Free The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch

traffic blurred below them. It was at this moment that the van that Stephanie’s father was driving intersected with the stolen marker from the local cemetery. The stone was falling earthward at thirty-two feet per second, per second. The van was headingsouth at seventy miles per hour. The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie’s father’s right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat. She had just traded places with her younger brother who cuddled with his two other sisters in the rear seat of thevan. It did not kill Stephanie instantly. Her sternum was broken, her heart bruised beyond repair. A trucker stopped to radio for help but at two A.M. in Nowhere, Kentucky, on a Friday morning, such things take time. The family waited by theroadside reciting the rosary as Stephanie gasped for air and moaned. They declared her dead at the hospital two hours later. Stephanie’s mother found thestone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities. It said RESERVED FOSTER and was reckoned to be a corner marker from the Foster Lot in Resurrection Cemetery.
    S ometimes it seems like multiple choice.
    A : It was the Hand of God. God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, “I want Stephanie!” How else to explain the fatal intersection of bizarre events. Say the facts slowly, they sound likeGod’s handiwork. If the outcome were different, we’d call it a miracle.
    Or B : It wasn’t the Hand of God. God knew it, got word of it sooner or later, but didn’t lift a hand because He knows how much we’ve come to count on the Laws of Nature—gravity and objects in motion and at rest—so He doesn’t fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes. He regrets to inform us of this, but surely we mustunderstand His position.
    Or C : The Devil did it. If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of Evil. And sometimes, Evil gets the jump on us.
    Or D : None of the above. Shit happens. That’s Life, get over it, get on with it.
    Or maybe E : All of the above. Mysteries—like decades of the rosary—glorious and sorrowful mysteries.
    E ach of the answers leaves my inheritanceintact—my father’s fear, my mother’s faith. If God’s will, shame on God is what I say. If not, then shame on God. It sounds the same. I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty asking Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth? The alibi changes every day.
    Of course the answers, the ones that faith does not require, and are not forthcoming, would belong to Stephanie’s parents and the hundredsI’ve known like them over the years.
    I ’ve promised Stephanie’s headstone by Christmas—actually for St. Stephen’s Day, December 26th. The day we all remember singing Good King Wenceslaus. Stephen was accused of blasphemy and stoned in 35 A.D.
    When I first took Stephanie’s parents to the cemetery, to buy a grave for their daughter, her mother stood in the road and pointed to a statue of TheRisen Christ. “I want her over there,” she said, “at the right hand of Jesus.” We walked across the section to an empty, unmarked space underneath the outstretched granite right arm of Christ. “Here,” Stephanie’s mother said, her wet eyes cast upward into the gray eyes of Christ. Stephanie’s father, his eyes growing narrow, was reading the name on the neighboring grave. FOSTER is what it read. Itwas cut in stone.

Words Made Flesh

    E vents unfold in ways that make us think of God. They achieve, in their happening, a symmetry and order that would be frightening if assigned to Chance. Things that happen here intersect with things that happen elsewhere, as if there were a plan. Coincidence makes way for correlation which, in its turn, bespeaks the intimate consortium of cause and effect—first in whispers, then in the fullblushless voice of certainty: because it says, because.