I meet the dead girl’s parents in my office at the church just before the funeral service. I shake hands all around, offering condolences to each member of the family.
“These are always the most difficult deaths to accept,” I say. “Funerals for the young. It was not her time, but somebody chose to take her away from this life. You can be sure that the guilty will be punished by God.”
The father nods, the rest of them too—even the brother, I see, expert at not revealing his guilt. He is a slippery character.
“The matter of the murder is in God’s hands,” I say. “You have to get past this. You cannot live on hate. You must live on love. There are questions likely never to be resolved for you about your daughter’s death, questions for which neither you nor I will ever know the answer. You must let go.”
The girl’s mother, face tear run, nods. The children and the father remain sullen.
“Funerals should be a happy time,” I say. “Even in circumstances such as these. Do not forget that your daughter is with God. That’s something to be happy about.”
We pray together and I stand holding the door open, shaking their hands as they file past. I stop the brother, grip his hand tightly.
“What’s your name, son?” I ask.
“Josh,” he says.
“Josh,” I say. “Ah, yes. Your sister told me all about you.”
A flicker of something passes near his mouth and quickly disappears.
“I doubt it,” he says.
“Doubt not, fear not,” I say. “Thus sayeth the Lord. Come visit me sometime.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” he says.
He pulls his hand out of mine and steps out. I let the door swing shut.
As I gather my notes off the desk and take my Scriptures from the drawer, a knock comes from the window, from behind the curtains. I hold myself still, listen as the knock comes a second time, then a third.
I part the curtains. Outside, his face pressed against the glass, is a man.
I open the window, see the glass smeared with blood where his forehead was.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
He pulls his head straight and I see that there is an X hacked into his forehead. The hair of his head is shaved to the length of a day’s growth of beard. His eyes are dark and penetrating, nervous.
“The question is, can I help you?” he says.
“I don’t think so,” I say, and begin closing the window.
He blocks me by placing his head in the gap. I can see all over the crown of his skull slits and streaks of blood, razor slashes.
“Can it be you don’t recognize me?” he asks.
I go cold. I pull the window back and slam it against his head, opening a gash above his eye. Blood begins to drip onto the sill.
“I take it you aren’t happy to see me again?”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“How quickly we forget,” he says. “The bus? Wednesday afternoon? And the woods before that?”
I look at him, his torn shirt, his faded jeans.
“No,” I say. “You can’t be.”
“I can,” he says. “I am.”
“What happened to your clothes?”
“What?” he says. He looks down at his body, tugs up his T-shirt. “One takes whatever is available. I assumed you and I were close enough it wouldn’t matter.” He looks back to me. “Or shall we say I am traveling incognito?” he asks. “That I am trying to avoid someone?”
“Avoid who?”
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asks.
“I have a funeral service to conduct.”
“I am here to help,” he says. “There are things that should be said at this funeral. I am just the man to say them.”
“You?”
“Why not?” he says. “Invite me inside.”
“You aren’t dressed for a funeral.”
“This?” he says. “Don’t worry about this. Nobody will mind.”
I stand staring out at him.
“Invite me in,” he says. “The people would much rather listen to me than to you.”
I stand hesitating, fingering my notes.
“Do you really trust yourself not to slip?” he asks. “What are you going to feel when you see her casket?”
“Come in,” I say. “But only for a minute.”
He pushes the window fully open with his hand, then reaches out to me. I extend my hand, pull him up onto the sill and through.
“You can’t stay long,” I say.
“Once I’m in, I’m in,” he says. “Nobody tells me how long I can stay.”
He opens the door and goes out, ushering me before him. I step out and into the foyer, find it empty, the doors to the chapel proper shut. Opening these doors, he waves me in.
The whole congregation is seated. They turn their heads as I enter, following me with their eyes as I walk up the aisle and onto the platform. The family is already seated on the stand. In the front and to the side, near the sacrament table, is the casket, lid screwed down, gleaming.
I can see my face in its skin. I cannot take my eyes away from the face, distorted and rippling.
I feel a hand tight upon my arm, the bloody-headed man tugging me toward the stand.
“You see?” he says. “You could never make it through the service without me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit up there and keep your mouth shut,” he says.
I let him drag me up the steps and to my seat. I sit, heavy and awkward.
“Where is the program?” he asks.
I hand him the mimeographed half-sheet of paper, a picture of Jesus and the open tomb on one side, the program notes on the other. He squints at it and approaches the microphone, taps on it.
“Is this thing on?” he asks.
After this, I don’t know what happens. I know that he is speaking, can hear him utter phrases, can hear the individual words and tones, but the words do not seem to string together properly. He is babbling and I am in dread of how I will be able to repair the damage.
But, as I wait, I realize that the audience seems to be swallowing his words well enough. They regard him intently and do not turn away. They do not seem displeased, and many are moved to tears by his words. They seem to hang on his every phrase.
