THOUGH IT WAS still early in the afternoon, the sky was almost black with threatening clouds by the time Conrad pulled up in front of his house and backed the truck onto the pebbled driveway.
Next door, May Brown had hung her wash on the line stretched between two old champion oaks, the splayed hands of their leaves turning wildly in the wind. The luminous sheets and white shirts wrenched against their clothespins.
Staring through the windshield at the dark windows of his house, Conrad remembered why he hadn’t wanted to leave home for so many weeks after Rose’s death: it was shocking to come back without her there, like opening the door and discovering you’d been robbed. His eyes traveled over the path and up to the porch steps. No basket, either, so there would be no dinner, unless he wanted to cook it himself.
He felt ashamed at the anger that overtook him then; he had no business being angry about the inconsistency of these deliveries. After all, that anybody should be looking out for him in this way was remarkable enough; he should just be grateful. But he felt disappointed all the same. She ought to have a schedule, something I can depend on, he thought. And almost in the same moment he realized once again that he didn’t know who she was. For that matter, why she? It might be anybody. If it were the Pleiades running this round-robin of meals for him, for instance, a notion that had occurred to him before, they’d be better organized than this.
He rolled down the truck window, caught the mineral scent of the river. From far away, carried along the river’s gray, choppy waters and up the hill to his ears on a current of rising air, he caught the distant, bright ring of the chain knocked against the metal gatepost in Horace Fenton’s pastures downriver, heard his faint call to the cows as he rode the swinging gate to let them pass. “Come on home,” Horace called, low and mournful, an echo. “Come on home.”
Next door, May’s kettle on the boil released a sudden, high-pitched scream; Conrad jumped in his seat at the sound, jumped again as one of the open casement windows to her kitchen knocked back against the house with a sharp report. Conrad felt his heart throb wildly in his chest. A branch snapped nearby. And then the air was drenched with a sudden, wet electricity, a swarm of insects rising on silver wings from the low marshlands bordering the river, over the airy, empty heads of the pale pampas grass flattened in the wind.
He was worried about his pigeons now. They didn’t mind the rain, but an electrical storm could throw them off course, as if they depended on the topography of the earth’s electromagnetic fields to steer them home, a language of sensation, an invisible matrix as known to them as the chains of rock outcroppings and looping streams and rivers running in map lines through the green forest.
He opened the door to the truck and swung his legs out. But as he did so, he heard a nearby whistling through air and a soft thud, the sound of a projectile landing in the dense earth nearby. Conrad looked down at the ground but didn’t see anything. Still, he wasn’t imagining it—he’d heard the sound. Something had fallen from the sky.
Dropping to his hands and knees, he began combing warily through the tall grass that bordered the driveway, its rough margin blooming with the loose, creamy spikes of mugwort.
He jerked back when the flowers were disturbed by an alarmed rustle, the frantic noises of a mute creature. As he leaned forward, a violent fluttering parted the leaves, and he saw the bird, light tan with iridescent feathers, a yellow band around one leg. One wing was bent. Folded, it scraped the ground. Conrad could tell the injury was several weeks old, for the feathers were shorn away but cleaned of blood. As Conrad hovered there on his knees, the pigeon keeled over to one side, finally exhausted, and Conrad saw also that one eye had been plucked out, leaving a hole the size of a cherry stone, chalk white and vacant. Conrad slowly extended one hand, hesitated a moment, and then touched the pigeon’s back. A slight shudder ran through its body, then nothing.
Slipping his hand under the pigeon’s breast, Conrad held his breath. It was there, a slow pulse separated by long intervals. And Conrad wished then, as he had wished once before at Rose’s bedside, that simply by wanting it, simply by some heroic act of concentration, he could change his whole life, everything that had come before—every moment of foolishness and stupidity, every instance of timidity and fear, every act of temerity and cruelty. Would that be enough, he thought, to earn a miracle? He pressed his fingers to the pigeon’s breast, squeezed.
