"He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You know about that. He's always traveling, on the move, researching. It's not my fault… being out of touch with him."
Reluctantly, Devokowski nodded. "I saw the piece about him in People a few months ago."
P.J. Shannon was the quintessential writer of life on the road, the most famous literary Gypsy since Jack Kerouac.
"He should come home for a while," Devokowski said, "maybe write another book about Asherville. I still think that was his best. When he hears about your dad, poor P.J., he's going to be broken up real bad. P.J. really loved your dad."
So did I, Joey thought, but he didn't say it. Given his actions over the past twenty years, he wouldn't be believed. But he had loved Dan Shannon. God, yes. And he'd loved his mother, Kathleen — whose funeral he had avoided and to whose deathbed he had never gone.
"P.J. visited just in August. Stayed about a week. Your dad took him all over, showing him off. He was so proud, your dad."
Devokowski's assistant, an intense young man in a dark suit, entered the far end of the hallway. He spoke in a practiced hush: "Sir, it's time to transport the deceased to Our Lady."
Devokowski checked his watch. To Joey, he said, "You're going to the Mass?"
"Yes, of course."
The funeral director nodded and turned away, conveying by body language that this particular son of Dan Shannon had not earned the right to add "of course" to his answer.
Outside, the sky looked burnt out, all black char and thick gray ashes, but it was heavy with rain.
Joey hoped that the lull in the storm would last through the Mass and the graveside service.
On the street, as he was approaching his parked car from behind, heading for the driver's door, the trunk popped open by itself and the lid eased up a few inches. From the dark interior, a slender hand reached feebly toward him, as if in desperation, beseechingly. A woman's hand. The thumb was broken and hanging at a queer angle, and blood dripped from the torn fingernails.
Around him, Asherville seemed to fall under a dark enchantment. The wind died. The clouds, which had been moving ceaselessly out of the northwest, were suddenly as unchanging as the vaulted ceiling of Hell. All was lifeless. Silence reigned. Joey was frozen by shock and cold fear. Only the hand moved, only the hand was alive, and only the hand's pathetic groping for salvation had any meaning or importance in a world turned to stone.
Joey couldn't bear the sight of the dangling thumb, the torn nails, the slow drip-drip of blood — but he felt powerfully compelled to stare. He knew that it was the woman in the transparent gown, come out of his dream from the night before, into the waking world, though such a thing was not possible.
Reaching out from the shadow of the trunk lid, the hand slowly turned palm up. In the center was a spot of blood and a puncture wound that might have been made by a nail.
Strangely, when Joey closed his eyes against the horror before him, he could see the sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows as clearly as if he were standing upon the altar platform at that very moment. A silvery ringing of sacred bells broke the silence, but it was not a real sound in that October afternoon; they rang out of his memory, from morning Masses in the distant past. Through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. He saw the chalice gleaming with the reflections of candle flames. The wafer of the host was held high in the priest's hands. Joey strained hard to detect the moment of transubstantiation. The moment when hope was fulfilled, faith rewarded. The split instant of perfect mystery: wine into blood. Is there hope for the world, for lost men like me?
The images in his mind became as unbearable as the sight of the blood-smeared hand, and he opened his eyes. The hand was gone. The trunk lid was closed. The wind was blowing again, and the dark clouds rolled out of the northwest, and in the distance a dog barked.
The trunk had never actually popped open, and the hand had never reached toward him. Hallucination.
He raised his own hands and gazed at them as though they were the hands of a stranger. They were trembling badly.
Delirium tremens. The shakes. Visions of things crawling out of the walls. In this case, out of a car trunk. All drunks had them from time to time — especially when they tried to give up the bottle.
In the car, he withdrew a flask from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. He stared at it for a long time. Finally he unscrewed the cap, took a whiff of the whiskey, and brought it to his lips.
Either he had stood half mesmerized by the car trunk far longer than he'd realized or he had sat for an awfully long time with the flask, struggling against the urge to open it, because the funeral-home hearse pulled out of the driveway and turned right, heading across town toward Our Lady of Sorrows. Enough time had passed for his father's casket to be transferred from the viewing room.
Joey wanted to be sober for the funeral Mass. He wanted that more than he had wanted anything in a long time.
Without taking a drink, he screwed the cap back onto the flask and returned the flask to his pocket.
He started the car, caught up with the hearse, and followed it to the church.
More than once during the drive, he imagined that he heard something moving in the trunk of the car. A muffled thump. A tapping. A faint, cold, hollow cry.
OUR LADY OF SORROWS WAS AS HE REMEMBERED IT: DARK WOOD lovingly polished to a satiny sheen; stained-glass windows waiting only for the appearance of the sun to paint bright images of compassion and salvation across the pews in the nave; groin vaults receding into blue shadows above; the air woven through with a tapestry of odors — lemon-oil furniture polish, incense, hot candle wax.
Joey sat in the last pew, hoping that no one would recognize him. He had no friends in Asherville any more. And without a long drink from his flask of whiskey, he wasn't prepared to endure the looks of scorn and disdain that he was sure to receive and that, in fact, he deserved.
More than two hundred people attended the service, and to Joey the mood seemed even more somber than could be expected at a funeral. Dan Shannon had been well and widely liked, and he would be missed.
Many of the women blotted their eyes with handkerchiefs, but the men were all dry eyed. In Asherville, the men never wept publicly and rarely in private. Although none had worked the mines in more than twenty years, they came from generations of miners who had lived in constant expectation of tragedy, of friends and loved ones lost to cave-ins and explosions and early-onset black-lung disease. Theirs was a culture that not only valued stoicism but could never have existed without it.
Keep your feelings to yourself. Don't burden your friends and family with your own fear and anguish. Endure. That was the creed of Asherville, a guiding morality stronger even than that which was taught by the rector of Our Lady and the two-thousand-year-old faith that he served.
The Mass was the first that Joey had attended in twenty years. Evidently at the insistence of the parishioners, it was a classic Mass in Latin, with the grace and eloquence that had been lost when the Church had gone trendy back in the sixties.
The beauty of the Mass did not affect him, did not warm him. By his own actions and desire over the past twenty years, he had placed himself outside the art of faith, and now he could relate to it only in the manner of a man who studies a fine painting through the window of a gallery, his perception hampered by distorting reflections on the glass.
The Mass was beautiful, but it was a cold beauty. Like that of winter light on polished steel. An Arctic vista.