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florid, his eyes puffy with grief. I stammered that I was from the hospital and that I was here to drop off the things that had belonged to a certain Mr. Corrigan.

—Ciaran Corrigan, he said, coming across and shaking my hand.

He seemed to me first the sort of man who would be quite happy doing crosswords in bed. He took the box and looked down, searched through it. He came to the keyring and gazed at it a moment, put it in his pocket.

—Thanks, he said. We forgot to pick these things up.

He had a touch of an accent to him, not very strong, but he carried his body like I had seen other Irishmen carry themselves, hunched into himself, yet still hyperaware. The Spanish woman took the shirt and brought it into the kitchen. She was standing by the sink and sniffing the cloth deeply.

The black bloodstains were still visible. She looked across at me, lowered her gaze to the floor. Her small chest heaved. She suddenly ran the tap and plunged the cloth into the water and began wringing it, as if John A. Corrigan might suddenly appear and want to wear it again. It was quite obvious that I wasn’t wanted or needed, but something held me there.

—We’ve got a funeral service in forty- five minutes, he said. If you’ll excuse me.

A toilet flushed in the apartment above.

—There was a young girl too, I said.

—Yes, it’s her funeral. Her mother’s getting out of jail. That’s what we heard. For an hour or two. My brother’s service is tomorrow. Cremation.

There’ve been some complications. Nothing to worry about.

—I see.

—If you’ll excuse me.

—Of course.

A short heavyset priest made his way into the apartment, announcing himself as a Father Marek. The Irishman shook his hand. He glanced at me as if to ask why I was still there. I went to the door, stopped, and turned around. It looked like the door locks had been jimmied a number of times.

The Spanish woman was still in the kitchen, where she suspended the wet shirt from a hanger above the sink. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember. She put her face in the shirt again.

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I turned and stammered.

—Would you mind if I went to the girl’s service?

He shrugged and looked at the priest, who scribbled a quick map on a scrap of paper, as if he was glad for something to do. He took me by the elbow and then down the corridor.

—Do you have any influence? the priest asked.

—Influence? I asked.

—Well, his brother has insisted on getting him cremated before he goes back to Ireland. Tomorrow. And I was wondering if you could talk him out of it.

—Why?

—It’s against our faith, he said.

Down the corridor, one of the women had begun wailing. She stopped, though, when the Irishman stepped out the door. He had jammed his tie high on his neck and his jacket was pulled tight across his shoulders. He was followed by the Spanish woman, who had a stately pride about her. The corridor was hushed. He pressed the button for the elevator and looked at me.

—Sorry, I said to the priest. I don’t have any influence.

I pulled away from him and hurried toward the elevator as it was closing. The Irishman put his hand in the gap and pulled the door open for me, and then we were gone. The Spanish woman gave me a guarded smile and said she was sorry she couldn’t go to the girl’s funeral, she had to go home and look after her own children, but she was glad that Ciaran had someone to go with.

I offered him a lift without thinking, but he said no, that he had been asked to travel in the funeral cortege, he didn’t know why.

He wrung his hands nervously as he stepped out into the sunlight.

—I didn’t even know the girl, he said.

—What was her name?

—I don’t know. Her mother’s Tillie.

He said it with a downward finality, but then he added: I think it’s Jazzlyn, or something.

—

i pa r k ed t h e c a r outside St. Raymond’s cemetery in Throgs Neck, far enough away that nobody could see it. A hum came from the expressway, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 144

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but the closer I got to the graveyard the more the smell of fresh- cut grass filled the air. A faint whiff of the Long Island Sound.

The trees were tall and the light fell in shafts among them. It was hard to believe that this was the Bronx, although I saw the graffiti scrawled on the side of a few mausoleums, and some of the headstones near the gate had been vandalized. There were a few funerals in progress, mostly in the new cemetery, but it was easy enough to tell which group was the girl’s.

They were carrying the coffin down the tree- lined road toward the old cemetery. The children were dressed in perfect white, but the women’s clothes looked like they had been cobbled together, the skirts too short, the heels too high, their cleavage covered with wraparound scarves. It was like they had gone to a strange garage sale: the bright expensive clothes hidden with bits and pieces of dark. The Irishman looked so pale among them, so very white.

A man in a gaudy suit, wearing a hat with a purple feather, followed at the back of the procession. He looked drugged- up and malevolent.

Under his suit jacket he wore a tight black turtleneck and a gold chain on his neck, a spoon hanging from it.

A boy who was no more than eight played a saxophone, beautifully, like some strange drummer boy from the Civil War. The music rang out in punctuated bursts over the graveyard.

I stayed in the background, near the road in a patch of overgrown grass, but as the service began, John A. Corrigan’s brother caught my eye and beckoned me forward. There were no more than twenty people gathered around the graveside but a few young women wailed deeply.

—Ciaran, he said again, extending his hand, as if I might have forgotten. He gave me a thin, embarrassed smile. We were the only white people there. I wanted to reach up and adjust his tie, fix his scattered hair, primp him.

A woman—she could only have been the dead girl’s mother—stood sobbing beside two men in suits. Another, younger woman stepped up to her. She took off a beautiful black shawl and draped it on the mother’s shoulders.

—Thanks, Ange.