And then something struck the back of his head as he knelt there, a pinprick of pain that loosened in him a ganglion of fury. He lifted his eyes, felt the first random drops of rain like hail strike across his head and shoulders in a yoke, surprisingly heavy. Struggling angrily out of his jacket, he folded it awkwardly, lifted the bird, and placed it carefully on the cloth. He rose to his feet with the pigeon cradled near his chest and stood then to face down the accumulated threat of the afternoon, the gathering storm, the dark windows of his house. He turned toward the porch, the fierce heat of anger on his face running with the scattered rain. And then he stopped, for there on the top step of the porch, laid there in the timeless instant when he had knelt—was it in prayer?—over this lost bird, was a basket. A wreath of steam rose from the willow lid.
He turned to catch the deliverer, to be a witness, to say what he saw, but there was nothing. Just his garden gate slowly closing and a pattering sound, light as snowfall, which might have been the rain.
HE ATE EVERYTHING in the basket, sitting on the floor by the French doors, the repast spread out on newspaper, the wounded pigeon resting in a blanket by his knee. A beef stew, clover rolls dusted with flour, a tin of gingersnaps, a carafe of dark beer—it tasted as good as anything he’d ever eaten. It occurred to him fleetingly that he didn’t need to eat it all, that he might do well to save some, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Through some combination of the cook’s skill and his own bottomless hunger, he was given an endless appetite, a craving that felt, even as he enjoyed the meal, vaguely unconnected to food. It was odd how the contents of the basket, while always comforting him, also aroused in him a desire for more.
Between mouthfuls, he forced a dropper into the bird’s beak, dripped herbal tea into its craw. And gradually the pigeon revived, rustling within the warm folds of the blanket, opening its one eye and fixing Conrad with a look that he took to be one of gratitude.
At last, finished with his meal, Conrad licked his fingers for the last of the gingersnap crumbs, leaned back against the legs of the chair, gathered the bird onto his lap, and gently inspected its wing.
“Now, what happened here?” he asked, gently extending the pigeon’s wing. He probed near the missing eye with a finger, but the pigeon retracted its head sharply into its breast. “I think you’re a homer who’s never going home again, my friend,” he told it. “At least not without a chauffeur.” He inspected the band on its leg. He didn’t recognize the code—no numbers, just a series of letters that spelled out hi roller.
Conrad stood up, the pigeon in his arms, and walked to the open French doors leading out to the garden. The rain of an hour or so before had been a false start—just a fistful of cold drops and then no more.
“Well, let’s get you a proper meal,” he said. “Introduce you around.”
As he stepped outside, he felt how the temperature had dropped; the warm atmosphere of the sunstruck earth had turned dank, and the coolness palmed his cheek. He crossed the terrace, past the black circle of the reflecting pool, that bottomless well. Stepping up to the retaining wall, he looked down over the sloping terraces below.
And then he froze at the shape he saw moving there, small and dark, a bowed head, something, someone standing there inside the vegetable garden. The stroking motion of his hand over the pigeon’s back ceased. Rose?
No, no, too short, too squat, he saw; too thick at the waist. An angel? They come like this? In broad daylight? Short and square? He glanced behind him at the house. Had he missed someone there, an intruder who had shadowed him, evaded him, standing in a dark corner, behind the door, in the recess beneath the stairs? The basket, he thought. Was this who’d been feeding him?
When he began to descend the steps, slow and tense as if he might have a fight on his hands, he saw the figure more clearly, though it did not move as he approached the garden. The face was obscured by a scarf tied over the head, the plane of the jaw averted. Conrad shifted the pigeon to one arm, walked to the gate, lifted the latch. At its warning click the figure turned, startled.
“You said you’d welcome visitors in the afternoons,” Betty Barteleme said, her eyes wide. “But I didn’t think I should bother you.”
Conrad took her in—her cheap black coat with the wide, twisted belt cinched around her middle, her good shoes filthy now and ribbed with mud, her face white beneath a faded paisley scarf. A brooch at her chin, a cameo, pinned the scarf there.
“Miss Barteleme?” he said, amazed.
“I came to see for myself,” she said. “But I’m not a snoop, I’ll have you know that.”
“No, I—” Conrad began, confused, but she interrupted him.
“I saw your letter,” she said. “When I was tidying up yesterday. It fell on the floor by Kenny’s desk. I picked it up to put it back and then I—I read it.” She stopped. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.” She glanced at him quickly, then turned away again. “But I’m not a snoop,” she repeated, sniffing. She extracted a pale blue tissue from her sleeve, touched it to her nose.
