Fear Nothing

crown of the hill, the blacktop looped back on itself to form a spacious turnaround with a small grassy circle at its center. In the circle was a cast-concrete reproduction of Michelangelo's Pietŕ .
        The body of the dead Christ, cradled on his mother's lap, was luminous with reflected moonlight. The Virgin also glowed faintly. In sunshine, this crude replica must surely look unspeakably tacky.
        Faced with terrible loss, however, most mourners find comfort in assurances of universal design and meaning, even when as clumsily expressed as in this reproduction. One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.
        I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn't assess the danger into which I was about to leap.
        The massive two-story Georgian house-red brick with white wood trim - would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay. A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk's handsome pile. This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.
        The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.
        The viewing rooms were on the ground floor. Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.
        I rang the bell.
        A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door. Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk. He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.
        He reached the foyer and switched on both the interior lights and the porch lights. When he opened the door, he seemed surprised to see me squinting at him from under the bill of my cap.
        “Christopher?”
        “Evening, Mr. Kirk.”
        “I'm so very sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man.”
        “Yes. Yes, he was.”
        “We've already collected him from the hospital. We're treating him just like family, Christopher, with the utmost respect - you can be sure of that. I took his course in twentieth-century poetry at Ashdon. Did you know that?”
        “Yes, of course.”
        “From him I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Auden and Plath. Beckett and Ashbery. Robert Bly. Yeats. All of them. Couldn't tolerate poetry when I started the course - couldn't live without it by the end.”
        “Wallace Stevens. Donald justice. Louise Gluck. They were his personal favorites.”
        Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: “Oh, excuse me, I forgot.”
        Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.
        Standing on the dark threshold, he said, “This must be terrible for you, but at least he isn't suffering anymore.”
        Sandy 's eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles' shells.
        Studying his eyes, I said, “Could I see him?”
        “What - your father?”
        “I didn't turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn't have the heart for it, didn't think I needed to. Now… I'd really like just one last look.”
        Sandy Kirk's eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.
        His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved.
        “Oh, Christopher I'm sorry, but the process has begun.”
        “You've already put him in the furnace?”
        Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”
        “Wasn't that terribly quick?”
        “In our work, there's no wisdom in delay. If only I'd known you were coming…
        I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
        Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I'm so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
        In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their