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he might have the soft fur of a dog. I saw that his body was shaking and I understood he was crying. Someone in the congregation gave a cough. It sounded phony, as if it had been done to break the moment. What it did was make Gus turn and face them.
He said, Bobby used to help me take care of the cemetery sometimes. He liked the quiet. He liked the grass and the flowers. To me and you he wasn’t much of a talker, but he used to whisper to the headstones like he was sharing a secret with the folks buried there. Bobby had a secret. You know what it was? It took nothing to make him happy. That was it. He held happiness in his hand easy as if he’d just, I don’t know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground. And all he did his whole short life was offer that happiness to anybody who’d smile at him. That’s all he wanted from me. From you. From anybody. A smile.
He looked back at the casket and anger pulled his face into sudden lines.
But what did people offer him? They made fun of him. Christian folks and they said things to him hurtful as throwing stones. I hope to Christ you’re right, Captain, that Bobby’s sitting up there in God’s hand, because down here he was just a sweet kid getting his ass kicked. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him like I’d miss the robins if they never came back.
His face was a melt of tears. I was crying too. Hell, everybody was crying. My father held his composure and, when Gus had returned to his pew, said, Would anyone else like to offer something in memory?
I thought about getting up. I thought maybe I could tell them about Bobby at the back of the classroom in first grade. The teacher didn’t work with him much. She gave him clay and Bobby spent his time at his desk carefully rolling out snakes which he arranged in rows, and every once in a while he would look up while the rest of us recited the alphabet and added two plus two, and his myopic eyes behind those thick, gold-rimmed lenses seemed contented. And I thought about telling them how I’d figured Bobby was hopeless but I was wrong and Gus was right. Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.
I didn’t stand up. I didn’t say anything. Like everyone else I sat there dumb until my father offered a final prayer and Ariel began playing the final hymn and my mother stood up in her red satin robe and gave voice to the finality of it all.
And when she’d finished I heard the black hearse idling outside the open church door and everyone stood to follow Bobby to the hole Gus had already dug for him in the cemetery.

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    omething fishy about that boy’s death, Doyle said.
    It was Saturday afternoon, the day after Bobby Cole was buried. Jake and I had spent all morning working on my grandfather’s yard. Mowing, clipping, raking. Chores we did every Saturday that summer. My grandfather had a big house on the Heights with a yard that was a beautiful green sea of thick grass. He was in real estate and claimed that the look of his own property said as much about him as any piece of advertising he put on a billboard. He paid us well but he oversaw our every move. By the time the job was done I never thought the money was enough.
    Always when we were finished—hot and sweaty and covered in grass clippings—we hit Halderson’s Drugstore where we could belly up to the soda counter for root beer served in a frosty mug.
    At the back of the drugstore was an open passage to a storeroom. More often than not a curtain hung across the doorway but not that afternoon. I could see three men in the yellow light of a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling of the back room. They sat on crates. Two of them drank from brown bottles which I was pretty sure held beer. The one not drinking was Mr. Halderson. One of the other men was Gus. The third was the off-duty officer we’d met