LITMIR.BIZ

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names. The troublemakers were largely young males. The other day a woman’s body had been found wedged behind a door at the public library. Instinctively, Tuuro pinched his nostrils as he opened the cupboard door.

      It was a boy. A small Melano boy, not more than five years old, curled up in the cupboard facing out as if he were simply hiding, his nappy head tucked down to his chest. Tuuro touched his shoulder, cold and stiff. He wrapped his arms around the small chest and unwedged the body from the cupboard, slipped it on its side onto the floor. The boy’s face had a pleading, confused look. Tuuro felt for a second as if he were looking at himself.

      Tuuro’s clearest memory of his mother was her shoes. A blue pair with suede appliquéd sea-stars, an olive-green pair with seams stitched in a yellow zigzag. His mother liked to scoop Tuuro up so his legs dangled. A lilac smell. After she was shot by the man Tuuro called Uncle, Tuuro was raised not by his father (no one was raised by a father) but by his great-aunt and his grandmother Tati, who lived together in a welfare apartment that was actually Tati’s, where Tuuro had to scoop his toys and himself under the bed when the caseworker arrived, because children were not allowed. The great-aunt had an ex-sister-in-law Tuuro was told to call Aunt Stella, who lived in an apartment down the hall. “To whence are you headed, little man?” she might ask. “To whom are you carrying that candy?” A stickler for grammar. She had what Tuuro later learned was an erect carriage: she always stood high with her neck extended, like an African queen, like a Zulu, she said. Tuuro could be Zulu, she liked to point out, that height and those high, wide cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Really, a remarkable-looking people.

      People who adopted Melano boys got subsidies from the state of Ohio, because people didn’t want to adopt Melano boys. “That adopting you should require a bribery is a tragedy and a crime,” Aunt Stella said. “I couldn’t be sure which it is more.” But she and Tuuro would live better if she adopted him. They could leave this ill-kempt building with its slovenly occupants and rent a house with a yard and honeysuckles edging the back fence. A back door as well as a front one, three steps up from the yard to the kitchen. They would be a family. Tuuro could call her Mom. Would he mind calling her Mom? Or would that be sad for him?

      “I could call you Mom,” Tuuro said.

      In his dream of how it was, she indeed adopted him. They moved to their little house in Englewood. Tuuro went to a good school and wore a uniform; when he got off the bus each afternoon, Aunt Stella was waiting by the fire hydrant. They had a dog. They barbequed in summer. Tuuro spoke correctly. No one stomped on anybody’s heart.

      It had been, in its way, a terrible childhood, not because he was unwanted but because after his mother’s death he was wanted too much, by three aging, angry women who each had their own purposes and plans. Tuuro remembered sitting on the brown plaid couch at Tati’s, eyes darting from face to face as he tried to figure out what they wanted, to whom he should acquiesce, to whom he should say “to whom.” Now Tuuro saw in the dead boy’s face the same confused pain that he had felt, and all Tuuro wanted was to make it end.

      He picked up the body and carried it to his supply closet behind the pulpit, which no person but Tuuro ever entered, cleared a space on the bench against the wall there, and set the boy down. He could not get the boy uncurled. There was a wound in the left chest, a complicated thing with congealed blood mixed with torn fabric, an area he would have to clean, Tuuro knew, but for now something he chose to ignore. There was a streak of dried blood coming out of the right ear. Tuuro turned the light off in the supply closet, stood outside it praying the Lord’s Prayer for himself more than the boy, then closed and locked the door.

      He took a ten-minute bus ride home. He left his apartment to return to the church with a duffel bag full of supplies, remembering even the hat to cover the wounded ear.

      He took off the boy’s clothes and, starting with his face, washed him with a washcloth scented with cologne, cleaning off every part of him, even the bits of blood next to his wounds—which must be knife wounds—in his chest. As he worked he dried the boy with his fluffiest towel. Under the boy’s blue shorts there was a surprise, dried stains on his white underpants, urine and stool and blood, which wasn’t right, which hurt Tuuro in his soul. He said the Lord’s Prayer again, left the body on the bench, the towel carefully draped over it, locked the door, and took a bus to K-Bob’s East to buy clean underpants, carrying the soiled underwear in a paper bag that he dumped in a bin outside the store. He bought the best children’s underwear they had, boxer shorts in red silk with a black waistband. He returned to the church, finished his washing, oiled the body especially over the knees and elbows, where the skin was ashy, dressed the boy in the boxer shorts, and wrapped him in a red-and-green-and-black scarf Naomi had once given him for Christmas. Tuuro then shut the door to the closet again and walked to the social hall to get wood for the coffin.

      Tuuro went through the planks of wood stored at the back of the stage. No one would miss a few boards. It was evening now, but still light out, and Tuuro checked the parking lot through the window to be sure the pastor’s car was gone. Making a coffin would involve banging. Tuuro knew his boss’s habits: unless there was a committee meeting—unlikely in the summer—the pastor would not be back during the evening.

      By the time the boy was nestled on his side in his coffin, his lips over his broad white teeth oiled, a drop of cologne placed in the indentation below his nostrils, the city was almost dark. These days there were fewer and fewer lights at night, and Tuuro wanted the burial finished before he had to use a light to see. “Good-bye, my son,” he said, kissing the boy’s forehead, and then he hammered the board onto the coffin’s top. It was sad to no longer see or touch him: Tuuro thought of the boy’s puzzled face, his long fingers and slender wrists.

      He dug a hole in a bare patch behind a prickly shrub in the church garden, a place Tuuro had never liked much (the volunteer gardeners were lazy) but one that would have to do. The hole was maybe a bit sloppy, not quite deep enough, but every minute it was darker and Tuuro wanted to be done. Beads of sweat dripped from his nose. He laid the coffin in the hole and shoveled dirt over it. The hollow thuds echoed like cannon shots, the worst sound in the world.

      Another prayer.

      But where was the service? The boy deserved the service.

      Why am I creeping? Tuuro thought. Why don’t I put the lights on? But he was creeping, without the lights on, through the narthex and past the social hall and the classrooms and into the pastor’s office, a place which, for the sake of cleaning, Tuuro had a key.

      There, Tuuro closed the curtains and put the light on. He went through the pastor’s computer index, then his bookshelves. The Book of Presbyterian Liturgy. Seasons of Life. Today’s Rituals for Today’s Times. He finally found the service he wanted (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) in a book with a broken spine that made him sneeze as he leafed through it. He took the book outside and, with a flashlight, read the entire service over the grave. He replaced the book in the pastor’s office. Then, because it was too late for the buses to be running, Tuuro walked the three miles home.

      TUURO BOLTED awake in the middle of the night: But he has a mother.

      A cold sweat washed over him. He got up and stood over the toilet, wanting to vomit.

      So what if Tuuro didn’t have a mother, so what if other women, not his mother, fought over him? Why in the world did he assume the same about the boy? The boy who was just a boy, maybe four, maybe five, who lay now in the dark, warm ground. Of course the boy’s mother, his only mother, his true and real mother, was frantic now, looking for him.

      Tuuro dressed and ran back to the church, his left little toe sore, a blister rubbed open, the air still hot and sticky even as the dawn made a pink stain in the sky. He would unearth the coffin, go into the church, call the police to tell them what he’d found. The police would say oh yes, thank you for calling, we have the mother right here. They would bring the mother over in their car, her eyes like draining holes in her broad face, but when Tuuro prized the coffin open (he hadn’t used that many nails), she would understand. As terrible as her son’s fate had been, Tuuro had, in his small way, eased the pain of it. He pictured the boy’s mother kissing her son’s face, running her hand over the boy’s thin

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