XVII

“HOW LONG WOULD YOU say it’s been since we’ve been to church?”

Flossy was leaning her back against the counter with a tea towel in one hand that she wound around the inside edge of the blue mug.

Mealie raised an eyebrow. “Bazaars count?”

Flossy gave it some consideration. “I don’t suppose so.”

Dropping the corner of the Chronicle Herald to give the older woman her full attention, Mealie Marsh puckered her face up in thoughtfulness.

“Well, we went to a bunch of funerals. Reverend Mumford’s, then Thomas and your mother … It must be going on a lot of years, Flo.”

“Going on a lot of years,” she murmured, turning back to the counter. “You’re right, Mealie, a lot of years.” She put the mug down and picked up a plate. “I spent half my life busting my tail to get to church every Sunday and the other half doing my darnedest to stay away.”

“So it seems.” Mealie turned the newspaper page.

Flossy was trying to remember when it was that Mealie stopped going to church. Was it before she went off to Montreal? She couldn’t be sure. It was as if the two of them had ended up in the same room through different doors. Mealie’d gone away and Flossy’d stayed in the village, though losing David, Thomas and her mother, three pearls dropped from the same broken string, all within two years, might have constituted the same degree of rupture. She’d tried to go back to church after a new minister had been appointed but it just wasn’t the same.

In that building where David Mumford had so kindly presided for so many years, Flossy could smell her grief as keenly as if she were lying in his bed with her face in his pillow. Before they started locking the doors, she’d occasionally step into the church after school when she could be sure no one else would be around, sit there in the dark, close her eyes and wrap herself in his memory. She could almost feel him at her fingertips, as if he were there, behind some dimension she didn’t yet understand, trying to reach her too.

She looked down at the front cover of the Chronicle Herald that Mealie was reading. It was a photo of a perfectly ordinary matron holding a photo of herself at Woodstock twenty-five years earlier.

Flossy lifted her glasses and looked closer. “Did you see that? Woodstock turns twenty-five.”

Mealie glanced at the front cover again. “Yeah,” she said, “quarter of a century can scare the hell out of you, can’t it?” She turned back to what she’d been reading. “I myself am waiting for the tattooed generation to turn up in nursing homes. ‘We’re ready for your bath, Simon.’ Won’t they look like the wreck of the Hesperus?” Flossy could hear the water running upstairs. Ruth must have gone back to her bed from the chesterfield. She and Phil were leaving early for Five Islands today to hike and hunt for amethyst.

“Ever miss it, Mealie?” she asked.

Mealie pulled the paper down, doubling it over against her bosom. “Miss what, Woodstock?”

“No, no, church?”

“You kidding me?” She peered at Flossy over the top of her glasses, amusement wrinkling her eyes, “I think I miss Woodstock more.” When she saw she was serious, Mealie pulled the glasses down to her chest and was, at once, thoughtful. “No, Flo, can’t say I ever missed it.” She sat up. “Maybe a few people, but no one I wasn’t likely to bump into at McLellan’s on a Saturday anyway, and not enough to ever go back.” She turned her face and stretched to see out the window but this was a thinking pose more than a looking, while she chewed it over a bit more. “Always had the feeling they were doing their best to hold things the same, like some tethered mule going around the same circle every year. I’d be looking for something that leans out a bit more …”

“Jesus not do that?” Flossy asked. She and Mealie didn’t usually talk about these things and though she herself didn’t want the bother of going back to church, and explaining to all the curious, she could have a guilty pang every now and again about ignoring all of that Christian upbringing, as if she’d walked out on a husband and four children over in Bridgewater.

Mealie’s thoughtful eyes narrowed. “Oh well, I’d have no quibble with that one, Pet,” she smiled, “but for me, there’s always been more searching among artists than in churchgoers.” She folded the newspaper neatly, by feel. “That urge to make something, burn it right down to the wick, I’ve always thought these things showed much more gratitude and appreciation for creation than just taking a number and standing in line behind the Rule Book Boys. Never seemed as if Jesus had all that much to do with church, any of the ones I ever attended.”

