The vicar had done what he could with an awkward situation, basing his sermon on a pair of verses in which St. Paul exhorted his brethren “to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands . . . so that you may command the respect of outsiders, and be dependent on nobody.”
Mr. Huggins hadn’t worked with his hands, exactly, and the villagers had bristled slightly at the suggestion that they might have been regarded as “outsiders” by a man who’d never made the least effort to become a part of the community, but they couldn’t deny that their late neighbor had lived quietly, minded his own affairs, and depended on nobody but himself. The general feeling seemed to be that, if self-reliance were a virtue, then Mr. Huggins had earned his place in Heaven.
What he had not earned was a place in our hearts. I doubted that anyone in the churchyard felt a deep and abiding sense of loss at his passing. They might have felt pity for a man whose family had, apparently, abandoned him. They might have regretted their failure to get to know him better. They might even have felt sorry for not feeling sorrier about his death. But no one was heartbroken.
I suspected that the vast majority of my neighbors had, like myself, come to Mr. Huggins’s funeral out of a sense of duty, and a sense of duty could hardly be counted on to inoculate them against a contagious bout of giggling. Even so, we all looked a bit shamefaced after our indecorous descent into comedy, and redoubled our efforts to appear somber. A neighbor had died, he had no one to mourn him, and we owed it to the honor of our village to see him off properly.
The vicar was about to drop a morsel of mud on the coffin when he was distracted by a commotion in the lane. Heads that had been bowed rose alertly as a white Ford Focus splashed to a halt on the grassy verge beyond the lych-gate, and the vicar’s hand fell to his side as a tall figure leapt from the car, vaulted the churchyard’s low stone wall, and sprinted across the sodden grass, dodging nimbly between headstones and skidding to a halt mere inches from Mr. Huggins’s open grave.
The newcomer was a young man—in his midtwenties, perhaps. He was dressed in a dark-brown rain jacket, khaki cargo shorts, and a pair of rugged hiking sandals, and though his clothes were slightly shabby, he was much more than slightly good-looking. His blond hair was like tousled corn silk, his eyes were as blue as a summer sky, and his deeply tanned face made his teeth seem almost too white. Even his toes, which were rapidly turning pink in the cold air, were handsome. As he paused to catch his breath I could sense hearts fluttering among the faithful, but though many mouths had fallen open, words seemed to be in short supply.
Once again, a child led us.
“Hello,” Will said brightly. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jack MacBride,” the young man replied in a broad Australian accent. “And I’ve come to say good-bye to Uncle Hector.”
Two
The young man gave Will a friendly wink, then turned to face the vicar.
“I’m in the right place, aren’t I, Padre?” he inquired anxiously. “St. George’s church? In Finch? Only, Finch wasn’t on my map, so I had to stop in Upper Deeping for directions and the bloke who gave them to me was a bit of a wally.”
“Calm yourself, Mr. MacBride,” the vicar said gently. “You are in the correct place. You may, if you wish, be the first to cast earth into your uncle’s grave.”
“Beauty,” said Jack.
He scooped a heaping handful of mud from the mound near the grave and let it fall with a mighty splat on the coffin lid. The gruesome noise broke the spell he’d cast over the churchyard. Gaping mouths snapped shut, astonished gazes were averted, and the ancient ritual continued as if a golden-haired Adonis hadn’t burst upon the scene like a ray of sunshine.
The women stepped forward to drop damp posies into the grave and the men contributed modest lumps of dirt, but Will and Rob, delighted by Jack MacBride’s exuberance, had to be restrained from hurling great gobs of mud in the grave’s general direction. Bill and I clamped our hands onto their shoulders until the vicar had pronounced the final blessing.
Amelia Thistle nodded sympathetically to Jack, then strode off to visit her recuperating beau in his graceful Georgian home, but the rest of the villagers formed a line and shuffled past the newcomer, studying him covertly while murmuring impromptu words of condolence. Bill and I allowed the boys to throw one small mud-ball apiece into the grave, then joined the vicar and Lilian at the end of the line, while our neighbors lingered near the lych-gate to await developments.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. MacBride,” the vicar began.
“Jack’ll do,” the young man interjected. “Mr. MacBride’s my dad.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Jack,” the vicar began anew. “I’m Theodore Bunting, vicar of the parish.”
“And I’m Lilian Bunting, Teddy’s wife,” said Lilian, furling her troublesome umbrella. “Please allow me to introduce our friends: Bill Willis, his wife, Lori, and their sons, Will and Rob.”
“G’day,” said Jack, with a nod to each of us.
“Your feet look cold,” said Rob.