The End
pages 38 - 40 (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Across the ball field a sister scampered, her habit hovering in the infield dust, waving her downturned hands with emphasis at the begrimed men who operated the carnival rides. The Matterhorn and the Witch's Wheel were spinning, and the Dipsy-Doo was dipping, all of them festooned with lights that blinked ever more quickly as the cars approached maximum velocity, each blaring its own tinkle-tinkle melody. Stop the machines, she commanded; the Holy Mother was out of the church and in the street. The men, sometime vagrants, sometime elementary school janitors whose clothes emitted the musk of pencil shavings even in August, opened the gates, and the dizzy children stumbled into the outfield.

There were kids even on the roof of the convent, one climbing a flagpole by its cord.

The alter boys were preceded down the avenue by twelve prodigious men of early middle age: slow on their feet, oxen-stout, contemptuous, in white muslin cassocks and white gloves and brimless black felt hats. They forced a channel through the masses by prodding them with the blunt ends of brooms and packing them into the stalls of vendors, against the storefront windows, unspeaking, a hard element parting a soft element in two, like the keel of a ship cutting the water.

Somebody said, "Do you have a time yet as to what time you will come to see us?"

On the roof of the Twenty-fourth Street nickelodeon, the men who had readied the fireworks display passed a bottle of beer among themselves and spat on the tar, lethargic, cursing.

Following the alter boys was a troop of priests from various parishes, some in long skirts and birettas. And the bishop of the city, a German, was among them, in a green miter and cope, a scowling, ancient man walking with a shepherd's crook and leaning on it to balance himself.

Behind the clergy came the Virgin, smirking, her porcelain skin dark like an Arab's, the nose upturned, English, her stature dwarflike, her clothes and hands stuck with specks of diamond donated over many years by women who had had them pried from their engagement rings. She stood on a stone platform, four spiral wooden columns supporting the gilt roof over her head. The rails undergirding the platform were borne on the shoulders of sixteen men in white albs. Ribbons hung from the columns and the people pinned money to the ribbons as they dragged by. And white-robed men with hoods hanging down their backs guarded the platform, holding bull-rib torches, singing plainsong.

It was darkening but the heat was the same.

Several hundred women in black followed the Virgin, praying rosaries, their feet naked to the pebbles and the cigarette butts and the soiled napkins and the spilled pop on the pavement. A band brought up the rear, making vehement noise. The brass played a waltz and the clarinets a two-step and the violins something else you could only barely make out. And behind the band, in the wake of the procession, was a half block of empty space where maybe it was cooler, maybe you could breathe freely.

All the bells in the church were tolling.