TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER I’D gotten dressed up for my arrest, I put on the same outfit once more and climbed into the Taurus. I felt odd and conspicuous—ashamed, almost—to drive through the rustic cabins and campground wearing a coat and tie, especially two days in a row. The fancy getup seemed as inappropriate here in the woods as shorts and a T-shirt would have seemed at a symphony concert. But once I got to the funeral, I would blend right in.
I had not known Jess was religious; for that matter, I still didn’t, but the location of her memorial service—St. Paul’s Episcopal Church—suggested that either Jess or whoever arranged her funeral was. How strange, I reflected as I approached the outskirts of Chattanooga yet again, to know someone’s flesh as intimately as I had recently come to know Jess’s, yet to know nearly nothing about their spirit, or at least their beliefs. So many things I’ll never get the chance to learn about her, I thought, and the realization sent me spinning down another dark spiral of grief.
St. Paul’s was located in downtown Chattanooga, three blocks from the convention center and practically alongside U.S. 27, the elevated expressway that skirted the western edge of the business district before crossing the Tennessee River and angling northeast up the valley of the Tennessee River. I took the second downtown exit, which fed me north onto Pine Street; I was early, so I was able to park at a meter directly across the street from the church’s main entrance.
St. Paul’s was set above street level, and the entrance was beside a tall bell tower of red brick, rising from a gray limestone base. Episcopalians, I’d observed, tended to have a flair for architecture, along with the money to indulge it. As I crossed the street to the front steps, I noticed several police cars at the curb. Technically, Jess wasn’t part of the police department, but she was part of the extended family of law enforcement, and the code of honor extended to her: You turn out to honor your fallen comrades. The unwritten, darker corollary, I’d noticed over the years, was that the more shocking the death, the bigger the turnout, as if a show of posthumous solidarity might somehow make up for the tragedy that had struck down one of their own—or prevent the next one.
As I topped two flights of steps and reached a brick plaza just below the double wooden doors into the nave, I noticed two uniformed officers flanking the entrance. I thought perhaps they were giving out programs, but their hands were empty, so I decided they were simply some sort of honor guard. One of the officers looked my way; I made eye contact with him and nodded somberly. He stepped forward to meet me. “Dr. Brockton?”
“Yes, hello there,” I said, holding out my hand and reading the name MICHAEL QUARLES on a brass bar on his chest. “Have we worked together before, Officer Quarles?”
“No, sir,” he said, “we haven’t met. Dr. Brockton, I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed here.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not allowed to be here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said, sir. You’re not allowed to enter the church; in fact, you’re not allowed anywhere on the church property, so I’ll have to ask you to go back down these steps.”
“This is Dr. Carter’s memorial ser vice, isn’t it?” He nodded once. “She was a colleague and a friend of mine,” I said.
“Maybe so,” he said, “but there’s a restraining order, signed by Judge Avery, that bars you from entering this church or setting foot on this property today. So I’m asking you—no, sir, I’m telling you—to leave the property now.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Who requested this restraining order?”
“Assistant District Attorney Preston Carter.” Jess’s ex-husband.
“This is not right,” I protested. “He has no grounds for this.”
“Way I hear it, you’ve been charged with her murder,” he said. “I’d call that pretty solid ground. In any case, we’re here to enforce a restraining order that bars you from this property. I’ll give you to the count of three to comply; if you do not, I will take you into custody, sir.”
“Who can I talk to about this?”
“One.”
“I need to be in there.”
“Two.”
“Please. I am begging you.”
“Three.” He stepped forward and took my arm. I shook off his grip; without taking his eyes from mine, he reached to the back of his belt, where I knew police carried their handcuffs. Holding up both hands, I began backing down the stairs. He allowed me to retreat. A small group of onlookers who had gathered at the foot of the steps parted to let me pass. Some of them glanced at me furtively; others stared openly.
I noticed Jess’s receptionist at the edge of the group, her eyes rimmed in red. “Amy,” I said, “please see if you can get me in there.” She ducked her head and hurried up the stairs, and the rest of the small crowd followed suit.
The two policemen were still watching me. I looked from one unyielding face to the other, then finally shook my head and walked across the street to the Taurus. As I pulled away from the curb onto Pine Street, I rolled down my window and stopped to give the officers a long last look, which they returned without expression. Then I took my foot off the brake and eased north on Pine, toward the STOP sign at Sixth Street. As I turned right onto Sixth, I took a final look back at the church and I thought I saw Officer Quarles speaking into the radio mike that was clipped to his shoulder.
