Black Evening

Your brother or your sister? Your twin? Is your counterpart under the grass you clutch?

You shriek, "Two hundred!"

Despite the howl of the storm, you hear a car, its engine roaring, its tires spi

Chief Kitrick shoves his door open, stalking toward you through the raging gloom. "God damn it, I told you to leave the past alone."

You rise from the grass, draw back a fist, and strike his mouth so hard he drops to the mushy ground. "You knew! You son of a bitch, you knew all along!"

The chief wipes blood from his mangled lips. In a fury, he fumbles to draw his gun.

"That's right! Go ahead, kill me!" You spread out your arms, lashed by the rain. "But June'll be a witness, and you'll have to kill her as well! So what, though, huh? Two murders won't matter, will they? Not compared to a couple of hundred children!"

"I had nothing to do with – "

"Killing these babies? No, but your father did!"

"He wasn't involved!"

"He let it happen! He took the Gunther's money and turned his back! That makes him involved! He's as much to blame as the Gunthers! The whole fucking town was involved!" You pivot toward the ridge, buffeted by the full strength of the storm. In the blinding gale, you can't see the town, but you scream at it nonetheless. "You sons of bitches! You knew! You all let it happen! You did nothing to stop it! That's why your town fell apart! God cursed you! Bastards!"

Abruptly you realize the terrible irony of your words. Bastards? All of these murdered children were bastards. You spin toward the grass, the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Falling, you hug the rain-soaked earth, the drenched lush leaves of grass. "Poor babies!"

"You can't prove a thing," Chief Kitrick growls. "All you've got are suppositions. After fifty years, there won't be anything left of those babies. They've long since rotted and turned into – "

"Grass," you moan, tears scalding your face. "The beautiful grass."

"The doctor who delivered the babies is dead. The Gunthers – my father kept track of them – died as well. In agony, if that satisfies your need for justice. Orval got stomach cancer. Eve died from alcoholism."

"And now they burn in hell," June murmurs.

"I was raised to be… I'm a Jew," you moan and suddenly understand the significance of your pronouncement. No matter the circumstances of your birth, you are a Jew, totally, completely. "I don't believe in hell. But I wish… Oh, God, how I wish…"

"The only proof you have," Chief Kitrick says, "is this old woman, a Catholic who goes every afternoon to pray in a ruined synagogue. She's nuts. You're a lawyer. You know her testimony wouldn't be accepted in court. It's over, Weinberg. It ended fifty years ago."

"No! It never ended! The grass keeps growing!" You feel the chill wet earth. You try to embrace your brother or your sister and quiver with the understanding that all of these children are your brothers and sisters. "God have mercy on them!"

What do you think has become of the children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

"Luckier?" You embrace the grass. "Luckier?"

Through the rain-soaked earth, you think you hear babies crying and raise your face toward the furious storm. Swallowing rain, tasting the salt of your tears, you recite the kaddish prayers. You mourn Mary Duncan, Simon and Esther Weinberg, your brother or your sister, all these children.

And yourself.

"Deliver us from evil," June Engle murmurs. "Pray for us si

Back in 1970, just after I finished graduate school at Pe

The Shrine

Grady was in the mausoleum when the beep from his pager disrupted his sobbing.

The mausoleum was spacious and bright, with shiny marble slabs that concealed the niches into which coffins had been placed. In an alcove near the tall, wide windows that flanked the main entrance, glinting squares of glass permitted mourners to stare within much smaller niches and view the bronze urns that contained the ashes of their loved ones. Plastic, bronze-colored letters and numbers that formed the names of the deceased as well as their birth and death dates were glued upon the squares of glass, and it was toward two of those panes, toward the urns behind them, that Grady directed his attention, although his vision was blurred by tears.

He'd chosen cremation for his wife and ten-year-old son, partly because they'd already been burned – in a fiery car crash with a drunken driver – but more because he couldn't bear the thought of his cherished wife and child decomposing in a coffin in a niche in the mausoleum or, worse, outside in the cemetery, beneath the ground, where rain or the deep cold of winter would make him cringe because of their discomfort, even though the remaining rational part of Grady's mind acknowledged that it didn't matter to his fiercely missed family, who now felt nothing because they were dead.

But it mattered to him, just as it mattered that each Monday afternoon he made a ritual of driving out here to the mausoleum, of sitting on a padded bench across from the wall of glassed-in urns, and of talking to Helen and John about what had happened to him since the previous Monday, about how he prayed that they were happy, and most of all, about how much he missed them.

They'd been dead for a year now, and a year was supposed to be a long time, but he couldn't believe the speed with which it had gone. His pain remained as great as the day he'd been told they were dead, his emptiness as extreme. Friends at first had been understanding, but after three months, and especially after six, most of those friends had begun to show polite impatience, making well-intentioned speeches about the need for Grady to put the past behind him, to adjust to his loss, to rebuild his life. So Grady had hidden his emotions and pretended to take their advice, his burden made greater by social necessity. The fact was, he came to realize, that no one who hadn't suffered what he had could possibly understand that three months or six months or a year meant nothing.

Grady's weekly visits to the mausoleum became a secret, their half-hour concealed within his Monday routine. Sometimes he brought his wife and son flowers and sometimes an emblem of the season: a pumpkin at Halloween, a Styrofoam snowball in winter, or a fresh maple leaf in the spring. But on this occasion, just after the Fourth of July weekend, he'd brought a miniature flag, and unable to control the strangled sound of his voice, he explained to Helen and John about the splendor of the fireworks that he'd witnessed and that they'd used to enjoy while eating hot dogs at the city's a