The rain stops. After a few hours the clouds part and the sky clears. During that period of overcast without rain yet before the clearing of skies, the Bishop wanders the field mulling over matters episcopate.
At some point he's broken from his mulling by the noise of shouting. He stops and looks north.
He watches with mild interest some activity by the wretched shed in the field, that field torn and muddy, specked with dark reflective puddles. He watches as
two figures - the fat man and the frayed woman, both wearing expressions of profound discontent on their tired, pitted faces - step from the dark. They cough several times, hoarking phlegm, before the fat man slams shed door and they shamble over the slippery field due north-northeast. Their backs turned, they resume their argument. (In language largely incomprehensible, yet clearly of English derivation, possibly infected with aspects of demotic French, yet guttural and Saxon, seasoned with heavy swearing.) Thus they walk shouting until the shouting softens as they walk further, until they're no longer heard - but only seen very small on the horizon, as mites on a dog's neck.
The Bishop blinks, turns away, and continues his peripatetic meditation.
When the Bodyguard arrives, he's greeted by a shout. The Bishop calls him from a
small hillock southwest of the oak. The Bodyguard is dressed in a conservative blue collared shirt, the shirt tucked into dockers, and - fitting the increasingly temperate weather - a heavy spring jacket, or a light winter coat, or neither a jacket nor a coat but an intermediary of unknown origin/label. He walks to meet the Bishop. From the minor vantage provided by the small hillock they look over the field.
They speak exactly as two good-intentioned strangers of lower middle-class origin are wont to speak when first meeting over a field rife with bones and skulls and decomposing bodies.
Beautiful weather we're having, says the Bishop.
That's for sure, says the Bodyguard.
There's a long period of silence. Both men stand in the same direction, both facing the oak, yet both looking away from the oak - one to the north and one to the south - as both wait in the hope that an either they or the other man, or both of them at once, or neither they nor the other but someone or something apart from either will speak or act.
Eventually they hear a low rolling thunder from above. Then the last mangled bits of the
International Space Station arc across the clear sky leaving a trail of fire and white.
They turn to one another, both happy for a topic outside their present condition.
That was unexpected, says the Bishop.
Very! says the Bodyguard.
They both express wonder and concern.
Then, like the sea to shore, the silence returns. Even as the echoing blast of the Station tumbles through the valley, the silence between them remains.
Minutes pass. Finally the Bodyguard, the whole time searching for an appropriate question to ask a bishop, finds one that seems to him appropriate:
Have you've blessed the dead?
Oh, says the Bishop. Well of course I plan to include them in the prayer I'll say at vespers.
The Bodyguard nods. The Bishop pauses, then clarifies:
As a bishop I try to focus my attention on the suffering of contexts. Peoples, causes, that sort of thing. Not so much
specifics.
Of course.
For example, as I watched that thing fall and burn up in the atmosphere I prayed a quiet prayer to Saint Henri the Navigator, to help the
spacecraft industry in this its time of need.
The Bodyguard nods.
In a matter of speaking, the Bishop says candidly, I pray less for a man than the umbrella over his head.
The Bodyguard, eager to continue, asks about those men without an umbrella.
Protestants?
Excuse me?
Silence.
More silence until, almost in unison, they decide to walk down from the small hillock and chose their pistols and take the field. Which they do. Standing ten paces apart.
They raise their guns. Their guns go off.
