Carefully I removed the bright bandanna, revealing soft wisps of hair, all that remained of Ezra’s thick curls. I stroked the fine bones of his skull. Then I touched the craggy eyes; his bones felt so fragile, so close to the surface. I had always wanted to touch his face. My fingers whispered over his cheek, found the scar, stayed there.

Ezra’s eyelids shut and he trembled. A hint of deep purple showed beneath his lids.

“I’m tired,” he said.

“I know.”

“Nyle, I have to leave.”

“I know that too, Ezra.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Ayuh.”

He nodded. A glistening in the corner of his eye. I touched it with my finger, drank it into my skin.

With one of my hands curved under, one wrapped over top, I surrounded his bony fingers with everything good inside me.

He never opened his eyes again.

Gran and I walked back to the truck. We kept our own space. Not daring to touch.

“Why?” I asked, hardly trusting my voice.

“Nyle,” Gran said as she headed the truck back home. “I don’t know.”

“But accidents happened before. They happened in other places. Somebody knew.”

“More people needed to know. More people know now. Maybe enough people. Something will be done.”

I thought about how at first everyone talked about the accident. But now, other news was more important, as if Cookshire had never happened. How could people forget?

Mrs. Haskins said all of us would be touched by it. And we were. Yet nothing changed.

“You really believe that?” I asked. “That something will be done?”

“Ayuh,” Gran said. “But maybe, Nyle, you have to be the one to do it.”

Mrs. Haskins had said our class should write letters. I didn’t know what to say then. Would it make a difference if I wrote now?

“It’s too late for Ezra,” I said.

But it’s not too late for the rest of us.

Back home we passed Shep, guarding the flock in the flat pasture along the main road.

“I’ll get out here,” I told Gran.

Uncle Lemmy stood inside the front pasture, surrounded by lambs. He looked fine up there, right at home. He, Aunt May, and Bethany had come to stay in the back bedroom. Bethany was getting better, slowly, slowly better.

Uncle Lemmy agreed to move in last month and help Gran with the spring work. The rest of my cousins had gone to stay with Uncle Lemmy’s brothers.

Shep sat at attention as I walked up.

We’d trained him well.

I climbed over the fence, sank to my knees and buried my head in his side.

There was no more puppy smell to him. Only outdoor smells, grass and pine, seeds and wind, and sheep, the oily, woolly smell of sheep.