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By Root 2457 0

the West. It was built in the nineteenth century with all the pomp and glory of old-fashioned religious architecture. It served a parish of mostly Mexican immigrants, and offered daily services in both English and Spanish. This was the church where Rita would take Lily on Sundays for confession and the service. Rita knew the priest—Father Malcolm—and Hilarious Lily’s face was familiar to him, always sitting beside Rita in the first or second pew from the pulpit, her hairy head lowered in sincere genuflection. Of course he agreed to say the liturgy for her husband. Why shouldn’t an ape go to his God as well? If he truly believed Christ was King of Men, then does it not follow, if one is also able to accept that all men are apes, that Christ was also King of the Apes? Much like Tarzan? I don’t know what his logic was (not that there necessarily had to be any), but he performed Hilarious Larry’s funeral rites as seriously as he would have for a deceased human. As Saint Francis—who could make peace between men and animals—did not find it odd to preach to birds and baptize the wolf, Father Malcolm did not find it odd to say the liturgy for an ape.

I had never been in a church before. There were not many people in attendance: just me, Lydia, Lily, Clever, Rita, the Lawrences, and several of the ranch workers. I was awed by the mysticism and magic of the ceremony. The costumes of the priest who delivered the homily and the men who walked up the aisle swinging jars of incense on thin golden chains, the recitations and chants in Latin, the beauty of it, all the colors and ornaments. I have never exactly wished that I was religious, but all the soul-stirring ritual of a Catholic funeral makes me understand something about it. How could anyone sit in a Catholic church and watch and listen with an open heart to the Requiem—the solemnity, the beautiful music, the Latin incantations—and walk away unmoved?

After the funeral we drove back home in a short chain of cars with the headlights on, where all that was mortal of Hilarious Larry was inhumed in a grave on the ranch grounds. Lily stood beside the grave in a black dress and lace veil while the casket was lowered into the earth and Father Malcolm scattered holy water from a wand and threw dirt on it as he said the Pater Noster. Afterward the others retired inside for the wake. There were cookies and punch. Lily did not join us. The small chapel the Lawrences had built for her on the ranch stood just a little off to the side of the big house. From the outside it looked like little more than a glorified toolshed with a cross on top of it. It was Lily’s space; I had never been in it. I saw her walk away from everyone else and enter the doors of the little chapel. After mingling for a while around the cookies and punch bowl at the wake, I wandered outside onto the back deck to have a look at the deep red light of the late afternoon waning on the faces of the mountains, still in my little black suit but with my black tie loosened, with a plastic cup of punch in my hand. My feet crunched in the grass as I approached the little chapel. I quietly cracked the double doors and slipped my head inside. It was a small, windowless room, but beautifully built, with planed and polished rosewood wainscoting on the walls and a wooden ceiling and floor, ambiently underlit with dim soft lights, and an altar at the far end of the room. At the altar, an especially gory and emaciated Jesus hammered to an elaborate cross tipped his curly-haired and serene head heavenward. Candles flickered and dripped wax over the altar. I saw Hilarious Lily kneeling on a red prayer cushion before the altar with a lowered head and shut eyes, fondling the beads of her rosary. She touched her long fingers to her shoulders, head and chest, shoulders, head and chest, making the sign of the cross over and over. I went out and shut the door behind me.

That night, after the wake, I followed Clever outside, and we walked together through a field of dry waist-high yellow grass, shushing all around us in the wind. I was drunk, quite