LITMIR.BIZ

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certainty that if she spoke during the meeting she would cry—and that if she didn’t, she would never come back.

      Back then, it had sometimes been all she could manage to say her name. Today she would have to say more. Not for those gathered here: besides Smoke and Ruthie, there was only Randall, standing at a respectful distance and twisting his handkerchief in a tight knot around his knuckles, and Paul, who never missed a funeral, and Greg, who’d spent some evenings with Gloria even after she was banned from working the comfort tents.

      And then also Rae, who managed the comfort tents, and probably felt guilty about firing Gloria, since, when Gloria couldn’t work, she couldn’t buy anything to drink. And that was what killed her, in a way—after only a few days of forced sobriety she had drunk a bottle of Liquid-Plumr from the garbage hill slowly accumulating on the far side of the stadium’s parking lot.

      Cass gazed out on the others and swallowed back tears. Smoke had put on a clean shirt, not that you could see it under his heavy work coat. Ruthie wore a little red coat and matching hat that a raiding party had brought back last week. Everyone else was dressed in the usual layers of clothes splodged with stains, the heavy boots. No one looked directly at her, save Smoke. No one gathered here would care if Cass cried for Gloria, but it was important to her that she not be misunderstood, not now, not today.

      She trailed her fingers along the scratched wooden top of the small table enlisted as an altar. Someone had brought it back from a night raid, a humble thing whose most appealing feature was that it was light and easy to carry. Cass thought it might—half a century ago—have been a telephone table, back when phones had to be plugged into the wall. On Sundays, Randall put a cloth on the little table, rested his Bible on top of that. He didn’t lack for an audience. Cass didn’t begrudge him his followers—nor did she begrudge them their hour of peace or solace or whatever it was they found in his words.

      Still, today: no cloth, no Bible. It had fallen to Cass to plan the service. No one else offered, and Randall had come to stand in the door to their tent, hat in his hand, and asked Cass what would be right. Gloria had never spoken of God and Cass felt it would be presumptuous to impose Him on her now.

      Cass shut her eyes for a moment and exhaled slowly. When she opened her eyes again, Ruthie was watching her expectently, lips parted in anticipation. For a child who didn’t talk, Ruthie listened to others with great care, none more than her mother.

      Cass produced a tiny smile for her daughter. She reached for the string around her neck and pulled from under her blouse the pendant she had made yesterday, and Ruthie did the same. They wore clothespins, the old-fashioned wooden kind, knotted to nylon cord. Cass held the clothespin as though it were a precious thing and considered it, turning it slowly this way and that.

      “Gloria and I talked about clothespins once,” Cass began, her voice rusty. “She told me about hanging clothes on a line.”

      Greg, dry-eyed and somber, nodded as though what Cass was telling was a story he’d heard a dozen times. That couldn’t have been. Gloria made little sense when she talked; she dredged memories and unfurled them carelessly, moving in and out of time and sense. You didn’t have a conversation with Gloria so much as an occasional glimpse into the ill-tended recesses of her mind. There was nothing there to hold on to.

      She wondered what memories Gloria had shared with Greg, if they had talked at all. The comfort tents were places of shame; men and the occasional woman slipped in and out of them like shadows, bartering whatever they had for a grope in the dark, an awkward coupling, a muffled cry. Anything to forget the gone world for a while.

      Those who worked in the tents usually had no other way to earn. That was the case with Gloria, who was too far gone to raid, to cook, to harvest, to mend or make things, or even offer knowledge that helped. But she had meant more than nothing to Greg.

      “She told me about hanging clothes on a line,” Cass said again. She cleared her throat. “And she…had someone, once. His name was Matthew.”

      Gloria had long, thick silvery hair. That, and her faded blue eyes, were the only clues to her long-ago beauty. She was lean and leathery. She’d broken a tooth and on the rare occasions when she was sober she was suddenly self-conscious and tried to hide the gap, barely moving her lips to speak. Her nails were ragged and dirty. Her clothes grew filthy and torn in the days before her death. The last time they spoke, Gloria had answered all of Cass’s questions with noncommittal grunts and never once met her eyes. Ruthie had been afraid of her.

      “She loved him,” Cass concluded. Once, Gloria had loved. That would have to be enough. Cass had said all she knew—all that was important, anyway. Gloria never told her anything but his name; if he’d been a lover, a husband, a childhood friend, it didn’t matter.

      She bent to the earth, the rectangle of dirt raked carefully one way and then the other, crosshatched from the tines. She dug her fingers in and took a handful, then stood up and slowly sifted the earth back over the length of the grave.

      She stood back as the others filed around the perimeter of the grave. They knelt and scooped their own handfuls of dirt, even Ruthie. The knees of her tights were smudged with dirt—another stain Cass would not be able to get out. She sighed. Each person shook their dirt back down onto the grave, and Cass wondered what words they said in their minds. Hers was goodbye—maybe everyone said goodbye.

      The dirt was sprinkled and still they ringed the grave, waiting. Randall dug in his pocket. “Cass, perhaps you’d like to…”

      He held out a plastic bag, gapping open; inside were dried kaysev beans, dull and brown. Cass looked at him sharply, but for once Randall stared back with a hint of challenge in his expression. Smoke squeezed her hand, shook his head. Smoke stayed far clear of Randall’s Sunday-morning services. He had little to do with believers. He even did his occasional drinking at Rocket’s—not German’s, where believers tended to congregate.

      Cass didn’t want to take the beans. The funeral practice of sprinkling the grave with kaysev seed—it was based in the Bible, the passage in Matthew about the sower. It was a common practice, almost secular by now; a whole new culture of loss, its habits and practices as ingrained as if generations of ancestors had practiced them. It had only been eight months since the Air Force had rained kaysev down from the skies on their last flights, but eight months had been long enough to create new rituals. The plant was meant to feed the population; it had begun to feed their imaginations, as well.

      Smoke saw everything through the filter of ideology and he was resolute, and Cass was inclined to agree with him, at least on this. Terrible memories of the Convent were too fresh, the mark its zealotry had left on Ruthie too deep.

      God had not taken up residence across the street in the stadium—of that Cass was sure.

      But unlike Smoke, she was not ready to declare Him absent. Still, He was an elusive, crafty cipher to Cass, and for now she meant to keep Him distant.

      When Cass did not take the plastic bag from Randall’s outstretched hand, the frowning man narrowed his eyes and upended it himself, the beans falling to the earth and rolling into the crevices and fissures in the earth. “He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word,” he intoned, his gaze never leaving Cass’s face.

      Then he stepped back from the grave, jamming the empty bag back into his pocket and brushing his hands together fastidiously. Everyone else followed him, retreating to the cleared area where the service had begun, shuffling slowly.

      “And now we conclude our service for Gloria,” Randall murmured, the wind snatching at his words and carrying them away, so that everyone leaned in closer to hear. Everyone, that is, but Cass, who picked up Ruthie and edged to the back of the small gathering while Randall raised his hands for a final benediction.

      “Man, you are dust,” he said, closing his eyes. “And to dust you shall return.”

      Not for the first time Cass considered that Randall was a fraud, cobbling together bits and pieces of faiths to suit himself.

      What did it matter, though? Dead was still dead, and the rest of them were

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