Father Laurence nodded at the organist to start the processional. The red-tailed hawk opened up its throat, and the young buck nosed the back of the priest’s vestments. A pair of solemn eyes. A look of gravitas. Father Laurence wondered if he should step aside. If he was interrupting something. Two herons waited at the altar and a pine martin sat on the lectionary.
The organist sat under a pile of cats and made a valiant effort to pluck out the notes of the hymn. The congregation—both human and animal—opened their throats and began to sing, each in their own language, their own rhythm, their own time.
The song deepened and grew. It shook the walls and rattled the glass and set the light fixtures swinging. The congregation sang of the death of loved ones. A life eclipsed too soon. They sang of the waters of the bog and the creak of trees and of padded feet on soft forest trails. Of meals shared. And families built. Seeds in the ground. The screech of flight, the joy of a wriggling morsel in a sharp beak. The roar of pursuit and the gurgles of satiation. The murmur of nesting. The smell of a mate. The howl of birthing and the howl of loss, and howl and howl and howl.
Father Laurence processed in. Open-mouthed. A dark yodel tearing through his belly.
“I am lost,” he sang. “And I am found. My body is naked in the muck. It has always been naked. I hope; I rage; I despair; I yearn; I long; I lust; I love. These strong hands that built, this strong back that carried, all must wither to dust. Indeed, I am dust already.”
Mrs. Sorensen and her Sasquatch watched him process down the aisle. They smiled at his song. He paused at their pew, let his hand linger on the rail. They reached out and touched the hem of his garment.
It was, people remarked later, the prettiest Mass they’d ever heard.
Mrs. Sorensen and her family left after Communion. They did not stay for rolls or coffee. They did not engage in conversation. They walked, together, into the bog. The tall grasses opened for a moment to allow them in and then closed like a curtain behind them. The world was birdsong and quaking mud and humming insects. The world was warm and wet and green.
They did not come back.
What he wrote:
My dearest Angela,
I have spent weeks dreading what we must do today, and even as I write this, I am not entirely convinced that it is right. We are, and have been, and will be for the foreseeable future, overrun with soldiers, which is to say, our dear American guests. (Which is worse, love, their public drunkenness, or their incessant leering?) Far better, my darling, that you should be far away from this nursery of convalescing men, and far from the multitudes of explosives that spin like vultures in the sky. London will be flattened before the year is up, if the rumors are true. How could we not be next?
My family, yes, are tiresome. The house, yes, is drafty and unpleasant. But the grounds are lovely. And if you cannot paint the sea, perhaps you could paint the wood. Or paint the sea from memory. Or paint me from memory. Or paint a memory of me. Dear god, my girl, but I shall miss you.
Ever yours,
John
What he did not:
John watched the train wait at the platform with Angela’s pale, lovely, and petulant face framed by the greasy window. She would forgive him in time, of course. She always did. And the things that she did not know, she had no need to forgive.
The train shuddered, then rumbled, then slid out of sight. John stood still, watching the empty space where Angela’s face had been, as though a shadow of his wife still hung in the air, like a ghost. Unaccountably, he shivered, and his skin was damp and icy cold. He breathed in, deeply, through his nose, luxuriating in the smell of oil and smoke, and faintly, he was certain, the smell of lavender and lilac that was ever his wife.
He missed her.
And yet, he did not.
Shivering again, he rubbed his arms briskly with his long, narrow hands. Hands that were meant to entertain; fingers that could coax music from reluctant instruments and moans from hesitant lovers. Hands that now produced documents—perfectly accurate, deadly quick—for his superiors in the RAF. His instruments lay untouched and abandoned in the music room. His lovers—well, that was a different story.
He turned and headed out of the station.
The day was fine again, the fifth in a string of fine days, with a warm sun set in a cool blue sky with a bracing wind coming up over the water. The promenade was inundated, as usual, with soldiers—big, strong-jawed Americans with their strange shimmer and stink, their arms weighted by simpering girls. There were English soldiers too, but by comparison, they were pale, worn, their edges fraying to dust and light. No spending money in their pockets. And they were without women.
He cut through the gardens into a street of row houses. A man stood framed between a doorway and a shuttered window, leaning against one of the houses. The door was red, the shutters green. The man was trim and pale and clean. He shimmered. John approached the man and leaned where he leaned. The man did not smell like lilacs or lavender. And yet. The bricks were warm and solid. They smelled of sun and oil and smoke. Without a word, the pair slipped inside the red door.
Later John would try to piece together the events of the day following his wife’s departure, though for the life of him, he could