Two blocks east, Sixth intersected Broad Street, the main boulevard through the heart of downtown. A right on Broad, followed by another right onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, would take me back to highway 27, and from there to I-75 North, and to Knoxville. But I did not turn right; instead I turned left onto Broad Street, away from my route home. I parked at the first meter I came to, fed in five quarters I fished from the change tray, and started walking toward St. Paul’s. Then I turned back to the car; I took off my suit coat and my tie and put a UT cap on my head. My clothes—black pants, a blue shirt and tie, and black wingtips—looked too dressy for the cap, but I hoped I could pass for a tourist or casual passerby if a policeman didn’t look too closely.
Where Sixth met Pine, I looked left toward the front of the church. I didn’t see any police on the sidewalk, but just to be on the safe side, I continued down Sixth, past a high-rise nursing home named St. Barnabas, then doubled back through an alley that ran between the nursing home and the back of the church. An iron gate behind the church opened onto a small playground; to one side of the playground, a door led into what looked like a wing of classrooms. I tried the gate and found it locked. Looking around, I saw no one, and I gripped the uprights and prepared to scale it. Then I thought of all those windows in St. Barnabas, and all those rooms filled with elderly people whose chief entertainment might consist of staring outside in search of something interesting. I hurried up the alley to Pine, and turned onto the sidewalk bordering the church.
Ten yards down, I came to a side entrance to the classroom wing. A pair of wooden doors, up half a dozen stairs, was set into a deep archway sheltered from the view of anyone near the main entrance. I trotted up the stairs and studied the doors. They were an old-fashioned kind that met in the middle, with no pillar between them. The lock was in the right-hand door; my hope was that the church custodian had forgotten to engage the vertical bolt that anchored the left-hand door to the floor. If that was the case, a good tug might be enough to swing both doors outward and apart, even if the crash bar was locked. As it turned out, I got even luckier than that. I smelled the aroma of fresh varnish on the wood, and I noticed that a small wedge had been placed between the doors to keep one slightly ajar so the wet varnish wouldn’t glue them together. I opened the wedged door just enough to slip between the varnished edges, then pulled it quickly shut behind me.
My educated guess, my educator’s guess, had been right—I was in a wing of classrooms which I hoped would connect with the nave. I set off down the hallway to find that connection. The hall smelled of musty wax and dirty paper wrappers, the unmistakable scent of crayons that had been gripped by countless little hands. A large puppet theater was tucked into an alcove in the hall, beside a poster of Noah’s ark, jammed with animals. The door of the first classroom featured a poster of Jesus, with the caption “Let the little children come unto me.” Inside the room were miniature wooden chairs and tables, as well as something that resembled a wooden rowboat on rockers. With a jolt, I suddenly remembered one exactly like it from my own childhood, and the tune “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” popped into my head from fifty years before, sung in the voice of Miss Eloise, my sweet-tempered kindergarten teacher.
After three children’s rooms, the last equipped with playpens, cribs, and several cushioned rocking chairs, the hallway intersected with another hall and a stairway. Even before I could hear it, I felt the deep thrumming of a pipe organ down the passage to the left, its bass notes resonating in my core. I passed through a thick doorway arch, which led into an older part of the building; there, a curving passage hugged what I guessed must be the apse of the nave, the semicircular area behind the altar. I turned left into the curve, and within twenty feet I found an arched wooden door helpfully labeled NAVE. It was slightly ajar, and I put an eyeball up to the crack and eased it open another few inches. What I saw made me jump back from the doorway, as if a snake were coiled inside at eye level. Not ten feet away stood the high altar, and to one side, facing me, was the organist. Another ten feet beyond him, farther to my left, was the first row of people, their pew marked with a white bow. I recognized the face of Jess’s ex-husband; on the same pew with him, but several feet away, sat a woman who looked like a seventy-year-old version of Jess. It was her mother, I realized, and it saddened me to think of a mother burying her child. Behind them, blue-suited police officers sat shoulder to shoulder, three pews deep. Behind them, I noticed with a start, was an elegant black woman; her face was half hidden by the broad brim of a hat, but I suspected the face belonged to Miss Georgia Youngblood. Her choice of seat—immediately behind dozens of muscled policemen—virtually confirmed my hunch. I eased the door shut. This vantage point would give me an unmatched view of the ser vice, but it would also leave me dangerously exposed.
As my mind and my pulse raced to the accompaniment of the pipe organ, the music gave me an idea. I’d toured a number of Gothic cathedrals in En gland and France, and most of them had a balcony or mezzanine ringing the entire nave. I wondered if there might be one in this church, since it was neo-Gothic, and I decided to risk another look. I eased open the door again, less than an inch this time, and was rewarded with a glimpse of dark archways twenty feet up. A set of silvery gray organ pipes filled some of the arches, but most of them looked empty, and they appeared to ring the entire apse. I hurried back to the hallway crossing and staircase, and climbed four flights to the upper level. Again turning left, I found another old-fashioned wooden door. This one wasn’t labeled, but it was directly above the other one, and when I laid my hand on it, I felt the wood quivering in time to the organ’s bass notes. At the top of the door—out of the reach of the Sunday school students—was a small latch, the kind found on screen doors throughout Tennessee.
