Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled along the street on which St. Bernadette’s stood. The creche had been arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to camels — and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn’t realized that it was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from it, squinted my eyes.
The priest was halfway up the stairs and climbing faster.
Then I remembered that Angela Ferryman had attended Mass at St. Bernadette’s. Undoubtedly, considering her dollmaking, she had been prevailed upon to lend her talent to the making of the creche.
End of mystery.
I still couldn’t understand why she would have assigned my face to an angel. If my features belonged anywhere in the manger scene, they should have been on the donkey. Clearly, her opinion of me had been higher than I warranted.
Unwanted, an image of Angela rose in my mind’s eye: Angela as I had last seen her on the bathroom floor, her eyes fixed on some last sight farther away than Andromeda, head tilted backward into the toilet bowl, throat slashed.
Suddenly I was certain that I had missed an important detail when I’d found her poor torn body. Repulsed by the gouts of blood, gripped by grief, in a state of shock and fear, I had avoided looking long at her — just as, for years, I had avoided looking at the figures in the brightly lighted creche outside the church. I had seen a vital clue, but it had not registered consciously. Now my subconscious taunted me with it.
As Father Tom reached the top of the steps, he broke into sobs. He sat on the landing and wept inconsolably.
I could not hold fast to a mental image of Angela’s face. Later there would be time to confront and, reluctantly, explore that Grand Guignol memory.
From angel to camel to magi to Joseph to donkey to Holy Virgin to lamb to Lamb, I wove silently through the creche, then past file cabinets and boxes of supplies, into the shorter and narrower space where little was stored, and onward toward the door of the utilities room.
The sounds of the priest’s anguish resonated off the concrete walls, fading until they were like the cries of some haunting entity barely able to make itself heard through the cold barrier between this world and the next.
Grimly, I recalled my father’s wrenching grief in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, on the night of my mother’s death.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I keep my own anguish private. When one of those wild cries threatens to arise, I bite hard until I chew the energy out of it and swallow it unspoken.
In my sleep I grind my teeth — no surprise — until I wake some nights with aching jaws. Perhaps I am fearful of giving voice in dreams to sentiments I choose not to express when awake.
On the way out of the church basement, I expected the undertaker — waxy and pale, with eyes like day-old blood blisters — to drop on me from above or to soar out of the shadows around my feet or to spring like an evil jack-in-the-box from a furnace door. He was not waiting anywhere along my route.
Outside, Orson came to me from among the tombstones, where he had hidden from Pinn. Judging by the dog’s demeanor, the mortician was gone.
He stared at me with great curiosity — or I imagined that he did — and I said, “I don’t really know what happened in there. I don’t know what it meant.”
He appeared dubious. He has a gift for looking dubious: the blunt face, the unwavering eyes.
“Truly,” I insisted.
With Orson padding at my side, I returned to my bicycle. The granite angel guarding my transportation did not resemble me in the least.
The fretful wind had again subsided into a caressing breeze, and the oaks stood silent.
A shifting filigree of clouds was silver across the silver moon.
A large flock of chimney swifts swooped down from the church roof and alighted in the trees, and a few nightingales returned, too, as though the cemetery had not been sanctified until Pinn had departed it.
Holding my bike by the handlebars, I pondered the ranks of tombstones and said: “‘…the dark grew solid around them, finally changing to earth.’ That’s Louise Gluck, a great poet.”
Orson chuffed as if in agreement.
“I don’t know what’s happening here, but I think a lot of people are going to die before this is over — and some of them are likely to be people we love. Maybe even me. Or you.”
Orson’s gaze was solemn.
I looked past the cemetery at the streets of my hometown, which were suddenly a lot scarier than any bone-yard.
“Let’s get a beer,” I said.
I climbed on my bike, and Orson danced a dog dance across the graveyard grass, and for the time being, we left the dead behind.
THREE. MIDNIGHT HOUR
18
The cottage is the ideal residence for a boardhead like Bobby. It stands on the southern horn of the bay, far out on the point, the sole structure within three-quarters of a mile. Point-break surf surrounds it.
From town, the lights of Bobby Halloway’s house appear to be so far from the lights along the inner curve of the bay that tourists assume they are seeing a boat anchored in the channel beyond our sheltered waters. To longtime residents, the cottage is a landmark.
The place was constructed forty-five years ago, before many restrictions were placed on coastal building, and it never acquired neighbors because, in those days, there was an abundance of cheap land along the shore, where the wind and the weather were more accommodating than on the point, and where there were streets and convenient utility hookups. By the time the shore lots — then the hills behind them — filled up, regulations issued by the California Coastal Commission had made building on the bay horns impossible.
Long before the house came into Bobby’s possession, a grandfather clause in the law preserved its existence. Bobby intended to die in this singular place, he said, shrouded in the sound of breaking surf — but not until well past the middle of the first century of the new millennium.
No paved or graveled road leads along the horn, only a wide rock track flanked by low dunes precariously held in place by tall, sparse shore grass.
The horns that embrace the bay are natural formations, curving peninsulas: They are the remnants of the rim of a massive extinct volcano. The bay itself is a volcanic crater layered with sand by thousands of years of tides. Near shore, the southern horn is three to four hundred feet wide, but it narrows to a hundred at the point.
When I was two-thirds of the way to Bobby’s house, I had to get off my bike and walk it. Soft drifts of sand, less than a foot deep, sloped across the rock trail. They would pose no obstacle to Bobby’s four-wheel-drive Jeep wagon, but they made pedaling difficult.
This walk was usually peaceful, encouraging meditation. Tonight the horn was serene, but it seemed as alien as a spine of rock on the moon, and I kept glancing back, expecting to see someone pursuing me.
The one-story cottage is of teak, with a cedar-shingle roof. Weathered to a lustrous silver-gray, the wood takes the caress of moonlight as a woman’s body receives a lover’s touch. Encircling three sides of the house is a deep porch furnished with rocking chairs and gliders.
There are no trees. The landscaping consists only of sand and wild shore grass. Anyway, the eye is
