Annabel - Kathleen Winter [10]
The inside of the church was something she could not stand that day. She liked to sing inside it on other days, and was part of the small choir, and wore the same choir robes as everyone else. But today she could not go in. She did not want to contain her thoughts about Graham and Annabel inside the walls, which shut out the light this spring day, and which smelled of old wooden pews and the fragrant paper of ancient prayer books and the soap and perfume of people who had washed themselves clean enough to come to a religious ritual. She could not bear to have the lives of her husband and daughter reduced to this ritual when out here the sun and air were boundless, and insects had begun to inhabit the place again after the long winter, and there was, even though Graham and Annabel had drowned, glad birdsong. This was the litany she wanted to hear. She could not understand it, but she wanted to hear it, and she would not hear it if she went inside.
Through the church walls she could hear what was inside if she leaned back and touched the boards — there was a low murmur, a strain of sad music from the pedal organ Wilhelmina Simpson had brought in from Boston and on which she would soon play “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” as Easter Sunday would be early this year, the moon almost full now and March not yet ended. The people inside that church did not realize that Thomasina would be able to sing resurrection anthems when Easter came. They did not know that her idea of resurrection was different from that of the Church, as were her ideas of Christ, of light, of immortality and holiness. Christ, for Thomasina, was not so much a person as an opening in the grass, a patch of sun, a warm spot in the loneliness. She had never been a person who respected stained glass or altars. That butterfly’s small early wings were her stained glass. That patch of earth, peeping through the melting snow, was her altar. Her mother had not called her Thomasina for nothing. “If you were a boy,” her mother had said when she was young, “I was going to call you Doubting Thomas, after the disciple who wanted to see Christ’s nail marks with his own eyes. But you were a girl. So I called you Doubting Thomasina.”
After the funeral, at which Wilhelmina Simpson played Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” the hymn she played at every funeral, the people walked down the hill to the cemetery, and the gravediggers, Simon Montague and Harold Pierson, lowered the coffins into the graves, and Thomasina watched the part of the procession visible from her sunlit corner. She stood there, the wind blowing her coat, a faintly ominous vision, a figure who had stepped out of the bounds of what was normal for people in this place. Those who stole a look in her direction felt someone should do something, someone should go to her, put an arm around her and guide her into the group; after all, they were supposed to be mourning with her. They thought someone should do this, but nobody did. When the handfuls of earth had been thrown into the graves, the crowd walked up to the tiny community hall across the road from the church, and they walked the way they had descended, along the east and north walls, not the south and west walls at whose corner Thomasina stood — all except Jacinta, who handed the baby to Treadway.
“Go in and get a sandwich and tea,” she told Treadway. “Talk to Harold Pierson about shovelling the ice off Thomasina’s roof before it slides off in a sheet and kills her.”
Jacinta picked her way through last year’s thistles. Snow filtered into her ankle-boots