He looked up nervously at the audience, then back down at his pad. “I think Uncle Thomas was about as good an uncle as you could have. I’m glad he was alive on the earth for ninety-six years so I could know him. I wish he had lived longer. I know we’ll never see him again, but I’ll always remember him.”

He paused, then walked briskly to his seat without looking up.

A flautist began playing a familiar song about the beauty of life and the naturalness of death. It was a fitting end to the ceremony, Hutch thought. His father hated the flute.

Abby left the funeral gathering, walked to a small creek she had spotted on the far side of the cemetery, sat down, and cried.

In a few minutes Sabin sat down next to her. “Abby, are you okay?”

Abby wiped tears from her cheeks. “I…You wouldn’t understand, Sabin.”

He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “You can try me.”

Abby turned, looked into his face, and gave a hint of a smile. “I’m not sure this is going to make much sense to you. The talk the woman gave…”

“The eulogy?”

“Yes. It was awful.”

“Why?”

“Because…because it had no hope. What a terrible statement to make at the end of someone’s life.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked down at the creek. “It was like the Inisi when my family first went to live with them. Funerals for them lasted a week or more—mourning the dead, I mean. I remember it as a child. There was loud wailing for days, and the mate and the parents of the deceased would cut their arms as a demonstration of their grief.”

“I suppose that was their custom.”

“Yes. But they had a good reason for the long mourning, for the grief. They believed loved ones passed to the realm of the dead, the realm of the spirits. And the spirits—they weren’t on the Inisi’s side. They weren’t on any human’s side. They were pernicious and unpredictable. And the Inisi’s loved one was now in their hands. But there was nothing they could do. There was no hope.”

Sabin thought for a moment. “You said that was the case when you first went to live with them. What changed?”

“My parents brought them a message of hope. When someone died, they didn’t have to be in the hands of the spirits. They could forever be in the hands of the loving God who created them and who came to earth to die for them so that their sins might be forgiven.”

“And how did the Inisi react to that?”