Walking with Ghosts

priest and some people who had worked with Billy’s father, but there was no coffin. The coroner’s office had forgotten to send it. The priest had telephoned, and someone was trying to sort it out. After sitting in the church for nearly an hour, all the other people left. Then the priest explained to Dora that the coffin would arrive, but he couldn’t wait for it. He had to be somewhere else. Some of his parishioners were sick. They were waiting for him. He’d return as soon as he could.
    They went to the churchyard and found the hole in the ground. The gravediggers were still finishing it off, putting pieces of wood by the edge to stop the earth running back in. They walked off when Billy and Diana and Dora arrived. They didn’t say anything.
    It was cold there. There was no sun, and the wind was whistling through the shrubs, round the gravestones. The hole had been dug at the very edge of the graveyard, under the wall where everything was in shadow. In the centre of the graveyard, there were graves with marble angels, and others with white and green pebbles and tiny wrought-iron barriers. Billy would have liked to see his father’s grave in the centre there, where there was light and air. But it seemed it had to be here in the gloom.
    No bells rang in the church. Billy stood with the women and watched the earthworms in the newly dug soil. From time to time Dora or Diana shivered with the cold. Stamped their feet. Billy didn’t shiver or stamp his feet. He gritted his teeth and waited.
    The hearse ordered by the coroner’s office came through the gate and drew up a hundred metres from the grave. Two men got out and loaded the coffin on to a wheeled gurney, which they pushed along the grass path to the edge of the grave. The plain wooden box containing his father’s body rocked and teetered as if it might crash to the ground. The main man nodded at Dora, glanced at Billy and Diana. Then the two gravediggers returned, one of them flicking a cigarette end into the bushes.
    The priest returned, breathless, and commended Billy’s father’s body to God. Trusting that thou wilt in all things surely ordain what is best for thy creation; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.
    ‘Do you want to say anything?’ the priest asked Dora. She took Diana’s and Billy’s hands and stepped forward. She said the Lord’s prayer: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven...’ She said it right through to the amen. Then she stepped back again, and looked at the priest and the gravediggers and Arthur’s coffin. Billy pulled his hand free from his mother’s grip.
    They had a green rope which they put around the coffin so they could lower it into the hole. It seemed heavier at one end than the other, and it swung dangerously for a moment, as though they would lose it, banging against the top edge of the grave. But they controlled it and lowered it to the bottom. They threw the ends of the green rope down there too.
    They stood quietly for a moment, then the main man said they’d be off. ‘We’ll leave you with yours,’ the priest said to Dora. She nodded at him.
    After a while Dora collected a handful of earth and threw it into the hole. Billy heard it rattle on top of the coffin. Diana did the same. Billy watched his sister, thinking she Would have to copy Dora, pretend she was grown up.
    And that was it. They walked away from the grave, and the gravediggers began filling it in before they’d reached the gate of the graveyard. The priest came out of the church then, and stood there while they walked past him. He had a black cassock on, and he had his hands tucked inside the sleeves, like a muff.
    He called round later in the day, to see if he could be of service. Dora swore at him.
    The church service had been different for Arthur because he had ‘laid violent hands’ on himself. That’s what they called it. Billy would never go into a church again after that day. If he lived to be a hundred he would never forgive them. The church was happy to give the proper service to idiots and lunatics, murderers and rapists, almost anyone who needed to be buried. But not William’s father, who was a truly good man.
     
    William carried the candle into the room next to his father’s study. The room was unfurnished and faced the back garden. There was nothing covering the floor, just the bare boards. Along the wall behind the door was a long chest, and inside the chest was a busybody. Only he wasn’t busy any more.
    Charles