Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [45]
Now here it was again, that second impact. The New York Times, arbiter of what mattered, laid it out in black and white: two official fatalities. An ‘incidental’ drowning. The pathos of that incidental drowning floored her, and her carefully acquired strength cracked like glass. The tears came.
*
The funeral was well attended, the congregation unusual in its shabbiness, locals outnumbered by vets who showed up in force, along with wives and children. Between the hymns there was an old army song.
Ben’s parents, surfacing into grief, tried to connect with Nancy’s family but seemed unable to find the right words. They stood, grimly accepting condolences, kissed Joey briefly on the cheek and turned away, resentful of their loss. A tall blond boy trailing behind them stepped forward, smiling.
‘Nancy? You probably don’t remember me. Jack.’
Moving through the day like a sleepwalker, Nancy acknowledged the greeting mechanically:
‘Jack . . .’ She paused. ‘Ben’s cousin. Of course! You were at our wedding. Thank you for coming today.’ She turned. ‘And here’s Joey, you remember him.’
‘Hi,’ Jack said, not remembering.
By her side, Joey remained silent.
‘How you’ve grown,’ Nancy remarked, for something to say.
‘Runs in the family, I guess.’
He wanted to say more, tell her that because of Ben he had always known what he wanted to do with his life: join the navy, and as soon as he was old enough, that’s what he would be doing. And, he’d like to add, if Ben had stuck with the navy, he wouldn’t be lying in a coffin now; he’d be alive, safe at sea, wearing his white uniform. But even at fourteen he knew enough to know you didn’t say that to a widow, so he just offered condolences and backed off.
Daniels from the bank was absent, away on a business trip as he explained, when he wrote to commiserate. There were other absences; the better-off, uneasy with the politics of protest. But the marchers were different: they spoke of the dead man with the warmth of comrades.
‘We’d see him scribbling away there in his little notepad. Ben was quite a one for poetry.’
Ben? Nancy wondered if she was hearing right. Poetry?
Joey recalled that his father had once recited something that could have been poetry, something about a jumping frog . . . he said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most anything.
Always a quiet child, Joey had been virtually silent since the news came in. So now his father, too, was dead.
He was three when Nancy carried him on to the big ship and showed him the water glowing with green light in the darkness. Later they told him his mother was dead. He wasn’t sure what that meant at the time, but he was ten now and he knew about people dying. A man died and was put into a box and buried and everyone said what a good man he was.
His father is a good man. Was a good man. Joey found it hard to imagine him not being there. There was a peculiar, heavy feeling somewhere in his body that he couldn’t quite locate, the way it was when he tried to find a place that was itching. His nose ached and his throat hurt.
He moved closer to Nancy. The pew felt hard under him, but that just made the empty space on his other side, where his father should have been, even bigger. It felt lopsided and cold, like having the blanket slide off you in bed. When Ben came home from work he smelled of the truck, oily and strong, and sometimes of the farm stuff he had been shifting, but when he laughed his breath reminded Joey of the green beans and mint that Nancy sometimes put on the supper table, and when he remembered to look in on Joey to say goodnight, poking his head round the curtain of the closet bedroom, something of that minty smell lingered.
When the service was over, they moved on into the church hall and the shabby strangers stood about awkwardly. Nancy went round the room and shook hands with each in turn, and thanked them all for coming.
One or two of them told her about the night Ben died, and now she saw it through their eyes,