folk songs. He told about how she longed to see the ocean, and here he fell into the story without meaning to. They had started on a trip to Florida a few years before Seth was born but broke down right outside Seaforth, only a hundred miles away. “The money for the trip went to pay for a new tranny instead. At the motel that night she filled the tub, added in bath salts. We put on our suits and climbed in.” He smiled at the memory. “Sure, she cried a little, but then she shut her eyes. ‘Tell me how it is,’ she said. Well, I had never been, so I did my best.”
A knock came at the door, Dr. Salverson with his news, but they already knew what he had to say.
“MR. FALLON? SETH?” THE pastor’s voice calling him by his Christian name startled Grizz. No one called him Seth anymore. The pastor must have heard the door open and come looking. He didn’t look much older than an altar boy himself, a thin spiderweb of a beard around his mouth, pale hair and skin. His eyes skimmed over Grizz, noting the mud spattering his jeans, the dirt around his collar, his very nails black with it.
“I’ve come to ask you something,” Grizz said.
“Let’s go to my office and talk.”
They stopped at a fountain where the pastor took a paper cup from a dispenser and filled it to offer to Grizz. After Grizz refused, they continued down the hallway to the pastor’s office, where he gestured toward a seat and retreated behind his desk. “I want to tell you how sorry I am about your son,” he said as he sat down in his swivel chair.
Grizz stayed standing but took off his seed cap and kneaded it in his hands. “I’d like you to come out to my property and do a private ceremony. A cleansing or blessing to get rid of bad spirits. Whatever you people call it. I’m asking on behalf of the boy’s mother.”
Pastor Logan coughed, then sipped some of his water, his frown deepening. “You mean like an exorcism? I don’t know. It’s not really something Lutherans do. But maybe after the funeral—”
“There isn’t going to be any funeral.”
“Pardon?”
“Not here. My son won’t be buried with your suicides.”
Pastor Logan swiveled in his chair, nervous. “You got the permit the county said you were after?”
“No.”
“Then he’s going to be cremated?”
“They didn’t mention that option at the funeral home.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for some time now. It might be a good way around this … impasse.”
Grizz continued to twist his hat in his hands. “I haven’t met anyone who buries people that way.” He thought of his uncle Harry who lost his hand in an accident with the corn picker. He retrieved it and kept it up in his icebox all his life, among the rump roasts and frozen peas. When he died, he was buried with it so the Lord could resurrect him properly for Judgment Day.
Logan nodded and went on. “Regarding your son, I am bound by the church’s rules and bylaws, like it or not. What I mean is that if Seth was cremated we could put all of this behind us.”
Grizz felt his mind clicking, justifying his actions. “You’re not following. How would he be resurrected then, if he was only ashes?”
“I follow. But God doesn’t play by our rules. It says in the Bible that we will be given new bodies in heaven. New bodies, a new earth.”
Grizz hadn’t come to argue over such things. Cremation, strangely, hadn’t crossed his mind. It was not something done in his experience. You died and you were put in a box and your place in death reflected your place in life. To be ashes, dust. It was what people did in the Cities. Or like the Hindus or Vikings. But it didn’t matter, not after what he’d done. “What I am asking is for you to come out to the house and speak a few words.”
The pastor began to massage the center of his forehead. “There is something I’m not understanding here.”
Even in his tiredness Grizz could see why. “Headache?”
“It feels like nails were driven there.”
“You been drinking the water from that fountain regular-like?”
“Sure.”
Grizz said nothing.
“Is there something wrong with this water?”
“Well, for one thing it’s so full of minerals you could build a bridge with it. There’s rust in it, and even if the fountain is new, the pipes that bring the