The old woman nodded. Every day. Likes the salt lick I got her. Any word from your brother?
The girl shook her head.
The man went around to his helper’s door. His helper looked shrunken, crumpled as a dry leaf. The small group gathered around him as a car with flashing lights drove up. More got out, front and back. Everyone talked and embraced. The man and the girl spoke together, deciding things.
Shall we then? the man said.
They walked in slow, silent procession across the snowy field. The sky was overcast, considering the gray matters of clouds, whether to snow or rain. A sudden wind spun the whirling parts of the man’s makings. A few whined or creaked as they turned, like singing. The man walked beside his helper, who hugged the covered pot. The others followed, two by two, the cat and the girl last.
They crowded inside the stone garden, circling a small, perfect square dug deep. The helper set the pot tenderly into the hole. The girl opened the book she was always scribbling in, took a long breath, and spoke softly for a time, pausing to wipe her wet cheeks, turn a page. All of their faces grew wet then, and the cat glanced up at the gray sky. And it began to snow.
21
Bessie’s service was beautiful—the Padre’s church full of fresh flowers even in winter—and afterward those I loved came to the house for the burial. A miraculously goodly number, a number that had been zero only a few months before. Only Bessie herself and Wil were missing.
I had to hand it to my brother: when he wanted to disappear, he vanished like a dream in daylight. There wasn’t one single sign of him anywhere. Despite local and state law enforcement searching the highways and byways and the greedy citizenry combing the small towns and wild places in between to collect the mayor’s hateful bounty, Wil kept out of sight.
Helen and Franklin flew in from New York and Sheriff and Mrs. Bean got back from Christmas with their daughters just in time for the service at the church. Maud actually wore a dress. We all sat with Fred and Fred’s cousin Henrietta in the front rows reserved for family. Every pew was filled—a huge turnout for someone who’d hardly left her house in years.
Bessie had given Fred and the Padre strict instructions about how her service should go, threatening to come back and haunt them if they didn’t do as she said. Unlike the solemn services I’d attended with Manny’s mother, Bessie’s had joyful music and laughter. The Padre spread one of her quilts over the altar. He said how God had walked again on this earth in the person of Bessie Parsons Montgomery, as surely as Christ had walked here two thousand years before. Heads nodded. Amen, those present said, and God seemed a hair friendlier to me then, if only a hair.
I stood on a communion wine crate at the lectern and read the parts Bessie liked best from my memoir, though it was all I could do to read without crying. I read the part where she said folks were starved for beauty. I read how she’d refused a heart transplant, saying she wouldn’t be herself with someone else’s heart beating inside her. And I read the Thanksgiving entry, where Bessie had spoken the truth about little Garland Bean’s rescue and laid the local lie bare.
People stood and clapped when I was done. I knew they were clapping for Bessie.
I read from more recent parts of my journal at the burial—about Henry’s New York opening and Sister’s brush with religion in the Padre’s pews—because Bessie hadn’t lived to enjoy them. I liked to think she could hear. Henry had her grave dug next to Mama’s, just like she’d asked. Bessie thought that she and Mama might have things to say to each other, if such conversations were possible. That they might become friends.
The snow started again right after the burial, and for a while everyone looked a little lost and kept to themselves. Fred lingered at the graveyard with Bessie. He couldn’t get it out of his head that she’d be lonely there all by herself. When he finally came up to the house, he headed mechanically for the kitchen and stood staring at the cabinets, the refrigerator, and the stove like he was standing on the moon.
Maud led him to a chair. After that he stayed quiet, the way anybody’d be when his whole reason for living had been yanked away. He hardly seemed to hear when people spoke to him. Henry kept close by him, and though I didn’t hear them exchange twenty words, I understood whole conversations taking place in the silence between them.
The Padre sat by the front room fire sipping sherry. By the second glass he’d declared Bessie beatified and by the third glass sainted. To my eyes, his collar didn’t afford him any more protection against loss than the next person. He looked plain and simple, like a man who’d just buried his best friend.
Harlan paced and muttered to himself about Wil’s taking the motorcycle, sure something bad would happen because he hadn’t had a chance to check the air in the new tires or replace the old brakes.
Then people started to come, some who’d been at the church and some who hadn’t, though no invitations had been issued, no formal reception planned. “People know,” Helen said. “It was like that after my mother died. They just come.”
And come they did, in snow-dusted dribs and drabs all the rest of the day: farmers who knew Fred and who had brought Henry their plows to weld, people who’d bought Fred’s flowers and whose hearts Henry had mended, people who’d known what Bessie had meant to one or all of us. They filled the
