“She’s a lovely woman.”

“Oh, none of that! She’s a siren!”

Atticus shot him a fierce glance and said, “I got other things on my mind.”

“I have offended your courtliness, haven’t I.”

Atticus failed to reply.

Stuart’s face changed and they walked in silence for a few minutes. And he asked, “How old are you, Atticus?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“I shall be sixty-four in May. And I fear I shan’t be much older.” Stuart stopped by the party-colored cart of a man selling paper cones of green ice and asked, “Will you permit me?”

“Okay.”

Stuart held up two fingers, saying “Dos,” and passed one cone to him. The green was peppermint and the ice was a nice pain to his teeth, but only after he’d chewed up the greater part of it did he wonder if the ice water was pure. Stuart sipped at his and tipped his nose toward a pink church that was trumped up with European lacework and Gothic belfries and spires. “Such fraudulence,” he said. “La parroquia. Architectural gumbo.”

A five- or six-year-old boy offered to polish his shoes, but Stuart stepped aside and said, “No, no me gusta.” The hurt boy looked at Atticus, but he shook his head.

Stuart said, “Renata hates Cipiano; he finds too many reasons to touch her. Not that I blame him.” He looked at the jardín just across from the church. Wide laurel trees shaded the sidewalks, and green flower beds circled the great white gazebo in the center. Young teenaged girls in the kinds of white dresses one sees at First Communions were strolling in groups of four or five while boys hunting novias hung back and talked about them. Stuart asked, “Are you in love, Atticus?”

“Was. With my wife. And I got grandkids now.”

“But it’s not the same, is it.” Hearing nothing from him, he said, “I have often wished I weren’t in love. I often find the feeling indistinguishable from hurt.”

Stuart looked up at the parish church and said, “You go ahead, all right? I have to have a cigarette.”

Atticus walked past him, sidestepping between halted cars and carts and crossing over to the great plaza in front of the church. A hospital clinic had been set up inside the old rectory. Crowding outside it were pregnant women, a dark man with a goiter in his neck like a plum, a girl with a cotton patch over her mouth, and a stump of a man with toes that were only partly covered by a rolled-up and bloody sock. On the steps of the Church of the Resurrection was a hunched woman so wrapped in a blue serape that she was no more than a nose and an open hand, and in the dark pews inside were more old women with rosaries, harshly whispering their prayers. Campesinos were stacking unshucked corn on a linen altar cloth below a statue of Saint Martin de Porres, and tacked up over a side altar were tin cards with childlike illustrations of fractured bones or maladies or crippled people in sickbeds. Words on the tin cards either sought the saint’s help or gave thanks for the cure that came. Up near the main altar the Mexican pallbearers were setting the painted coffin down in the Saint Joseph side chapel as a handsome Mexican priest lighted candles with a match. And there, too, were twenty Americans, retirees, former college students, friends from the bars and cantinas.

Atticus knelt to pray and slid his hat underneath the chair. After he was sitting, Renata softly came up from behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. She wore an informal black silk jacket and full print skirt, and a perfume he thought might have been the kind Serena wore. She kissed his cheek and said, “I’m not Catholic. Is it okay if I sit up here?”

“Oh sure.” She sat and he felt her forearm gently touch his own and not flinch away. And he found himself fondly gazing at a face that was haloed by the brilliant stained-glass windows. “You clean up real good,” he whispered.

She flushed and smiled.

A girl of no more than eight sashayed up and down the nave with a wide push broom that skidded on top of a towel. The high altar held a six-foot-high statue of

Christ in his funeral sheet, floating out of his sepulchre and looking up to Heaven. Awkwardly pictured on the great wall behind him were choirs of angels, white clouds, and blue sky. And in the high altar’s sacristy was a glaring Mayan boy of seventeen or so in a grayed white western shirt and frayed blue jeans. Atticus wasn’t sure if it was himself the kid was staring at or not, and then finally the heat in his look flamed out and he withdrew.

Renata was prim beside him. Without emotion. She stared at the painted black coffin as though she were a photograph of stillness and moderation. And then a priest in black vestments walked to the Saint Joseph side altar and all the people stood up. The priest crossed himself and raised up his hands in order to invoke God’s presence, saying the word Señor for “Lord,” but only a few people there knew the Spanish responses.

Colorado was in his head, Saint Mary’s church bright and beautiful and filled to bursting with his neighbors and friends, Serena in the pink casket and Frank holding up pretty good while Scott fell apart with tears, his hands held to his face through the funeral, fourteen black stitches above his left eyebrow, a hard plastic neck brace on. Their hands happened to touch at the funeral and Atticus never forgave himself for sliding his hand away.

Stuart went up to the front at the gospel and interpreted in English as the priest read from Saint John: how Jesus wept when he heard Lazarus was dead, and then ordered the stone to be taken away from the tomb, and cried out for Lazarus to come forth. And Lazarus came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, so that Jesus said to loosen the windings and let Lazarus go free.

And then, for the homily, Stuart Chandler hooked on heavy black spectacles and unfolded a sheet of paper that trembled in his hands. Without looking up, he said, “I’ll be reading a hymn from the Madrid Codex, a hymn that was sung in the City of the Gods, Teotihuacán, in the presence of the dead.” And he read: “‘Thus the dead were addressed when they died. If it was a man, they spoke to him, invoked him as a divine being, in the name of a pheasant; if it was a woman, in the name of owl; and they said to them: ‘Awaken, already the sky is tinged with red, already the dawn has come, already the flame-colored pheasants are singing, the fire-colored swallows, already the butterflies are on the wing.’ For this reason the ancient ones said, he who has died, he becomes a god. They said: ‘He became a god there,’ which means that he died.’”

And then there was the cemetery. The cemetery. And skull candles on some graves, teacups of candies, a carnival of piping and crepe and shot-glass votive lights, crucifixes at angles in the blond grass, rosaries like string neckties on the gray stones, a full toy shop of Jesus and Mary dolls. Twenty people stood around an open pit in the one P.M. sun, talking about practical matters, saying hello to old friends; and Atticus kept telling himself it was only temporary, the box would be raised up, the body shipped, and his son would be put to rest on Coyote Hill where the Dutch elm looked like a cleaning woman hanging up sheets in the wind. The Mexican priest said in unfamiliar Spanish the Catholic prayers of burial that were too familiar to Atticus, and then the priest stepped away and the crowd broke apart and kind people Atticus didn’t know said good-bye or wished they could’ve met him under happier circumstances.

Renata waited until he raised up from a last prayer and then said, “We have the day.”

“What I’d like to do is look at his studio.”

She hesitated before saying, “Yes. Good idea.”

She took him in the old red Volkswagen, haltingly riding through Resurrección. Renata got out of her silk jacket and shifted to second gear in order to go around a box-framed garbage truck that up north would have been used to ship hogs. A heavy man in green hip waders was standing knee-deep in a high tonnage of trash, sorting whiskey bottles, looking into a car battery and stacking it next to a crippled electric fan, ripping off the back of a radio in order to poke the tubes inside.

Tags: Ron Hansen Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net