Every Friday, Duncan and Maggie attend Vespers at St. Mary of the Wharves, and listen to the choir singing De Profundis, the psalm of the holy souls in purgatory: Apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio. And Duncan sees astronauts, not just Michael Collins, but hundreds and thousands of men adrift throughout the cosmos—faceless men with the sun reflected in their golden, mirrored visors—all dead, all desanguinated and floating through the heavens, flashing through the crystalline, neo-chrome tails of fiery comets a hundred miles long, and always, the star-spangled banner across their left shoulder blinking in the crimson and blue haze of stellar ash a hundred million years old.
He thinks of the astronauts and cosmonauts sent on space missions that the world had never heard of or been told about because of their failures—and of all the astronauts thrust into space upon the pinhead of the great Saturn V rockets that were still out there somewhere, lost just like his father and unable to come home. He watches his mother mouth the words, the wet clicking of her mouth like a metronome. She smiles, and reaches for his hand, and when he takes it, and closes his eyes, he hears the longing of all those exiled from Heaven, all that pain and suffering for which prayers, in the absence of God’s embrace, Father Toibin always said, offered the only succor.
Later during Mass, when the priest shakes the aspergillum and sprinkles them with holy water, Duncan turns to the back of the church and sees Joshua there, his head lowered on his forearms as if he were at the Windsor Tap and dusk has just fallen outside.
When he and Mother rise, Joshua is still sitting in his pew: head bowed, eyes closed, and looking so peaceful he might have be sleeping. But Duncan knows it’s the meds that he takes, that in the evenings he often lines up on the bar and puts back with his beer. Mother sidles down the pew, lowers her head, and whispers to him, asks him to come back to the house with them, but Joshua raises his head groggily and waves her away.
In the transept, Duncan places coins in the prayer box and they clatter loudly in its bottom. He begins lighting as many candles as he can, for suddenly he feels an emptiness so vast he can put no name to it. He thinks of all the souls in purgatory lost to God and he knows that if he and his mother were to die in this very moment, they would need such a powerful intercession of grace to be with Him in His Kingdom that he fears that they might be lost forever as well. Purgatory resounds in his head as if his skull were the inner chamber of a bell.
Honey, who are you lighting all those candles for? Mother asks. Leave some for other people, would you?
Duncan ignores her and rests his knees on the padded rest, places his forehead against his entwined knuckles, stares at the flickering flames muted through the blue glass, smells wax and lead wick melting. The lingering odor of incense. Cool air rushing up the nave. He hears an altar boy practicing his swing of the censer for the blessing of the Eucharist, the chain taut through its pendulous stroke, and the slight rattle of the censer at the height of that arc. Mother kneels beside him and begins praying as well, and he takes comfort in this. As they pray, her voice surging beside him, thrumming beneath the bones of his chest as when she sang to him, his fears begin to fade.
On the way out of church she takes his hand in hers and swings her arm. That was nice of you, lighting a candle for Joshua.
Duncan looks at her, and she smiles.
You always light five. I assumed the extra one was for him.
He nods.
It’s important that we pray for people, most especially for people who can’t help themselves.
Why can’t Joshua help himself?
Mother doesn’t respond, and when he asks again, she sighs. It was the war. He’s not the same as the Joshua I used to know. Sometimes he does things … it’s not his fault. You would have liked the old Joshua.
I like this Joshua.
I know, honey, I know. She nods and looks toward the rooftops but there is only the dark blue sky with night sinking down through it like ink. The last of the sun has sunk into the bay.
What happened to Joshua in the war? he asks.
I don’t really know, honey. He doesn’t talk about it. Sometimes, though, I wish he would, just so I could understand him better.
She swings his arm and their footsteps sound on the tile as they skip, but he knows that she is thinking of the Joshua she once knew and the man he was now, and in the space of those years, everything that has been lost between them.