“You want me to explain?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” said George. “You’re going to make it yourself?”
“I might.”
George sighed, but she explained nonetheless.
“So, you need a boiling fowl, and then you stuff the neck with dumpling ingredients, stitched at both ends, and you boil that up alongside it.”
“Right.”
“And you save the fat.”
“Schmaltz?” said Israel.
“Bless you,” said George. “And then you chop the onion, cook it in the fat.”
“OK,” said Israel.
“Then you take the livers.”
“Right.”
“And you add them.”
“OK.”
“Cook them. And then I add some hard-boiled eggs.”
She raised her hands in a gesture that suggested completion.
“And that’s it?” said Israel.
“Pretty much.”
“That’s delicious,” said Israel.
“Chickens are not what they were,” piped up old Mr. Devine from his seat. “The auld Sussex cockerel. Breastbone ye could shave with.”
“Right.”
“It’s all the thigh now. Breast and thigh. Breasts like towers. Sin and greed and wickedness.”
“Uh-huh,” said Israel.
He turned his back to old Mr. Devine and helped George to wrap kitchen foil around platters of sandwiches.
“So. Are you OK, Armstrong?” she asked, tucking up the final platter.
“Yes, I’m fine,” said Israel. “Totally fine. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“It’s going to be a difficult day,” said Israel.
“Yes,” agreed George.
“We’re all going to miss Pearce.”
“Yes we are,” said George, giving a little cough.
“‘Dear friends,’” said old Mr. Devine, “‘do not be surprised at the painful trial that ye are suffering as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ.’”
“Granda!” said George.
“1 Peter 4:12,” said old Mr. Devine, with a distinctly self-satisfied air.
“Right. And that’s meant to be some sort of comfort, is it?”
“It doesn’t do a Christian good to grieve,” said old Mr. Devine.
“All right,” said George. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more from you today. Do you understand?”
Mr. Devine narrowed his eyes.
“Let’s go,” said George. “Or we’ll be late.”
So, Israel drove to Pearce Pyper’s funeral with George and old Mr. Devine, sitting on the backseat, in total silence, surrounded by sandwiches, and bread, and chicken liver pâté.
Outside Tumdrum Presbyterian there were crowds of mourners. Men with white hair. Women in hats. Gray stone buildings all around, the sky an eggshell blue; it was as though Pearce himself had painted the scene. Israel saw Linda; said hello to Seamus Fitzgibbons, Green Party candidate; embraced Minnie; nodded to Zelda; shook hands with Mrs. Onions; avoided Maurice Morris and Lyndsay and Mrs. Morris; and greeted at least half of the mobile library’s regular clientele, who had turned out in force to say good-bye to Pearce. Veronica cut him dead. The talk was of the day’s election and the return of Lyndsay Morris; Israel and Ted were congratulated on having helped find her.
At two thirty the organ music began, and Pearce’s coffin was taken into the church, Israel one of the pallbearers, along with Brownie-who’d made it back from university-and a group of Pearce’s friends, artists and aristocrats mostly, and some of them both, not the kind of people you saw every day around Tumdrum, people who wore hand-benched shoes and inherited clothes and novelty headgear. One man had a handlebar mustache; another sported a long gray ponytail and wore battered brown cowboy boots; another wore a tamo’-shanter and a kilt. The rich, it seems, wear fancy dress to a funeral. Tumdrum’s Presbyterians wear black.
Israel had never carried a coffin before. He’d been too young when his father died, and at subsequent funerals there had always been others to take the burden. The coffin weighed more than he’d expected.
“On my count, gents,” said the undertaker, and on his count they made their slow, steady procession into the church, laying Pearce on a bier at the front, and the congregation filed in behind and sat down, and the Reverend Roberts stood up and led them in prayer, and then he began to speak.
“A Christian funeral,” he said, without any introduction or ado, “is a service of worship in which God’s people witness to their faith in the hope of the Gospel, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”
People gulped and shifted in their seats as they began to adjust to the tone and the rhythm of what they were a part of. Israel took a deep breath.
“A funeral,” continued the Reverend Roberts, “is God’s way of bringing comfort to the hearts of those who mourn.” He paused. “At a funeral we read the Scriptures, and prayer is offered, and praises are sung.” Another pause. “And remembrance is cherished.” You could hear the sound of the cars outside the church, in the main square, with people going about their business, as if nothing had happened, as if life were going on as normal. “A funeral is an occasion when we, by the grace of God, bless the name of the One who gives and who takes away. Though today we mourn our loss and remember our loved one, our eyes remain fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of the faith.” Israel felt a tightness in his chest and his throat. He tried to concentrate on the Reverend Roberts’s oratorical swing-the alliteration, the contrasts, his little triads of phrases.
Then they sang a hymn, “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended, the Darkness Falls at Thy Behest,” and Israel felt a prickling around his eyes, the early signs of tears. And then they prayed. And then there was a reading. An old friend of Pearce’s-an old, old man with a shaky voice. “A reading,” he wobbled, “from the Gospel of John, chapter fourteen.” It wasn’t the words. It was the pathos of the words being spoken, the ceremony. Israel felt himself on the brink.
And then the Reverend Roberts stood up again to speak.
“Pearce Aloysius Pyper,” began the Reverend Roberts in sonorous tones, pausing respectfully between each word-and Israel was crying now, without shame. “Our dear friend Pearce was born on the twenty-sixth of June 1918, in the last months of the First World War. He was the third child of the Reverend Julian and Margaret Pyper. They were a privileged family-Pearce’s mother, Margaret, being a descendant of the earls of Tyrone-who had a long history of serving the poor through good works. Margaret was a suffragette, and Pearce would often recall in later years his memories of the destitute and the homeless coming to his father for assistance at the rectory in Ballycastle. Pearce was sent to Sherborne preparatory school, in England, and then to Marlborough, and from there on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as he was always glad to report, he graduated with what he called the poet’s degree: a Third.” There was wry laughter among the university-educated in the congregation. “On coming down from university Pearce found work as a teacher before becoming a commissioned officer in the Second Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles. He was most proud in his life, he said, of having gained the Distinguished Conduct Medal-during the Second World War, for his bravery during some of the fiercest fighting following the invasion of Dunkirk.”
The congregation was able to relax now into the flow of the Reverend Roberts’s narrative. Israel found himself breathing more easily.
“After the war Pearce married Lillian Jabotinsky, the celebrated soprano, and they had two sons, both of whom, alas, predeceased their father. Pearce and Lillian’s elder son, Jacob, whom some of you will doubtless remember, became a surgeon and died aged only thirty-three, in a car crash, in 1983. Their younger son, Leon, was a conservator at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and he, alas, died of a brain hemorrhage in 1999. Pearce was enormously proud of his children, and their early and tragic deaths brought him a great sadness. We should perhaps remember today that this was a man”-and here the Reverend Roberts nodded toward Pearce’s coffin-“who was not himself unacquainted with grief.”