He saw the old man slumped against the end of a pew, over by the wall. Paul walked up and went sideways down the pew and put his hand on a shoulder to wake him. Shaking him a little, he bent over and said to him, “Mr. Jeansomme, it’s time to go home.” The old face showed no sleep, just a complete vacancy, and when Paul placed the back of his hand against it, it was cold. At the touch, he felt a thrill of fear, and he thought at once of Colette. He sat next to him and said things, but when he pulled his arm, his ex-father-in-law went over slow and heavy like a sack of oysters. Paul called to him again. “Hey,” he said, and again “Hey,” but Mr. Jeansomme was beyond all voices. He felt the hand for a pulse and saw the thumb and forefinger pinched on the third bead of the first decade of the rosary. The old man had prayed off into the sorrowful mystery of death, and Paul sat back, looking up at the dark-haired Virgin, her heart bound by thorns and floating on a broken gulf of blazing glass.

Chapter Nineteen

Nineteen

First things first. He went up the aisle to find the priest, and then he called the ambulance from the rectory. While Father Clemmons was anointing Mr. Jeansomme, Paul went outside the church and leaned against its sun-warmed brick, listening to a siren rise across town. He felt weak and ashamed for not following the paramedics in, for letting the priest give Last Rites alone. He did not want to see Mr. Jeansomme handled onto a stretcher, the dead limbs swinging like a killed animal’s. A sheriff’s deputy drove up and went inside, taking off his hat at the door and hanging it on the handle of his pistol. Whatever they were doing was taking a long time, and he walked back over to the cypress rectory and let himself in to use the phone. He heard Colette pick up while she was talking to Mrs. Fontenot, and when he began to speak, he knew for the first time how life changes in midsentence; one second the brain deals with an old lady cooking greens and the next with the death of a father, the words coming as unstoppable and random as bullets.

He walked up in front of the church and watched her come running down the street, jogging under the oaks and sycamores. He guessed she didn’t want to spend the time to find the keys, start the car, drive it, and find a place to park. She passed him as though he was not there, swinging through the Gothic doors in an instant, and he did not follow, because worse than seeing the body would be seeing her look at the body, then turn inward and blame herself for leaving him both this morning and the other time.