Unhooking the latch, I pushed open the door and found a dark, narrow passage, eight or ten feet long, leading to the arches I’d seen from below. To my left, as I felt my way toward the nearest arch, I could hear one set of pipes; looking across the apse through the narrow arch ahead of me, I saw the other set. In addition to the rumbling bass notes and high trills and all the intervening octaves, I could hear the rush of air through pipes, and the clicking of valves deep within the organ’s mechanism. The arch gave me a bird’s-eye view of the altar and the soaring marble structure that topped it, like a twenty-foot-high doll house.
A white-robed priest stepped slowly into view, carry ing a brass urn about a foot high. He set the urn on a wooden stand in front of the altar, and I realized with a shock that the urn must contain Jess’s “cremains,” the hokey contraction funeral directors had coined for “cremated remains.” From my research, I knew that her cremains—ground-up bits of crumbly bone, whose minerals were the only things to survive the heat of the furnace—would probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of five pounds. I knew the chemical composition was mainly calcium, seasoned with a host of trace elements. And I knew that Jess, her essence, was not among the trace elements inside that urn.
As the priest ascended the stairs to the altar itself, the music reached a crescendo that set my very teeth buzzing. Then the music fell away, and the priest began to speak.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” he began. “From whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.”
A chorus of voices rang from the nave beyond. “Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and merciful Savior,” the congregation recited, “deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death.” Ah, my heart answered, but what about the bitterness of empty life? I would have traded places with Jess if I could.
The priest began to chant, a high incantation that had no discernible melody, and I lost the thread of its meaning, circling back instead to the opening words of the ser vice. “In the midst of life we are in death.” No, that’s backward, I thought. In the midst of death, Jess and I were most alive. It was our daily bread. We were oddities, she and I: a doctor who never had a live patient, and an ivory-tower professor immersed to his elbows in death and dismemberment. Could we have made an odd life together, I wondered, sharing space and hearts and bodies in Knoxville or Chattanooga or somewhere in between? The power couple of the dead set, I thought, and smiled at the grim humor even as tears sprang to my eyes for the loss of what might have been. I knew I was grieving for something that never really existed except in my imagination, but the loss cut deeply all the same.
As the congregation read a response to some prompting I hadn’t heard, I shifted my stance, and when I did, I kicked a chair hidden in the dark catwalk. It grated on the stone floor, and the priest looked up in my direction. As he registered my presence, his eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed sharply. I realized that the police had probably briefed him about me, the forbidden intruder, and I suddenly pictured him interrupting the service—Jess’s service—to have me hauled away. I clasped my hands in front of my chest in a gesture of prayer, a gesture whose sincerity I hoped he could see. Maybe he did; maybe he saw sorrow etched in my face, or tears streaking my cheeks; maybe he simply didn’t want to interrupt the ser vice. At any rate, his expression softened, and he turned back to his text. “O God of grace and glory,” he read, “we remember before you this day our sister Jessamine. We thank you for giving her to us, her family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn.” He never looked at me again, but at that moment he seemed to be speaking to me, speaking for me, alone among the crowd.
At the end of the main ser vice, the priest invited the mourners to join him for a brief burial ser vice in the courtyard beside the nave. Then he lifted the brass urn from the altar and processed out the nave.
Retreating into the maze of hallways and stairwells, I made my way by blind reckoning in the direction the priest had indicated. I soon found myself in an elegant lobby just outside the parish offices; then, down a long, sunny hallway, I glimpsed windows looking out onto an enclosed garden. At the garden’s center was a sunken circular courtyard inlaid with black and white tiles that formed the pattern of a labyrinth, a symbol of spiritual pilgrimage. To one side, in a raised bed of flowers and hostas, stood a statue of an angel, and in one edge of this plot was a freshly dug hole, perhaps a foot square. The priest stood there with the urn, and the tightly bunched crowd faced him. I recognized Preston Carter in the group; I also saw the woman I’d known at a glance to be Jess’s mother. She held her head high, almost defiantly—another recognizable echo of Jess—but her face told how much the show of strength was costing her. She kept her distance from Carter, which I took as a sign that she had not forgiven him for what ever had caused the rift between him and Jess.
The priest began to speak, and I crept to a window to catch his words. I got there just in time to see him pour the urn’s contents into the ground. He straightened and then raised both hands in a gesture of blessing. “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “we commend to Almighty God our sister Jessamine, and we commit her body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.”
“Amen,” I whispered. “Sleep well, Jess.”