Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 775 & 776, March/April 2006

Mrs. Sweeniey’s Request by David Schanker

David Schanker is a novelist and attorney who teaches creative writing and film studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His first novel, A Criminal Appeal (St. Martin’s Press, 1998), was nominated for the Edgar Award and published in Japanese translation. A second book, Natural Law, was published by St. Martin’s in 2001. Mr. Schanker’s short fiction has featured in many magazines and on NPR.

Her blue eyes were watery with age, yet her gaze was penetrating as she sat before me in a threadbare black dress and asked, her voice trembling, if I would help her get her husband back. “I miss my Donald something awful,” she said. “And if it takes a lawyer to bring him back, so be it.” I was dumbfounded; for nearly a month, Donald had resided beneath the ground in the Calvary Baptist Memorial Park.

Mrs. Emma Sweeney was a tiny, unprepossessing woman in her seventies. Though I’d never before met her, I’d seen her and Donald running errands in the stores around Courthouse Square in the center of our town, Farley, Indiana, a farm community in the southeastern corner of the state. From their appearance, they were country people — lower on the scale of life than the middle-class folks who employ lawyers for wills and divorces and higher than most of those who come to me for criminal defense. Donald had earned his living as a day laborer in the limestone quarries to the north of Farley, and, as I remembered him, Donald was a man as dull and unrefined as the blocks of stone he hewed out of the earth. He had lived to the age of seventy-five, considerably longer than most men who worked the quarries, and he had suffered from heart disease for years. Now, his widow was sitting on the opposite side of my desk telling me she wanted me to help her take possession of her husband’s corpse.

“You’re my last hope, Mr. Shapiro—” she pronounced my name Sha-pie-ro, as most everyone here does, not Sha-pee-ro, as it’s pronounced where I come from, New York — “I spoke to the kind people at the cemetery, and they sent me to the mortician, and he told me to see the county coroner, and he done said I had to go to the Board of Health, and they told me no.” Her voice grew thick with emotion. “I’ve spoken with every other lawyer in town, and not one will take the case. The folks at the courthouse said I should come see you.”

I winced. I had moved to Farley a year before with my wife, Nancy, a Hoosier I’d met and married while she was a medical student in New York. It was Nancy’s dream to return to her hometown, where family practitioners were in direly short supply. I resisted, never having lived outside New York City, and I feared the anti-Semitism of Bible Belt Indiana. It turned out that my fears were well founded; I was the first Jew most of the good people of Castor County had met, and they seemed surprised not to find horns growing out of my forehead. The old-boy network of the legal community, comprised literally of old boys, was particularly unwelcoming. My fledgling practice became the county dump for crackpot tax protesters, social-security cheats, perennial accident victims, and every kind of client except the paying kind. And now Mrs. Sweeney.

“All I want,” she went on, “is to get Donald out of the ground and take him home so’s I can revive him as the Lord has commanded me to do.”

I rolled a pencil between my fingers and tried to formulate an appropriate response. “Well, Mrs. Sweeney, I don’t quite understand. Do you have some reason to believe your husband isn’t dead?”

“No, no, sir,” she said definitively. “He is dead. But the power has been given to me to bring Donald back to life, just as our Lord Jesus brought Lazarus back to life.”

“I see,” I said. “But Mrs. Sweeney, he’s been gone a few weeks now.”

“That don’t matter. God spoke to me, sir, and he done told me I got the power to do this thing.”

I rubbed my chin, bewildered. “Um... but you say the Department of Health won’t allow you to exhume the body?”

“That’s right. But they said I could—” her face froze a moment — “petition the court to order the health department to exhume the body.”

“I see.”

“All I got to do is give a good reason.”

“Mrs. Sweeney, the only reason I’ve heard for exhuming a body is to find evidence in a criminal matter, and this wouldn’t be anything like that.”

“Oh no, it wouldn’t.”

“Then I don’t think your chances are very good, unfortunately, and I’d hate for you to pay me to do something that was bound to fail.”

“Just tell the court what I told you,” she implored.

“That you plan to bring your husband back to life?”

“Yes. I know they’d listen.”

I looked into Mrs. Sweeney’s eyes, alive with hope, and I knew that I should have told her that it was simply impossible, that she should seek counseling to help her through her grief. But I could not. If going through the legal process to exhume her husband would facilitate her acceptance of her husband’s death, why shouldn’t I help her? What would be the harm — other than to my reputation, which had nowhere to go but up?

I told Mrs. Sweeney I would take the case. I said I would file the required papers with the Circuit Court and that I would not charge her for my services unless the request was granted.

