It was the church where Henry had gone with his mother as a child. He’d sent Jimmy up to the Sunday School and then had walked around to the front and started in himself to listen to the service. There were people on the steps, not a soul he knew, mostly young or middle-aged, one old, old man — all beautiful as lovers, as it seemed to him, in their Sunday clothes, and all happy-looking, laughing, talking — so happy he thought they must really know what he’d guessed they knew, or not knew, felt: And he had felt humble, ashamed of his monstrous bulk and remoteness, and had crossed the street to look at the washing machines in the Salway Store window until they’d gone in. Then, steeling himself, he crossed again quickly. When he went from the sunlit street to the foyer it was so dark at first he could barely see, but even so he noticed at once a frail, coy-looking elderly woman in a dark blue dress, white hat, white gloves, and he knew by instinct that the woman was there to greet him. His heart leaped, and he snapped his fingers as if he’d just remembered something and turned on his heel and fled back into the light.
For maybe fifteen minutes he walked up and down on the sidewalk, sometimes looking at the maple trees on the church lawn, the gray stone walls, the arched windows, sometimes studying the washing machines, his blood all the while in such agitation he was afraid he might have an attack. When he got up his courage to try it again the woman was gone and the foyer was empty except for the ushers. He could hear the minister praying inside. The ushers left him to himself, and he went to the table where pamphlets were laid out. He picked up the first one that caught his eye, Predestination? in bright red on yellow, and carried it over to the door to leaf through it. It upset him. According to the pamphlet all Christians believed in Predestination, works were of no account whatever (What is human righteousness beside the perfect righteousness of God? it said), and the whole secret was to renounce the arrogant wish for free will and joyfully accept God’s Plan. When he finished reading his hands were shaking. It wasn’t so much that he disagreed; he couldn’t tell whether he agreed or not. He minded the fact that they’d spelled it out: It was not what he wanted, what he wanted was — God knew. “Idealists,” his father would have said: ministers, or the New York State troopers, or Welshmen who ran their families like the army. And then a new thought had come to him. Surely there weren’t ten people in there who knew Predestination from a turnip. They accepted whatever the minister said, and forgot about it, and carried away a vague feeling that it was better to be good than bad, unselfish than selfish, if a man could keep his mind on it, and that somehow things made sense — like the hymn they were singing now, “Faith of our Fathers,” whatever that was, not that it mattered, finally, in the least. And he felt unworthy to go where they were worshipping, and he left again to go stand humbly by the washing machines, waiting for Jimmy.
That afternoon he’d gone hunting again, his fat hands loving on the shotgun, and had shot three squirrels that seemed to him to dance like fire on the limbs. He became what he was, with a gun in his hands: doom and doomed and serene.
They reached the bottom of the slope and rested awhile. Henry took one of his pills, and Jimmy held the gun for him, making a show of holding it very carefully, the way Henry had taught him, the barrel aimed away and toward the ground. The earth was softer here and the grass less brittle, thick and rich yellow-green, shaded by beeches. There was a horse’s skull here somewhere, but he couldn’t think where. Hunting through the grass with his foot, he found a pair of ladies’ underpants, and he covered them up again quickly, embarrassed. They started up the hill. Above them, among the tombstones, the old man and the old woman stood solemn and silent, watching them come near.
4
They were digging up the body of their son. He’d died at fourteen, fifty years ago, and at that time they’d lived around these parts. Now they lived in Rochester, and since they were getting on in years, coming to the time when they had to take some thought about their final rest, they’d decided to move him to where they were going, a plot in a very nice cemetery on a hillside overlooking the Genesee. The woman was ninety-two, the man eighty-seven; their clothes hung on them like clothes on hangers. Inside his hat, and hanging down over his ears, the man had burdock leaves, and under the burdock leaves thick white hair. He had a brown, unadorned cane with a rubber tip. His skin was white as paper, with splotches on it, and he had white-blue eyes that bulged in his head like the eyes of a skittish horse. He made you think of a preacher, one of the old-timers, not the kind that cowered when he came to your door. The woman looked like a small, addled witch — sharp features, tiny black eyes that glinted like needles, a hundred thousand dirty-looking wrinkles from her collarbone to her hairline. She looked as if she had no water left in all her body, but the rims of her eyes were red. Jimmy clung with one hand to Henry’s belt and watched them.
“I tell Walt it don’t much matter where he lays,” the woman said, “his soul’s in Glory.” She stood sideways to Henry, her big-knuckled hands folded two inches or so below her chin, and she spoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed, as if intently, on the ground.
“Mmm,” Henry said, nodding, thinking about it.
The old man waved at her as if to hit her. “Oh, shut up,” he said. Then, to Henry: “She’s crazy. Always has been.”
“Walt don’t believe in God,” the old woman said. She smiled, sly, still looking at the ground.
Jimmy leaned forward to look around Henry at the grave-diggers. Henry put his hand on the boy’s head, glad to have an excuse to make no comment.
“He’s dead and rotten,” the old man said. He jerked his arm, with his cane dangling from the end of it, in the general direction of the grave. Again, however incongruously, he had the look of a hell-fire preacher. He said, “Now, you shut up.”
Henry cleared his throat, preparing to leave. “Well—” he said. He glanced over at the grave-diggers. One of the two men was down in the hole, throwing the dirt up — all you could see of him now was his hat. The other man stood at one corner, poking with a crowbar. Beyond them the hillside sloped away in sunlight and shadow, from thick glossy headstones to the taller, narrower markers over in the older section, past the statue of the Kunzmuller girl and the Kendall crypt with pine trees around it, and down to the creek, where the woods began. The shadow of a crow swept over the grass and out of sight in the trees, incredibly swift. Jimmy left Henry’s side now and walked a few feet toward the grave. He stood with his hands behind his back and watched.
“Fine boy you got there,” the old man yelled.
“Yes, he is,” Henry said, grinning.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the old woman said. She separated her hands for a minute, and the fingers shook.
Henry rubbed his nose and said nothing.
“She’s crazy,” the old man said.
“I believe in the resurrected Lord,” she said.
Henry looked away, over in the direction of the old people’s car. It was an old green Hudson, as big and square as a truck. It had a stubborn look, a kind of solid inflexibility that was vaguely impressive. He wondered how people as old as they were could get it to go around corners. He said, “I guess we’d better be getting on home.” He took a step toward Jimmy, but the old man raised his arm.
“My boy,” he said, then hesitated a moment, “—was fourteen.”