“Oh please.” It was the stage whisper again, surprisingly loud in the silence that had followed the minister’s big finish. I saw a few heads turn in the direction of my elderly seatmate; one of them was the minister’s. A look of confusion and anger flashed across his face, then he regained his composure and directed us to a closing hymn. The words were printed in the program, which everyone but me seemed to have received. We stood to sing, feet scraping and throats clearing, as the organist played a stanza to acquaint us with the melody.
The music sounded quaint and prim, like something from another century. I’d never considered myself much of a singer, so I didn’t much mind that I couldn’t sing along. I did feel slightly self-conscious, though, to be standing amid the singing throng with my mouth closed and my hands empty. I felt a gentle nudge at my right elbow. My neighbor extended her program slightly toward me. She gripped the lower right corner of the page between a bony thumb and knuckle, her skin papery and blue-veined. She gave the program a slight twitch to indicate that I should take hold of the lower left corner. The paper certainly didn’t require both of us to hold it up; rather, the paper was a sort of bridge, a bond, between two strangers jammed together on a wooden pew. It was an oddly intimate gesture. Two strangers bound, by a link and a story, to a brass urn and the ashes within, which had once been Leonard Novak. Together we sang.
Let there be light, Lord God of hosts,
Let there be wisdom on the earth;
Let broad humanity have birth,
Let there be deeds, instead of boasts.
Within our passioned hearts instill
The calm that endeth strain and strife;
Make us thy ministers of life;
Purge us from lusts that curse and kill.
Give us the peace of vision clear
To see our brothers’ good our own,
To joy and suffer not alone,
The love that casteth out all fear.
Let woe and waste of warfare cease,
That useful labor yet may build
Its homes with love and laughter filled;
God give thy wayward children peace.
As the words of the hymn sank in, I decided to cut the minister some slack for his overheated delivery. The beginning of the song fit with his “divine spark” image, and the ending—well, I decided it took some guts to close an A-bomb scientist’s funeral with an antiwar plea.
I halfway expected to hear a snort or feel a cynical elbow in my ribs at the song’s earnest goodheartedness, but I never did. And as the final notes died away, I glanced to my right and saw that the woman beside me—the same woman who had said “Oh, please” just moments before—had tears on her cheeks.
As the service ended, I turned to her. “Thank you for sharing your pew and your program with me.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re Brockton, aren’t you?” I nodded, surprised. “You’re the guy that watches the bodies rot?”
I laughed. “You do have a way with words. How’d you know? Do I smell that bad?”
“I saw your picture in the Oak Ridger a couple of days ago. Here, let’s go out the back door. I don’t want to have to shake the preacher’s hand—it would just embarrass us both.” She steered me through a door that led through a cluttered vestry and out into the thin sunshine. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. Fifty yards ahead of us, walking down the steps and away from the chapel, I saw Jess Carter, my dead lover. I thought I saw her, at any rate: I saw a striking woman wearing Jess’s black hair and Jess’s lithe body, walking Jess’s walk. Then she turned her head enough for me to see that it was not Jess. Of course not: it had been nearly a year since Jess was murdered; I had attended her memorial service in Chattanooga, had seen her ashes buried in a churchyard, had nestled a granite plaque to honor Jess in the ground at the Body Farm, where her corpse had been taken by her killer. How could it possibly be Jess walking ahead of me down a hillside in Oak Ridge?
I felt a tug at my sleeve. My elderly companion was studying my face shrewdly. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” she said.
“I thought I did,” I said. “Or hoped I did. Sorry. You were saying something about the newspaper.”
“Oh, nothing important. Just that I saw your picture in the story about Novak. By the way, I gather that when you came to fetch the body, you left a souvenir behind, in about eight feet of water.” Her eyes were dancing as she pointed a crooked finger at the swimming pool, a hundred yards downslope from where we stood.
“They wrote about my chainsaw?” I meant to sigh but it came out as a laugh. “I wish they’d hurry up and drain that pool.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.
“Oh, it’s starting to warm up,” I said, although I noticed that the rectangular opening I had cut in the surface had refrozen. “It’ll probably thaw out enough to drain in another couple of days.”
“It’s not just the ice,” she said. “It’ll be a miracle if the drain still works. That whole place is falling apart.”