Journal of Small Things

by Helen Mackay

The black hearse came up the road with several croquemorts and eight Republican Guards; they had two crossed palms for the boy, and the flag to cover him, and the black wooden cross that was to mark his grave.

We followed down the road and across the courts and out of the hospital gates.

The Sunday morning market was busy and noisy outside in the street, but a silence seemed to form itself around us as we went between the barrows and booths of summer country things. Then we went along a wide avenue that was empty, where the sound of the wheels of the hearse and of the horses' hoofs seemed solemn and monotonous, and as if it were something that never would cease. The boy's father and mother trudged ahead sturdily, with the strong gait of peasants from the fields, and my wounded dragged along, already tired. It was a long way from the hospital to the church.

There were many people in the street of the church, and on the church steps, and the church inside was crowded. It is the church of an irreligious quarter, but it was crowded.

A big Suisse with his mace led us along the aisle, through the throng of people who stood back from us, to the chapel of Our Lady, behind the high altar. Many of the Suisses of the churches of this quarter are gendarmes, needed because the roughs who come into the church would often make disturbance. The big Suisse had the air of a gendarme, ordering us.

But now the boy's mother and father were in a place they understood. There was no need to order them. They knew just what to do. They had been uncertain elsewhere, timid and bewildered, in the hospital, in the streets, but in the church they were at home.

The boy's mother motioned me into a chair behind hers. She and I were the only women: Madame Marthe had had to go back to her work in the ward. I knelt where she told me to kneel. The boy's father helped the wounded into the chairs across the chapel aisle from us, and took his place in front of them. In the aisle, between his father and mother, the boy had his four lighted tapers and his crossed palms and the flag of his country.

The priest who said the office was old, and fumbled and murmured. I was glad that he was slow. It gave a longer time for the father and mother to rest and be comforted.

The Suisse was rather in a hurry at the end of it, perhaps there was another funeral waiting. He would have had us follow the priest out quickly.

But the boy's mother would stop to kneel by the boy for a little moment, there before the altar of the Blessed Virgin. The boy's father came and knelt also, on the floor of the aisle.