NATURALLY THEY COULDN’T GET Thomas to go. It wasn’t unusual for some of the local men to vanish from church a few years after they’d tied the knot. Lillian O’Reilly wasn’t the kind of woman to allow any son of hers to stop attending but they couldn’t even get Thomas as far as the outhouse, let alone St. James United Church on a Sunday morning.

To make matters worse, he wouldn’t talk to the minister when he came right to the house and Reverend Mumford had had no end of troubles since coming to Great Village. Regardless, he still faithfully came by for a visit every two weeks, snow, hail, rain or shine. Not many would have done twenty or more years of that.

“A rare soul, wasn’t he? Reverend Mumford?” Flossy murmured wistfully. She’d stopped what she was doing, plate and tea towel held against her breast, looking off and recalling an early memory of him as a carefree young man, in bare feet, his pant legs rolled up his white shins, sitting down by the shore on a picnic blanket beside his pretty wife, Sarah, before everything had come entirely unravelled. You didn’t often see your minister in bare feet. It made her smile to think of him.

“Lovely man,” Mealie replied, as if completing some prayerful invocation.

In he’d come every two weeks. Even now, decades after David Mumford’s death, Flossy couldn’t resist the comfort of the memory. He’d remove his black jacket, worn at the cuffs, and place it over a chair in the kitchen, his hat on the seat, greet Lillian and Flossy, have a word with Jimmy about fishing or school, then plod upstairs to sit by Thomas. Every second Wednesday, sometimes he’d read to him from the Bible or speak softly. For hours they might just sit there in silence. At the end of each visit, he’d put a gentle hand on Thomas’s brow and briefly bow his own in prayer.

After a few of those visits, the others left them alone. It was always an occasion to have the minister to the house — special visitors were rare — and they all wanted to be around but their mother would shoo the youngsters away. She told them Reverend Mumford needed time alone with Thomas.

In those first weeks that slid into months then ground into years, Flossy wished with all her heart that Thomas would acknowledge the minister, say something, anything, that would make him believe his coming was in some small way helpful. Thomas was impenetrable. He rarely lifted his head from his pillow. There wasn’t malice or hatred in his eyes, like someone who resented the minister. It was indifference, which made it all that much worse for such a devout man of God. It made no difference to Thomas whether their minister prayed for his soul or played tic-tac-toe on the wall.

Possibly the best thing about Reverend Mumford’s coming was what it meant to all the rest of them. He would ask how they were getting on at the barn or with the harvest, the lady’s hats, the churning, and he’d listen carefully as they rattled and sawed away on the same sad log about how hard it was and how tired they were. He’d offer help. Of all the people they knew, of neighbours and family alike (with the exception of Uncle James, who just showed up to sow the grain, and the old Faulkner sisters who put in the garden every single year until they were no longer able), Reverend Mumford had the imagination to realize there was still a farm to run and with their two men gone the adjustment was hard. There were four more hours of work to fit into a day already too short and overburdened. Flossy and Lillian couldn’t be called prissy and they weren’t afraid of work, but they were small women and the care of cows, horses and pigs took strength they didn’t have.

Then, at the end of each evening, when they were cold, dirty and exhausted from milking, hauling water, cleaning pens and lifting hay at the barn, there was no one in the house with the fire lit and supper on the table. Flossy thought it was no wonder widowers remarried before they could turn around three times.

Even Jimmy, who was only nine, knew things were different without being told as much and took to the small fetch-and-chase chores of the young, keeping the kindling box full without being reminded, bringing Queen Esther up from the pasture to be milked, feeding the chickens and collecting eggs, keeping the potatoes from boiling dry, most of the things Flossy herself once did.

For their mother too, Reverend Mumford’s visits eased her conscience about refusing to whip Thomas. Flossy remembered how he’d hung his head and shook it sadly as her mother related Dr. Rushton’s advice and confessed how guilty she’d been for not whipping him as the doctor instructed. She thought she might be letting Thomas down by neglecting her duty as his mother Reverend Mumford patted her hand.

