“The Reverend Miriam Young has passed on, I’m afraid.”

We were standing on the porch of the little blue house that used to be the Spiritualist Church of Glen Meadows when we heard these awful words. And all three of us, I’m sure, felt for a moment like just passing on with her.

We’d found the place without any trouble. Drove the main highway in, stopped at a filling station and checked a phone book, and by 10:00 A.M. we were on the Reverend Young’s front porch. Or what used to be hers.

There was no sign outside the home advertising it as a church, but Ob said, getting out of the car, that it wasn’t the kind of religion people necessarily advertised. He said it wasn’t what you’d call Welcome Wagon material. And Cletus made some joke about the church not needing a sign anyway because everybody who was supposed to come most likely heard of it telepathically anyway. But I wasn’t so optimistic. I was always set for failures since May died, and I was set for this one.

“Passed on where?” Cletus asked the man like a fool.

Smiling kindly to the imbecile in our company, the chipmunk of a man (that’s the animal he favored) said, “She died, son. Last June. She’s passed on to the Spirit World.”

We three just stood there dumbfounded. We were trying to outwit Death on this trip, rise above it, penetrate the blockades it put up between us and May. We were coming to Putnam County to put Death in its place, and instead it had put us squarely back in ours.

“So who are you?” I asked brazenly, forgetting my manners. I had nothing left to lose anyway. I was mad at this chipmunk and ready to fight. Ready to squeeze that Bat Lady right out of him.

But his face never altered as he looked into my eyes. He smiled again, again kindly, and he said, “I am Miriam’s nephew, dear. I’m living here until I get her affairs in order.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Then Cletus said, “Where are the bats?”

The chipmunk chuckled. He said, “Flying free, son. Like the Reverend Young herself.”

All this time Ob had said nothing. He hadn’t even been facing us. As soon as he’d learned Reverend Young was dead, he had turned away and looked off the side of the porch, rubbing his forehead as he always did when he was lost and searching for a way to go.

But after the feeble attempts of Cletus and me to deal with this house empty of its Small Medium at Large, he turned back. Turned back and in a quiet voice said to the man, “I was hoping she could help me contact my wife. I needed to talk to my wife.”

And the nephew of the preacher Ob had needed so desperately to find looked on Ob’s heartbroken face and saw his pain and he reached out and put a hand on Ob’s shoulder.

“I am so sorry, sir, but I haven’t my aunt’s spiritual powers. There is no one else here. But I do know someone, a man in Sissonville, who might be able to …”

But Ob put up his hand and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No. We were led here, and here my looking ends. I can’t go traipsing through the state like some old fool, searching out psychics. I’m not meant to do it and I won’t.”

Cletus looked at me and I looked at him, both of us hoping for the other one to do something.

Then Cletus said, “Well, sir, do you have any materials you might give us? Anything she might have used in church?”

Leave it to Cletus to think of that. Wanting something to take, something to hold between his fingers, to hide away in his vinyl suitcase. Cletus always needing something to collect.

“Well,” said the nephew, “there is the church brochure the Reverend always handed out to newcomers. I could give you one of those.”

Cletus nodded his head.

The nephew looked over at Ob.

“Would you care to come inside while I look? Could I offer you a cup of coffee?”

But Ob shook his head and remained silent. His face was pale and full of strain, and I wanted to take his suffering from him. But all I could do was wait for the chipmunk and Cletus to take care of their business so we might just go on home.

The nephew reappeared at the door with a folded white paper in his hands. He again apologized sorrowfully, wrote his number on the paper in case he could ever be of any help to us, and then the door that had held so much hope was closed and we were back on our own again.

We walked silently to the Valiant, then sat there a few minutes without a word. I was waiting for Ob to decide what he was going to do next. We had already called up our reservations at the one motel in town. Then tomorrow — after the Reverend Young would have connected Ob to May and everything was finally set right — tomorrow we were supposed to drive to the capitol. Spend the whole day there hobnobbing with the legislators. And then we were to go home and maybe live again.

But it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, we had been on this journey only three hours, and already everything was cracked and broken — and some of us with it.

Ob gave a deep sigh and he said, “I guess we better head on home, children.”

He started the car, and slowly we pulled away from all the spirits resting in that little blue house. Cletus and I said nothing. I guess we both knew it was too delicate a situation for fixing.

Unlike the happy silence we’d all enjoyed earlier that morning, we suffered instead a black kind of stillness on our route back home. Ob looked awful. I thought he might just pull the car over to the shoulder and die. Cletus opened up the Spiritualist handout and stared at the page mile after mile. And I watched out my window, swallowing back the lump in my throat and praying for something to save Ob and me. For I truly felt Ob had taken his final punch.

Off of I-64 and back on the turnpike, the signs for Capitol Street started cropping up again. I could feel Cletus lift his eyes and watch them slide past. And before long, there she was. That pretty concrete queen Cletus wanted to marry someday.

We traveled the road up the river alongside her, and no one said a word. My heart was aching for Cletus, for I knew there was little in life he really wanted this bad, this chance to see the West Virginia State Capitol. But I had nothing left to try to get it for him. We headed on south toward the bridge that would take us across the river and as far away from Cletus’s capitol as any soul could be. Back to Deep Water, where life would become again an empty trailer, an old man’s declining will to go on, a crazy fool believing in the mysteries of a beat-up vinyl suitcase, and me. I kept my eyes straight ahead, unwilling to look behind me at that gold shining dome that had accepted all our deepest wishes just a few hours back. Then just as we were nearly out of its sight, just as we were ready to put that last disappointment behind us and go back to the old life, we heard Ob say, “I’m turning this buggy around.”

And he did. He turned that buggy around and he drove it back the way we’d come. Back toward that shining castle. My heart began to lift. And Cletus leaned forward from the backseat.

Sounding almost too scared to ask, he said, “Are we going anyway, Ob? Going in to see it?”

Ob said, “It’s getting on to lunchtime. I figure the governor will be in the coffee shop, watching for somebody interesting to come through the door.”

Ob straightened his shoulders, and his face eased up a little, and he said, “We sure don’t want to disappoint him.”