Wednesday dawned gray and sunless with a whiff of winter in the air. Perfect for a funeral.
Farley Nelson was on my mind.
Evie and I took coffee out to the garden, as we always did when it wasn’t raining. We wore sweaters and held our mugs with both hands for warmth.
A downy woodpecker was hammering away at the suet feeder. Nuthatches and titmice were filching sunflower seeds from the hanging feeders, and a gang of goldfinches flocked on the thistle feeder. The finches had begun to don their more somber winter shade of olive.
I never tired of watching our birds.
“That funeral is today,” I said to Evie.
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “I feel like I should.”
“Yes, you should,” she said. “Want me to go with you?”
“No, honey. That’s okay.”
Evie shrugged. “Up to you. I will, you know.”
“I know. Thanks. I’m fine.”
Henry, who had been snoozing under the table with his chin on my instep, lifted his head and looked at me. Sometimes I was positive he understood everything.
“You can’t go,” I said to him. “You don’t own a good necktie.”
At nine o’clock I called Julie and told her I’d be out of the office all day because I had to attend a funeral.
She said, “Likely story.”
“Evie thinks I should go.”
“Sure,” she said. “Blame her.”
Both sides of Southwick’s main street were lined with parked vehicles. I found a place to leave my car in the lot behind the general store and walked from there to the Congregational church, a couple hundred yards down the street.
A police cruiser was parked directly in front of the church, and two uniformed officers were standing there. They sipped coffee from foam cups and nodded to the folks who were filing inside.
I recognized both of them—Officer Somers and his female partner, who’d been the first on the scene when I called about Farley Nelson. When I walked past them, they both nodded without smiling. The female cop said something to Somers out of the corner of her mouth, and I could feel their eyes follow me as I mounted the church steps.
I was the guy who’d found Farley’s dead body. That made me a suspicious character.
Helen Madbury was standing inside the door greeting people. When I walked in, she gave me a hug. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “It would please him to know you’re here.”
Mechanical words. I figured she was saying the same thing to everybody.
It was quarter to one, fifteen minutes before the service was scheduled to begin, but already the place was packed. I didn’t know whether they were all Farley’s friends, or if the citizens of Southwick just considered attending funerals to be their civic duty.
A lanky woman with short white hair and sharp blue eyes whom I’d never seen before handed me a program. Another relative of Farley’s, probably. A younger sister maybe. I saw some family resemblance.
She also thanked me for coming.
When I entered the church, heads swiveled around to check me out, then turned to say something to the heads next to them. To most of the citizens of Southwick, I was a stranger.
Or maybe they all knew who I was. That Boston lawyer who’d been snooping around. The guy who’d found Farley’s body.
I found a seat on the outside aisle in the back pew on the right. The organist was playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The townsfolk whispered among themselves. I didn’t see any tears flowing. It was a somber occasion, but not a tragic one.
I spotted the Goff brothers about halfway to the front on the other side of the middle aisle. They weren’t hard to spot. They were big men and seemed to take up a lot of room. They were wearing dark suits and appeared to have trimmed their beards.
They had their heads bowed, as if they were praying. I’d never seen Harris Goff without his baseball cap. His head
was balder than his older brother’s, and it shone pink in the muted light that seeped down through the stained-glass windows. Both Goff men looked older in suits and ties than they did in grease-stained overalls and ratty T-shirts and work boots.
A cluster of teenagers were sitting a couple rows in front of me. One of them was the girl who worked at the general store, the one who’d given me directions to Farley’s place. The girls wore dresses and heels, and they looked like grownups. The boys wore suits and neckties, but they still looked like kids.
I spotted Carol, Helen’s partner at the real estate office, and Jeff Little, the innkeeper, and a couple of other familiar faces that I couldn’t place.
Otherwise, they were all strangers to me, even if I wasn’t a stranger to them.
I sat on the hard wooden pew, rolled the paper program in my fingers, and hummed along with the organ music. I always liked those old Protestant hymns.
I tried to think about Farley Nelson, to remember him properly on this occasion, but I hadn’t known him very well. My thoughts kept turning to Gordon Cahill. I’d known Gordie quite well. The horrible images from Horowitz’s photos kept popping up in my head.
