He kept the bloodied bible in his bedside drawer as if it represented something greater than life itself. As if the rust-colored pages somehow made the holy book more sacred. A relic of life that once was. A momentum to a violent end, yet it should somehow comfort him as he slept next to it.
The bible was always held in reverence, and no one ever questioned why it had not been buried with one of the men whose blood penetrated its pages. No one ever questioned why this thing that had absorbed two men’s life force while they bled to death in the desert with only each other’s dying presence as comfort had been gifted to a ten-year-old.
No. No one questioned it. They let him have it, whether he was old enough to totally understand what it meant or not. And he would keep it, sleep next to ghosts of his brothers for the next thirty-five years, no one telling him he could have peace.
Then one day, he gave it away under the guise of a gift of memory. But really, he was tired. The young men haunted him every night, starting the night the officer gifted the bible to the family, and he hadn’t slept unassisted since. Not even after he moved out of the house, not when he married, and certainly not when he had children. They haunted him even after he drank himself to sleep, but drinking somehow made it easier to deal with.
They aged him. Everyone blamed the alcohol and the drugs, but it was them. It was as if they were trying to bring life back into themselves by taking it from him. But they remained dead, and he remained a shell. Even so, he wouldn’t let that bible go. Not after his wife left him, and not after his children abandoned him. He unknowingly held on to the phantoms that tormented him night after night.
Until his sister found it while helping him move yet again into more affordable housing. Truth be told he had somehow forgotten about it. His forgetfulness led to guilt. Had he let them down? Shamed their memory by momentarily lapsing in his lifelong vigil to them?
After some thought, he decided it was time to pass it on. And since his children wanted nothing to do with him, maybe his sister could pass it on to her own children. So he gave it to her, and she greedily accepted. She deserved the heirloom more than he did anyway.
But when she left with it, he felt an immediate sense of relief that he couldn’t quite explain, as if an enormous burden had lifted itself from him. Out of the bible’s presence, he no longer felt guilty. And for the first time in thirty-five years, he slept. And he dreamed dreams not of desert mountains or agony, not dreams of purgatory or hellfire, but dreams of spring waters and children’s laughter. Dreams of green meadows, light, and happiness. And when he woke, he knew. He knew they were haunting someone else. And he did not care at all. Let them, he thought. And he went back to sleep.