BECKETT
I did not cry at the funeral. I cataloged it.
We buried her at Arlington, on a slope that runs down toward the Potomac, where the white stones stand in rows so exact that the eye keeps trying to finish them and cannot. It was the one thing that day I did not manage to count.
Everything else I counted. She came down the hill on full honors, which a lieutenant colonel rates and which she would have had opinions about. The Old Guard’s caisson, six horses in harness, a soldier riding the left-hand horse of each pair. Ahead of it the colors, a band, and a platoon of Marines from Eighth and I in step. At the grave the Army stood the horses down and six Marines took her off the caisson, and I understood that the procession was built exactly that way on purpose: the Army brings you down the hill, and your own service carries you the rest of the way.
I counted the people too. One general with four stars, who had come because her next orders would have put her in his outer office, and two with one. Fourteen lieutenant colonels from her year group, standing in a knot. Her Marines from the provost marshal’s office in a block of dress blues at the back, thirty-one of them, and I knew why it was thirty-one. Somebody had to keep the gate at Quantico, and she would have relieved anybody who left it short-handed to come and watch her be buried.
Her family sat in the front row with me. Almaz had a small prayer book open on her knee, in a script I cannot read, and she did not turn a page the whole service. Desmond was in his church suit with his chin set the way he sets it at his own table when he has decided not to lose an argument, and one arm along the back of Almaz’s chair. Selam sat at the end of the row, dry-eyed, her hands one over the other in her lap, the way Nyah held hers in a briefing. My mother sat behind me with my brother. She spent a career on the other side of an interview table from people who did not want to tell her things, and she kept her eyes on me the entire service. I gave her nothing. I knew she would wait.
There was a rifle volley — three rounds, seven rifles, twenty-one in the arithmetic that is supposed to mean honor — and then a bugle at a distance doing the twenty-four notes that undo people, and I stood at the correct angle and did the arithmetic instead. Twenty-one.
My father stood at my left shoulder and said nothing. At the first note he put his hand on my shoulder. Twenty-four notes. His hand stayed for twenty-five.
The flag came off the casket in thirteen folds, which is the regulation number, and I counted every one. Thirteen folds, a triangle of blue with the red tucked out of sight, white stars against the dark. The Marine who handed it to me went down on one knee to do it and wore gloves so clean they looked issued that morning. He said the sentence they say, which begins with the President, passes through a grateful nation and ends on faithful service, and I counted the words instead of hearing them. It came into my hands stiffer than I expected, and warm on the underside where his gloves had been.
Thirteen folds. Twenty-four notes. A thing you can count cannot ambush you. That is the whole architecture of me. Nyah used to say I could survive anything if you let me write down its dimensions first.