Читать книгу Bury This - Andrea Portes - Страница 18

NINE

You could make a funeral here today. With the sky bright blue for miles, the rolling green lawn, on and on, never mind the tombstones. You couldn’t have picked a better day.

It’s a hole in the ground. Nine by four. Around it are the tops of people’s heads. Black hats. The chapel choir is there, too. At the service, back at St. John’s, they’d sung “Walk with Me Lord” and “Dona Nobis Pacem.” Now, here on the lawn, Beth Krause sang at her own funeral. The conductor from the chapel choir dutifully quietly, pressed PLAY on the tape recorder and there she was.

Even when she was alive, the timbre of that voice, the pale white-haired girl bellowing out the “Ave Maria” to such great heights, even then, it had been hard for the stoniest of hearts to “keep a grip,” to “maintain” as it were. Such a thrilling voice from such a shy, tepid girl. A girl in a baby blue sweater with, what was that? A bow? A butterfly? A tiny little piece, a minuscule piece, of vanity. Maybe it was a dragonfly. A cameo behind it.

But now, here, with the chapel choir standing to the side and the service over, with Lt. Colonel Charles Krause and his wife, Dotsy, the two of them standing there, stoic, the voice coming out of the tape recorder, Beth Krause singing at her own funeral, might as well have been made of tears. The girls, Shauna and her friends, were shaking uncontrollably, sobbing themselves into convulsions. Even Troy Boggs had to stand them straight. Please, girls, please. Oh Lord. Stand still.

The chapel choir, twenty-six of them, simply stood stooped in tears, a row of weeping willows, unabashed.

It was a wonder to think, looking on that little hill in Muskegon, Michigan, on that big blue day in mid-winter that the hill itself wouldn’t cleft itself somehow from the land around it and float downstream on a river of tears, down to the Ohio, and then the mighty Mississippi, down to the warmer climes where there is no snow to find a girl.

It was a wonder, too, to think as the “Ave Maria” split the sky in twain and the hearts and faces off the gathering of what must’ve been the entire town, that the only two faces laid blank, laid bare, were that of Lt. Colonel Charles Krause and his handsome wife, Dorothy.