The church was too small to hold the service, so Buju and Teego had built a three-foot stage out of bamboo and palm fronds outside the door. I-nelik steered the Land Rover to where the cars were parked on the common and the rest of the procession nudged and squeezed its way to the stage, then split in two to form an aisle, up which Sarge led the mule with Miss Gita. She handed the urn to Reverend Bartley, who’d dressed himself this evening in a black-and-gray-checked three-piece suit and a Panama hat with a purple band. Sarge lifted Miss Gita down from the mule onto the stage; there she sat in an aluminum chair beside a plastic table decorated with pink and purple doilies and a portrait of her son.

Clutching a tattered bible, Mr. Bartley approached the microphone and asked to be joined in prayer. The crowd sar-dined between the gated park and the gingerbread houses bowed its head, and the ochre light from the setting sun washed over heaving shoulders.

“Dear Lord and Heavenly Father, we are gathered here before you now as sinners begging forgiveness. We are not worthy of Thy sight, O Lord. We do not deserve Thy love. But still You sent Your only son to die for our sins, so great is Thy forgiveness. The poet Dylan Thomas said that death shall have no dominion. But we don’t need no book to tell us that. For in You we have eternal life. You alone have loosed the bonds of death. So we ask that You grant each and every one of us the wisdom to look into our hearts and admit that we are sinners, to confess our imperfections so that we may be humble in our actions before You and each other, in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

“I still can’t believe so many came,” Fire said to I-nelik as they walked to the square from the common. “We have about five to six hundred people and about two hundred vehicles with a lotta minivans.” He’d taken off his robe and was dressed now in a black-and-navy windowpane suit with flaps on the three patch pockets. As he surveyed the crowd, he pulled his hair into a ponytail and loosened the neck of his lavender shirt. People were clinging to branches and perched on shingled rooftops.

I-nelik stopped and looked at him, smothering his anger by stroking his beard. He began to whistle as he felt an urge to shake his nephew. Instead, he tapped him on the shoulder and addressed him frankly in the voice of the dentist he used to be. “You’re sounding like a concert promoter. Okay, Fire, you’ve managed to attract a horde of people through a focused marketing plan. But so what? What does that mean? It means a lot to you, obviously. But fundamentally, Fire, what does it mean? None of this will bring him back. Accept that.”

Fire stuck his hands in his pockets; he did not want to hear this now.