“Whatever has hold of Thomas,” he said in a voice not much above a whisper while looking towards the top of the stairs, “will never be beaten out of him. The spirit doesn’t need to be broken, Mrs. O’Reilly; anyone can see something’s already done that,” he said, bringing his gaze back to her. “The only thing for him is kindness, prayer and patience.” Stopping for a moment and clasping his hands together, as he often did when getting ready to say just a bit more, the minister added, “forgiveness, quite a lot of forgiveness.” He nodded his head and smiled, “I haven’t met a soul yet who couldn’t use a second helping of that.”

He was a gentle man, David Mumford, not the stern kind of minister the O’Reillys were used to as Presbyterians, though by then their church had gone with the newly formed United Church. Reverend Mumford was more suited to the United Church anyway. He sat before the assembly of parishioners each Sunday with his head bowed and hands crossed, not at the wrists, but just enough up the forearm to bring his shoulders in and make it look as if there were a naked sorrow at the heart of him that needed protection. Few in the congregation thought him much good and though a sizeable contingent complained it was no easy task to find a replacement as amenable to poverty as was David Mumford.

Lillian O’Reilly wasn’t like the rest. She was partial to him, motherly, though there wasn’t a vast difference in their ages. She would sew a button on his jacket or make an effort to mend those hopelessly frayed sleeves as he sat upstairs with Thomas. They all liked him. A good many churchgoers thought a minister had to put the fear of God into people to be any good. “Doesn’t he know,” old Mrs. Starritt would list towards their mother on their way out of church, speaking from behind her glove, “people need to have the dickens scared out of them to behave?” Lillian would smile, uttering not a word. The value of well-placed silence was something they’d all come to learn from Thomas.

My but David Mumford could put a shine on a Wednesday, all adrift as it was in the middle of the week. Even now, so long after, Flossy could get up in a morning, look at the calendar and feel that Wednesday-glow all over again, as tangible as a long-forgotten smell that could bring him back in an instant. The Wednesday in between his visits to the O’Reillys, it was said that Reverend Mumford went off with the early mail run to Halifax to visit his wife, who’d been committed to Mount Hope after a nervous breakdown from which she would never come home.

Wednesday was also the day Lillian baked bread. The comforting smell of fresh bread in the oven would fill the house by afternoon and he was always given a loaf to take back with him to the manse. Being on his own, their mother worried Reverend Mumford wasn’t eating all that well. Flossy came to associate the smell of fresh-baked bread, the coziness of the kitchen kept warm and still for the dough to rise, with David Mumford, and perhaps a pinch of loving yeast had its first sweet stirrings right there.

The more familiar Reverend Mumford became to the O’Reillys with those visits, the more his face seemed the incarnation of Job, a soul steeped in suffering. For years he came and sat in the ashes with Thomas, in silence, trying to understand where he’d gone and hidden himself. No doubt the good minister did the same on alternate Wednesdays on the other side of the province with a woman who, they say, no longer even recognized him as her husband.

In spite of what Thomas was going through, it was clear to Flossy that it must have pained her brother twice over to have David Mumford, of all people, sitting patiently beside him. To have to look at that one face of all faces every two weeks would have felt like salt water in open wounds. Flossy was sure Thomas dreaded the smell of freshly baked bread drifting up into his room as much as she adored walking into the house and being greeted by it, that inescapable reminder the minister was coming.

Since that night by the bay when they said Thomas and Reverend Mumford wept in each other’s arms, there hadn’t been anything said between them, but seeing the black circles beneath those gentle dark eyes, the lines carved into their minister’s face — he wasn’t but in his mid-thirties — shoulders stooped, all alone as he was and knowing the O’Reillys were married to his tragedy, to all its sad consequences, made those visits the more terrible for everyone but especially Thomas. Nobody ever said you shouldn’t talk about things that made you weak in the hollow hours of the night. You just never did.

