to the patio, and said something to Vivian, who reached up and took her hand. Carrying Jack’s Bible and the poems, Els led them all to the top of the garden, where Liz and Boney had set the coffin on some cinder blocks next to a long, narrow hole, the dirt piled behind it. At the coffin’s foot, Els had placed an arrangement of the garden’s wildest assortment of croton boughs. Pinky emerged from the bush and came through the back gate to join them.
The family of monkeys Els had dubbed “the bathroom gang” and tried to keep out of the restaurant were gathered on the back fence, a mute choir. Miranda, wearing a white caftan and turban, her nails painted bright red to match her lipstick, took her place at the foot of the coffin with her back to the sea. When she brought her palms together and nodded, Boney stepped forward and opened the lid.
Everyone gathered closer.
“Well, hello, Old Jack,” Boney said. “Looking nattier than the last time I saw you, or maybe ever.”
“She got all a’ his things in there,” Finney told Vivian. “I see a corner of that Anguilla T-shirt I brought him, what left of it after he wore it clean through. She got him laid out like a undertaker would do.”
“Liz, I want you to know all his shirts are in there,” Els said.
He stared toward the sea. “Seems a good time to part with them.”
Eulia stepped closer and looked in. “I told you to get rid of all a’ that. I thought you’d a’ burned it by now.”
“I wasn’t ready,” Els said. She placed the Bible in the coffin and arranged the empty sleeves over it.
“You want ol’ Jack to rest easy, you might not want to put that in there,” Boney said.
“Trust me, he’ll rest easier if this particular Bible is underground.” She looked around the group. “Anything else you want to send along with him?”
Boney tucked a dart into the jacket pocket, its flights a jaunty boutonniere. Jason unrolled a tattered burgee and placed it across the chest like a sash of honor.
“His drinkin’ flag,” he said.
Liz propped a Bob Marley CD next to the cap where the ear would be. “Dance the night away, mon,” he said.
“Doan never forget how I taught you to shape them boards,” Finney said, and placed a small block plane next to the jacket’s elbow.
“Eulia?” Miranda said.
“He got everything from me he gon’ get,” she said.
The monkeys began squabbling, and one jumped into a tree and screeched at the others. When the commotion subsided, everyone shuffled and looked at the ground.
“Read your piece, darlin’,” Miranda said.
Els stepped to the head of the coffin. It was a still, oppressive afternoon with enough of Montserrat’s ash in the air that the sun hung like an orange halfway down the sky. “As Jack wasn’t a religious man,” she said, “I thought I’d read a few lines of poetry that he might well have chosen for today.”
She began:
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;”
She caught a movement in the periphery. Jack appeared behind Eulia, his beard clipped, his hair shining; he, too, had cleaned up for the occasion. He’d never appeared in full daylight before. He stood with his hands clasped low, merriment at the corners of this mouth. Miranda glanced at Els and nodded. Peanut squirmed in Vivian’s lap and pointed at Jack, his expression crinkling toward a wail, but Jack raised a finger to his lips and Peanut looked at his mother and back at Jack and only stared. A quick scan of all the faces told Els that nobody else could see Jack, though Eulia hugged herself as if she was chilled.
Liz touched Els’s elbow. “You okay?”
“Brilliant,” she said, and continued reading:
“When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;”
Jack looked into the coffin and smiled. He stepped in front of Eulia and turned to face her, but she stared through him at the coffin, her mouth in a tight line, her nails digging into her upper arms. Jack reached toward her face, then lowered his arm. His shoulders drooped.
Eulia looked at Els.
“That all?”
Els resumed reading.
“Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
When she closed the book, Jack was gone. Peanut gasped and