“God bless you,” she said. “Donald will be so grateful.”

“Well, that remains to be seen,” I said, hoping as the words came out of my mouth that she did not catch the awful double entendre.

I took the appropriate information from her regarding Donald’s date of birth, date of death, place of interment, etc. When she told me his social-security number, it occurred to me that if he did return to life, we’d have the sticky problem of reactivating his social-security benefits.

After she had gone, I immediately got to work on the petition. Having convinced myself in a jocular way that what Mrs. Sweeney intended was somehow possible, I knew that time was of the essence.

I stated in the petition exactly what Mrs. Sweeney had told me, and as I wrote the words, “It is the petitioner’s intention to restore the deceased to life with God’s aid,” I realized that it was entirely conceivable that Mrs. Sweeney had a Constitutional right to act on the belief that it was possible for her to raise the dead. It was an argument that had deep resonance for me, though I feared that in Castor County, Indiana, a Jew making a freedom-of-religion argument might be regarded with suspicion. I attempted to defuse any such hostility by striking a patriotic tone, pointing out to the court that the authors of the Constitution had made the separation of Church and State a cornerstone of our society, intending that the nation’s laws intrude as little as possible, consistent with public safety, upon religion. I hoped that this argument would catch the attention of the Circuit Court judge, the Honorable Jason Drewes, who fancied himself a scholar of Constitutional law.

It did. The very day I filed the petition, the judge set the case for an emergency hearing. I was not informed of this by the court, however; I read it on the front page of the Castor County News.

It happened that on the afternoon I filed my petition, Laurel Sturgeon, editor and sole employee of the Castor County News, had dropped by the courthouse sniffing for stories. She walked in to find Amanda, the judge’s secretary, giggling over Mrs. Sweeney’s request. The two of them shared a good laugh over it when the judge came in and took a look at the petition. He scolded them for their insensitivity and instructed Amanda to set a hearing. By that evening, half of Farley knew about Mrs. Sweeney’s intention to bring her husband back from the dead. The next morning, when the News landed on doorsteps all over town, the rest knew, and my phone was ringing off the hook with Christian fundamentalists congratulating me for my courageous stand, friends questioning my sanity, and several people who simply laughed and hung up.

The hearing was held at ten A.M. on Thursday, a time when most of Farley is normally occupied with school or work, but no such obligations kept a crowd of two hundred from congregating on the courthouse steps at the appointed hour. A number of people held signs reading, “SAY YES TO DIVINE INTERVENTION,” “GOD HEALS,” and “LET DONALD LIVE.” I was extremely nervous, and I feared for my safety; I am not a Jew who passes easily — I am dark and balding and speak with an ineradicable, unmistakable New York accent, and in this insular community of Hoosiers, everyone knew who and what I was. Much to my astonishment, as Mrs. Sweeney and I walked through the crowd, we were applauded and cheered, and several people reached out and touched Mrs. Sweeney’s dress as if it were the garment of a saint.

Inside, the courtroom was packed with more than a hundred spectators. Several well-wishers pressed their hands around mine on my way to the petitioner’s table, and I found myself thinking that with so much public support I actually had a shot at winning the case — that is, until I saw at the respondent’s table the county prosecutor, David Kittle, who also served as counsel to the Department of Health. I had lost to Kittle every one of the four times we’d been adversaries — him representing the state, me representing one of my bottom-of-the-barrel clients, those criminal defendants so hopeless that none of Castor County’s other attorneys would take their cases.

Kittle’s mouth was twisted into the miserable smile of someone who is so sure of victory he feels guilty about it. He came over to introduce himself to Mrs. Sweeney, and while shaking my hand he asked me if I was out of my mind.

“Probably,” I told him.

Judge Drewes entered a moment later, and after admonishing the crowd to be silent, he invited me to make my argument to the court.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, and I moved to the center of the courtroom. “May it please the court: Mrs. Sweeney’s request is unusual, Your Honor, but there are issues at stake in this case that relate to the bedrock constitutional protections upon which this great country was founded. Mrs. Sweeney is a woman of strong religious convictions. She believes that God, working through her, will perform the miracle of bringing her husband, Donald Sweeney, back to life from his current status—” and I’m afraid I lost my train of thought here — “otherwise known as death.”

A number of the spectators laughed. Judge Drewes rolled his eyes.

“Your Honor,” I continued, “the First Amendment principle of freedom of religious expression requires that this court grant Mrs. Sweeney’s request that the Department of Health permit her — at her own expense — to exhume the body of her husband for such period of time as is necessary for Mrs. Sweeney to invoke God’s help in bringing him back to life.”

