Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,41

on the wash shed of the kitchen, and one landed on a hut that wasn’t even Tim’s but had an air conditioner and the fellow was away and so Tim was using it. Even the army morticians, with all their glue and stuffing and wax, couldn’t make him resemble a human being. His remains were delivered to Zachary in a closed coffin draped with an American flag, which was how he was displayed on the altar of St. Aloysius Catholic Church that chilly winter day between Christmas and New Year 1973.

Holiday decorations were still up, evergreen wreaths on the walls, a nativity scene at the front of the church. I recognized some of Tim’s old high school buddies and a few of his relatives who’d driven in from Lafayette. I wondered how Jack would get through it, remembering his wife lying in the same spot on the same altar four years ago. “First Suzy and now this,” people whispered. “Good Lord.”

Unlike the first, this service was a stark, brief affair with no flowers, no incense, no organist. The lights of the church hadn’t even been turned on, as I recall, and the only illumination was a watery glow of red, blue, and yellow seeping through the stained-glass windows and spilling across the wooden pews and floors that damp gray afternoon. I sat next to Jack in the front row because he asked me to. We barely spoke, and when we did it was mostly to exchange factual and necessary information: go here, do this, give that lady a hand, would you. Jack didn’t allow a sermon from the priest, just the minimum required words to send the soul to heaven. In a moment of terrible insight during the prayers and sniffling, I recognized this service to be the exact opposite of the service that Tim had always dreamed of for his homecoming: sorrow instead of joy, an end instead of a beginning, and one instead of two at the altar.

Soon we were lining up to pay our respects. Nearing the coffin, I tried to picture Tim’s soul rising to heaven. His body would be smooth and pure as I remembered it, but transparent. The ghost-soul of Tim would be met in the sky by Saint Michael, who would escort him up past the clouds, through dark space and stars, bypassing purgatory to ascend swiftly into the radiant sphere of heaven, where, the nuns assured us, the blessed lived in supreme happiness in the presence of God forever and ever.

But as I touched my lips to the dark wood of the casket, I couldn’t hold on to this vision. I was conscious only of the unnatural gloss of the wood, and of the creak of the floorboards behind me, and of the priest standing to one side coughing and rustling his vestments. He might have been a man waiting at a service station to have a tire changed. There was nothing sacred there that day. What I mean to say is, as far as I was concerned, God has vanished, flown far away, leaving us poor human beings with nothing more than pieces of charred bone and flesh in a wooden box. That’s all it was.

At the cemetery, Jack stood back blinking as the coffin was settled in the dirt in front of his wife’s marble memorial. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands—to let them hang at his sides, or put them in his pockets, or fold them below his waist as the priest was doing. The clouds of his breath huffed in front of his gray face. He looked all of a sudden like a brittle, lost old man, and if I felt anything at all that day, it was a soft, vague pity for Jack. The undertaker was standing by with the shovel, and Jack obligingly took it in hand to toss the first clod of dirt into the hole. It landed with a flop on top of the coffin, and Jack passed back the shovel. A black crow cawed impatiently from the branch of a nearby pine, telling us to hurry up and get it over with.

I hadn’t expected to accompany Jack back to his trailer that evening, but after all the friends had left and the relatives had gone back to Lafayette, there was no one left to care for him but me. The trailer was cluttered and cheerless, even smaller than I remembered it. I cooked dinner for him and tried