“No, I’m—”
But she interrupted him again. “This is where?” she said. She looked around, nodded slowly. “I can see it. I can.” She put her hands out. “A big angel, with wings like—an angel’s.” She closed her eyes. “He puts his hand on your brow”—she reached and touched her own forehead, lightly, with one black-gloved finger—“and you’re—comforted, aren’t you?”
She opened her eyes. “My mother saw an angel when I was born, you know,” she said quickly, though Conrad could barely hear her, did not know. How could he know?
“It was in her sewing room. I was not a week old,” Betty went on quietly. “She said she turned around, feeling something there behind her, and saw him, saw him bending down and smiling at me, his hands on my cradle. She wasn’t afraid at all, she said. She knew he meant me no harm. ‘Oh, you’re special, Betty,’ she would say to me. ‘You’ve an angel’s breath on your face.’”
Betty stopped, turned to Conrad. “But you don’t see it there, do you?”
Conrad took in her face, the puffy eyes, the jowls, the violently black hair escaping from under her scarf. He did not know what to say.
“I don’t either, though I’ve looked and looked,” she said, reaching into her sleeve again for the tissue. “It’s a plain face, I know. More than plain, even. I don’t know how that could be, how an angel’s breath could have done that.” She looked up at Conrad. “You don’t think it was—a joke?”
“Oh, no, I—” But his voice failed him. Rose had been so beautiful.
“And now—” Betty drew in a long breath. “Now I have to think, you see. Decide what to do. You don’t know him—Nolan—Mr. Peak,” she corrected herself. “He’s a man of honor, true honor.” She said this last fiercely; Conrad was surprised at her vehemence. “He would never do anything he thought wasn’t strictly—by the book. And I have never, in all our years, never gone against him.”
She had drawn herself up now, stood facing Conrad fully. “Of course, he’s never asked me, but I know he sees what I think about things. I catch him watching me sometimes. He wouldn’t let on about this, you see, because he has a man’s sort of pride, he’s—” She took a deep breath, held Conrad’s face in her eyes. “But this time—this time, he’s mistaken. He thinks there’s no such thing as angels.” She put her hands up to her face, covered it with her gloved fingers.
Conrad took an anxious step toward her, but she waved him away, collected herself. “Your wife,” she said, taking a deep breath, looking out over the terraces beneath them, the waves of green interrupted here and there by patches of soft color, the roses and the lilies, the chrysanthemums, the fringed heads of the butter-colored dahlias. “She had a real green thumb on her, didn’t she?”
Betty folded her gloved hands, knit her fingers together, sniffed. “Of course, she was lucky, she had the time for it. I just do my African violets. You can do those on a windowsill, you know. Perfect for a working girl like myself. But your wife—” She shook her head at the waste of death, as if it were a lack of judgment or a sin of excess. “She had a heart of gold, too, didn’t she? Green thumb and heart of gold.” She laughed a little. “I used to see her at the cemetery sometimes when I’d go to sit by Mother. She always had a big basket of flowers, arranged them for people’s stones. And that child—you know, the funny one who works out there now, Kate and Eddie’s girl—oh, she followed your wife all over the place. They had flowers in common, I suppose. But it was something else, too, wasn’t it? Sometimes I’d see them, walking around out there together, pointing at things, kneeling down on the ground together, looking and touching. Like a mother and daughter, I thought, or two sisters. I don’t know how your wife got her to talk. Won’t say anything to me when I try to wave hello. She’s done wonders with the gardens out there though, you know. Keeps them up very pretty.” Betty nodded slowly, as if Conrad had agreed with her.
“Your wife always had a bunch of those pink roses for Mother, who loved them so. She used to come and read sometimes to her, too, after Mother lost her eyes. Poetry. That’s what Mother liked.”
Betty clasped her hands before her stomach, as if it hurt her. “But you already know that,” she said. “You know all about that.”
But Conrad hadn’t known. Betty Barteleme’s mother? He didn’t think he’d ever seen her, ever even known her mother was here in Laurel. Or had Rose mentioned it to him, choosing something from the bookshelf to read to her before she went off, and he’d just forgotten? He shook his head. And the notion of Rose and Hero, wandering the cemetery together, like a mother and daughter.