Judge Drewes smoothed back the few hairs on his head, thanked me, and turned to my opponent. “Mr. Kittle, do you wish to address the court?”

“Yes, thank you, Your Honor,” Kittle said, and he made his way slowly to where I had stood. “I do not seek to denigrate the sincerity of Mrs. Sweeney’s beliefs, but this court must deny her request to exhume her husband for two reasons. First, there is the doctrine of impossibility — this court cannot base its decision upon the possibility of something which is factually impossible. It is an incontrovertible fact that the dead cannot be returned to life. Second, Constitutional precedent consistently holds that the freedom of religious expression is not absolute. For example, a person may not perform human sacrifice or take illicit drugs in the name of religion. Mrs. Sweeney has no fundamental right to attempt to bring back the dead.”

The judge nodded. “Thank you, Counselor,” he said as Kittle sat down. “Do you wish to respond, Mr. Shapiro?” Sha-pie-ro, of course.

“Yes, Your Honor.” I stood slowly and spoke from my position next to Mrs. Sweeney. “First, allow me to pose the rhetorical question: Who are we to say that what Mrs. Sweeney intends to do is impossible? How can the Department of Health or the State of Indiana or the United States of America say that Mrs. Sweeney cannot invoke God’s aid and perform a miracle? I propose that we cannot. The Bible — Old Testament and New — contains abundant examples of miracles, including the bringing back to life of the dead. Therefore, Your Honor, the doctrine of impossibility does not apply. Second, the Constitution does not dictate what the people may or may not do; it places prohibitions on governmental action. Specifically, the First Amendment provides that the Congress may not abridge the freedom of religion. Yes, there are times when the government may place restrictions on religious expression, but this is not one of them. There is no compelling government interest in refusing Mrs. Sweeney’s request to attempt to be reunited with her husband.” I paused, evaluating the effect of my words on Judge Drewes, who maintained a quizzical look. “And if it doesn’t work,” I went on, “back into the ground he goes!”

I could feel Mrs. Sweeney’s eyes fix worriedly on my back. I turned and smiled at her.

“Mr. Shapiro,” the judge said, “how long a time does Mrs. Sweeney require with the body to accomplish her...”

“Resurrection?” I proposed.

“Let’s say revival,” the judge suggested.

“I’d like to pass that question to the petitioner, Your Honor.”

“Just ten minutes, Your Honor, please,” said Mrs. Sweeney, standing. “I just need to be alone with Donald in our bedroom for ten minutes.”

The judge raised his eyebrows, looked carefully at Mrs. Sweeney, and sighed. “The court finds for the petitioner,” he said.

Mrs. Sweeney bowed her head and appeared to give thanks. The courtroom erupted in cheers.

It was ordered that the body of Donald Sweeney be exhumed the following morning at nine o’clock and that he be transported in his coffin to the home of Mrs. Donald Sweeney, where the coffin was to be placed on a bier in the Sweeneys’ bedroom and opened. Mrs. Sweeney would then be permitted ten minutes alone with the body to perform the “revival.”

The next morning was as sunny and cool a summer morning as one could hope for; the greens of the cemetery trees and grass were vivid against a robin’s-egg-blue sky. Along with about four hundred believers bused in from neighboring communities, I watched Donald’s coffin as it was lifted unsteadily from the grave by a construction crane. The coffin was caked with the clayey soil of this part of the state, and bits of mud fell as it swayed, suspended on heavy chains. A pair of men in yellow hard hats swung the coffin into the back of a hearse, where it was set down and the chains were removed.

The crowd from the cemetery reassembled at Mrs. Sweeney’s house, a small white shingle farmhouse on the south side of Farley. Nearly a thousand others had already arrived; there were church buses parked for nearly a mile along the rural road where the Sweeneys lived. They came from as far away as Wisconsin, traveling through the night to attend the vigil outside Mrs. Sweeney’s home in the hope of seeing a miracle firsthand. Families kneeled on blankets and prayed as preachers stood among them and read from scripture. I observed these proceedings with some anxiety, and I worked at maintaining a professional detachment as I answered questions posed by the media, which were represented by television crews from Indianapolis and Louisville, along with reporters from newspapers throughout the region.

Mrs. Sweeney had not come to the cemetery. When I arrived at the house, Sheriff Jack Weems, an imposing potbellied figure, was standing guard on the Sweeneys’ front porch. He greeted me with a solemn nod, opened the front door, and I stepped inside.

