The Funeral (2014 September)

THE FUNERAL

I found myself in a small village last night at dusk.  It was only a few houses and could not have held more souls than populate an English country church.  Around the village, there grew a thin, circular hedge, dense enough but not more than was necessary to establish a boundary.  In spots, I could see through it, out toward the River Ouse. 

By time I'd come upon the village, I had cycled out too far and found myself lost amongst the flat fields of the Fens.  The roads curved and bent to follow rivers and streams, though some measured the length of furrows.  Most of the latter were straight for planting and stretched out from east to west, maximizing exposure to sun at this northern latitude.  By the time I'd entered the village, it didn't matter to me just where I was.  I thought that I should stop, to call for a taxi to return me home.

Despite the sleepy landscape, the village itself was excited.  Not to see me, of course, but with some going-on.  People were running toward the village church.  I was mistaken; at first, believing that I’d landed — that’s often what you do cycling across the wind-blown Fens — landed amidst the village saint’s feast day.  With my luck, I told myself, it would be one of the saints whom had survived bloody bodily harm, one who would have been mangled in some way by the calling to sainthood.  Everyone loves a comeback following adversity.  Look at Lance Armstrong.  Less than a saint; in the end, it was his embodiment of the Livestrong® campaign that got you on your bike.  By hook or by crook, nothing else mattered.  You'd done something for humanity.

The old Norman churches that dot the countryside here in East Anglia were built like German machine-gun bunkers.  During the war, they would have passed as bomb shelters.  This one was like all of the others.  A pillbox whose skin was so thick that its walls stood on a quarter of the building’s footprint.  Its bell tower, in the fading light, appeared to be a finger raised in defiance.  Though I'd heard its bell ring on approach across the Fens, it was silent now.  If not for its clear tenor on the wind, I wouldn't have come to this village.  I’d have continued on toward Ely, which I knew to be in the distance.  There, lured by its lit cathedral, the so-called “ship of the Fens” because it could be seen to sail over a sea of corn crops, I'd have caught the next train back to Cambridge.

Once inside the village, the church lights were lure enough.  Of course, the sight of villagers scurrying into the building at a pace peaked curiosity.  The place was lit inside for the second coming.  The lights were on; and, their burning glory was a metal wheel with bare incandescent bulbs hung over the altar.  Seen through chancel windows, it seemed to sway even in the air’s stillness.  “Come inside”, a man of my age encouraged.  His insistence was more than evangelical.  “You must come inside!” he repeated, tugging at my arm.

I explained that I'd only come to call a cab.  “It was silly of me to have left my mobile at work in London.” I driveled on.  “Come inside”, he said, “you can use mine.”  I suspected that he had no intention of allowing me the use of his phone.  Not until I had been baptized, or, sacrificed on the altar.  But, his grip on my upper arm would soon come untethered and, with it, any hope of making the call.  I allowed him to lead me on.

I noticed, as we crossed the threshold, that parishioners inside were busy with the work of lighting candles.  The candles were everywhere and, particularly, anywhere light would shine come day.  Votive and tea candles warmed to the windowsills.  The wicks of tall, narrow tallows burned bright inside doorways.  Like a devil’s exorcism, the dark for darkness sake was being cast out.  Wax fell from the rafters, from the wings of eavesdroppers, from everywhere that men on stilted ladders could reach. 

The man who led me in turned and again reached out toward me.  “May the Lord protect you this night”, he said as he passed a candle into my hands from a table at the door, “and all of your days.”  I took the language and act as ceremonial.  It was something that he certainly would not have said outside.  "Good to meet you." he might have said shaking my hand.  Behind me, the wooden doors were being pushed closed.  “I hope so too!” I responded, trusting that my American accent world excuse its lack of appropriate formality.  A key turned the lock; and, a medieval plank bolted the door.

Now, I dared not ask to borrow the man’s phone.  Even had I wanted to, for whatever I feared, curiosity trapped me within my skin.  What cult had replaced English Catholicism? I wondered.  What ritual required bolting the door?  Darkness, I could see through the great window behind the altar, had fallen.  I would likely spend the night here.  By time the service ended, no cab would come out this far. 

“Oh.  I’m George.” said the man at my side.  “We won't detain you long.”  He was lying.  His eyelids fell and fluttered as he spoke the words.  We were still standing.  And, now, he was leading me down the small nave toward a baptismal font.  “May I anoint you?” he asked.  His hand cupped water from the font and raised it toward my head.  He intoned a Latin prayer.  The Romans occupied Britain for four hundred years.  The language remained.  Dons at the University of Cambridge still use it to bless their meals, to initiate and close convocation and even, I’m told, in some colleges, to pass the threshold of the cloak room.  “Each of us come to the Lord as we are,” he concluded in English as he wet my forehead, “not as we were born.”  He was staring into my eyes; this time without as much as a blink.

Had this been a pub or even public transport, I would have held his gaze.  Here, it was difficult or, more to the point, uneasy.  It was as though he was digging for something.  Acceptance, if not faith; I don’t know.  My sights drifted toward the sacristy door.  It seemed to quiver in its frame as though a window had been opened in the room beyond.  And, on cue, the door opened.  “Cantemus Domini.  In nomine Patris.” — Let us sing to God.  In the name of the Father.  — one of the female parishioners shuddered as she crossed herself while another uttered the briefest of cries.

