JOSIAH PYKE AND THE NEW GRAVESTONE

Having recently met his grandfather for the first time, now Joiah finds himself attending the old man's funeral.

Barely six months passed after the few weeks spent at the King’s Arboretum when Josiah found himself back there.

This time it was for a funeral.

His grandfather’s funeral. The man he’d only met the once, and now with winter lying heavily all around, there were piles of snow lining the rutted road and the minibus that took him having to stumble along with the driver wanting to curse the journey but he couldn’t really, not being in holy orders himself…

Eddie was with him, the cynical room-mate who doubted every word the lecturers spoke and who was determined to make his way through the ranks until he was at the very least a bishop. That room-mate. He had volunteered to be company for the bereaved Josiah, not that Josiah felt particularly bereaved. How can you mourn someone you didn’t know existed until a few months ago, and only spoke to once?

“Damned strange place to be holding a funeral,” commented Eddie, needing to find something odd about just about everything he encountered.

“You know the nurse at the Arboretum?” asked Josiah, “you know, the one who held my hand when I was sick and sat with me near the lilyless pond??”

“She was all right for an old woman,” nodded Eddie, generously for him.

“Well my granddad made love to her regularly,” said Josiah, determined to undermine the reputation he had for absolute purity, which had been well earned because, apart from anything else he was absolutely pure. “She told me, and from the light in her eyes I’d guess she liked it.”

Eddie nodded, not really shocked that his own cynical attitude was showing signs of being relayed back to him. “They do,” he murmured, “or so I believe. So I’ve read. I’m not declaring any personal knowledge, you understand, I don’t want you to think I go around doing that sort of stuff to any young lass who crosses my path.”

You don’t, thought Josiah, because if you did we’d all know about it, you wouldn’t be able to keep that mouth of yours shut…

The chapel at King’s Arboretum was only small but it was the largest room in the building and had a sort of inbuilt sombreness that nothing could drive away.

Once upon a time, thought Josiah, the nuns would gather in here and sing their hymns and chants and anthems, dressed in their pure white robes and with solemn faces… I think I’d have liked a choir of nuns with solemn faces, rosy cheeks, sweet voices…

Nurse Jennie was there, which shouldn’t have surprised him, but did. She saw him as he made his way to a seat near the front. He was told he should sit near the front because he was family, and family for the deceased were few and far between.

And because of that he found himself sitting next to Julian Pyke, his father.

He was the last companion at any event, even a funeral, that Josiah would have wanted, so he didn’t afford him one glance in the hope that the man fidgeting next to him chose to ignore him as well.

The service was short, which was good. The only person who had anything to say about the deceased was an old friar who had known him during the war.

“Poor old Ignatius,” he said in a warbling voice that was testament to his age, “he waved many a dying soul to the Hereafter. He prayed for the dead, too, prayed as hard as he could. He even got a bullet in his leg doing his bit for the souls of those falling in battle, and walked with a limp until his dying day...”

“Tosh,” muttered Josiah’s father all of a sudden, and loud enough to be heard by most mourners in that small chapel, “utter tosh!” he added as though it was the most important contribution he could make to his own father’s life.

“It was tosh,” he said to Josiah as they stood shivering in the snow outside while the coffin was being slowly carried into the small graveyard attached to the place.

Josiah chose to ignore him. He didn’t know whether the eulogy had been tosh or not, but assumed that if his own father thought it was then it most likely wasn’t.

“The man was a sinner,” grumbled Julian Pyke.

“You knew him, sir?” asked Eddie, who’d joined them in the cold.

“He was my father,” muttered Julian, “and there never was such a sinner in a dog collar, never was anywhere on the planet, so help me Lord for saying it on a day like this. But his time in the Hereafter won’t be a joyful one, you can take my word for that. No sir, it won’t be joyful at all.”

And that would have been that but Julian turned suddenly to Josiah and looked at him through fierce eyes as though he was looking for a mark of something, maybe a scar, maybe the remnants of an ancient bruise, maybe something that ought to have been there, but wasn’t.

“Who are you, sir?” he asked suddenly. “I don’t know you, do I? What on Earth is a scoundrel like you doing at the incarceration of a great man into the Earth?”

“I’m Josiah,” replied Josiah quietly.

“I knew a boy called Josiah once,” recalled his father after a moment’s thought, the light of recognition not flickering in his eyes. “A bad lot he was, a thoroughly evil wretch. Needed punishment, you know, needed sound thrashings … but he absconded! Can you imagine anything more sinful than that? Eh? A boy absconding from the loving care of his family and settling in the habitation of a witch? And not a make-believe fairy story witch either, but a real one?”

“There are no witches, sir,” put in Eddie, “they’re figments of the imagination seen as flesh by ancient monks who were half-blinded by copying texts until after dark with only a flickering fat candle to show them where the parchment was, and thus they imagined the shadows to be anything at all, even old women with warts. They were probably yearning for a woman themselves, and their dreams constructed their cosy shapes from the flickers and the darkness.”

“Tosh!” shouted Julian, “I’ve never heard so much tosh in my life. I had a woman once, a wife, and I never yearned for her!”

They were threading their way by then through the ancient graveyard, between crumbling gravestones to where a new grave had been dug and a new grave stone already erected.

“It’s a sad occasion,” came Nurse Jennie’s voice from just behind them. “You would have liked him, Josiah. I know you would.”

“I only spoke to him once and he seemed fair enough,” replied Josiah turning round to where she followed. “But he was old and rambled a bit...”

“He had some marvellous qualities,” murmured Jennie, “and he knew how to comfort a lost soul. That was his strength and his goodness. He comforted lost souls...”

“Rubbish!” shouted the Reverend Julian Pyke, “he was the worst of sinners and don’t you forget that! He knew the flesh of unwed women! He sinned with them, sinned and sinned and sinned until he had no more sin left in him!”

“Like the mother’s group back in Henstooth and the man of God living there?” asked Josiah. “That kind of sin..?”

“Who… How… I never heard such nonsense!” roared Julian Pyke, “The harlots tell tales, they do, lies, lies and more damned lies! I’m off!”

And he stomped away all of a sudden, still yards from the freshly dug grave, dark against the white of the snow that lay all around, and the coffin containing his own flesh and blood that was to be lowered into it.

“You touched a raw nerve there,” chuckled Eddie, “a very raw nerve indeed!”

“I know,” sighed Josiah, “but I don’t think he knew who I was, which is a shame really.”

“Who was he?” asked Eddie, the penny not having dropped.

“If I’d wanted to I’d have called him dad, but I didn’t want to,” replied Josiah quietly.

© Peter Rogerson 19.03.18