sometimes. She sinks her forehead onto her husband’s shoulder for a moment, sighing, and then lifts her head and looks out over the guests. She sees Rollie and Judy and Andrea Onopa, Greg and Alma and Oscar Martin, Enid Embry, Sara Cadwallader, Tommy Taulbee and his father, Todd Paul. The wind has blown a shoal of rain-clouds in from the east, so that half of the sky is a dense gray-black and the other half is filled with sunlight. The thick branches of an oak tree are rocking and creaking above the rows of folding chairs, and the skirt of Janet’s newly purchased black dress keeps billowing taut between her legs. She sees Sheila and Tim Lanzetta, but not their daughter Kristen, holding a cane umbrella across their laps. She sees Melanie Sparks, Celia’s old baby-sitter, who is standing at the margin of the grass, her arms wrapped around a lamppost she has pressed her ear to as though she were listening to vibrations from the ground. In the past four years Melanie might be the only person in town who has never told Janet what she should do to make herself feel better. She has been amazed at the number of people who seem to believe they know the answer, the one sure remedy she hasn’t thought to try yet, everything from yoga to Prozac to deer hunting to a good hard cry. The Reverend Gautreaux, who is waiting on the steps of the pavilion, signals to Janet that she and Christopher can take their seats, and the two of them walk down the aisle to the front row.
The thing about cigarettes, the Reverend has discovered, is that when you breathe through them they breathe right back, like another set of lungs, and this sensation of having your breath returned to you, along with the almost respiratory heat of the smoke, makes smoking a cigarette very much like exchanging a kiss—but a kiss that you can control, measuring it out in increments, however shallow or deep you wish them to be. It is one of his pet theories that this, as much as the nicotine, is what makes it so hard to quit smoking. He waits for a few late arrivals to settle into their chairs and then stiffens his posture as a sign that everyone should fall quiet. He learned to do this— to broadcast this aura of preparedness, like a runner poised on his mark—within weeks of accepting his parish. It never fails to work. United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson, drinking from a paper bag in the corner of the pavilion, stops to blow his nose loudly, explosively, into a handkerchief. When the Reverend asked him earlier if he would mind moving into the chairs until the ceremony was over, the congressman’s eyes flared into frightened blue stars and he gripped the banister behind his bench and said, You can’t make me go, this is where I live. The Reverend can feel a crawling sort of itch in the back of his throat, but it is only five-thirty, and he has another two hours before he will be safely home to light another cigarette. He coughs and tells the congregation, those who are gathered here to remember Celia Brooks, that he will read to them first from the book of Jeremiah. When his father died, Reverend Gautreaux found that he had underlined more than a thousand verses in his Bible, some with a watery blue ink that had faded to the color of a robin’s egg and others with a fluorescent yellow highlighter. This particular verse he had marked for some reason with a pair of stars and an exclamation point. The Reverend lifts the silk tail from his Bible, and Christopher listens as he begins to read.
For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black;
astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead; is
there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of
my people recovered?
The Reverend shuts his Bible and holds it against his stomach with both hands. Christopher watches the wind gather up his hair, tossing it about like streamers of grass, and listens as he says that it is hard for us not to react with anger, yes, with
The thing about cigarettes, the Reverend has discovered, is that when you breathe through them they breathe right back, like another set of lungs, and this sensation of having your breath returned to you, along with the almost respiratory heat of the smoke, makes smoking a cigarette very much like exchanging a kiss—but a kiss that you can control, measuring it out in increments, however shallow or deep you wish them to be. It is one of his pet theories that this, as much as the nicotine, is what makes it so hard to quit smoking. He waits for a few late arrivals to settle into their chairs and then stiffens his posture as a sign that everyone should fall quiet. He learned to do this— to broadcast this aura of preparedness, like a runner poised on his mark—within weeks of accepting his parish. It never fails to work. United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson, drinking from a paper bag in the corner of the pavilion, stops to blow his nose loudly, explosively, into a handkerchief. When the Reverend asked him earlier if he would mind moving into the chairs until the ceremony was over, the congressman’s eyes flared into frightened blue stars and he gripped the banister behind his bench and said, You can’t make me go, this is where I live. The Reverend can feel a crawling sort of itch in the back of his throat, but it is only five-thirty, and he has another two hours before he will be safely home to light another cigarette. He coughs and tells the congregation, those who are gathered here to remember Celia Brooks, that he will read to them first from the book of Jeremiah. When his father died, Reverend Gautreaux found that he had underlined more than a thousand verses in his Bible, some with a watery blue ink that had faded to the color of a robin’s egg and others with a fluorescent yellow highlighter. This particular verse he had marked for some reason with a pair of stars and an exclamation point. The Reverend lifts the silk tail from his Bible, and Christopher listens as he begins to read.
For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black;
astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead; is
there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of
my people recovered?
The Reverend shuts his Bible and holds it against his stomach with both hands. Christopher watches the wind gather up his hair, tossing it about like streamers of grass, and listens as he says that it is hard for us not to react with anger, yes, with
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