Chapter Seven

It was now Friday morning, February 27, the seventh day since the Mullens had learned of their son’s death and the third day since Captain Pringle had told Peg Mullen to call the Pentagon herself. The Mullens had not heard from the captain since. They knew neither who would be escorting Michael’s body nor when it would arrive. The Mullen family, anxious, tired of waiting, was beginning to grow angry with Peg. In their impatience, they blamed Peg, she felt, because she had “defied the Pentagon and demanded our rights.”

That morning Peg recalled that Senator Hughes’ aide had told her to wait no longer than three days, that if no word had come from the Army concerning their request for the special escort by then, the Senator would have Michael’s remains released and sent home. It was the third day, so Peg telephoned the Senator’s office to find out what she should do. The aide told her to wait a little longer; he would contact the Pentagon himself to see what was going on. He called back almost immediately. One of the escorts had, in fact, been located and was in the air on his way to Oakland. The aide did not, however, know which one. Peg thanked him and told him not to worry, that Captain Pringle would be able to tell them when he got in touch.

By four o’clock that afternoon, when the captain had still not called, Peg decided to telephone his office herself. She was told that Captain Pringle was not in, was not expected back, and that she might try him later at his home.

Moments later one of the ladies of Father Shimon’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church telephoned that they were making their preparations for the dinner to be served those attending the funeral on Saturday, the next day.

“You’re getting the dinner ready?” Peg asked, surprised. “But there isn’t going to be any funeral tomorrow!”

“What do you mean?” the lady asked. “We thought you told Father Shimon—”

“I told him—I told Father Shimon yesterday morning that if we heard anything, if Michael’s body arrived yesterday, we would hold the funeral Saturday,” Peg said. “But Michael’s body isn’t here yet, and … well, we just don’t know when it will be.”

“Then you won’t be holding the funeral tomorrow?”

“I don’t see how we can,” Peg said tersely.

“Peg, I don’t understand. What are you doing to Father Shimon?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s so … so disturbed by all this.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing to him,” Peg said, “but I do know what he’s doing to me.”

“I think it’s terribly cruel,” the lady said. “Father Shimon built the hall for this sort of thing, and now you don’t even want to use it.”

“Look,” Peg said, “if we have the crowd we’re expecting for the funeral, then we’ll probably need the whole space, the dining room back of the church and all. If we have the Don Bosco Chorus and John’s high school class, they’ll simply overflow the church. We’ll need all that extra room. That’s why we sort of decided among ourselves today that we’d be better off if we go to dinner at the country club—that’s where we went before the church was built anyway.”

“What do you want me to tell Father Shimon?”

“I don’t care what you say,” Peg replied. “Tell him we can’t make plans yet. We don’t know when Michael’s—when the funeral will be held. How many will attend. We just don’t know.”

“So you don’t want to have dinner down here?”

“We don’t really care whether we have the dinner or not. Do what you want,” Peg said. “All we’re sure of is that the funeral will not be tomorrow.”

When Peg did try Captain Pringle’s home, there was no answer, so she called his office again. The office phone was busy. For the next hour Peg tried both phones. The office continued busy, and there was no answer at the house. Peg began to worry.

Captain Pringle told Peg he would have to contact the four other families that week whose sons had been killed in Vietnam. She could tell how these deaths disturbed him, how much he hated his job. She believed him to be a compassionate man, and she began to worry that, like the Waterloo Marine survivors’ assistance officer they’d heard about, Pringle might have suffered a nervous breakdown. Maybe even taken his own life. She discussed her concern with the telephone operator, who suggested Peg call a Mrs. Mason with the Red Cross. Mrs. Mason did everything in her power to locate the captain but was unable to find him. When Pringle’s office phone remained busy for several hours that evening, Peg called a friend in the Waterloo telephone company to ask whether there might be something wrong with the captain’s line. Peg continued trying to reach Captain Pringle before finally giving up that night at eleven o’clock.

Peg’s friend with Northwestern Bell in Waterloo reported early Saturday morning that Captain Pringle’s office phone had, in fact, been taken off its hook. The Mullens decided to help themselves. They first contacted Ozark Airlines, one of the airlines servicing their part of the Midwest, and explained that they were entering their second weekend since having received notification of their son’s death. Might Ozark Airlines, they asked, have any record of an advance booking indicating when their son’s body would return? Within minutes an Ozark employee was able to tell the Mullens that Michael’s body was scheduled to arrive at the Waterloo Airport on their 7:45 P.M. Sunday evening flight.

