Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks Page B

loggerheads with the priest, a new appointee. Over an old transgression, on his part not hers. When they were at university together. A drunkard, and violent. She’s had him banned from the house, by order of the bishop who’s been inundated with calls to bring back the previous priest. His response to ban the previous priest from the parish entirely so that the new one can get on with it. But now Nona is dead, and Katia’s parents have bitten the bullet, gone to the bishop’s house, caught him and his minions at breakfast. He’d have looked petty to refuse. A special dispensation. The previous priest allowed back, just this once.
    ~
    Heavy rain the night before the funeral. Air clear in the morning, all the haze washed out. The far mountains outlined clear against the sky, mist like a white skin on the plain, peaks floating above it unanchored, cut adrift. I’d been worried that the grave had already been dug and would now be filled with water, but no, they must watch the weather. Came early in the morning and dug it then. Three men, who by the time the funeral had commenced had changed into suits. In the same small plot as her husband, dead forty-five years now. How would they do it? Dig until they find a trace of him and then place her on top? His coffin rotted now, surely. Gone. These things you don’t think about until you need to. So many bodies in that small cemetery. And how will they manage with me? Not so hard I suppose. I will be ashes in a jar. Katia will hold me.
    ~
    A thought crosses the mind. Or is it a vision, a glimpse? This of the moth – as if I were with it – in the garden somewhere, feather-light in the corners of darkness. Dreaming me, moving on.
    ~
    A week after. The eighth-night Mass. Has she been waiting, for this final permission? Aldo is anxious that he not have to go alone, but the church is being painted; the first floor of the gallery next door is to be used instead. And Lucia, Katia’s mother, is still on crutches after her operation, can’t handle the stairs. He comes to ask Katia to go with him, knowing full well her fury with the church, and she too at first refuses – he has left it too late, the dinner is already on the table – but then unexpectedly relents. Leaves the meal half-eaten. She will be half an hour, no more.
    I sit and watch the sunset. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. People are walking back from the Mass in first darkness. More people than I would have thought, but then Nona has been here a very long time. And then suddenly, from the courtyard, Katia’s voice calling, urgent. I go to the landing. She is holding something to her chest. A cat, she says, and it’s dying, might be dead already, she can’t tell. Bring water. Bring food. By the time I get down she has laid it on its right side on the floor of the boot-room. She rushes into the house to get a syringe, so that she can feed it water drop by drop.
    I watch it in the pool of yellow light, can see no movement. Long, thick hair, matted, gaunt, either very old or very ill. Both. It must weigh almost nothing but already the gravity has flattened it against the tiles. It. Him. Her. Such sad stillness. And then suddenly the right forepaw stretches, lunges almost, a spasm, and goes limp again. Within seconds Katia is back and tries to coax it to drink from the syringe, but the water simply runs out onto the floor. We place rags in the alcove at the side and she moves it there. There is no resistance in its body. It droops in her hands like something already far off. As we finish our dinner she tells me the story. That she’d seen the cat in the grass by the road as she was walking to the Mass, sick, obviously dying, and straight afterward had run back there, to find that it had moved to the other side. Robbie had called from his porch to say that it had been there for three days already, and the woman next door to him had been feeding it. She had