With a glance at the steeple, Ulysses could tell that the shortest route to the church was directly across the fields rather than by way of the road, so that’s the way he went, running as the crow would fly. It didn’t take long for him to realize that this was a mistake. Though the corn was only a foot and a half high and the farmer’s rows were wide and well kept, the ground itself was soft and uneven, making for cumbersome work. Given all the fields he’d slogged across in Italy, he should have known better. But it seemed too late to switch back to the road now, so with his eye on the steeple he pressed ahead as best he could.
When he was halfway to the church, the twister appeared in the distance at two o’clock, a dark black finger reaching down from the sky—the inversion of the steeple both in color and intent.
With every step now, Ulysses’s progress was slowing. There was so much debris kicking up from the ground that he had to advance with a hand in front of his face to protect his eyes. Then he was holding up both hands with his gaze partly averted, as he stumbled onward toward the upward and downward spires.
Through the gaps in his fingers and the veil of the unsettled dust, Ulysses became aware of rectangular shadows rising from the ground around him, shadows that looked at once orderly and in disarray. Dropping his hands for a second, he realized he had entered a graveyard and he could hear the bell in the steeple beginning to toll, as if rung by an invisible hand. He couldn’t have been more than fifty yards from the church.
But in all likelihood, it was fifty yards too far.
For the twister was turning counterclockwise and its winds were pushing Ulysses away from his goal rather than toward it. As hail began raining down upon him, he prepared for one final push. I can make it, he told himself. Then running with all his might, he began closing the distance between himself and the sanctuary—only to stumble over a low-lying gravestone and come crashing to the ground with the bitter resignation of the abandoned.
—Abandoned by who? asked Billy, with his book gripped in his lap and his eyes open wide.
Ulysses smiled.
—I don’t know, Billy. By fortune, by fate, by my own good sense. But mostly by God.
The boy began shaking his head.
—You don’t mean that, Ulysses. You don’t mean that you were abandoned by God.
—But that’s exactly what I mean, Billy. If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.
Lying on the ground of that graveyard, feeling the old abandonment and knowing it for what it was, Ulysses reached up and took hold of the top of the nearest gravestone. As he hoisted himself upward, he realized the stone he was pushing on was not weathered or worn. Even through the maelstrom of dust and debris he could see it had the dark gray luminescence of a stone that had just been planted. Rising to his full height, Ulysses found himself looking over the shoulders of the marker down into a freshly dug grave, at the bottom of which was the shiny black top of a casket.
This is where the caravan of cars had been coming from, realized Ulysses. They must have been right in the middle of the interment when they received warning of the tornado’s approach. The reverend must have hurried through whatever verses would suffice to commit the soul of the deceased to Heaven, and then everyone had dashed for their cars.
From the look of the coffin, it must have been for a man of some wealth. For this was no pine box. It was polished mahogany with handles of solid brass. On the lid of the coffin was a matching brass plaque with the dead man’s name: Noah Benjamin Elias.
Sliding down into the narrow gap between the coffin and the wall of the grave, Ulysses bent over to unscrew the clasps and open the coffin’s lid. Inside was Mr. Elias lying in state, dressed in a three-piece suit with his hands crossed neatly on his chest. His shoes were as black and shiny as his coffin, and curving across his vest was the thin gold chain of a watch. Though only about five foot six, Mr. Elias must have weighed over two hundred pounds—having dined in a manner suited to his station.
What was the nature of Mr. Elias’s earthly success? Was he the owner of a bank or lumberyard? Was he a man of grit and determination, or of greed and deceit? Whichever he was, he was no longer. And all that mattered to Ulysses was that this man who was only five foot six had had a big enough sense of himself to be buried in a coffin that was six feet long.