Yet there he was, like clockwork, stamping his feet at the cookhouse door as he came into the house smelling of fresh air, nodding at each of them, removing his hat and revealing a perfect little dome of shiny flesh fringed with a halo of hair at the top of his head, David Mumford, the soul of kindness. Not much taller than Lillian, but slighter, ears stuck out a little too far, he was a giant in heart and mind. No recrimination, not a hint or trace of bitterness, nothing but tender encouragement for every last one of them.

A rare sympathy would grow up between Reverend Mumford and Thomas over nearly two decades, entirely organic like vine on trellis. He took neither her brother’s indifference nor agnosticism to heart, if that was what it was. He came, sat by him, talked softly and sometimes prayed. It might have been like sitting by his silent, inscrutable God at the end of each newly unfathomable day. The minister’s constancy seemed to have its own wearing effect on Thomas too. The silence that lay between them would become a place of compassion, as of two old men of different languages content to sit beside each other on the same sunny bench every day for a dozen years only observing sights before them. They might have no words in common but they would come to count on each other and if the one were confined to his home with an illness or a broken foot, the other would have felt considerably smaller out there.

Flossy became aware of Mealie beside her, the coffee pot in her hand tipped towards the mug in front of her.

“Anybody home?” she asked.

“Sorry, Mealie, I was asleep.”

Mealie began to pour. “They also serve,” she said, “who only sit and stare.” Flossy motioned enough.

Stirring a little milk into her cup, she said, “Mealie, if I were to go …”

“What, you hiking off to Oakville next?” She replaced the coffee pot on the stove.

“No, no. Away,” Flossy said.

“Away?” Mealie stopped.

“Away, yes.” Flossy was watching her.

Seating herself back down at the table, Mealie took her own coffee cup into her hands and looked at Flossy over the top of her half glasses. “Ahh,” she said, “you’d be referring to The Big Away.”

Flossy nodded.

“You feelin’ all right these days, Flo?”

“Yes, yes, oh yes, but if I were to go away, Mealie, I’d want you to be sure … to know …” She stirred her own coffee absently, working her mouth to find words that had turned tail of a sudden. “You’ve been, to me, you’ve been …” They could hear Ruth coming down the creaky stairs.

“Yes, yes, Pet, I know, I know. Me too, me too.”

Ruth greeted the others and they all cooed over her remarkable bruise. Settled back into her newspaper, Mealie suddenly sat forward. “Well, I’ll be …”

Flossy looked up from her coffee. Ruth stopped what she was doing.

“The Barnes is on the move. Never thought I’d see the …”

“Old Barns?” Flossy asked.

“The Bishop’s step-cousin’s barns?” Ruth added, getting the orange juice from the fridge and a piece of apple pie.

“Albert Barnes,” Mealie exclaimed.

Flossy and Ruth looked at each other.

“An eccentric old bugger,” Mealie continued. “He managed to collect Picassos, Renoirs, Matisses and Van Goghs all his life. He died a while back but specified in his will that the paintings should never leave his home. Well, the place has been falling down around them for years and a judge has finally agreed to send eighty of the pictures on tour to raise money for the house. They’re going to Toronto. You’ve gotta go see them, Dash,” she looked up at her. “Part of your aesthetic education,” she grinned. “Go for all of us.”

“Why don’t you and Flossy come too,” she said as she finished a last bite of pie. “You can stay at our place.”

Flossy smiled as she and Mealie exchanged a dubious look.

“That’s an idea,” Mealie said. She was just about to return to the newspaper when Ruth went back to the counter for a second piece of apple pie. As she sat back down at the table, Mealie raised her eyebrows.

“O, reason not the need,” the young woman said with flourish.

