renewal of spring, he thought. Bad trade. He continued walking through the
mud to his car, amongst the other departing mourners.

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Nathan Poole Shannon is an emerging writer of the strange and macabre. Creepy and weird stories, whether they be modern or historically set, are his specialty. From oozing monsters to cryptic curses, he is only beginning to share with the world. He lives in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife and a small menagerie of pets who are decidedly not creepy—but from time to time, inspire something that is.

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