Witness

By Peter Bowden


They found Mr. King’s body not far from the corner of 8th and Sycamore, face down in the street, the rain still falling like the soft breath of God. No one saw the car. No one claimed the blame. The children at St. Patrick’s learned the news in murmurs—passed like secrets behind hands folded in prayer. The janitor was gone. Just like that. The man who mopped the halls with a limp and smiled with his eyes more than his mouth. The man who fixed the loose desk legs with wire and tape and wiped tears from scraped knees without asking names.
He had no family, they said. The office clerk searched and found no next of kin. But Sister Agnes insisted there be a funeral. “The man cleaned our sanctuary for twenty years,” she said, voice sharp as the bell that called the faithful to Mass. So on a cold rain-soaked morning of that March, two altar boys in damp cassocks stood beside the pine box, their shoes wet through and their candles shivering. Father Thomas read the rites in Latin as if the sky itself were listening. The sisters stood in two rows behind him, rosaries wrapped like ivy around their fingers, their faces bare to the wind.

No music played. Only the rain. A steady, tapping litany on the umbrellas and the graveyard stones. When it was done, no one left right away. They lingered like the faithful always do when they don’t want the moment to end, not because of grief alone, but because they knew—somehow—they were the only witnesses left to a man who lived in the margins. And it mattered. It mattered that he was seen, and that he was remembered, even just like this: a simple coffin, the smell of wet earth, and a final blessing whispered into the cold.

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