I wondered when they’d turn what was left of Cahill’s body over to Donna. I figured a funeral and a burial would help her push on with her life.
After a while the organ stopped playing, and a gray-haired woman in the robes of a minister walked slowly down the aisle. When she got to the front I noticed that Farley’s casket was already there.
The service lasted less than an hour. Some familiar lines of scripture were read, a few familiar hymns were sung, and the minister delivered a short but touching homily about Farley and the full and God-fearing life he’d lived. It was evident that she’d known him well, and her words almost convinced me that there was a God to whom we should give thanks for allowing us to know people like Farley.
Then Helen Madbury went to the front and talked without notes about her uncle. She told a few stories that evoked quiet laughter from the congregation and made it clear that Farley would be missed and remembered fondly and gratefully but without tears. At the end of her talk, Helen reminded us that Farley would be buried in the cemetery across the street. She hoped we’d all attend, and she invited everybody to her house for refreshments afterward.
I figured everybody but me knew where she lived.
We sang another hymn, and the minister delivered her benediction, and then six men, a couple of them about Farley’s age and the others a generation or two younger, toted his casket up the center aisle while we all sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Singing felt good, and I found that I remembered most of the words to all four verses.
The congregation recessed from the front to the back, so I was one of the last to leave. When I got outside, I saw that the sky had darkened and a few fat drops of cold rain had begun to fall. Typical.
The two police officers stood in the middle of the road, prepared to halt traffic, although there was none to halt, and the mourners were straggling across the street toward the cemetery on the hill. I followed along. Up front I could see the pallbearers leading the way.
We gathered in a big semicircle around the grave site. A
few umbrellas had sprung up. From where I stood in the rear, I couldn’t see much, but I heard the minister recite the Twenty-third Psalm, words that never failed to move me. I was happy to observe that she stuck with the old poetic King James language. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For Thou art with me.”
Nowadays they say: “ … you are with me.” It would never sound right to my ears.
“ … and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Then the minister’s voice lifted, inviting us all to bow our heads and join in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
I bowed my head but kept my prayers to myself.
“Go in peace,” said the minister, and the folks began straggling back down the hill to the road. I moved under one of the big beech trees that grew here and there in the cemetery, leaned against the trunk, and waited for the crowd to disperse.
By the time the last of them had reached the foot of the hill, the first of them were already in their cars heading north out of town—to Helen’s house, I assumed.
I waited there under the beech tree until I was alone in the cemetery. Then I started walking up and down the rows.
I’d covered less than half of the two or three acres of gravestones when I found Bobby Gilman’s. It was a simple, gray polished granite stone, and even though it had stood there for thirty years, it looked shiny and new.
ROBERT ALTON GILMAN
August 7, 1958–July 16, 1972
Beloved Son of Andrew and Rebecca
Thy Will Be Done
I noticed that they’d used the day Bobby’s body was found as the date of his death. He’d been up on the mountain for nearly ten months by then. I supposed it was as good a date as any.
I pondered Bobby Gilman’s fate for a minute or two, but had no new insights. He’d barely turned thirteen when he got lost on that mountain in the sudden October snowstorm. He was close to turning fourteen when his body was found. All the rest was mystery.
As I turned and started to leave, the gravestone next to Bobby’s caught my eye.
REBECCA COLE GILMAN
December 6, 1936–October 12, 1972
Beloved Mother Of
Robert, Harris, and Lyndon
With God’s Angels Now
It took me a moment to process this information.
Bobby’s mother had died just three months after her boy’s body was found—on the one-year anniversary of the Columbus Day when Bobby got lost on Mount Monadnock.
It was hard to believe that the date was a coincidence.
I guessed Bobby’s mother had chosen October 12 as the day when she would join him in heaven.
Rebecca Gilman had two other sons besides Bobby.
Lyndon and Harris.
Lyndon was known by the nickname his kid brother had given him because he couldn’t pronounce the word “brother.”
Dubber. Dub.
Dub and Harris Goff.
Bobby Gilman had been their brother.