UPSTAIRS, A PRISONER TO his bed, Thomas’s world shrank to nothing. A fly could torment him for hours, unable as he was to get up and swat it. Up there he had only the slow path of the sun to watch on his walls during the day and the lights of an occasional automobile heading down shore by night, the rain chucking against the window, the clatter and voices of the downstairs world, food they brought him to eat, footsteps, doors closing. Flossy used to wonder if Thomas listened to them, if he followed their movements or heard what they all said to each other or just themselves, forgetting he was there and loosening their interior thoughts as they mumbled through the housework. Did he parse sounds with the family’s customs to figure out what they were doing? It must have been as if he were blind, some things easy to follow from a distant room, the scraping of ashes, building the morning fire, the first sharp crackles of ignited kindling, the clatter of an armful of wood dropped into the box, a steaming kettle, kneading bread on the kitchen table. Others harder still, grudges and withholding, overt and covert anger. It was spare.

Reverend Mumford wasn’t a reformer by nature, a man who put a lot of stock in dramatic conversions. No doubt he’d seen far too many people slide back to their old ways who felt the more disheartened about themselves for having done so. David Mumford was a believer in increments, or perhaps a man who hoped in hope. After all the usual religious talk was so apparently wasted on Thomas and made him turn towards the wall, Reverend Mumford began to talk to him from somewhere else. He spoke of his own doubts, disappointments and loneliness. He sought to be truthful, said he even admired that Thomas lived so honestly. Some days, when she would be putting the linens away and could catch a few phrases, Flossy thought David Mumford sounded sadder, far closer to despair than ever her brother did. It was, she imagined, something Thomas knew something about even if he didn’t talk all that much.

Could a minister lose his faith? She’d often wondered about that. Did he ever lose confidence in those bits of hope he cast about here and there among his flock? Whatever happened to them when they did? What was there beyond faith and hope? Did they ever come up short on compassion when they heard the tawdry failings of those in their care? Was the assurance of God’s continued love anything more than the hopeless return of the weak back into the world that would certainly overcome them again next week as it had last week and would the following week and all those to come?

For Reverend Mumford, alone as he was, it must have been like crossing into Cumberland County and finding another hermit monk to confide in. Over the years Thomas turned out all the dogged patience and compassion, whatever he could find left in that husk, to give back to the other man and after the first decade or so, he did talk some and shook the Reverend’s hand each time he left. It may have been the essence of friendship because those two men, despite the losses of a lifetime, had become just that to each other: the taker and the restorer.

Of course you could never discount what happened the summer before he took to his bed. It affected all of the O’Reillys, but none more than Thomas.

Living along the edge of the bay, those restless waters and sweeping tides became the symbol of unchanging change to them. As farmers, the bay was a god they could turn their backs to and, for the most part, get away with it. Fishermen may have faced the sea and taken its blows head-on, but farmers faced the road. The land was the angel they’d wrestled over the years, doing battle with fecundity, hacking back alder, spruce and birch.

That the land butted up against the bay was pure coincidence now, an earlier century’s necessity when water was the sole means of transportation in an inhospitable land where trees squared off to shore.

Every few years, however, the unfathomable god demanded a sacrifice. It wasn’t so often a fisherman — they knew what they were up against. Nowadays it was more than likely a tourist confusing a sandbar for the water’s edge or some such innocent to spectacularly misjudge the tides and come to grief. You had to know your way through the bay’s channels to navigate in a place where tens of thousands of tonnes of water rush back and forth twice a day. And back then, when Flossy and Thomas were children, no one knew how to swim, none of the farmers and precious few who were fishermen.

The sea, though, the bounty of its tides, the mystery of its delicacies, its ever-changing moods, colours and rhythms, the beauty of sunlight on wet rock, barnacles, lichens and marsh greens, held a solemn and incomparable attraction nonetheless, especially for the very young, the unseasoned who understood less of the dangers.

