“What’s this?” he asked again.
Mr. Harvey stopped long enough to look at him and then turned back to his work.
“A mat tent.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Salmon,” he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Drawing himself up, my father gave back what the ritual demanded.
“Thank you.” It was like a rock perched in his throat.
There was a moment of quiet, and then Mr. Harvey, sensing my father had no intention of leaving, asked him if he wanted to help.
So it was that, from heaven, I watched my father build a tent with the man who’d killed me.
My father did not learn much. He learned how to lash arch pieces onto pronged posts and to weave more slender rods through these pieces to form semiarches in the other direction. He learned to gather the ends of these rods and lash them to the crossbars. He learned he was doing this because Mr. Harvey had been reading about the Imezzureg tribe and had wanted to replicate their tents. He stood, confirmed in the neighborhood opinion that the man was odd. So far, that was all.
But when the basic structure was done – a one-hour job – Mr. Harvey went toward the house without giving a reason. My father assumed it was breaktime. That Mr. Harvey had gone in to get coffee or brew a pot of tea.
He was wrong. Mr. Harvey went into the house and up the stairs to check on the carving knife that he had put in his bedroom. It was still in the nightstand, on top of which he kept his sketch pad where, often, in the middle of the night, he drew the designs in his dreams. He looked inside a crumpled paper grocery sack. My blood on the blade had turned black. Remembering it, remembering his act in the hole, made him remember what he had read about a particular tribe in southern Ayr. How, when a tent was made for a newly married couple, the women of the tribe made the sheet that would cover it as beautiful as they could.
It had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow since my death, and this was not lost on my father.
“I can hear you, honey,” he said to me, even though I wasn’t talking. “What is it?”
I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened.
But through the snow I noticed this: my father was looking toward the green house in a new way. He had begun to wonder.
Inside, Mr. Harvey had donned a heavy flannel shirt, but what my father noticed first was what he carried in his arms: a stack of white cotton sheets.
“What are those for?” my father asked. Suddenly he could not stop seeing my face.
“Tarps,” said Mr. Harvey. When he handed a stack to my father, the back of his hand touched my father’s fingers. It was like an electric shock.
“You know something,” my father said.
He met my father’s eyes, held them, but did not speak.
They worked together, the snow falling, almost wafting, down. And as my father moved, his adrenaline raced. He checked what he knew. Had anyone asked this man where he was the day I disappeared? Had anyone seen this man in the cornfield? He knew his neighbors had been questioned. Methodically, the police had gone from door to door.
My father and Mr. Harvey spread the sheets over the domed arch, anchoring them along the square formed by the crossbars that linked the forked posts. Then they hung the remaining sheets straight down from these crossbars so that the bottoms of the sheets brushed the ground.
By the time they had finished, the snow sat gingerly on the covered arches. It filled in the hollows of my father’s shirt and lay in a line across the top of his belt. I ached. I realized I would never rush out into the snow with Holiday again, would never push Lindsey on a sled, would never teach, against my better judgment, my little brother how to compact snow by shaping it against the base of his palm. I stood alone in a sea of bright petals. On Earth the snowflakes fell soft and blameless, a curtain descending.
Standing inside the tent, Mr. Harvey thought of how the virgin bride would be brought to a member of the Imezzureg on a camel. When my father made a move toward him, Mr. Harvey put his palm up.
