In my beginning is my end.
—T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
The first time I went into the cement building with the big cross on it, set at the top of the hill like a pan of bread dough slowly rising, I was 10. Nannie ordered us off across the Betzwood Bridge not to church but to Sunday School, which has no Hell—only pianos on wheels and classroom doors with paper hands and crayon-heightened Jesuses taped onto the glass.
The two stories sat upon one another like Duncan Hines layers, with a portico running the length between them like escaping frosting. The ground floor was a dark labyrinth of little rooms, but upstairs was a single meeting hall, airy and open as a ballroom, with a stainless steel kitchen at one end and a small stage at the other—the whole studded by curtainless casement windows gazing down onto the tiny green cemetery like portholes.
Poppy just dropped us off, and I didn't know which tiny room to enter. I was terrified of the families—all familiar to one another—and at the end of the hour we never went back.
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