At about ten o’clock that same morning, Sergeant Fitzgerald checked in. He told the Mullens that the captain should not have gone off without notifying Sergeant Fitzgerald that he was to act for him. Peg said they had been able to learn when Michael was to reach Waterloo, but could the sergeant discover which of the two boys they had requested as the escort would be the one to accompany him? The sergeant explained there was no way for him to find out; he knew only that the body would be escorted.

Gene called Ozark Airlines again, and the same employee who had assisted them before was able again within minutes to check the passenger manifest and tell them that Tom Hurley, Michael’s classmate at Rockhurst, would be coming. The Mullens telephoned Hurley’s parents in Missouri and informed them that their son would be arriving in Waterloo the next night. His parents could barely conceal their delight and surprise, although, they were quick to add, they were terribly sorry for the circumstances which had permitted him to return. The Mullens understood.

At 7:45 P.M. on Sunday the Ozark Airlines flight carrying Michael’s casket touched down at the far end of the Waterloo runway. The airplane braked, reversed its thrust, shuddered, slowed, braked some more and taxied in toward the terminal.

Peg was not there to see it. She simply could not make herself drive out to the airport where six months earlier Michael had kissed her good-bye and told her not to worry, saying, “Come on now, Mom, please? It’ll all be over March first.” It was March 1, and it was all over. Peg, therefore, remained behind, and her daughter Patricia stayed to keep her company.

Gene Mullen, his son John and daughter Mary went with the Hurleys and Sergeant Fitzgerald to meet the plane. The six of them stood by the picture window looking out at the nearly deserted airfield. As the airliner braked to a stop next to the terminal and shut down its engines, Gene Mullen asked Sergeant Fitzgerald what had impressed him most about Vietnam.

Without turning away from the window, Fitzgerald replied, “The corruption.”

Tom Hurley was the last passenger to leave the plane. As his parents crowded forward to watch, Hurley walked down the boarding steps and stood next to the freight bay, watching while Michael’s casket, covered by an American flag, was slid onto a baggage cart. The cart backed away from the plane, turned and gently lowered and guided Michael’s casket into the hearse. Only when the hearse’s back doors were closed did Hurley enter the terminal to embrace his family.

The Hurleys departed together, and the Mullens and Sergeant Fitzgerald followed the hearse to Waterloo. Michael’s casket was taken inside the Loomis Funeral Home, and Tom Loomis, the director, asked Gene to wait in the vestibule while the casket was opened. Sergeant Fitzgerald followed Loomis, and Gene, Mary and John stayed behind. They sat silently, patiently in the vestibule wondering whether they could be certain it was Michael, worried that his body would have been so shattered by the artillery shell’s explosion that they might never be able to know. After about twenty minutes Tom Loomis called down to Gene that he could now view the body. Gene rose and glanced, stricken, at his children.

“We’ll be all right, Dad. You go ahead,” John said.

Mary gave her father’s hand a gentle squeeze. “We’ll come up after a while.”

Gene Mullen nodded and slowly turned away. He took a few steps and paused at the doorway of the funeral parlor’s viewing room. The casket was in a far corner, and he forced himself to raise his eyes to look at it. The casket’s lid was up, and Gene noticed Tom Loomis standing somberly to one side. Feeling apprehensive and ill, Gene walked forward until he could see a uniformed body inside. Despairingly, haltingly, he took another step. And another. Then Gene stopped, looked reluctantly at the face and quickly away.

It was Michael, his son. There was no question about it.

Gene Mullen steeled himself, made himself move right next to the coffin, close enough to touch the cold hands so carefully folded across his son’s chest. Gene examined the military tunic, the strangeness of its brass buttons, the uniform jacket’s lapels with the brass infantry and U.S. insignia, the black Army tie, the starched khaki collar’s points, the throat, the lower jaw, the still blue lips, the mustache—the mustache? Michael had a mustache! When had he grown a mustache? But it wasn’t the mustache that bothered Gene. There was something else. Gene wasn’t sure what; he just sensed there was something wrong. Suddenly Gene realized there wasn’t a mark on his son.

