Tub understood none of this, of course, but shrugged anyway, and Blinky whispered the plan to Jack, who squinted across the field as if measuring the difficulty of the task before nodding his agreement. Without explaining the goal, he arranged us on all sides of ARRRGH!!!: Claire and Tub at one leg, Dad and I at the other, Jack at the right arm, and Blinky at the left. At Jack’s call we attempted to drag the great troll from her position midfield. Panting and groaning and sweating, our attempts earned us less than a first down.

Then I felt another pair of hands at my side and looked up to find Sergeant Gulager. He took hold of a horn so that ARRRGH!!!’s head wouldn’t drag across the turf. More people followed: Principal Cole, Coach Lawrence, and Ms. Pinkton, all goggling in disbelief at the arm they lifted from the ground; Carol the museum cashier, the man with the dyed black goatee, and his little girl whom I’d first seen on a flyer lifted up a foot; Mrs. Leach and her thespians took up an entire left leg; and then, in a single wave as if responding to a referee’s whistle, the entire varsity squads of the Saint B. Battle Beasts and the Connersville Colts assembled to lift the torso.

None of the players knew what they’d witnessed that night or if they’d wake up Saturday morning to find this had been a wild fantasy brought on by concussion, but at that moment they were moved by a sense of right, and so they lowered their shoulder pads, flexed muscles trained in weight rooms, and lifted.

The body traveled the entire length of the field as if by miracle, with the noble, snouted face pointed at the stars. When we reached a spot just past the end zone close to the street, Jack gave a signal and we set the body in an upright arrangement. As Jack gathered yard markers and first-down poles to prop up the arms, I began to understand Tub’s plan. Tears sprung to my eyes and I backed way, afraid to be so close to something so beautiful.

ARRRGH!!! was posed in a stance so lifelike I expected her to wink at me one more time. Her crouch made it look as if she were about to spring forward, while her open jaw suggested the earsplitting roar that would never again be heard. Right now it was the macabre posing of a corpse, but in a few hours, when the sun crested over Mount Sloughnisse, she would turn, quite painlessly, into a stone statue. Hers would not be one of those sad things lost in the Cemetery of Souls; hers would memorialize the site of the Battle of the Fallen Leaves and serve as a reminder that the worlds of human and troll could operate in friendship rather than in the age-old cycles of animosity and carnage.