His mother comes through the door first; her eyes sweep the line of them and she steps toward him with reaching curved arms. "Hassy, what have they done to you?" She asks this out loud and wraps him in a hug as if she would carry him back to the sky from which they have fallen.
This quick it opens, and seals shut again. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he pushes her away and stands to his full height. As if unaware of what she has said, his mother turns and embraces Janice. Pop, murmuring, shakes Springer's hand. Mim comes and touches Harry on the shoulder and then squats and whispers to Nelson, these two the youngest. All under him Harry feels these humans knit together. His wife and mother cling together. His mother began the embrace automatically but has breathed a great life of grief into it. Her face creases in pain; Janice, rumpled and smothered, yet responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the big—boned frame yearning against her. Mary Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height understands. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a woman like her and then had sensed that she too, having restored her son to himself, must be deserted.
He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her amts tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness. They of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, "My daughter," recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.
And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.
Eccles has arrived by some other entrance and from a far doorway beckons them. The seven of them file with Nelson into the room where the flowers wait, and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. Eccles reads. "I am the resurrection and the life, with the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die."
The angular words walk in Harry's head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility. Eccles doesn't; his face is humorless and tired. His voice is false. All these people are false: except his dead daughter, the white box with gold trim.
"He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom."
Shepherd, lamb, amts: Harry's eyes fill with tears. It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at last the saltwater gets into his eyes. His daughter is dead: June gone from him; his heart swims in loss, that had skimmed over it before, dives deeper and deeper into the limitless volume of loss. Never hear her cry again, never see her marbled skin again, never cup her faint weight in his arms again and watch the blue of her eyes wander in search of the source of his voice. Never, the word never stops, there is never a gap in its thickness.
They go to the cemetery. He and his father and Janice's father and the undertaker's man carry the white box to the hearse. There is weight to it but the weight is all wood. They get into their cars and drive through the streets uphill. The town hushes around them; a woman comes out on her porch with a basket of wash and waits there, a small boy stops himself in the middle of throwing a ball to watch them pass. They pass between two granite pillars linked by an arch of wrought iron. The cemetery is beautiful at four o'clock. Its nurtured green nap slopes down somewhat parallel to the rays of the sun. Tombstones cast long slate shadows. Up a crunching blue gravel lane the procession moves in second gear, its destination a meek green canopy smelling of earth and ferns. The cars stop; they get out. Beyond them at a distance stands a crescent sweep of black woods; the cemetery is high on the mountains, between the town and the forest. Below their feet chimneys smoke. A man on a power lawnmower rides between the worn teeth of tombstones near the far hedge. Swallows in a wide ball dip and toss themselves above a stone cottage, a crypt. The white coffin is artfully rolled on casters from the hearse's resonant body onto crimson straps that hold it above the small nearly square but deep—dug grave. The small creaks and breaths of effort scratch on a pane of silence. Silence. A cough. The flowers have followed them; here they are, densely banked within the tent. Behind Harry's feet a neat mound of dirt topped with squares of sod waits to be replaced and meanwhile breathes a deep word of earth. The undertaking men look pleased, their job near done, and fold their gloved hands in front of their flies. Silence.
"The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing."
Eccles' voice is fragile outdoors. The distant buzz of the power mower halts respectfully. Rabbit's chest vibrates with excitement and strength; he is sure his girl has ascended to Heaven. This feeling fills Eccles' recited words like a living body a skin. "O God, whose most dear Son did take little children into his arms and bless them; Give us Grace, we beseech thee, to entrust the soul of this child to thy never—failing care and love, and bring us all to the heavenly kingdom; through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen."
"Amen," Mrs. Springer whispers.
Yes. That is how it is. He feels them all, the heads as still around him as tombstones, he feels them all one, all one with the grass, with the hothouse flowers, all, the undertaker's men, the unseen caretaker who has halted his mower, all gathered into one here to give his unbaptized baby force to leap to Heaven.
An electric switch is turned, the straps begin to lower the casket into the grave and stop. Eccles makes a cross of sand on the lid. Stray grains roll one by one down the curved lid into the hole. An ungloved hand throws crumpled petals. "Deal graciously, we pray thee, with all those who mourn, that, casting every care on thee . . ." The straps whine again. Janice at his side staggers. He holds her arm and even through the cloth it feels hot. A small breath of wind makes the canopy fill and tuff. The smell of flowers rises toward them. ". . . and the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, now and for evermore. Amen."
Eccles closes his book. Harry's father and Janice's, standing side by side, look up and blink. The undertaker's men begin to be busy with their equipment, retrieving the straps from the hole. Mourners move into the sunshine. Casting every care on thee . . . The sky greets him. A strange strength sinks down into him. It is as if he has been crawling in a cave and now at last beyond the dark recession of crowding rocks he has seen a patch of light; he turns, and Janice's face, dumb with grief, blocks the light. "Don't look at me," he says. "I didn't kill her."
This comes out of his mouth clearly, in tune with the simplicity he feels now in everything. Heads talking softly snap around at a voice so sudden and cruel.
They misunderstand. He just wants this straight. He explains to the heads, "You all keep acting as if 1 did it. I wasn't anywhere near. She's the one." He turns to her, and her face, slack as if slapped, seems hopelessly removed from him. "Hey it's O.K.," he tells her. "You didn't mean to." He tries to take her hand but she snatches it back like from a trap and looks toward her parents, who step toward her.
His face burns. His embarrassment is savage. Forgiveness had been big in his heart and now it's hate. He hates his wife's face. She doesn't see. She had a chance to join him in truth, just the simplest factual truth, and she turned away. He sees that among the heads even his own mother's is horrified, blank with shock, a wall against him; she asks him what have they done to him and then she does it too. A suffocating sense of injustice blinds him. He turns and runs.