Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon Page A

family. Who loved who, who was cruel, who was kind. When I look at the pictures of those children, dressed up and hopeful, I think of all the things they must have longed for when they were young—puppies, a pony—and how long they’ve all been dead and buried, the children and the ponies. What’s left is us.
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    Monica Faithful The woman who was doing the estate sale arrived as we were packing to leave the house for the last time. It was a beautiful morning. Those huge elm trees behind the house were in leaf, arching over the lawn. It was the trees that really got to me. We have parishioners up on the Heights in Sweetwater with trees like that, but the one big tree we had at the rectory was an ancient spruce that blew down in a storm last winter, right onto the roof of the garage.
    I didn’t want to linger any more, it was too complicated. I just wanted to pack the car and go.
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    Edith Faithful The auction lady wasn’t very happy. She’d been planning to use the dining room to do her cataloguing. But at the last minute Uncle Jimmy took the dining room table, and of course Aunt Eleanor took the chandelier. The movers were taking it down as the lady walked in the door.
    Dad was out in the driveway with the Volvo packed.Standing there with the driver’s door open. We’d have been ready to leave sooner if he’d come in and helped, but he had ants in his pants—he stood out there so Mummy would know she was keeping him waiting. He had put on his priest shirt and collar. He always drives like that so he won’t get a ticket if he gets caught speeding.
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    Monica Faithful Imagine driving away from the house you grew up in, where your parents lived for almost fifty years, for the last time. The last time Eleanor and Jimmy and I would be under that roof together. And just as I really was going out the door, Nora came down the stairs with a box she’d found under a bed on the third floor. It was full of jewelry carved out of lava from Pompeii that somebody bought in Italy a hundred years ago. There were letters too, and photographs bound in a little Victorian album. Whose? Eleanor said she couldn’t even look at it. She told Nora to put it in the car and she’d deal with it at home.
    We were all out of time. Everything in the house that we were keeping had colored stickers so the movers knew who to ship it all to. Jimmy and his family had already left for the airport; Edie was going to New York with Sylvie. Bobby and Nora were in the den reading old letters while Eleanor tried to make them stop and seal the boxes so she could pack the car.
    The piano movers were in the driveway, carrying Papa’s Steinway out of the studio to take it to the showroom in New York. Edie said that Charlesie had gotten into Mother’s medicine cabinet and started taking the pills. In the end, as I got into the car Norman was talking about how far he wanted to get by nightfall, and I forgot to even look back.
    I dream about that house. On my deathbed I’ll be able to walk into any room in it and tell you exactly what it looks like; what’s on the walls, what’s in the drawers.
    I hear the family that bought it ripped out the kitchen to make a great room, and put gold-plated faucets in all the bathrooms. They have four children, all girls. They send us Christmas cards.

II
A NCIENT AND M ODERN H ISTORY
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    H ow long does it take before you begin to move, leaving behind the world you knew? Three days, just as you thought. But time is rather different here, if we can be said to have it at all, so that answer may not mean what it seems.
    So many think that they will slip out of the body and whisk straight away to Heaven or Hell, singing or snarling. But no. There is much to be determined in the spirit world. The spirits of infants and children need time to become themselves. We tend them. Many others arrive with wounds or scars suffered in life in various personal