Some of them watched the vicious killer in the back of the meetinghouse, the mad widow at her husband’s funeral.
It was difficult for me not to tear their pews from the ground, difficult not to fling those tourists through that glass. But Tess squeezed my hand, she kept me still. As always, she knew before I did. She knew and I stayed where I was.
Someone rang a bell.
Then we were all quiet.
We waited and we listened for God.
After a while, I stood. I had to break my hand away from her.
I didn’t see it, but I know she dropped her head in fear, in fatigue.
I said that my father had found a home first in White Pine, and then at the meetinghouse. I said that he had found friendship and peace in both places and I believed he had been happy when he died. I said that he had been the strongest, most courageous, kindest man I’d ever known.
I can’t remember what else. I’m sure there was more, but believe me, it was inadequate.
I was just trying to fill the room with words.
I looked at my mother, who smiled at me in a way I hadn’t seen for many years. What was it? Pride? Certainty? Maybe it was simple tenderness. Maybe it was love that I saw.
Seymour gave me a nod. A greeting, but also, I thought, I hoped, a gesture of approval and encouragement. He was sitting toward the back, not far from my mother. He was heavier, softer. He’d lost a lot of hair. There were none of those frightening angles left in his face.
I saw a young woman, too. She was the right age, had the right eyes. She seemed to be alone. She could have been Anna. Might have been.
Whoever she was, when the service ended, she was gone.
We walked down to the beach. Me and Hank and Tess and my mother and the two stony guards who allowed her to stand in the sunshine with her wrists unbound.
They allowed her to bend at the waist and remove her shoes and socks.
The tide was high and the wind was blowing strong offshore. I took the top off the urn and shook the ashes free. They blew across the sand and scattered and dissolved over the water.
That was it, the end of my father’s funeral, the end of my father’s body.
My mother was so bright in the sun. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a white sweatshirt. They’d run a piece of webbing through the belt loops and tied it tight with a tidy bow knot. I try to imagine what it must have been for her, after nearly nineteen years locked away, to smell the ocean, to feel the cold sand against her bare feet, the wind on her body, the warm light. To be, all of a sudden, in one fail swoop, in the center of the whole whirling world.
She closed her eyes and cried. I don’t know if it was for my father, or because she was overcome by sensation, or because she wasn’t free. She began to walk toward the water, but the guards held her back. Maybe they were afraid she’d drown herself.
Tess said, “Come on, let her feel it, goddamn it, you assholes.”
But one of them was already kneeling at my mother’s feet, slipping her shoes on, while the other was closing the cuffs.
We followed those three up past the promenade to the prison van. And then they drove her away.
In the evening we had dinner with Hank. We invited Seymour, but he didn’t come. I don’t remember much else. Not in terms of event, or language.
I do remember the physical world, but really, how many more descriptions of the vast ocean and blue sky can you possibly endure?