It was like entering a church. The shades had been pulled in the Sweeneys’ living room, and I could barely see in the dim light cast by a scattering of votive candles. What I did see gave me goosebumps. The room was filled with religious objects gleaming in the candlelight. There were winged angels, cherubs, crosses, and crucifixes mounted on the walls, portraits of the Savior, statues of the Virgin, and even a replica of Michaelangelo’s Pieta on the coffee table. Nearly everything in the room was gold-plated or gilded with gold leaf, and the effect of the flickering candles was to make one feel that there were hundreds of tiny fires burning within these sacred objects.

I was deeply moved by this evidence of the strength of the Sweeneys’ devotion to their faith. It seemed to me a wondrous thing that they lived so plainly, yet devoted their meager resources to the glory of their God.

I found Mrs. Sweeney in the bedroom, which was similarly decorated with gold objects; gold crosses of various sizes hung on the walls, along with a cheap painted portrait of Jesus in an elegant gold filigree frame. Mrs. Sweeney sat primly on the side of the double bed she had shared with Donald. There was a worn Bible in her hands, and she looked very much like a nervous newlywed. On the other side of the bed a bier awaited the coffin; a brass plaque at the foot of the bier advertised the name of the funeral home that had donated its use for the morning. I sat next to Mrs. Sweeney, placed my hand on her hand, and asked if she were sure she wanted to go through with the opening of the coffin.

“Oh yes,” she said, smiling. “It is something I must do. God has ordained it.”

I nodded and squeezed her hand. A moment later, four men from the funeral home bore the coffin into the room and placed it on the bier. The funeral director, Robert Duffy, a middle-aged man whose steel-gray beard made him look much older, came in and unsealed the coffin using a small hammer and chisel.

“Are you ready, ma’am?” he said to Mrs. Sweeney.

“I am,” she said, standing beside him.

Duffy lifted the split lid at the head of the coffin, then the part of the lid covering the lower two-thirds of Donald’s body. It was quite a terrible sight. The flesh had begun to recede from the bones of Donald’s face and hands, giving him a shrink-wrapped look, and the dark three-piece suit in which he’d been buried appeared to have collapsed under the weight of the leather-bound Bible he held beneath his decaying hands. To my eyes, he could not have appeared more dead.

The odor of the corpse did not register in my nostrils for two or three seconds, but when it did, it was overwhelming and unbearable.

“Your ten minutes begin now,” I said to her through gasps of air, and Duffy and I left her alone in the room. I stepped out onto the front porch to address the crowd.

“In accordance with the order of the Castor County Circuit Court,” I proclaimed, “the casket has been opened. For the next ten minutes, Mrs. Sweeney will be permitted to be alone with the body of her late husband, Donald Sweeney.”

The crowd grew quiet. Heads were bowed, and hands clasped together in prayer. I stood on the porch and looked out over the many faithful standing shoulder to shoulder in Mrs. Sweeney’s front yard, in the road, and on the periphery of the woods across the road. I could not help but marvel at the power of the idea that love and faith could conquer even death, and there was a large part of me that hoped with them that by some miracle Donald could be made once again to live.

But, alas, when the ten minutes had passed, Mrs. Sweeney came despondently onto the front porch and beckoned for me to lean down to her. When I did so, she whispered in my ear, “It didn’t work.”

I kissed her forehead and hugged her. “I’m sorry,” I said. To my surprise, the words caught in my throat.

I turned to the crowd, which waited silently, a sea of faces and cameras upturned to me. “Donald Sweeney has not come back to us,” I announced, and then, aware of the absurdity of my words, added, “but let us thank Mrs. Sweeney for her effort in attempting to bring him back, as she thanks all of you for your support in this endeavor.” No one moved. “The body will now be returned to its final resting place. Good day to you all,” I concluded, and Mrs. Sweeney went back inside to observe the closing of Donald’s coffin.

I took a deep breath of fresh air and watched the crowd drift away.

The failure of Mrs. Sweeney to raise the dead was accorded a perfunctory paragraph in the Castor County News and scant notice elsewhere. I could not help but laugh to myself at the thought of the headlines that would have been written had the result been otherwise.

Several days later, I received in the mail a small check from Mrs. Sweeney for my fee. I framed it and hung it in my office as a reminder that even the most unlikely cases can be successfully argued.

Despite the failure of Donald’s resurrection, my success in winning Mrs. Sweeney’s court case had the unexpected effect of pumping life into my practice. I became the Jew Christians could trust to protect their interests, and I began to number the county’s most fundamentalist Christians among my clients. Nancy, who had been brought up Southern Baptist, cautioned me that my newfound acceptance was no less the result of stereotype and prejudice than my exclusion had been. But there was a difference — I had the community’s respect now, I had the faith they put in me as their advocate, and I believed that from that seed understanding would grow.

