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Show Moon - 230 The service was in a restored Eighteenth Century Congregationalist church. Ruth would have whispered loudly, "Your ancestors went to a church like this. You go back. You go back." The hill-colored flowers had been arranged in two vases beside the brass urn, which rose up higher than the flowers like an arrogant bird. "That's her?" Lee whispered to Joy, and she said, "No. She's up in that big tree outside." Alice, pale and thin after her long vigil with her sister, left for her home in Pound Ridge. She invited Joy to come stay with her, her eyes shining with the promise of comfort. Joy did stay with her for a while, but that's a story I've already told you. At dusk, James and the boys and Joy made a little procession through the trees down to the edge of the lake, Lee cradling the brass urn to his chest like a baby. The problem was in the neck. It was too tall, too narrow. The mortuary person must have shoved in the ashes through a funnel. When Lee tipped the urn gently over the water, nothing came out. He shook it a little. All that came was a little cloud of dust. Things inside rattled. Caleb found a stick, poked it in and out a few times. James took the urn from him and pounded on the bottom, shook it hard. Another cloud of dust billowed out, then a small shower of white ashes and some bits of bone. A gust of wind took the ashes their way and they leaped aside, instinctively, unkindly. The sunset was flinging wild colors over the hills and into the lake like streamers at a mad celebration. They could not look at each other, could not speak. |