The room beyond was dark.  A boy carrying a Paschal candle emerged and, behind him, a priest in robes.  The priest held a Bible as though a shield, which he shifted in order to raise a hand of encouragement to someone, as yet, behind him in the dark.  The scent of cloves was heavy on the air.  Both priest and boy pivoted back toward the door, then knelt, heads bowed.  The congregation followed; and, George pulled me to my knees.

The church already full of light and with the scent of cloves now filled, too, with prayer.  From the sacristy, a bare foot stepped into the light; on its weight, the torso of a naked young man.  I was stunned.  Stepping forward, into a public space, let alone amongst neighbours, must have been an act of contrition.  One that left him at once vulnerable and perfect.  The light stripped him of his blemishes.  Bowed heads, incapable — unworthy perhaps — of noting his beauty, protected his modesty.

The young man made his way slowly toward the altar.  There, he lifted himself and swung his legs up.  He lay silent, eyes fixed on a point above him, perhaps blinding himself in one of the incandescent bulbs.  The young man’s skin grew even more pale in the light.

The congregation rose.  Their eyes followed the priest to the altar.  “This is our son.” He spoke.  Just then, a tapping at the windows began, like the rapping of rain mixed with hail.  It continued; and, the noise of it grew.  "Today, he has been taken from us." the priest continued, shouting over it.  If I had been stunned, I was now puzzled.  The young man was not dead.  Wax continued to rain down. 

George, sensing my bewilderment, explained that the young man had been bitten.  This did nothing to relieve my confusion.  Rabies wasn't known in Britain.  And, if it were, I was sure that Anglo-Catholic ritual had no ceremony that should have required a young man to supine himself on the altar.  “But, he is alive!” I told George, “Look.  You can see him breathing.” 

“That is the young man’s mother.”  George spoke of the woman who had made her way to the altar through the congregation.  She was joined there by two additional women.  Together, they bathed the young man with cloths wetted in the baptismal font.  When they were done, the mother kissed her son’s lips.  “This can go terribly wrong.” George said of the rite.  “Once a young girl returned the kiss; and, a father had to bury both wife and child.”  I began to worry that the young man had been bitten by the Ebola bug, by something deadly to us all.

A full moon shone bright through the great window.  It belied clear skies, betraying the sound of the rain as a lie.  The evening couldn't grow stranger.  It already seemed as improbable as a dream.

The mother stepped slowly back from the son, as if prising herself from the den of a sleeping lion.  The priest now raised his arms and head.  It was a pose that I'd seen earlier in the day — during a visit to the Fitzwilliam museum — on the side of an Assyrian vase.  It was another priest imploring the Divine for salvation.  “Shine your favour on him, oh Lord.”  He pleaded, as he drew a blue ribbon from his vestments.  It had been sewn into the cloth above his heart.  “and, show us your compassion and mercy.” He continued, his breath unbroken as he crossed the young man’s arms over his abdomen and bound them together.

George whispered into my ear the words I half expected to hear.  “Life is a river.” He said.  “Death is an ocean.”  It was as though he was drawing the words from me.  Death is always given the light touch.  You can be a prick in life and sainted in rigor mortis.  “Look, how he holds his breath, they will say of me.” I sighed.  George was smiling.  “The clouds await.”  This was the original blue-sky.  Heaven.  The words were intentionally trite.  The young man’s chest rose and fell gently.

His invocation made, the priest performed last rites.  “Clove oil.” George narrated as the priest silently dipped his thumb into a bowl, and, used it to anoint the young man’s forehead in the sign of the cross.  This was repeated for hands, and, again for feet.  Scented of clove, the priest anointed the young man’s ears, eyes and nose, pausing before making the sign of the cross over his lips.  These were the parts of the young man that had interacted with the world.  Touching it.  Taking it in.  Speaking to it.  One last time, the priest placed his thumb in the oil.  “Poor little fella”, George distracted.  “I understand he never got to use that properly!”  I turned back just in time to see the priest lift his fingers from the young man’s penis.  “Anointing of the groins;” explained George, “most English churches have abandoned the practice.”

With this, the three women folded the altar cloth over the young man's body.  It would serve as a shroud.  The tapping at the windows began to die back.  “This passion play will soon be over”, I thought.  “How good it was”, I looked forward to telling George, “to have come in unknowing.”  I would have to admit that I was a little creeped-out.  In response, he would say something plain but cryptic.  The young man would slough himself off of the altar, and, put on his clothes.

This was not to be.      — You don't want to see the end coming.  Perhaps what I was seeing was in part the product of fatigue.  I’d come a long way without enough water.  I was lost.  Disoriented.  For all I knew, the young man breathing on the altar was actually eighty-two; dead, of cancer; lying in an open casket.  But, I couldn't convince myself of it.

In the end, it happened swiftly.  The priest took a wooden cross from the altar boy — raised it toward the rafters — and, quickly drove it down into the young man’s chest.  In the moment, I don't recall a sound.  There was nothing, not even silence.  I recall George wrapping one arm around me, while using the other to grasp mine before I fainted.

I was found on a roadside south of Ely and woke in a Cambridge hospital.  It appeared, the police said, that I had been taken out in a hit-and-run.  My bike was mangled.  I was fortunate, they told me, that I'd been thrown into the wheat beyond the verge.  When asked if I knew who'd done this, if I'd seen a registration plate, I told them this story.  I have told everyone who would listen.  Now, I've even written it down.  The nurse told me that it was a dream.  But, I can see the imprint of George’s fingers around my upper arm.