Shadow Man: A Novel (25 page)

“Jim Ryan?”

The priest is bent, white-haired; his clerical collar too wide for his thin neck. A dark coat hangs off him, and he balances on a cane, a bronze cross dangling over his chest. The cold makes his nose run, and he sniffs and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, but with his
unsteady hand the handkerchief dances before him like a puppet. He is frailer than when James and I last saw him, and I don’t know why he is alone out here in this weather.

“Jim, it’s me, Father Heaney.”

James steps closer. He peers into Father’s eyes. James hugs him and starts to weep.

“It is you.”

“Not gone yet, Jim. Not gone yet, although some days I feel the Lord tugging fierce. I’m retired now, Jim. They gave me a room in the rectory, not the big one I used to have; that went to the new head honcho. I’m up near the attic in that little room we used to store stuff in.”

Father laughs, looks to me, and dips his head. It has been a while, but he knows James is lost. I brought James here two years ago and explained his condition. Father said a prayer over him back then, made the sign of the cross and kissed him on the forehead and told him that the Lord would keep a light on inside James and one day James would find it. I’d stop in from time to time and visit Father, asking him about Kurt and James in the days before Vera. One afternoon, he was sweeping the vestibule when I came in and sat in a pew. He slid next to me and I told him that James was my brother and Kurt my father; he held my hand and as we stared at the white marble of the altar and up to the golden crucifix, I felt a burden lifted.

“You’re here to see Kurt, huh, Jim?”

“Yes, Father. He and that time, the one summer, are the clearest things to me.”

“I know, Jim.”

Father’s cane taps the broken sidewalk. I walk close behind him in case he stumbles. James is at his side. Kurt’s resting place is the third one in from a tree, between Bobby Laughlin, a welder, and Chris O’Boyle, a rookie cop shot and killed one night on patrol. I still
cry when I see Kurt’s grave, and I’m crying now, looking at the gray stone, pretty calligraphy around its edges and a cross at its center, laid on this ground before I was born. James kneels and runs a finger across the shallow rivulets of Kurt’s name and dates. He takes off his scarf and polishes in slow circles, a dull gleam rises through the grit. He stands and drapes the scarf over the stone.

“I always felt bad, Jim, that Kurt and your mother weren’t buried side by side. Her family bought their plots years before she met Kurt. She lies over there, near the corner along the fence. You knew this once, but you may have forgotten. You visited her when you were a boy, before you moved away, and you’d sit over her for hours reading her words out of that dictionary of yours. You loved words. You used to try to disguise your sins in big words when you’d come to confession. I guess you thought they didn’t sting as much that way.”

“Do you still read mystery novels, Father?”

“I do.”

Kids walking home from school hurry past the cemetery. Little tilted armies with book bags dangling. James looks toward them and back to the brown grass beneath his feet. The sky feels like snow.

“The day before Kurt died we swam in the ocean beyond where the waves begin to lift and curl. The water is calm out there, Father. We floated and talked. The tide moved deep beneath us. We could see specks of people on the beach, but we couldn’t hear them. Even the seagulls were silent. Kurt told me about the ships he painted and how far they sailed, and he told me to make sure I see the world because he said he wondered what it would be like to be standing on one of those ships as it sailed into a faraway port.”

“You saw a lot of the world, Jim.”

James steps back from the grave. Father holds his one hand. I hold his other. We stand in silence. Lights click on in nearby row houses, silhouettes in windows, dinners on stoves, homework undone. The factory and dock men will be heading home soon, walking through
alleys beneath sputtering streetlights, opening doors and listening to voices that will carry them toward sleep. There is peace in the twilight. James’s scarf blows off Kurt’s marker and tumbles across the dead. The scarlet is pretty against the gray. The scarf lifts in the wind, twirling like a bird or a bright rag toward the coming moon.