Robert Wilson - The Harvest

At least the memorial service was still on schedule. Her father’s body had been committed to the earth a day before Contact, but the service had been postponed to allow Miriam’s uncle, a man she had never met, to fly in from Norway, where he worked. Naturally, the flight had been canceled—there had been something in the news about civilian aircraft commandeered for relief flights into the African famine zones. So the service would go on this afternoon with or without Uncle Edward.

Or so Miriam hoped. Was anything certain these days?

Dr. Ackroyd had been willing to go ahead with the service, but even the Rector had changed. Last week, Simon Ackroyd had confessed to being one of them. The Rector was engaged in the same transformation that had overtaken the rest of the world, and Miriam was not at all sure she would like what the man had turned into, or that he would like her, or that she would be safe at the end of the world’s strange new evolution.

She didn’t think of herself as an Episcopalian, but her father had called himself that even though he seldom attended services. She suspected he’d picked the Episcopalians because they were the most upscale congregation in town; barring the Catholics, whom Daddy had regarded as a fanatical sect, like Shiites or Communists.

The Episcopal Church squatted like a gray stone bulldog on its acre of lawn and peered across a long slope of rooftops to the sea. Miriam parked and climbed the stairs to the parish office. Dr. Ackroyd had said he would meet her here and they would drive together to Brookside Cemetery.

The Rector was waiting in his office with a concerned expression on his homely face. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said.

She listened as he explained how the memorial service would proceed, though they had arranged all this in advance. Does he think I’m senile? Miriam wondered. Or had the ministry lowered his expectations? Perhaps he often dealt with stupid people.

The ceremony would be outdoors, at the graveside. It was to be simple and brief. Above all, Miriam hoped, brief. She hated all mumbling over the dead and would never have agreed even to this much if Uncle Edward, the hypocrite, hadn’t insisted.

“I didn’t know your father very well,” the Rector was saying, “but there are people in my congregation who did, and they tell me he was a good man. A loss like this is never easy. I know you’re going through a difficult time, Miriam—for this and other reasons. I want you to know I’m here if you need to talk.”

The offer struck Miriam as both laughable and strange. Her response was spontaneous: “All I want to know is—how you can do this?” Tm sorry?”

“After what happened that night. You know what I mean.”

He drew back. “This is my job. That hasn’t changed.”

“You were touched by the Thing.”

He looked bewildered. “You mean Contact?”

“Nobody calls anything by its right name. Doesn’t matter. I’m a Christian woman, Rector. When the Thing touched me I knew it was nothing a Christian should have anything to do with, and I gave it a Christian response. I don’t see the point of immortality outside the Throne of God. But you. You shook hands with it—am I right? And yet, there you sit. Prepared to read Scripture over the body of my father. How can you do that?”

Dr. Ackroyd seemed dismayed; he took a long time answering.

“Miriam,” he said finally, “you may be right.” He paused as if to summon thoughts. “I’m not sure I know what a Christian is. I’ve thought about this a great deal since Contact. The harder I look for Christianity, Miriam, the more it evaporates before my eyes. Is it Martin Luther or is it Johann Eck? Is it Augustine, or is it John Chrysostom? Is it Constantine? Is it Matthew and Mark and Luke, and did they write the Scriptures we call by their names? Or was Christianity buried along with the apocrypha at Nag Hammadi?”

Now it was Miriam’s turn to be bewildered.

“I simply don’t know,” the Rector confessed. “I think I never did know. I think there is something in the Artifact nearly as rich and strange as all our earthly religions put together. Nearly. Miriam, when I spoke with the Travellers I put some of these questions to them. I have a sense of what their spirituality consists of… and I think it may not be incompatible with ours. They don’t claim to have unraveled every mystery. In fact, they’re quite humble about their ignorance. They think consciousness might have some special relationship to the hidden order of the universe, even a persistence after absolute death. I’m not sure whether this ought to be called religion or cosmology. But they acknowledge that some subtlety of mind may be bound into the functioning of stars and time.

“They didn’t ask me to abandon my Christianity, Miriam. It’s only that I’ve had to be more honest with myself about the things I know and the things I don’t. The divinity of Christ, the extrinsic nature of God… maybe I was never really convinced of those things. Only wanted to believe them.

“So you’re right, Miriam. I don’t guess I’m entitled to call myself a Christian any longer. But I can perform the memorial service. I can help you say goodbye to your father, and I can mark the mystery of death, and I can honor it—perhaps more sincerely than ever before. I would be pleased to perform that service for you. But if you feel I’m unqualified, I’ll step aside. Maybe we can find someone else, maybe even here in town.”

Miriam was stunned. She gazed at the Rector, then shook her head. “No… that’s all right. You do it.”

“Thank you, Miriam.”

“It’s not a vote of confidence. I don’t think it matters who says the words. If there’s a Heaven, it’s beyond our commanding, and if there’s a Hell, our prayers won’t keep us out of it.” She looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t we leave? It’s getting late.”

She drove with him to Brookside Cemetery, through the gates and up a winding road to the graveside. She had wanted an outdoor service. Miriam hated chapels. They smelled like overripe sachets, like decaying lavender.

Mist still lingered in the lowlands and across the water, but the sun had burned the sky blue overhead. Mt. Buchanan rose up behind the cemetery like the shoulders of a green and granite colossus. This was a hillside plot, and it was pleasant to see the rows of graves running down to the main gate and the road.

From this hillside Miriam watched the crowd begin to gather.

She had mailed an announcement of the memorial service to those few of Daddy’s friends still living, mainly retired staff from the Community College and the members of the Bridge Club whose company he had enjoyed before his stroke. She was surprised by the relative youth of the crowd beginning to gather—too many strangers, faces she did not recognize—and by its size.

Cars had filled the chapel parking lot at the foot of the hill, and more cars had begun to park along the road, all the way down to the intersection and out of sight.

Troubled and vaguely frightened, Miriam turned to Rector Ackroyd. “Daddy didn’t know all these people.”

“The service was announced in the Observer”

She knew that; she had clipped the announcement. “But why are they here? What for?”

“To mark a solemn occasion. Miriam, your father was the last man in Buchanan to die before Contact. Do you know what that means? His was the last involuntary death in this town.”

But it was a reasoning that made Miriam hostile, for reasons she didn’t wholly understand.

“I don’t want strangers here.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. But it’s not a joke. They’re sincere—their feelings are genuine.”