“That was a kind thing you done,” she says.

When Maggie and Beth died on the coffin ship, all I could do was pitch them overboard, sputtering what Bible words I could remember, but, in my mind, they got a proper burial. In my mind, I marked their graves with an iron cross with curled edges. I don’t tell Sarah that the cross is as much for my sisters as it is for Ben.

“It seemed the right thing,” I say. I want to ask her to step out with me somewhere. Anywhere. I haven’t been close to her since the cobbler. But a burying day isn’t the day for it.

“She’s going to miss him something fierce,” she says. “They had a lifetime together.”

I hadn’t guessed it was otherwise, and I realize they easily could have been sold from each other and never had the chance.

I make my way past the slave huts and the fields down to the burial site. The slave graves lie out of the way, off in a far corner of the plantation. A cluster of forty slaves with long faces and slow movements has gathered in the tall grass.

No one speaks, which seems to me a strange way to gather, even in mourning, but then I see Mister Johnson standing just past the grave clutching a Bible in his hands. He eyes me strangely when he spots me walking up the path, but says nothing.

Bessie soon comes up behind me, with Sarah on one side and Clover’s square-jawed wife, Callie May, on the other. Behind them, Bessie’s two sons carry the front of Ben’s box, while Red takes the back, along with another field hand, all four walking with deliberate steps. It’s a rough pine box, but it’s solid built, and it’s going into the ground with him.

When the famine took my little brother, there’d been so many buried that timber was hard to come by. For his coffin, the wood was cut so thin it sagged with the weight of Dermot’s body, which is saying something because he hardly weighed anything in the end. After we lowered him into the grave, and Father Michael said the prayers, Ma didn’t want to leave. Father Michael pulled me aside and told me to take her home.

“She’ll stay out of the way while they finish burying him,” I said. “And you needn’t wait with her. We don’t want to keep you from your work.”

He shook his head. “It’s not that. It’s the coffin. We’ll be needing it back.” He flushed like I’d caught him at grave robbing, and I felt like I had. “We can’t get coffins as fast as we get bodies,” he said. “We try to comfort the families with seeing a proper burial, but, when you go, we’ll lay him in the ground and bury him so.”

As Ben’s procession reaches the grave, Mister Johnson waves them on with a hurry-up gesture. They lower the coffin quickly. Clumsily. I swallow to clear the knot forming in my chest, but it sticks there.