Gene looked up at the funeral director in bewilderment, then back down. He noticed that Michael’s face was a little puffy, his neck seemed swollen, but if it weren’t for the uniform, there would be no sign that Michael had been in a war at all. In exasperation and puzzlement, Gene removed his glasses and wiped his hands across his eyes.

“Something wrong, Gene?” the funeral director asked.

“But, Tom, he was supposed to have been killed by artil-tilery!”

“When we lifted the body up out of the casket—we had to,” Loomis explained; “because it had settled into it a little—I couldn’t feel any broken bones or abrasions.…”

“Do you think he could have been killed by the concussion?”

“I couldn’t say,” Loomis said. “I just couldn’t tell you that. I don’t know.” The funeral director leaned forward and traced his finger beneath Michael’s khaki shirt collar. “There’s some tape along here,” he said, “but that’s where they embalmed him.”

Gene looked again at his son. For some reason Michael’s coal black hair (which even when he had left was already thickly flecked with white) had now become a strange and alien brown. He noticed that his son’s complexion, which had always been dark, almost mahogany-colored, seemed gray, chalky, a pallor foreign even to death. But Michael’s hair and complexion were the only things that seemed wrong, and Gene kept asking himself how could Michael have been killed by an artillery burst, an explosion of burning jagged chunks of shrapnel, and still be perfectly whole? The more Gene tried to understand it, the more agitated and suspicious he became until finally, unable to tolerate it any longer, Gene asked the funeral director where Sergeant Fitzgerald had gone.

“I’m right here, Mr. Mullen,” Fitzgerald said. The sergeant had been standing out of the way at the back of the room. He now came forward.

Gene scowled at the sergeant. “Now I want to know how-my-son-died! I want a death certificate. I want a death certificate stating how my son was killed!”

While Gene waited impatiently, Sergeant Fitzgerald opened an accordion-pleated manila file folder. He fiddled through the papers while Gene grew angrier and angrier, and when the sergeant pulled a sheet of paper from the folder, it was the same paper from which he had read the official casualty message to the Mullens. Fitzgerald simply began to cover it again: “… died while at a night defensive position when artillery fire from friendly forces—”

“That’s not it! You know that isn’t it!” Gene interrupted indignantly. “Look at him! Look at his body! There isn’t a mark on him. Now let’s get down to the bottom of that stack of papers and find out. I want to know—I want a death certificate. I want this confirmed before I bury that boy, or I’m going to have that body held.”

The sergeant began leafing through the folder again. “I don’t have a death certificate, Mr. Mullen. All I have is the original message I read to you … that and the notes I made when I received the information over the phone. That’s this, here.…” Sergeant Fitzgerald resignedly handed Gene a piece of white typing paper upon which he’d handwritten the message: “Sgt. Michael E. Mullen, son of Oscar and Margaret Mullen, RFD #3, La Porte City, Iowa. Killed 18 Feb 70 near the village of Chu Lai. Nonbattle.”

Gene studied the page for a long moment, and then, in a howl that compressed all the rage and confusion and pain he felt into one anguished question, he asked, “What does this mean: ‘Nonbattle’?”

“It means a casualty not the result of action by hostile forces,” Sergeant Fitzgerald replied.

When Gene Mullen returned to the farm that night, Peg’s first question was: “Is it Michael?”

“Yes,” he said and dashed the one desperate remaining hope she had been nurturing all along.

Early Monday morning Gene drove back to the Loomis Funeral Home with Peg and Patricia. They had wanted to be alone with Michael’s body and were surprised to find that a number of people were already there. Some were elderly friends of Michael’s grandparents, some were Peg’s friends—people she had met through her work on the County Democratic Committee—some were families who had sons currently serving in Vietnam, some were from John’s high school class at Don Bosco, and others were families who too had lost sons in Vietnam. In all, about 145 persons signed the register. They had come because they had heard on the radio that Michael’s body was to be brought back to the Mullen farm that afternoon, and not wanting to intrude on the family, they had nevertheless wanted to pay their respects. Peg particularly remembered the parents whose sons had died in the war. Their anguish was so real, they were so clearly reliving their own personal tragedies, that Peg felt they were the only people who really understood the despair that she and Gene felt.