Every couple of months following the death of the O’Reillys’ father, Reverend Mumford and his wife Sarah would come by their place on a Sunday afternoon with their boys. Flossy could only remember it as a time when other friends and neighbours stayed away. Those visits, with the children in tow, tugged the O’Reillys away from their clenched sadness. Lillian liked Mrs. Mumford who was naturally more lighthearted than her husband though easily frightened. She was delicate looking, with fine sandy hair and white skin. She dressed in plain long skirts and white blouses with the smallest bit of finery on her collar and cuffs, as if they’d been dipped into a vat of lace. There seemed always a soft transparency about Sarah Mumford, as of a filmy, respiring creature you might find caught in a tidal pool.

The Mumford boys were just enough older than Jimmy, nine and ten, to look towards Thomas for adventure, at least the older one was and the younger had rather cling to his brother than forge his own friendships. On those Sundays, Thomas obliged and would take them beyond the watchful eye of their mother to explore the barn and see the newborn animals. Living in the heart of the village, these were not farm boys and so they adored the kittens, ducklings and calves that were less interesting to Jimmy from familiarity. When the weather got warmer, the women would sometimes pack a picnic lunch and the two families spend an afternoon by the bay.

On the last Sunday in May of ’26, an unusually warm day, the two families were to meet by Spencer’s Point. After they had their picnic, with the tide well on its way out and the bay looking like a drained, barren mudflat, Thomas proposed taking the boys on an adventure to see some nests of gulls’ eggs on the old Chisholm chimney beyond the point. Lillian cautioned him, Sarah fluttered, but Thomas and Reverend Mumford brushed off the women’s concern. They rolled up their pant legs and struck off, Pied Pipers with three little boys in tow, Jimmy having decided to tag along. Like a good many of the men around, Thomas was familiar with the channels, deep crevices in those mudflats that quickly become fast flowing rivers and by which the tides rush back in to fill the bay.

It was nearly a full week later when, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Jimmy was trout fishing in the stream beyond the edge of the farm when he met up with the Mumford lads again who were out fishing too. Charles, the elder, hadn’t had a nibble all morning and, losing patience with fishing, got the idea to go see if the gulls’ eggs had hatched. His little brother, John Calvin, threatened to tell their mother if he weren’t allowed to go too. Jimmy shied away from the adventure and headed home with his catch of two fine rainbow trout.

The Mumfords struck out on their own. It being a week later meant the tide, which always gains an hour each day, had exactly reversed from where it had been on the previous excursion and was already on its way back as the boys set out. Normally they weren’t permitted to play down by the flats but here it was fine weather and no one bothered much about the comings and goings of idle boys on a Saturday afternoon.

By land it would have taken a man with a brisk walk half an hour or so each way to get there. Along the mudflats, though, it’s always farther and much harder to drag through the thick muck, over the sandbars and stones, and there is so much to catch the attention along the way, that before they knew it, the little one was weary and they weren’t but heading back before the water was flowing in around them. By mid-afternoon, the tide was filling the channels and, like fingers it would surround the boys and close off another route along each sandbar and it seemed as if they were having to go farther out in order to find a way back in.

It was just about three o’clock when Reverend Mumford dropped by the house asking if anyone had seen them. Flossy hadn’t, nor her mother, and Thomas was just getting in from the barn. In the commotion of everyone talking at once nobody caught what Jimmy’d said. Reverend Mumford was already thanking them and turning to go when Jimmy tugged at mother’s apron and said it again, louder, about the “gulls’ eggs.” This time the words fell into a pocket of silence. As swiftly as they hit their mark, as if one seismic shudder passed through all the adults at once, Reverend Mumford and Thomas rushed from the house and down towards the shore. Flossy was sent to the Simmons farm to alert the men while their mother and Jimmy headed off to Uncle James to get a ride into the village. They would stay with Sarah Mumford while James returned by the Geddes farm calling up the men along the way.

Sure enough those little boys were stranded on a sandbar not five hundred yards from the shore. Charles was calling and waving, when the men spotted them, and John Calvin began to cry. The water had risen to their waists and there wasn’t any way they could get across the channel in front of them.

They found an old boat nearby that Thomas and Reverend Mumford hoisted into the bay but the minister hadn’t paddled twenty yards from shore before it was half full of water and sinking.

