EIGHTEEN

K ate was right: I needed to go see Harry.

Still, I knew I wasn’t the reason he had come, not anymore. All that was over and done. For years and years, since the summer after Kate turned four, he’d made his annual trip, fished a little, eaten in the dining hall, even smoked a cigar or two with Joe out on the dock as the years went by. “Harry, good to see you,” we’d all say in the driveway when he pulled in, and he’d shake Joe’s hand and kiss me quickly on the cheek, and ask about the water or the weather, and although for a week the place would seem different to me, simply because Harry was in it, it was a bargain we’d all learned to live with. More than live with: I can honestly say it made me happy.

Harry made me happy.

I saw him just one other time, at Joe’s father’s funeral. This was, in fact, the only time in my life that I saw Harry Wainwright in a season not summer. The icy depths of January: Kate was still little enough to sit on my knee, big and squirmy enough that it took all my effort to keep her there. The service was held in a small, wood-framed chapel that usually closed for the winter, though it was a pretty spot, framed like a picture by tall pines with a creek off to one side and a view of Long Ridge, and when somebody in town died in the off-season, it was understood that arrangements could be made.

Joe’s father’s last couple of years had not been easy. Though he’d rebounded from the stroke, a bad cold the following winter ballooned into pneumonia again, this time landing him in the hospital on oxygen, and while he was there, the doctors diagnosed him with a fast-moving lymphoma that had already spread to the nodes around his stomach. It was supposed to take six months but in the end took three times that, and though all the doctors attributed this delay to a simple case of north-country grit-the phrase, unspoken but always understood, was “too mean to die”-I knew what he was really waiting for. In October ’75, Joe finished the last of his sentence at the federal prison camp at Fort Devens, rode the bus home to all of us, and was with his father two months later when he passed away.

It was a small group that gathered that morning, maybe thirty people, though the room was tight and seemed full. The building had no central heating, but one of the chapel’s board members had come in early to light the small woodstove, which now gave off a crackling, wooly warmth, enough to make people unzip, but not remove, their coats. My parents were there, and the few friends Joe’s dad had managed to keep over the years, and one surprise: Hank Rogue. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since the day I’d clocked him with the bourbon bottle, and I honestly couldn’t be certain he even remembered who I was. My first impression, seeing him, was pure amazement: he was one of those people who seemed to have vanished completely from my life, to such an extent that I somehow assumed he’d died. He took a pew right up front on the opposite side, holding his cap on his knees and speaking to no one, and when I looked over at him, hoping to catch his eye-a wicked impulse, I confess, to extract some acknowledgment of my victory over him that June day-I was astonished to see that his pockmarked face was streaked with tears.

Joe’s father hadn’t wanted a religious service; he hadn’t been to a church of any kind in twenty years. But to do nothing seemed desolate, and at the last minute I’d talked Joe into letting Father Molyneaux, the priest from the Catholic church over in Twining, say a few words. He was stepping up to the lectern when I felt a whisper of cold air on my neck and swiveled around to see Harry standing at the open chapel door, stamping his feet and dusting blown snow from the sleeves of his overcoat. He caught my eye and gave a little wave.

“How did he know?” I whispered to Joe.

Joe had lost a lot of weight during his time at Fort Devens, but I hadn’t really noticed how much until that moment, when I saw how loose his collar was around his neck. Like all the men in the room, he was wearing a tie beneath his parka. He answered without looking at me. “I called him.”

“You did that?”

His voice was terse; he was in no mood to talk. “My father wanted him here.”

Father Molyneaux said the usual prayers, we all sang a hymn-badly, for we had no accompaniment to help us find the right key-and then Joe stepped to the front of the room.

“Well,” he began, and nervously cleared his throat. I thought I saw him glance to the back of the chapel to find Harry. “Thank you all for coming. At least we have a nice day for this, right?” A titter of laughter floated over the room; in my lap, Kate wriggled and looked about, wondering what the joke was.

“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” Joe went on, “and it’s cold. All I want to say is, my father would have appreciated everyone being here. I’ve been away awhile, but in the last couple of months he talked a lot about this place, and how much it meant to him. He also talked a lot about the war. We’re here to remember him, and I guess the easiest way to sum up my father is to say that he was a soldier. I know that idea may seem strange to some, but I think everybody who’s here knows that’s true. On the morning he was wounded, he had served 342 days as a battlefield platoon leader, and he hated everything about it. But he loved his men, and when the war was over, he loved this place. He wasn’t always the happiest man, or the easiest to get along with, and I’m guessing some of you know that”-Joe paused as a second frisson of knowing laughter moved through the crowd-“but he also was the bravest man I ever knew. It took me a long time, maybe right up until these last couple of months, to really understand this.”

Joe stopped again, opened his mouth as if he were going to say something else, but then seemed to change his mind. “Anyway, that’s all. Like I said, it’s cold. Thank you, everyone, for coming.”

A few other people got up to speak, most to tell a story or two about a nice thing Joe Sr. had done for them, and then Father Molyneaux led us in a closing prayer. When this was done, Joe returned to the front of the room and gave the signal for the pallbearers to come forward. Six men: Joe, of course, my father, Paul Kagan, Porter Dante, a man Joe had introduced me to earlier that day as Marcel Lebeau, and, striding from the back of the church, still in his smoke-gray chesterfield overcoat and cashmere scarf, Harry. They arranged themselves around the casket, three on a side with my father and Joe at the front, and hoisted it onto their shoulders. For an awful moment I think everyone worried they might drop it-a casket is a heavy thing, no matter who’s inside-but they gave no sign of strain, and without a word they carried it straight through the church and outside to the waiting hearse. There would be no burial until spring; for now, the casket would go to the funeral home, where it would wait for the ground to thaw.

“What’s inna box?” Kate asked, too loudly, as they passed.

I gripped her mittened hands to shush her. “Your grandfather,” I whispered.

Outside, the sun was blinding bright, making the air seem somehow colder, and I scanned the lot with a hand over my eyes, Kate wedged to my hip. But I didn’t see Harry anywhere, and all the cars were ones I knew and could connect to someone inside-the rusted sedan I knew to be Paul’s, Porter’s big Ford pickup with the plough in front, my father’s old Lincoln Continental, even Hank Rogue’s filthy drilling rig, like a big grease stain on the snow. Harry’s Jag was nowhere to be seen. Joe was leaning down into the front window of the hearse, speaking with the driver; a moment later he tapped the roof and off it went. Somebody asked me if folks were going for coffee, meaning the Pine Tree Café, since that was the only place in town open in winter, and I said I guessed we were.