Four months after the exhumation, Mrs. Sweeney disappeared. When she did not show up for church one Sunday, a group of parishioners was dispatched to her home. They found no sign of her and no sign of a struggle or of any disturbance to her belongings.

In truth, Emma Sweeney’s disappearance surprised no one; after her attempt to revive Donald’s corpse, folks in Farley, despite their faith, had come to believe that Emma Sweeney was one brick short of a full load, and it was commonly thought that she had wandered off one day, deep in conversation with the angels. The sheriff and his deputies and a great many volunteers, including myself, searched the fields and woods surrounding Mrs. Sweeney’s home without success.

Mrs. Sweeney had no will, no children, and no attorney other than myself, so it fell to me to take stock of her possessions and distribute her estate to whatever blood relations could be located, or, failing that, to the church. Four days after her disappearance, I undertook a thorough inventory of Mrs. Sweeney’s belongings.

On that day, I walked through her silent house listing furniture, appliances, china, cutlery, lighting fixtures, clothing, and other practical things, and then took to counting angels, cherubs, and other divinities. I ventured down to the Sweeneys’ cellar for the first time, and there I found what appeared to be a goldsmith’s workshop.

It was a wooden countertop, upon which sat a small anvil and a set of brushes, tweezers, and two heavy mallets. Bits of gold leaf lay scattered about, and on the shelf above the counter stood a number of spice jars containing tiny amounts of gold dust, flakes, and nuggets; the gold appeared to have been sorted by size and color. There was a jar of a milky sort of glue, and leaning against a nearby window was a picture frame, partially gilded.

What an interesting hobby, I thought, and though I wondered where the Sweeneys had gotten the gold, there did not seem to be enough of it — hardly a fraction of an ounce in all — for me to wonder if there was a connection between the gold and Mrs. Sweeney’s disappearance.

Three weeks later, however, Mrs. Sweeney’s body was found, and the truth began to emerge.

It was a farmer hunting deer in the woods at the edge of his property who discovered her. The farmer spotted Emma Sweeney facedown in a stream bed, where she must have collapsed, or slipped and hit her head. Next to her, trapped in the weeds, were prospector’s tools — a wide flat pan, a sieve, magnifying glass, and tweezers. Up the bank of the stream, at the base of a hackberry tree, were Mrs. Sweeney’s hat, shoes, and socks. And Donald Sweeney’s Bible.

I recognized the Bible when I saw it on the counter in the sheriff’s office. It had the initials DS in gold lettering on its spine, just as Emma’s Bible, an identical leather-bound Bible with gold-edged pages, bore her initials. Sheriff Weems handed me the Bible and smiled. “Open the back cover,” he said. When I opened it, I saw, written in Donald Sweeney’s tremulous scrawl, a set of directions from the quarry where Donald had labored all his life to the streambed where Emma had been found.

“Evidently, he’d been panning there for years,” Weems told me. “Somebody must have tipped him off to a good spot. The only problem was, it was on somebody else’s land.”

“I had no idea you could find gold in Indiana,” I confessed.

“The glaciers brought it down,” Weems said. “Country boys like me grow up searching the creek beds for black sand — that’s the glacial moraine, the ground-up debris left behind by the melting glaciers that receded after the last ice age. If you’re patient, you can find flakes and tiny nuggets of gold by sifting through the stuff. And it’s good-quality gold — often twenty-two carats.”

“Wow.”

“Over the years, Donald must have gathered all this gold, but he couldn’t sell it for fear its source would be questioned. So he kept it, and he and Emma gilded their objects, believing, perhaps, that taking the gold was less a sin if they devoted it to religious purposes.”

“But if the Bible contained the directions to the creek bed, why did Mrs. Sweeney bury it with her husband? Or why didn’t she copy it down before she buried it with him?”

Weems shrugged. “I’ll bet Emma honored her husband’s request that his Bible be buried with him, never dreaming that she’d want to go to the stream herself to pan for gold. When he was gone for a time, she ran out of the gold he had panned, and she realized that if she was going to carry on his work, she’d have to gather gold herself.”

I took Donald’s Bible and the panning tools, intending to add them to the other objects in Mrs. Sweeney’s estate. When I got back to my office, I could not resist thumbing through the Bible, and found, underlined, these words in Chapter 24 of Acts: “And have hope toward God... that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.”

Two days later, at Mrs. Sweeney’s funeral, I asked that her Bible as well as Donald’s be placed in her casket, along with a generous sprinkling of gold dust.