When Gene and Peg Mullen and their daughter Patricia entered the funeral home, Captain Pringle met them at the vestibule. He reached inside his brief case and lifted out a small satin-covered box which he started to present to Gene. Thinking the box contained Michael’s Army medals, Gene pushed the captain’s hand away before Pringle could speak.

“We don’t want them now,” Gene said. “Maybe in time we’ll change our opinion, but we don’t want them now.”

The box contained not medals but a small gold star symbolic of their son’s death.

At first, more than anything else, Peg was upset by Michael’s hair. She had heard that the malaria pills the boys took in Vietnam and the sun and water affected coloring; but now she saw that Michael had no white hair at all. She wondered whether the Army had been embarrassed to show the Mullens that their son’s hair had turned whiter, whether some well-meaning mortician hadn’t dyed it. Peg couldn’t stand its strange “taffy” color. But, other than that, as Gene had reported, Michael looked absolutely natural. There wasn’t a mark on him.

Peg was suddenly overwhelmed by anger. The depth of her anger, of her outrage, its force and fury, stunned her. Gripping the velvet-draped platform upon which Michael’s casket rested, Peg began to shiver. Her trembling transmitted itself down her shoulders, through her arms to the platform, so that it, too, vibrated slightly and the aluminum and brass-fitted handles on the casket began inexcusably to rattle—a thin, high, metallic pinging like a moored sailboat’s rigging in a wind. Peg, unable at first to identify the source of the sound, glanced in amazement at the coffin and next at her hands, her arms until she realized that she herself was responsible for that outrageous noise. She jerked her hands off the platform as though burned.

“Mother?” Patricia put her arm around Peg. “You all right?”

Peg clamped her hands beneath her upper arms to still the trembling and bit her lip.

“Are you all right?” Patricia repeated, and Peg’s look, when she turned to her daughter, was that of a frightened child.

“Daddy!” Patricia called. Gene hurried over and, sensing that Peg was for the first time about to break down, seized her other arm.

“Get me to the car, quick!” Peg said urgently. Her voice was a thin, compressed whisper. Gene and Patricia hurried Peg past the others in the funeral home, through the vestibule, where Captain Pringle called out, “Mr. Mullen, I need your—”

“Not now, wait. Be back,” Gene answered over his shoulder.

Once outside Peg inhaled great gulps of air. She reached their car without stumbling, got in, and Patricia slid in next to her. Gene remained standing by the open door.

“Gene, you go ahead,” Peg told him. “Go see what Pringle wants. I’ll be all right now.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“I’m all right,” Peg repeated. “Patricia will stay with me. I just need to sit for a while.”

Gene, leaning down so he could see Peg’s face, nodded reluctantly and closed the car door. He walked back toward the funeral home entrance, paused at the stairs to look once more at the car. Peg gave him a little wave. Gene waved back and continued on in.

“You feel better now?” Patricia asked worriedly. “Is there anything I can get you? Some water?”

Peg shook her head no. She reached into her purse and pulled out a handkerchief.

“Are you sure?” Patricia said. “Isn’t there anything you want?”

Peg continued to sit there in silence. After a moment, with obvious difficulty, she started to talk. She did not look up. Instead, she stared down at the plain white cotton handkerchief she had twisted into little knots in her hand.

“When … I … saw … Michael … whole.… When I saw Michael without a mark on him, I wanted—I don’t know what I wanted, but I don’t think … I don’t think.…” Peg paused to clear her mind. “I don’t think I wanted to see him … whole, you know? I got so angry … so furious because he … Mikey doesn’t look as if he … as if he.…” Peg shook her head and took a deep breath. She faced Patricia, and for a moment, her voice became very matter-of-fact. “I don’t think I wanted him whole, see? Because I’ve got to believe that he died in a war—and I can’t. I can’t believe it. And that’s why I sort of went to pieces in there, do you understand?”

Patricia nodded. “I think so.”

Peg studied her daughter, noted her worry, her concern, Patricia’s strength. Peg’s face softened, the whiteness around her lips started to fade, and she spoke quietly. “I do think I wanted him to have been blown to bits.”

Because it was the first time she had let herself relax, become vulnerable, Peg suddenly began to cry. Not since she had learned of Michael’s death had she displayed any emotion but anger. “I do think I wanted him to have been blown to bits … I do!… I know I did,” she said, and anguish flooded her face as she wept. “He was all whole! All whole! … Oh-h-h, why?… Why couldn’t he have been blown to bits? So I could believe he … died … in … a … war?”

