I saw it in print. I once had a friend with that name. One night I found an interview from the days after Jim returned from Libya. Jim told the interviewer that he prayed the Rosary every day of his captivity, keeping track of the prayers on his knuckles because he didn’t have beads. He knew his mother and grandmother would also be praying the Rosary, and he wanted to reach them though those prayers. I didn’t finish reading the interview. I got up from the computer and went into my sleeping daughter’s room. I found my rosary beads on her dresser, although their crucifix was missing; she had taken it off and glued it above the doorway of her toy chicken coop. I took the beads to the living room and for a long time I just held them, a pool of wooden beads in my palm. I tried to remember the Rosary’s prayers, but couldn’t recall even one. I felt like an imposter. I started walking back to my daughter’s room to put the beads away, but then I stopped. I had lost so many chances to reach Jim, what if this was my last? I went to the computer, and Googled “praying the Rosary.” I wrote out all the prayers on small pieces of paper that I could keep with me during the day. I taped The Apostle’s Creed to the fridge. I propped the Hail Holy Queen against a hand shovel while I weeded the garden. I felt foolish but kept at it; giving myself a few lines to learn each day and then adding a few more the next, like sections of cloth I was sewing together. It takes a while to pray the Rosary, which is how I ended up in the field on that September morning. I didn’t want to be interrupted. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing, considering I didn’t know what I was doing. After I fumbled and wept my way through the first prayers (the Apostles’ Creed, an Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory Be) I wiped my tears on my sleeve, determined to make it all the way through. I checked my notes and went on to reciting Mysteries. The Mysteries are the defining events of Jesus’ life. There are twenty in all, divided into four groups: Sorrowful, Luminous, Joyful, and Glorious. Each day of the week has a set of Mysteries assigned to it, but I had decided to stick with the Luminous ones because Jim was nothing if not luminous. I conjured the first Luminous Mystery — the baptism of Jesus. I recited the ten accompanying Hail Marys. I recited the Glory Be. After the first mystery I wasn’t crying, and I was moving fast. I was Autumn 2016 35
onto the second Mystery, then the third. And all those Hail Marys. The Hail Mary isn’t hard to remember; it had the even rhythm of a heartbeat so you can speed up and not get jumbled. My fingers moved from one bead to the next and the prayers tumbled out: ten Hail Marys, a Glory Be, an Our Father, ten more Hail Marys — until I heard myself say, Oh Jim. Startled, I stopped praying. I held the beads still in my hand. I said it again. Jim. And just like that it was his name again. I saw his face then, and it was not the face of photographs. It was the face of memory; of the buoyant young man whose existence I had begun to doubt. But he did exist. I knew that now. He was driven and restless, but he didn’t contain the dark future. He was entirely himself; he was having a wonderful time. And I was lucky enough to be having it with him. And here’s the strange thing. After I said Jim’s name, after I saw his face, the sky changed. It became a breathing thing, tipping from one horizon to another. It was entirely visible yet impossible to touch. It was Jim. I watched the clouds move as the air filled with his kind sturdiness. I wanted to stay with him all day, to lie again on the dirt, this time only so I could see the sky more fully. I wanted to stay until the stars emerged. But Jim was close enough now that I could hear him laugh at the idea. Close enough that I could feel him sending me back down the hill. But before I went I prayed the last prayer of the Rosary, the Hail Holy Queen. Or I should say I read it, from a slip of paper that remains in my coat pocket today. I once wanted to be a Catholic because it was the religion of everyday miracles. Catholicism was about training your eye to see the hand of God in the world. I once thought of the Rosary as part of that magic, the way it both cataloged and conjured miracles. But the Rosary is just an imposition of order. It is a discipline and a ritual; a place for the frantic or grieving mind to go so the heart can fly around a bit — like those crickets in the field — until it finds a new sort of rest, a peace that, as the bible verse goes, passes all understanding. I believe in new things since I began praying the Rosary again. I believe in the return of old friends and in the lasting freedom of death. I believe that Jim came to me in the field, and that he waits there for me still. Erin White is a writer in Massachusetts.
GETTY IMAGES / PHOTOGRAPHER: JUAN MABROMATA
home from vacation I began staying up late, looking at pictures of Jim on the Internet. Not the ones taken in the last minutes of his life — I still haven’t looked at those — but pictures taken in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Libya, and New York. As I scrolled through, as I opened window after window, I burned with embarrassment. Who was I to grieve James Foley? Who was I to mourn the death of this handsome war correspondent, this seriouslooking man in the helmet and flak jacket, the one eulogized by worldfamous journalists, by the president and the pope? With every picture, Jim moved further from me, I knew him less. Had theJim I knew — that young man who knew nothing of the horrors to come — ever existed? Even his name began to cleave from him. How strange, I thought when