Men began to arrive from every direction, on foot, horseback, carrying whatever their minds grasped might be of some help, rope or an axe, until a good group had gathered. Not one of them could swim. To a man they worked frantically to lash together a makeshift raft, pulling down and stripping the branches from trees leaning over the cliff or already fallen. One of the men who lived closest took off on his horse for hammer and nails. Others pulled boards off the boat to nail along the spruce trunks.

By the time the nails arrived, little Charles Mumford was holding his young brother in his arms, the water having risen to their shoulders. The men quickly secured the boards to the branches and then harnessed the minister’s horse to pull the raft into the water. They whipped and shouted at that animal, while David Mumford paced back and forth along the shore, watching those boys, calling to them, “Be brave, my little ones.” The boys called back, “Pappy! Hurry Pappy! Hurry!”

One horse and six strong men heaving and straining stretched every ounce of fibre and might to drag that wretched raft inch by inch into the water. Over their own shouts they could hear two little lads screaming.

Then just one.

Then … as the raft sat like stone beneath long lapping waves there was no sound other than panting, moaning men. They looked out onto the bay and there was nothing to be seen but calm, dreadful water and David Mumford crumpled in a heap on the shore.

Of all those six big, broken-hearted farmers gathered there that night with the minister, it was Thomas, a fifteen-year-old scrap of a kid, who would go to David Mumford and put his arms around him.

Death can leave a bitter taste on the tongue, any death, but this kind of a tragedy, in a place as small as Great Village, leaves its trace forever. And it was their tragedy; it belonged to the O’Reillys too. Those little boys had been as familiar in their home as their own Jimmy. Thomas thought too much about them, naturally took it all on himself and no one could console him. Within six months, of course, no one would have asked the question of why the lads were out there in the first place. Thomas’s name would have drifted away from the dark core of the tragedy — two little boys drowned — but he wore the blame like a twenty-pound albatross around his neck and never could forgive himself. Some people can’t get over thinking there’s got to be a reason for everything.

They all thought too much about it, imagining the lightness of setting out for a child’s adventure and then how it turned out so horribly, the loss of the minister’s two little lads. Some losses are inconsolable — there isn’t any satisfactory way you can work even a Christian mind around them.

Sarah Mumford still took her place in the second pew on the right side each Sunday morning but everyone was aware the poor woman was in a bad way and no one knew what to do for her. She frequently wore her sweater wrong-side out and her once-pretty hair was seldom tidy beneath her hat. Someone always had to go back in to the church to tell her that the service was finished. “Best be coming home,” David would say to her gently. Uncle James would drive Lillian over there now and again to spend an afternoon with her but she knew it wasn’t any help, maybe even made things worse, given they still had Jimmy safe and sound, and Thomas had taken the boys out there in the first place.

The fragile little woman took to walking the shoreline whenever she could slip away by herself. How many times had Reverend Mumford found her down there climbing over the rocks, no matter the weather, searching for her John Calvin, the little one whose body they’d never found. In the middle of the night, in bare feet, knees bruised and bloodied, her nightclothes billowing, he’d find her there.

“My baby’s out here,” she’d wail, pounding her fists into her husband’s chest, as he struggled to take her home. He was terrified of losing her too.

After a couple of months of it, Doctor Rushton proposed taking Mrs. Mumford to Dartmouth “for a rest cure.” Within a year they all knew she’d not be coming back. It wasn’t so long after that Thomas took to his bed.

It was hard for every last one of them and they each bore their sorrow in a haze of silence. From that optic, the loss of those little boys, Flossy O’Reilly could understand what happened to her brother Thomas: the mystery wasn’t that he awakened one morning and saw nothing around him, nothing of meaning and no reason to keep going. The mystery was that so many days and years of their lives all the rest of them awakened, saw the sky brighten, the sun push slowly up over the horizon, and found in that most distant, impersonal, mechanical event some meaning, a veiled promise, that allowed the trace of courage they needed to set out into the day with determination and lightness in their hearts.