Inside the funeral home, Captain Pringle was signing the release papers that gave Gene Mullen and Tom Loomis final possession of Michael’s body; in turn, Captain Pringle took Michael’s Army dog tags.

Gene had wanted to keep the dog tags, but the captain explained that they were part of Michael’s military equipment and, as such, were retained for record by the United States Army. Gene made up his mind that from that moment on he owed no more allegiance to the cause that had taken his son. He had had it with the Army, with the Vietnam War and with the U.S. government.

Peg never did understand why Michael’s dog tags meant so much to Gene nor why he had saved his own dog tags from World War II. But Gene knew the expression, “If you can’t make it in the Army, you won’t make it on the outside,” and dog tags represented not so much a souvenir of war with an enemy (the Army gives men medals for that), but war with oneself. To Gene Mullen, Michael’s dog tags were a symbol that when called upon to accept and perform his responsibilities as a man among his fellowmen, his son had done his duty.

Tom Loomis was saying, “Gene, I understand you’ve decided not to have a military funeral.”

“That’s right,” Gene answered, looking straight at Captain Pringle.

“When the coffin is brought to your home this afternoon, will you be wanting a flag draped across it?”

Gene thought for a moment. “Yes.… Yes, I want a flag.”

“Flag to be on casket,” Tom Loomis said. He made a little entry in his notebook. “And, let’s see, we plan to have the coffin out to your house around noon. Will that be suitable?”

“Noon will be fine,” Gene said.

“And the funeral mass is scheduled for ten o’clock at the Sacred Heart in La Porte City?”

Gene nodded. “Michael is to be buried in the family plot at Mount Carmel in Eagle Center.”

“Mr. Mullen, pardon me?” Captain Pringle said. “I can come to the service—I have to be there,” Pringle corrected himself, “but I mean, well, I can come to the service in civilian clothing, if you’d like.…”

“Certainly not, Captain,” Gene said. “I want you there in the uniform you represent.”

“Fine, sir,” Pringle said. He paused for a moment, then he added, “I have one more question.…”

“Yes?”

“Where would you like me to sit?”

“Sit?” Gene asked.

“During the church service, sir,” Pringle explained.

“Oh,” Gene said. “I want you to sit right up in the front of the church where everybody can see you.”

“All right, sir, fine,” Pringle replied.

When Gene and Peg and Patricia returned to the farm, the mail awaiting them consisted of letters from friends and still more families who had lost husbands and sons. Eleven days had passed since Michael had been killed so far and the only expression of regret from the United States government had been the telegram from Major General Wickham which had arrived the week before and the 9-by-12-inch White House envelope containing President Nixon’s speeches on how capably and efficiently the South Vietnamese were carrying out their share of the war. They still knew no more about how Michael had died than the information given in Wickham’s telegram. If “artillery fire from friendly forces landed in the area,” why, then, did Michael appear to be totally unmarked?

In Michael’s next to last letter, dated February 11, he had written his parents, “We are still at bunker line—will be here a couple more days—will move out on a search mission for a week.” The Mullens, therefore, knew their son was on a combat assignment, that he was in the field conducting a search mission February 18 when he died. Now the Army was telling them that although he was killed by artillery “while at a night defensive position,” he was considered a non-battle casualty. The Mullens wanted to know why.

At noon on Monday, Michael Mullen’s casket was brought to the farm and placed in front of the picture window in the Mullens’ living room. The strained relationship between the family and their parish priest had not lessened. Father Shimon had neither offered them any assistance in planning their son’s funeral nor made any effort to contact Father Hemesath, the priest whom the Mullens wished to have officiate at the mass. The only help the Mullens had received had been from the priests and sisters associated with the Don Bosco parochial school.

When Peg and Gene had asked that the music be sung by the Don Bosco Chorus, Father Shimon suggested they instead use the Sacred Heart Choir, whose experience singing together was evidently limited to Christmas, Easter and a few other occasions. When the Mullens persisted in their request for the Don Bosco Chorus, Father Shimon refused to permit the chorus to sing with the organ at the front of the church. He instead required that they stand at the back, where they would be “out of the way,” and, he said, if the chorus wished to have music accompany them, they would have to provide their own.

