The Funeral Was Ready to Start… Until the Man Everyone Buried Walked Into the Church Alive.

Chapter 3

He had swum with everything he had in a direction he could not verify was correct, that he was not certain was correct, in water that was cold and moving and entirely indifferent to whether he survived it. He had been trying to get to shore or to something solid, trying to stay above the surface while the storm did what storms did, and at some point — he could not say when, time had dissolved into pure physical effort — something solid had appeared beneath his hands.

A hull.

A wooden hull, not the boat he had been on, something else. He grabbed it and it held.

The fishing vessel was crewed by two brothers who worked a run about eight miles up the coast. They had pulled him out of the water and wrapped him in a blanket and given him water and spoken to him in the rapid Portuguese that he had four semesters of and which he had deployed, awkwardly, while shaking. They had been heading toward the small harbor at Ponta Velha, which was not a place he had heard of, which was not on his mental map of the coastline, and they did not have a radio that connected to shore, only the weather band, and his phone was at the bottom of the ocean.

Ponta Velha was a village of three hundred people who fished and farmed and did not have reliable cellular service.

He had been injured — a deep cut on his left forearm, taken from the boat’s hardware when he went over, which the brothers had bandaged and which had become infected by the time they reached the village, requiring several days of rest and the attention of the village’s elderly nurse who did not speak English but communicated with remarkable clarity through expression and gesture and a small collection of photographs she kept in the drawer beside the antibiotics.

He had spent twelve days in Ponta Velha.

The village had a telephone — one, at the shop that sold fuel and fishing supplies — but the line had been damaged in the same storm that put him in the water, and repair crews from the phone company were not expected for another week. There was a monthly mail boat. There was a fishing vessel that went to the larger town at the end of the month. He had not known how to reach anyone.

He had written a letter to Miriam and given it to a fisherman going to the larger town who had promised to find a telephone. He did not know if the letter had arrived. By the look on her face when he said this, it had not.

He had come home on the first transport available.

He had not known there was going to be a funeral.

He had arrived at the house to find it locked, no answer at the door, Lily’s tricycle on the porch, and a casserole dish on the front step with a note from Mrs. Alvarez that said, among other things, all of us at St. Augustine’s will be with you and Lily on Saturday.

He had read that note four times before understanding what Saturday meant.

He had walked to the church.

The congregation was very quiet during this account. Some people were crying. Some were the expression of people who had begun the day with a clear emotional expectation and had found it entirely upended. Marcus, Daniel’s brother, had sat down in the front pew with his hands on his knees and was staring at the floor with the expression of a man processing something large.

When Daniel finished, the quiet held for a moment.

Then the question that had been sitting in the room since the pallbearers set down the casket moved to the front of everyone’s attention.

“Daniel,” Pastor Williams said carefully. “If you are here, and you are clearly and wonderfully here—” a small, genuine smile crossing his face with the weight of real relief— “then we must ask. The coast guard. The search. What was found?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said.