Jake straightened up. “You said—”
“I know what I said. Lemme see.” I turned him and took a long look at the damage I’d done. If I told the truth, the circumstances of the accident would be hard to explain. So the truth was not an option. But a lie would depend on Jake and that was a problem. Even if I was able to convince him to go along with some goofy story, he’d stutter and stammer so awful that our guilt would quickly be obvious.
Jake craned his neck so that he could see the tear. “We’re going to get in t-t-trouble.”
“No we’re not. Come on.”
I ran across the pasture through the grass and wild daisies and purple clover. Jake was right behind me. We raced through the back door and went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. I pulled my mother’s sewing basket from the closet shelf and selected a spool of tan thread. I bit off a long section and speared the eye of a needle.
“Give me your coat,” I said and got to work.
I was a Boy Scout. Not a good one. I liked the general idea of being trustworthy and loyal and thrifty and brave and clean and reverent but the effort it took to hang in there with all those weighty virtues was usually more than I cared to muster. I learned some pretty good stuff though. Like how to sew onto my uniform the patches that went along with being a scout. I wielded a mean needle. I did a quick baste so that unless you looked closely you wouldn’t notice anything amiss.
“There,” I said and handed the coat to Jake.
He looked at it skeptically and put it on and shoved his finger through one of the gaps between the loose stitching. “It’s still b-b-broken.”
“It’ll be fine as long as you don’t go poking it all the time.” I put Mom’s sewing basket back in the closet and checked the clock on the nightstand. I said, “We better hurry. The service is about to start.”
• • •
My sister Ariel had turned eighteen in May and in June had graduated from New Bremen High School and was planning to attend Juilliard in the fall. When Jake and I entered the church she was at the organ playing something beautiful and sad that sounded as if it might have been by Handel. The pews were already pretty full. Mostly people we knew. Members of the congregation. Friends of the family. People from the neighborhood. A lot of folks who came regularly to my father’s church weren’t members. They weren’t even Methodist. They came because it was the only church on the Flats. Jake and I took places in the last pew. My mother was up front where the choir usually sat. She wore a red satin robe over her black dress. She was listening to Ariel play and she was staring at the stained-glass window in the west wall with that same faraway look she’d had at the kitchen table when she was searching for inspiration. Part of it was the music itself but it was also the way Ariel played. To this day there are pieces I cannot hear without imagining my sister’s fingers shaping the music every bit as magnificently as God shaped the wings of butterflies.
The casket was set in front of the chancel rail with a profusion of flowers flanking it on either side. The church smelled of lilies. Bobby’s parents were in the front row. They were older people to whom Bobby had come late in life. I’d seen how they treated him with a great and gentle love. Now they sat together with their hands in their laps and stared dumbly beyond the casket toward the gold-plated cross on the altar.
My father was nowhere to be seen.
Jake leaned to me. “He’s in there?”
I knew what he meant. “Yeah.”
Until Bobby died I hadn’t thought a lot about death but as I imagined him laid in that small casket I was struck with an awful sense of wonder. I didn’t believe in heaven—the Pearly Gates version—so the question of what had become of Bobby Cole was mystifying and more than a little frightening.
Gus entered the church. It was clear from his unsteady gait that he’d been drinking. He was dressed in his Sunday best which was a dark secondhand suit. His tie was askew and there was a cowlick in his red hair that stuck out at the back of his head. He sat in the pew across the aisle from Jake and me and he didn’t seem to notice us. He stared at Bobby’s coffin and I could hear the bellows of his lungs sucking air.
My father finally appeared. He came from the door to his office, dressed in his black Wesley robe and wearing a white stole. He was a handsome man and impressive in his ministerial regalia. He paused as he passed the Coles and he spoke to them quietly and then he took his place in the chair behind his pulpit.
Ariel ended her piece. My mother stood up. Ariel laid her hands again on the organ keyboard and paused and prepared herself then began to play. And my mother closed her eyes and composed herself to sing.
When my mother sang I almost believed in heaven. It wasn’t just that she had a beautiful voice but also that she had a way of delivering a piece that pierced your heart. Oh when she sang she could make a fence post cry. When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war. In the pause before she began, the only sound in the church was the breeze whispering through the open doorway. The Coles had chosen the hymn and it seemed an odd choice, one that had probably come from Mrs. Cole whose roots were in southern Missouri. She’d asked my mother to sing a spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
When my mother finally sang it was not just a hymn she offered, it was consummate comfort. She sang slowly and richly and delivered the heart of that great spiritual as if she was delivering heaven itself and her face was beautiful and full of peace. I shut my eyes and her voice reached out to wipe away my tears and enfold my heart and assure me absolutely that Bobby Cole was being carried home. It made me almost happy for him, a sweet boy who didn’t have to worry anymore about understanding a world that would always be more incomprehensible to him than not. Who didn’t have to endure anymore all the cruel mockeries. Who would never have to concern himself with what kind of man he would grow into and what would become of him when his aged parents could no longer protect and care for him. My mother’s singing made me believe that God had taken Bobby Cole for the best of reasons.
And when she finished the sound of the breeze through the doorway was like the sigh of angels well pleased.
My father stood and read scripture from the pulpit but he didn’t preach from up there. He came down the steps instead and passed through the opening in the chancel rail and stood finally beside the casket. In truth I didn’t hear much of what he had to say. Partly it was because my heart was already full from my mother’s singing and my head was already stuffed with too much wonderment about death. But it was also because I’d heard my father preach a thousand times. People said he was a good preacher though not as fiery as some of his congregation would have liked. He spoke earnestly, never passionately. He was a man of ideas and he never tried with overpowering rhetoric or dramatics to muscle people into believing.
It was quiet in the church when he finished and the breeze that swept through the open doors cooled us and the flowers beside the coffin rustled as if someone had passed by.