“That’s the south, isn’t it?” I say, pointing to the long, windowed wall.

“That is correct,” the pastor says.

“But the sun goes from east to west. It goes along that side . . . from east to west,” I say, looking at Rolan.

“The sun tells the story backward.”

It does not end in morbidity. It is not mired in death. The story, once told in the unnatural succession . . . naturally goes backward. From the Trinity just right of the altar to the tree squarely centered on the back wall.

It has to end in life.

I glance up toward the slant of sun through that fourth window throwing panels of light against the darkened wall. And for a minute I feel that the droplets in that pane are about to fall, to rain down on my upturned face.

43

The window is abbreviated by the organ pipes to a mere third of the size of its siblings. Near the top of that Gothic frame, the panes curve up like a bowl or a crescent—or the limbs of a tree. A circle floats above it, a single golden fruit. I blink, and the crescent branches are a pair of arms, lifted to the sun.

The vertical panes form tiny squares where they meet the line of the “ground” the tree grows from. They are inset with the same gold glass. I stare at them long enough to see them separate from the rest of the window.

Three. Like the teeth of the dragon. The Trinity, the holy number of the Progeny. Three, the Glagolitic symbol like two towers sharing the same line of flat ground. Like the three vows of poverty, chastity, obedience.

The images flash, rotate before my eyes. This time I juxtapose them with the curving lines of script arcing across the pages of my mother’s notes—so like those Gothic arches. I shuffle them in my mind, lay them out on an unseen canvas. Not the pages of contradictions, take those out. Not the front of the one with its uniform lines. Eight left. Two across, four high. Switch two. The back of this one instead of its front. This one turned upside down, the curving translation connecting to the end of the page beside it.

They form the Gothic arch, a tree like this, two limbs lifted as though to the sun.

A sun floating above the crescent, a golden island of light.

Rolan, beside me, is murmuring something.

“What is it?” I say.

“ ‘Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun,’ ” he says. “Francis of Assisi.”

The orb on the pages falls away, leaving only the curved arms, so like the Franciscan crest. The arms fall away, and the sun floats like a perfectly round island. The elements reassemble, forming the tree of life.

I glance toward the lattice at the top of the church, created, the pastor said, to draw the eye upward.

Thank you.