The mourners arrived two hours later and arranged themselves silently into their pews. It was a thin crowd. There was the required representative from the glass factory. A low-level supervisor. Mr. Sorensen was not important enough, apparently, to warrant a mourner from an upper-level managerial position, and was certainly not grand enough for the owner himself to drive up from Chicago and pay his respects.
The priest bristled at this. The man died at work, he thought. Surely . . .
He shook his head and busied himself with the last-minute preparations. The pretty widow walked with cool assurance from station to station, making sure everything was just so. The mourners, the priest noticed, were mostly men. This stood to reason as most of Mr. Sorensen’s coworkers were men as well. Still, he noticed that several of them had removed their wedding rings, or had thought to insert a jaunty handkerchief in their coat pockets (in what could only be described as non-funeral colors), or had applied hair gel or mustache oil or aftershave. The whole church reeked of men on the prowl. Mrs. Sorensen didn’t seem to notice, but that was beside the point. The priest folded his arms and gave a hard look at the backs of their heads.
Really, he thought. But then the widow walked into a brightly colored beam of stained-glass sunlight, and he felt his heart lift and his cheeks flush and his breathing quicken and thin. There are people, he thought, who are easy to love. And that is that.
Mrs. Sorensen had done a beautiful job with the flowers, creating arrangements at each window in perfect, dioramic scenes. In the window depicting the story of the child Jesus and the clay birds that he magicked into feathers and wings and flight, for example, her figure of Jesus was composed of corn husk, ivy, and dried rose petals. The clay birds she had made with homemade dough, and had affixed them to warbled bits of wire. The birds bobbed and weaved unsteadily, as though only just learning how to spread their wings. And her rendition of Daniel in the lion’s den was so harrowing in its realism, so brutally present, that people had to avert their eyes. She even made a diorama of the day she and her husband met—a man with a broken leg at the bottom of a gully in the middle of a flowery forest; a woman with a broken heart wandering alone, happening by, and binding his wounds. And how real they were! The visceral pain on his face, the sorrow hanging over her body like a cloud. The quickening of the heart at that first, tender touch. This is how love can begin—an act of kindness.
The men in the congregation stared for a long time at that display. They shook their heads and muttered, “Lucky bastard.”
Father Laurence, in his vestments, intoned the Mass with all of the feeling he could muster, his face weighted somberly with the loss of a man cut down too soon. (Though not, it should be noted, with any actual grief. After all, the priest hardly knew the man. No one did. Still, fifty-eight is too young to die. Assuming Mr. Sorensen was fifty-eight. In truth, the priest had no idea.) Mrs. Sorensen sat in the front row, straight backed, her delicate face composed, her head floating atop her neck as though it were being pulled upward by a string. She held her chin at a slight tilt to the left. She made eye contact with the priest and gave an encouraging smile.
It is difficult, he realized later, to give a homily when there is a raccoon in the church. And a very large dog. And a cat. Though he couldn’t see them—they had made themselves scarce before the parishioners arrived—he still knew they were there. And it unnerved him.
The white mice squirmed in Mrs. Sorensen’s pocket. They peeked and retreated again and again. Father Laurence tripped on his words. He forgot what he was going to say. He forgot Mr. Sorensen’s name. He remembered the large, damp eyes of the buck outside. Did he want to come in? Father Laurence wondered. And then: Don’t be ridiculous. Deer don’t go to church! But neither, he reasoned with himself, did raccoons. But there was one here somewhere, wasn’t there? So.
Father Laurence mumbled and wandered. He started singing the wrong song. The organist grumbled in his direction. The Parish Council, who never missed a funeral if they could help it, sat in the back and twittered. They held their programs over their faces and peered over the rim of the paper with hard, glittering eyes. Father Laurence found himself singing “O God, Your Creatures Fill the Earth,” though it was not on the program and the organist was unable to play the accompaniment.
“Your creatures live in every land,” he sang lustily. “They fill the sky and sea. O Lord, you give us your command, to love them tenderly.”
Mrs. Sorensen closed her eyes and smiled. And outside, a hawk opened its throat and screeched—the lingering note landing in harmony with the final bar.
That was October.
Father Laurence did not visit the widow right away. He’d wait. Let her grieve. The last thing she needed was an old duffer hanging around her kitchen. Besides, he knew that the insufferable sisters on the Parish Council and their allies on the Improvement League and the Quilters Alliance and the Friends of the Library and the Homebound Helpers would be, even now, fluttering toward that house, descending like a cloud.
In the meantime, the entire town buzzed with the news of the recent Sasquatch sightings—only here and there, and not entirely credible, but the fact of the sightings at all was significant. There hadn’t been any in the entire county for the last thirty years—not since one was reported standing outside of the only hotel in town for hours and hours on a cold, November night.
People still talked about it.
The
