The farther we walked, the more the tree limbs seemed to close over us like a tunnel through the night. It felt like we were trespassing into something sacred, like we were following Grandma into the darkest dream of her heart. The path was irregular, roots jutting up from the ground like half-resurrected corpse bones, like things frozen in the moment of escape. The tree limbs swayed in the air, a shivering of leaves. I heard the chitter of bats above us, darting through the trees, creatures out on the hunt.

Grandma came to a small clearing, the very end of the trail. We peeked out from behind a massive oak big enough to hide us, watching Grandma. She was staring at something there in the clearing.

It was a headstone, carved from marble and lugged all the way out here, hidden in the woods. Grandma set the lantern down and lowered herself to her knees on the grave. She folded her hands like she was praying, and she began to chant, some strange incantation half like singing, like what the monks did that one time I talked Mom into taking me to a monastery up in Arkansas. I remembered them all, heads lowered, chanting in Latin, all those secret garbled words made more powerful by the fact that I couldn’t understand them. Grandma spoke her strange language, words foreign and mysterious, the volume and pitch rising higher until it was as if she would hyperventilate. Her breaths came in gasps, and she began to weep, big heaving sobs that shook her whole body, the kind that seemed painful. Grandma cried and cried, the kind of brokenhearted wretchedness that I hadn’t even been able to conjure for Mom at her funeral. I’d never seen grief like that, not before or since, my grandmother’s wracking sobs on that grave.

Grandma lifted her head up and screamed, a raw-throated agony let loose like a flock of bats bursting from her throat. She gripped the gravestone in both of her hands and smashed her face into it—once, then twice. I saw a smattering of red across the stone, blood dripping down her forehead, splotching her hair. Grandma lay on the forest floor and pounded the dirt, weeping and screaming. She hugged the earth, she rolled on it, her hair sticky with blood and leaves. Grandma cried and cried until finally her breaths slowed and her sobs grew quieter, gentler. She rose back to her knees, wiping her nose with her forearm. Grandma reached up and felt the wound on her forehead as if it were the first time she’d noticed it. She gasped a little when she saw the blood on her fingers. It was like the whole thing had happened to her in a trance, like she hadn’t been aware of any of it at all.