He’d known Rose worked there sometimes. The Friends of Mt. Olive maintained an heirloom rose collection on the grounds; he remembered Rose corresponding with various growers about it from time to time. People used to send her canes through the mails, wrapped up in plastic bags. There was a whole group devoted to it, preserving the old varieties. He’d once said to her that he thought it sort of a waste, having it out there at the cemetery.
“Why not have it someplace where people can enjoy it?” he’d said.
And Rose, putting on her straw hat, ready to go, had stopped for a moment in the hall and thought.
“Who says no one enjoys it?” she’d said after a minute.
Like a mother and daughter. After that one miscarriage of Rose’s, early on, they hadn’t ever really talked about having children. That it might have been his fault, their lack of progeny—he’d hated the disappointment of that, imagining that he might have failed her in that essential way. And he never wanted her to feel that it was her fault, either. He had assumed that, like himself, she didn’t talk about it out of respect for his feelings. But perhaps it had always been there for her, he thought now. He had mostly forgotten about it, except for moments now and then when he found himself imagining what Rose’s child would have looked like, a replica of her, her childhood all over again, replayed for him like a favorite piece of music.
But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Hadn’t he thought, too, that they didn’t need a child? Hadn’t he thought there might be less of Rose for him if there were a baby, someone who could possess Rose in ways Conrad himself would never know? The sheer ugliness of that thought made him feel shrunken now, cut down.
In Hero, in that lost girl, what had Rose found?
Had he not known half of it? What had he missed?
He returned his eyes to Betty’s face and saw instead back into his life, to a bridge there that collapsed into rushing waters, no passage across.
“Well,” Betty said quietly after a minute, seeing his expression. “We always find out too late, don’t we?”
CONRAD BACKED AWAY, let her stand there, her head bowed. He closed the gate quietly behind him, walked carefully to his loft. A handful of his pigeons were there, waiting on the landing board in the chalky light of early dusk, looking at him. “I forgot all about you,” he said aloud, startled. How could he have done that?
He put the lost pigeon in one of the open roost compartments, where it could leave if it had a mind to, though he didn’t think it could fly very far—if at all now—with that wing. He moved to fetch grain, fed his own pigeons as they came in now, perhaps seeing him there below. They dropped one by one to the landing board after circling the roof. He began to shut them in, counting them in his head. “I’m sorry,” he said to them. “I’ve never done that before. Forgotten you.”
And then he realized finally, as he counted, who was missing—one missing. The archangel. He stopped, breathing hard. Where was the archangel? He stepped backward over the grass before the loft, scanned the sky, the dark clouds. Nothing.
Conrad waited a long time, standing in the growing cool of the early evening. Betty Barteleme vanished from his garden as though she, too, like Lemuel, like the angel, had been only a spirit. He waited awhile and then, fearful of climbing back up to the house as it grew dark, began to hurry up the hill.
The bird never appeared, never came home. Not that afternoon, nor that night, nor the next day, nor any day after that. There was a one-eyed jack now in Conrad’s roost, a pigeon that had become lost en route, had felt itself caught up and run off course by the sloping currents that crossed the country in a parabola of aching wind, and had fallen at last at Conrad’s feet, a survivor whose passage had cost him an eye and a wing, part of the precious instruments that steered him home. This survivor found himself in new country now but was already assimilating the telltale signs of this new place, the angle of the terra-cotta roof, the arm of the silver river curled around something precious, the precise geology of this changed world.
But the archangel was gone, and with him, Conrad’s last letter to his wife.
THERE WAS ONE lamp left on in the living room, a faint beacon that led Conrad up through the growing twilight, through the garden terraces to the house. He closed the French doors behind him, sighed at the mess, stooped wearily to pick up the litter of his picnic, still on the floor.
As he rose, the dishes in his hands, he caught sight of himself across the room in the gilt-framed oval mirror that hung there. The sight halted him; he did not know this apparition in the glass. And he realized at that moment that since Rose’s death he had created in himself a second presence, a corresponding figure that replaced him, accompanied him now like a shadow. Seeing himself for so many years in Rose’s eyes or at least in relation to her, he had never felt himself divided in this way. Now, though, he imagined that the self that had been married to Rose had been sealed off, silenced, with her death, though it lay harbored within him still like a mute or an amnesiac.
It was seeing himself like that, looming in the mirror, that stopped him, his eyes with that sunken, gaunt look, his white hair standing on end in wild tufts. This was who had replaced him. This—abnormality.