The preacher—a thin, elegant black man—coughed and the crowd fell silent. He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body’s fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 145

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the presence of what is left behind. Jazzlyn had a hard life, he said. Death could not justify or explain it. A grave does not equal what we have had in our lifetime. It was maybe not the time or the place, he said, but he was going to talk about justice anyway. Justice, he repeated. Only candor and truth win out in the end. The house of justice had been vandalized, he said. Young girls like Jazzlyn were forced to do horrific things. As they grew older the world had demanded terrible things of them. This was a vile world. It forced her into vile things. She had not asked for it. It had become vile for her, he said. She was under the yoke of tyranny. Slavery may be over and gone, he said, but it was still apparent. The only way to fight it was with charity, justice, and goodness. It was not a simple plea, he said, not at all. Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter—it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

—Justice, said Jazzlyn’s mother.

The preacher nodded, then looked up toward the high trees. Jazzlyn had been a child who grew up in Cleveland and New York City, he said, and she had seen those distant hills of goodness and she knew that one day she was going to get there. It was always going to be a difficult journey. She had seen too much evil on the way, he said. She had some friends and confidants, like John A. Corrigan, who had perished with her, but mostly the world had tried her and sentenced her and taken advantage of her kindness. But life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty, he said, and now she was on her way to a place where there were no governments to chain her or enslave her, no miscreants to demand the wrong thing, and none of her own people who were going to turn her flesh to profit. He stood tall then and said: Let it be said that she was not ashamed.

A wave of nods went around the crowd.

—Shame on those who wanted to shame her.

—Yes, came the reply.

—Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

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—Yes.

—That bad life. That vile life. In front of you will stretch goodness.

You will follow the path and it will be good. Not easy, but good. Full of terror and difficulty maybe, but the windows will open to the sky and your heart will be purified and you will take wing.

I had a sudden, terrible vision of Jazzlyn flying through the windshield. I felt dizzy. The preacher’s lips moved, but for a moment I couldn’t hear. He was looking at a single place in the crowd, his vision fixed on the man in the purple hat behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The man was biting his upper lip in anger and his body seemed to curl into itself, coiling and getting ready to strike. The hat shadowed him but he looked to have a glass eye.

—The snakes will perish with the snakes, said the preacher.

—Yessir, came a woman’s voice.

—They’ll be gone.

—Yes they will.

—Be they out of here.

The man in the purple hat didn’t move. Nobody moved.

—Go on! shouted Jazzlyn’s mother, contorting herself. She looked like she was strapped down but she was wriggling and squirming out of it. One of the men in suits touched her arm. Her shoulders were going from side to side and her voice was raw with rage.

—Get the fuck out of here!

I wondered for a horrific moment if she was shouting at me, but she was staring beyond me, at the man in the feathered hat. The chorus of shouts rose higher. The preacher held his hands out and asked for calm.

It was only then I realized that Jazzlyn’s mother had kept her arms behind her back the whole time, shackled with handcuffs. The two black men in suits beside her were city cops.

—Get the fuck out, Birdhouse, she said.

The man in the hat waited a moment, stretched upward, gave a smile that showed all his teeth. He touched the brim, tilted it, turned, and walked away. A small cheer went up from the mourners. They watched the pimp disappear down the road. He raised his hat one time, without turning around, waved it in the air, like a man who was not really saying good- bye.

—The snakes are gone, said the preacher. Let them stay gone.

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Ciaran steadied my arm. I was feeling cold and dirty: it was like putting on a fourth- hand blouse. I had no right to be there. I was tread-ing on their territory. But something in the service was pure and true:
Behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

The wailing had stopped and Jazzlyn’s mother said: Take these goddamn things off me.

Both cops stared straight ahead.

—I said take these goddamn things off me!

Finally, one of them stepped behind her and unlocked the handcuffs.

—Thank Jesus.

She shook her hands out and walked around the open grave, over toward Ciaran. Her scarf fell slightly and revealed the depth of her cleavage. Ciaran flushed red and embarrassed.

—I got a little story to tell, she said.

She cleared her throat and a swell went around the crowd.

—My Jazzlyn, she was ten. And she see’d a picture of a castle in a magazine somewheres. She went, clipped it out, and taped it on the wall above her bed. Like I say, nothing much to it, I never really thought that much about it. But when she met Corrigan . . .

She pointed over toward Ciaran, who looked to the ground.

— . . . and one day he was bringing around some coffee and she told him all about it, the castle—maybe she was bored, just wanted something to say, I don’t know. But you know Corrigan—that cat would listen to just about anything. He had an ear. And, of course, Corrie got a kick out of that. He said he knew castles just like that where he growed up.

And he said he’d bring her to a castle just like it one day. Promised her solid. Every day he’d come out and bring her coffee and he’d say to my little girl that he was getting that castle ready, just you wait. One day he’d tell her that he was getting the moat right. The next he said he was working on the chains that go to the gate bridge. Then he said he was working on the turrets. Then he’d say he was getting the banquet all squared away.

They were gonna have mead—that’s like wine—and lots of good food and there was gonna be harps playing and lots of dancing.

—Yes, said a woman in spangled makeup.

—Every day he had a new thing to say about that castle. That was their own little game, and Jazzlyn loved playing it, word.

She grabbed hold of Ciaran’s arm.

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—That’s all, she said. That’s all I have to say. That’s it. That’s fucking it, ’scuse me for saying it.

A chorus of amens went around the gathered crowd and then she turned to some of the other women and made a comment of some sorts, something strange and clipped about going to the bathroom in the castle.