Tom Loomis had never had a funeral at La Porte’s Sacred Heart Church before, and after he delivered Michael’s body to the farm, he continued into town to inspect the layout of the church. Sacred Heart is a modern brick building with pews divided into three sections, narrow at the front, then fanning wider toward the rear as in a movie theater. Loomis checked the interior and was preparing to leave when Father Shimon handed him a twenty-pound tub of soft butter which the women of the parish had dropped off in preparation for the lunch now scheduled to be served following Michael’s burial the next day. When Loomis asked the priest what he was expected to do with the butter, Father Shimon said he didn’t care so long as he got it out of the church. The priest suggested Loomis take it back to the Mullens’ farm. That is why not more than an hour after Tom Loomis had brought the Mullens their son’s body, he reappeared with a twenty-pound tub of soft butter.

That morning Michael’s former girlfriend, Caroline Roby, was also at the farm. She had been driven to La Porte the afternoon before by John Stagg. Although the relationship between Michael and Caroline had evidently cooled prior to his being sent to Vietnam (one had the impression that it had cooled primarily on Caroline’s part—at first Caroline wasn’t going to attend the funeral. She later relented and called John Stagg, explaining, “I have to go. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t”), there was no strain between her and Michael’s family. It was, in fact, Caroline who, along with the Mullens’ daughter Mary and Mary’s boyfriend, Rick DeJana, drove the tub of butter back to the Sacred Heart Church.

Mary carried the butter into the refectory kitchen and placed it in the refrigerator. Afterward she and Caroline and Rick DeJana began setting up the tables for the next day’s lunch. A few minutes later Father Shimon entered and told Mary he didn’t want the tables set up until after the service. Mary said there wouldn’t be time; they all would have so much on their minds she didn’t feel her family would want to worry about dinner preparations left until the last minute. Therefore, they had thought it best to get it done and out of the way.

Father Shimon told several women of the church who were present that if the Mullens wanted to do it, then they could do it on their own and instructed the ladies not to offer them any assistance.

Caroline turned to Mary Mullen in astonishment and asked, “Is he a priest?”

By the time the two girls and Rick DeJana returned to the farm the Mullens’ house was filled with flowers and friends.

Peg’s older brother, Bill Goodyear, was pacing in front of Michael’s casket. Finally, he pulled his sister aside and agitatedly told her, “Peg, you’ve got to find out what happened to him. Look at Michael! Look at him. He could have had a stroke from the way he looks.…”

Gene overheard Peg’s brother and asked, “What’s this about a stroke?”

“Our mother’s side of the family has a history of strokes in young people,” Bill Goodyear explained.

“No-o-o,” Gene said. “Tom Loomis told me when he brought Michael here, he took me into the bedroom and said that the shell had hit him back here.” Gene pointed above his right kidney. “There was a hole no bigger than a pen top, ’bout as big as that,” he said, holding up the tip of his thumb.

Peg shrugged. “Yeah, Gene, but he couldn’t have looked because he—”

“Yes, he did!” Gene insisted quietly. “He wouldn’t do it until I told Sergeant Fitzgerald, ‘Now I want to know how my boy died.’ He examined Michael up to the funeral home.”

“Do you really think he looked, Gene?” Peg asked. “He couldn’t have. How could—”

“HE DID NOT!” Peg answered angrily. “He couldn’t have—”

“It was before Michael left the undertaker’s parlor. Before they moved him out here.”

“How could they? They only had twenty-four hours. We were—you were with Michael last night. You saw the crowd when we went back out there this morning. When did he have time?”

“Mother, he left—when he was up to the funeral home, he checked Michael,” Gene said.

“When? When?”

“After everybody left last night,” Gene said.

“Well, all I can say is look at him,” Bill Goodyear insisted. “I say you ought to check Michael yourself.”

Gene, stricken, gestured toward their house filled with friends, relatives, young people. “How?” he asked. “How can we check him now?”

For the rest of that afternoon and well into that evening a steady stream of friends and neighbors, townspeople, relatives, classmates arrived to attend Michael’s wake. Some of Gene’s coworkers stopped in, too, as did the general supervisor at John Deere. All the supervisors that Gene dealt with attended but one. The men and women and young people took turns that evening by Michael’s casket, bowed their heads and said a rosary for Michael’s soul.