He put the dishes down on the desk, moved closer to the mirror, raised his hand to the glass. I don’t know you, he wanted to say to the stranger there. Who are you?
He put his hand over his bad eye, and realized that his depth perception was being affected more than he had thought by the condition, for the figure in the mirror failed to jump to the left, the usual result of his good eye’s adjustment to the deficit of the weak one. The image remained there, staring back at him; he wasn’t sure whether he would strike it if he swung at it, or merely strike thin air, the impossible boundary between them either inches deep, or miles.
Why did he call her name then? Why did he say it aloud—“Rose!”—with such urgency, as if he’d stepped to the edge of a cliff and, turning around to ask her to come forward and share the view, found her gone, missing, a tuft of grass where she had been, a sparrow hopping away.
“Rose!”
He called to her into the mirror, as if the silent self there would, hearing her name, awaken, restore him to himself, produce Rose as if leading someone forward onstage: See? Here she is. And it occurred to him then that this state, in which the parts of himself—past and present—could no longer be reconciled, was perhaps something like what Rose herself had experienced from time to time, this feeling that she was lost to herself.
It was grief that did it, he thought. It was grief that stole the soul, taped over its mouth, wound it in cotton batting, and locked it in a trunk. You had to be Houdini to escape it, running through the mazelike prison of your own injured mind like a trapped rat, aiming at the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel.
But he did not think it could be done. Whoever this stranger was, looking back at him, he seemed here to stay.
THE VIEWS FROM the road to the cemetery were lovely, especially at sunset, even on an evening when the sky was filled with clouds; a lingering glow lay across the humped shoulders of the mountains like the thin slice of light showing beneath a door. Conrad had not been to Mt. Olive since Rose’s funeral. Now, a mile or so from the gates, he pulled the truck over to the side of the road, got out, and stood on the sandy shoulder by the stone wall.
After a minute he returned to the truck and took his binoculars from under the seat. When he raised them to his eyes and aimed down at the scene beneath him, he was immediately struck by the sensation of weightlessness that overcame him, as though his bearings, his place in the world, had become suddenly uncertain. Within the lenses a small view of Laurel emerged, partially eclipsed by trees and the sloping shoulders of the mountain beneath him. He thought, as he often did when considering the mountains, how once, despite its formidable heft, this whole region had boiled with geology’s terrifying capacity for conversion, perfect matter transformed into something airy and rippling, the schist melting into a flow like water itself, the entire face of the earth shaping itself into a new place. Sometimes, lying on the ground, watching the clouds’ slow and elephantine progress in the sky, he had tried to feel his way down to the core of the planet itself, its fierce and bitter center. The sensation had almost frightened him, as if some cord connected him to the center of the earth, a tug deep within his spine.
Now, moving the binoculars slowly over the view beneath him, he took in Laurel’s town square, the golden, Oriental roof of the bandstand glowing in the falling dusk. To the west he saw the black curls of roads climbing up toward the high point of town; a few roofs, small and square, lay like scraps of paper among the trees. The natatorium at the hill’s crest, built by Havelock Eddison, who had in his younger days swum competitively at college and believed still in the healthful regime of daily laps for all his neighbors, shone strangely, its glass roof flowing with pale green light.
He lowered the binoculars for a moment and stared. The view, contained within the overlapping arms of the mountain, reminded him at that moment of the snow globe that Rose had kept on her dresser. It was an inexpensive one, the kind sold all over New En gland to tourists who came for the fall foliage and the skiing. The glass bell jar contained a tiny scene, a village nestled in a bowl of miniature snowcapped mountains, the tiny windows of the houses iced with yellow, the roofs brown and black, unevenly painted. Minute fir trees, green and dusted with white, grew close by the houses. When you raised the toy and shook it, the scene was suddenly clouded in a swirl of false snowflakes, which would settle gently on the tiny town, burying it in white.
Rose, whose tastes were usually informed by Lemuel and Adele’s exquisite appreciation for the finer things in life, had had an inexplicable fondness for this snow globe.
“Look,” she had said, finding it in a store one afternoon while they were shopping. And she had shaken it, causing a mighty storm within the glass, the snow shifting like sand. Conrad had glanced over, unimpressed. But Rose had remained standing there, watching the mighty storm whirl within her cupped hands. She had bought it that afternoon, brought it home, and placed it on her dresser.
