Chapter 25: The Burial
They buried Mick Cole on a Saturday in late spring, twenty-two years after his death, in the Cole plot at the Millbrook cemetery, between his mother and father, in ground his family had left for him all along, refusing across four decades, in the teeth of every official story, to fill it with anyone else. The stone had been cut weeks earlier: MICHAEL COLE, 1983โ2002, and under it, a line Laura had chosen and Ethan had not argued with โ HE TRIED TO TELL THE TRUTH. The funeral home had handled everything well, and the county had returned his remains with a dignity Ruiz had personally walked through every office.
The town turned out. That was the way everyone said it afterward. The cemetery's lanes filled with cars parked fender to fender out to the county road. The fire company sent its honor guard, four men and women in dress uniform at the grave with the flag Kozlowski had folded โ he had insisted, at seventy, on doing the folding, and had practiced for three evenings, and the flag that went to Laura's hands had creases like a blade. Pete Sandoval carried the casket, at the front left, where the weight rides heaviest. He and two sheriff's deputies and Ethan's cousin Daniel Reeve and, at the foot, Bill Kozlowski's grandson, a firefighter of twenty-six, bore Mick Cole up the grass slope, while five hundred people stood silent among the stones.
"It isn't heavy," Pete said to Ethan afterward, holding a paper cup of coffee he wasn't drinking. "That's the thing nobody tells you. A boy's casket isn't heavy. You spend the whole walk wishing it were heavier, because your arms want more to do than your heart's got." He cleared his throat and looked at the floor, recovering himself. "I'm glad it was now and notโ I'm glad we did it right. Say that part for me."
The service was short. The Cole family's minister read the psalm for a shepherd and spoke of a young man who had died defending his township's honesty, and Laura read, in a voice that held, the list of ordinary things her brother had been: a fair hand with an engine, a terrible singer, a boy who kept a notebook of everything. Ethan did not speak. He stood with his carpenter's hands clasped, eyes on the stone, and let his sister's words do what forty years of his family's silence could not.
Marge came. Everyone had known she would decide at the last hour, and she did: she arrived as cars were still filling the lanes, in black, with her handbag on her arm, and took her place at the back of the gathering, half behind the Sandovals' boy, with no claim to be anywhere in particular. Grace saw her there. So did Ruiz, in uniform. Nobody moved toward her and nobody moved away, and the service went on around her like water around a stone.
Afterward, when the grave was filled and the crowd had begun drifting toward the church hall, Laura crossed the grass. Ethan watched her go โ past the honor guard, past the fresh earth โ and understood her only when he saw where her walking ended. Marge did not retreat. She stood with her hands clasped before her and took what was coming the way she had taken the recorder and the courtroom, under her own power, and what was coming was Laura, who stopped in front of her, looked at her, and took her hand.
They stood that way awhile. No one near them reported words, and Ethan never asked his sister for any. What he knew was what the whole town saw: Laura Cole Bennett holding Margaret Hale's hand on the grass above a filled grave, both of them weeping, neither of them letting go โ and then Laura drawing her, gently, by that hand, down the slope toward the church hall, where the auxiliary ladies had set out ham and scalloped potatoes and cake for five hundred people, and where Marge Hale took her place at a folding table like anyone else: grief-stricken, hollow-eyed, served coffee by Pete Sandoval's wife without a flicker, and not turned away.
Ethan found her there near the end, when the hall had thinned. "You came," he said.
"I owed your family a grave I could stand at," Marge said. "Forty years I owed it. Your sisterโ" She stopped, pressed her lips together, and finished it the plain way. "Your sister has more mercy in her than I had any right to expect. I told her so. She said mercy wasn't the word. She said the word was finished."
Ethan nodded. Outside, the spring light was going long and gold across the cemetery hill, and the new stone stood clean among the old ones, saying its one sentence to the weather. "Finished," he said. "I can live with that word." And he could. They all could. It was, at last, enough.