Free Friendly Fire by C. D. B.; Bryan Page B

else to say the mass.…”
    â€œWell, yes,” Peg said. “As a matter of fact, we’ll want Father Hemesath to say the mass.” Father Gregory Hemesath of New Haven, a small town in Mitchell County, northern Iowa, was an old friend of the Mullens’.
    â€œThat’s just fine,” Father Shimon said. “You write down whoever you want and I’ll ask them. I’ll bow out and won’t have any part in the, ah-h, funeral mass.”
    â€œWe’ll want music, too,” Gene said, pausing in mid-phone call. “Michael always liked good music.”
    â€œWhenever we went to Kansas City,” Peg said, “if there was any good music being played, Michael would take us to hear it.”
    â€œAs you know,” Father Shimon said, licking his lips, “our church doesn’t have an organ.…”
    â€œSo it’ll be Sister Richard and the Don Bosco High School Chorus,” Peg said.
    â€œOh, all right,” Father Shimon said, “that’s fine. That’s just fine.”
    â€œAnd I’d like Father Hirsch to say a few words,” Peg said. Father Robert Hirsch was the principal of the Don Bosco High School in Gilbertville where all the Mullen children had gone. “And I want a White Funeral.…”
    â€œI can’t, Peg,” the priest said, shaking his head. “I can’t have one.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause when the permission order came to change the service, each parish had to request the permission from the archdiocese.…” In the Black Funeral, the then-traditional Catholic mass, the priests wore black vestments. The mass mourned the departed, and its prayers were directed toward the salvation of the sinner’s soul. In the White Funeral, which had only recently been introduced, the priests wore white vestments. The funeral service marked the deceased’s entrance into eternal life. It was a celebration of the resurrection rather than a mass of mourning. “I didn’t want the change,” Father Shimon told Peg, “so I ignored it.”
    â€œThat doesn’t matter,” Peg said, “All you’ve got to do is have it now. We had one only two months ago when that La Porte boy from the Jesup parish died in Vietnam.”
    â€œNope. Nope. Nope,” Father Shimon said, “I can’t do it.”
    Peg regarded him coldly, then lowered her head and went back to work on her list.
    After a moment, Father Shimon stood up. “Well,” he said, “I, ah-h, probably, ah-h, should be going.”
    â€œFine, Father,” Peg said.
    A few minutes later they heard the priest’s car driving away. Gene, off the telephone, came over to the kitchen table, too. There was nothing that they could do while waiting for the rest of the family to arrive but make a list of those friends who would want and need to know that which they themselves were still scarcely willing to accept: their son Michael was dead.

Chapter Five
    The Mullens’ friends and neighbors, stunned by word of Michael’s death, began arriving at the farm shortly after Father Shimon left. They were stricken, outraged, bewildered that this distant war in Vietnam, a war so wearying, so incomprehensibly foreign, so enduring, could somehow have taken Michael’s life as it had claimed the life of that Jesup parish boy only two months before. The men wearing faded bib overalls, ankle-high work boots, day-glo orange earflapped vinyl caps, their mellow, weathered faces creased with sorrow, approached Gene shyly, hesitantly. Gently they touched him on the shoulder, laid their calloused hands almost tenderly across his back. Their wives, in woolen slacks and heavy hand-knit cardigans, brought baskets of food, stews and casseroles, pots of coffee which they set to simmer at the rear of the Mullens’ stove. And then they moved back to take Peg’s hands in their own, hugged her, kissed her lightly upon