Once, Conrad had come into their empty bedroom and had been startled to find the snow falling gently, silently, from the globe’s glass ceiling. He had stopped, transfixed; and then Rose had opened the door from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her. She had smiled at him.
“What did you think?” she had said, laughing, reaching for the globe and shaking it again, raising the strange wind within it. “An immaculate snowstorm?”
But there was indeed something immaculate about this view, Conrad thought. In the sky above him the clouds formed their massive figures, hourglass shapes bending and twisting at the waist. He thought of his angel, of Lemuel’s wings fanning a wind that bowed the trees, flickered the lights, a door in the sky swinging open.
Nothing moved in the view beneath him. It was still and silent as the world within that snow globe, a paradise in which nothing had yet happened, no error had been committed.
He passed through the gates to the cemetery. The grass there was a vibrant green, the trees taller and more noble. In the sky the clouds had parted slightly in a crease, and the long rays of the setting sun fell across the hillside, through the leaves of the trees. Flowering vines curled over the mausoleums, buried them in blossoms, the white star shapes of the clematis, the orange horns of the trumpet vine. Blankets of dense green ivy lay draped at the feet of statuary, angels with their calm, upturned faces. Little lambs, their stone legs folded beneath them, lay shadowed among the late lilies.
Conrad drove along the main road between flower borders wild and exuberant with color—yellow and pink and smoky blue, pale orange like the translucent bodies of the carp in his reflecting pool. Purple martins crossed in the evening air on their bladelike wings.
Rose’s stone was set off by itself, just beyond the broad circle of shade thrown down by an old copper beech. He parked the truck by the side of the road, got out, and then could go no farther. He did not look directly at her stone, though he was aware of it, as if someone he knew had entered the room behind his back and was standing there, waiting for him to turn around. He looked out across the bowl of the hill, the varying markers set like prehistoric relics on the grass, some, substantial shelves of granite, others small and lime white, tilting and crumbling. In the urns and bowls set before the stones rested bunches of cut roses, masses of yellow lilies and black-eyed Susans, fistfuls of loose purple phlox.
He closed the door to the truck, stepped away from it. The grass was soft beneath his feet. A distance away, through the trees, he saw the yellow lights of the caretaker’s stone cottage. He began walking in that direction, passed into the darkness of a nearby grove of oaks.
He startled at the shrill baying of a dog, the sound veering toward him. From over the hill a small white terrier came, speeding across the grass, which was now almost black in the departing light. The screen door to the cottage swung open; Conrad heard it bang shut again and saw the girl step out into the last of the day’s light, her hair falling over her face. Conrad put out his hand, touched the rough bark of a tree, moved close to its wide trunk.
The dog drew near her, circled her legs twice at a mad run. Conrad saw her put out her hand, graze the air above the dog’s compact, leaping body. She walked out across the clipped lawn, which merged gradually with the unmown meadow. She stepped forward, parting the high grasses fringed with light. And then she stopped, her silhouette dark against the emptiness before her, the chasm that separated the cultivated acres of the cemetery’s lawns behind her from the steady rise of the mountains beyond, a torrent of blue.
And when she put her hands to her mouth, called out into the air, Conrad heard first her voice and then its echo, a volley of endless questions disappearing into the distance.
What had she said? Whom had she called?
Conrad stepped forward, away from the tree, strained to hear. She lifted her hands, called again, her voice resounding in the emptiness, the same note repeating like a skipping stone over the still air, no one there to answer. “Hello,” she called. Hello . . . hello . . . And then she dropped her head, as the last echo of her voice faded away.
BEFORE HE DROVE away, Conrad approached Rose’s stone, stood at a slight distance from it, attending to the absolute silence there. He looked around him at the soft folds of the darkened hills, the wavering lines of markers running down and away over the grass, disappearing. And then he stepped forward, meaning to touch his hand to the stone itself, a gesture he thought he could manage but found he could not. He stood there, staring at the inscription, just Rose’s name and her dates, rose sparks morrisey, 1915–1985. And then he noticed what he had not seen before: looped over a corner of the stone, dropped casually as if by a bird that had flown over the green grass, its tiny shadow skating rapidly over the graves, was a string of rose beads, its faint scent sweet and light and everlasting.