Free The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

our baffled, misled fathers.
        But
here's the thing we found out too late to make a difference: our fathers and
movie heroes might have been wrong.
        "When?"
I asked.
        "Tonight,"
Ben said.
    ----
        

[6]
        
        In the
city, churches are giving up. Dwindling congregations leaving their places of
worship to be converted into condos, daycares or yoga studios. But judging from
the streets Randy and I drive through in a cab on our way to St. Andrew's
Presbyterian, the churches of Grimshaw are hanging on. Every third corner still
has a gloomy limestone house of God in need of new windows and a Weedwhacker.
To the faithful this might seem an encouraging indication of resilience, the
heartland's refusal to let the devil go about his business unimpeded. But to
me, there is something chilling in all the broken-down bastions of the divine,
as though it will be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the
final wrestling of goods and evils will take place. And it won't be as showy as
Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tell
seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it will be quiet. And like all
the bad done in Grimshaw, it will be known by many but spoken of by none.
        Randy
and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up collars against the
cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews
are no more than a sixth full. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd,
something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were
the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old
suicide.
        As
the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to
identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along
with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to
Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs.
McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and collapsed as a puppet
after you pull out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the
rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look
hard enough I'll find him.
        The
minister delivers the brief eulogy. A sterile recitation of Ben's stalled
resume: his "lifelong commitment" to his mother, his love of fantasy
books and the "excitements of the imagination," the loss of his
father. There is no reference to the surveillance he conducted from his attic
roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's pied- à-terre in Grimshaw.
        After
the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be
clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches
our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over
Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.
        "Come
anytime, Trevor," she says, straightening my tie. "I'll make
tea."
        "I'll
call first."
        "If
you like," she says, shrugging. "But I'll be there whether you call
or not."
        
        
        We
take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's.
The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones
citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own
hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have
gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from
foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.
        The
minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" before they lower the casket into the
ground.
        "That's
it," Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed
tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other