I turn to one side, touch the girl’s father sitting next to me.
“What is he saying?” I ask. “Can you make any sense of it?”
The father does not seem to notice my touch. He stays still, his eyes welling with tears, watching the man with the blood-streaked head.
I look around. People throughout the chapel are similarly transfixed.
I watch it go on, the bloody-headed man speaking himself hoarse, the crowd fixing him in their attention with the utmost relentlessness. I look to the wall clock, watching the second hand spin slowly. I look out the side window, through marbled glass. A small dark shape is there, on the outside, where I know a bird is making a nest. I make a mental note to have the janitor remove it.
I nudge the girl’s father.
“How long is he going to speak?” I ask.
The father does not seem to notice me.
“Does he know he isn’t making any sense?” I shout in the father’s ear.
When there is no response, I turn again to Bloody-Head, listen carefully to his words. There are the words “awful blood,” among others. Or it might be “lawful blood.” And “redemption” and “love,” but nothing that comes together of a piece in and of itself.
I shake my head to clear it. It does not come clear.
I look past him and see the gleaming lid of the coffin, a long narrow blur on it that I believe to be the remains of my face. As I examine it, it seems to me my face and my body too, and myself and the girl in the woods.
The doors at the back of the chapel swing to either side and two men enter wearing dark suits and tinted glasses. The bloody-headed man at the pulpit stops abruptly, looks back to me, turns back to watch them come.
They approach slowly, unnoticed by the crowd, one of them speaking into a cellular telephone. Bloody-Head starts speaking faster, pounding his fist on the pulpit. The two come onto the stage, approaching him from either side.
“I suppose this is your doing?” says one of the men, pointing his finger at me.
“Me?” I say.
“Don’t think you are getting away with anything,” he says.
The other man has holstered his telephone so as to strike the bloody-headed man in the face. The bloody-headed man grips the podium tightly, keeps speaking as the other man hits him again, his colleague does so as well. With their fists they hammer his fingers until he can no longer hold to the podium. The audience seems not to notice. They knock him down. He keeps speaking.
They take the bloody-headed man under the arms, drag him from the stand as he struggles, continuing with the speech well down the aisle.
“Is this how you allow your guests to be treated?” he calls toward me.
I stand to see him better. He breaks away an instant, darts for the podium but is overwhelmed by the other two men before he arrives. They strike him a few times in the face and begin to drag him away down the aisle, backwards, his heels flopping along the floor.
“I’ll see you later, Provost,” he calls back to me.
“Don’t count on it,” says one of the men in dark glasses.
“You will have to finish yourself,” calls the bloody-headed man. “Don’t say anything stupid. Speak in tongues of flame or not at all!”
They push the chapel doors open and leave.
All of a sudden, I find myself before the podium, staring at the coffin, the image of my face. The crowd below seems restless.
“Where was I?” I ask. “What was I saying?”
The crowd pulls back visibly in their seats. A few of them begin to converse neighbor to neighbor, whispering among themselves, looking at me oddly.
“Someone please tell me,” I say.
They fall silent. I realize that I am holding a program of the meeting in my hand. I read aloud the first thing my eyes see.
I sit down. The girl’s father leans over, whispers into my ear, “You can’t end the service yet.”
I have to get him to show me where on the program we are. I stand and announce shakily that the girl’s brother will speak. I sit back in my seat, marking and holding with my thumb the next item on the program, the meeting dragging along, words labored and falling all around us until at last it is over.
I stay beside the grave as the other mourners leave, stay with the family as they consider the coffin, the heap of earth beside it. I sprinkle earth on the coffin, to ruin the reflection. The family, thinking it to be a ritual, follows suit.
There are, I can see, two men behind the trees, observing us. Plainclothesmen.
I signal to the men by touching an elbow. They each touch their brow. By their signs ye shall know them.
I give my final condolences to the family in gestures, without touching them, as the other mourners scatter around us. To the brother, however, I reach out and take both his hands in my own, squeeze them.
“This must be difficult for you,” I say. “More than the others, perhaps.”
Before he can respond I have left them, am walking away.
“What do you want from me?” the brother yells after me.
I walk a few more steps and then turn back to look, see the two officers step out from among the trees and move toward the family. From the bushes I observe the family again take dirt in their hands and sprinkle the coffin. Far behind them the caretaker fires up an earthmover. The family begins to walk, the two men following from behind.
They are only a few steps distant when the two men stop them, show their badges. The family looks confused, seems to be looking around for someone to save them. The men take a position to either side of the brother, speak to him at length, the rest of the family crowding around.
The boy starts shaking his head, the mother shrieks. The boy suddenly darts away and starts to run. He comes crashing through the bushes near me without seeing me, runs past. The two men come after him. I point them in the proper direction, listen to the sounds of their pursuit.