The new priest dropped consonants from the ends of words, causing consternation and some mirth among the few who still attended mass. Juan, sitting with a group of women near the fountain, an empty plastic water jug by his feet, listened as they talked about him. They were waiting for the bread and making fun of the priest’s Argentinian accent.

“If he were serving coffee, not communion, it wouldn’t matter what he sounds like!” Laura complained. She unfolded a handkerchief and laid it on top of her gray hair against the sun.

“He sounds strange, but, honestly,” said Loly, and dropped her voice a decibel or two, “I like him better than I liked Don Marco.”

“Yes but ... Don Marco was one of us,” Estrella said. “And he preached in Galician, not Spanish. He baptized me.”

“He baptized all of us! And gave us our first communions. But he was never nice. He was old. So old. He was old when we were children and now, we are old. God rest him.”

“He couldn’t have been that old,” Juan said, enjoying the familiar banter. “But yes, I guess he always seemed old, even when he was young.”

Estrella, who’d been in her garden and still had green-bean leaves stuck to her like they’d been printed on her clothes by design, said, “Don Marco wasn’t nice, but he did what he was supposed to do. He was born on the other side of that hill over there and stayed here for his whole life.”

Loly leaned across and pulled a leaf from Estrella’s shirt. “Yes, that’s true. But tell me, what Galician will go into the priesthood now? There isn’t anybody.”

“But he’s so young. And from South America. He can’t maintain morality, keep us in line!” This from Laura, who immediately saw the ridiculousness of what she’d said and laughed along with the others. Unspoken was the obvious fact that these women had never stepped out of line. Without exception, their long lives had consisted in hard work and keeping house and, more often than not, tolerating the men in their lives—husbands, fathers, brothers.

The frozen-food truck pulled into the village; a couple of women stood up stiffly from the stone bench and went to buy some things. Most of the vendors who came to Regadas regularly—selling bread, frozen food, fruit, fish—knew the priest because he led services at five other small churches.

Loly was imitating his pronunciation of the Bible verses they knew so well, her teeth chewing the air and allowing the edges of each word to leak out from where there should have been consonant fences to keep them corralled. “En el prinhipio creó Dioh y lo hieloh,” she said, her mouth full of imaginary pebbles.

The driver was still laughing at Loly’s imitation of the Argentinian as he pulled away.

“Juan, what do you think?” asked Estrella. “Have you seen the new priest? Heard him?”

“I haven’t met him.” Juan took off his cap and wiped sweat from his hairline, scooched closer to the stone wall, out of the sun. “But I’ll go to Doña Anabel’s funeral tomorrow, of course, so I’ll see him then.”

“You never went to mass, as soon as you could defy your mother,” Loly said.

“Yes, that’s true.”

Estrella laughed, an avian cackle. “Your mother didn’t like that!”

He smiled. “No, no she didn’t. Not at all.”

“That handsome grandson of yours, he doesn’t go to mass either. Your daughter? Lovely girl. But we didn’t ever see her in the church.” This from Laura, who was probably the most religious of them.

“Who can blame her?” piped up Loly. “It was Don Marco. Nobody will say it, but I will. He wasn’t right, upstairs, at the end.” She pointed to her own temple.

They laughed, and Juan marveled at how the village had changed in the years since he’d left. The fear was gone, the darkness they’d endured for generations burned off like fog in the sun.

“Juan, we know you are not religious, but what do you think?” asked Laura. “Should a priest be from the place where he preaches? How can a young Argentinian know anything about Galicia?”

Juan didn’t know how to answer. He’d been back for almost a year, but he hadn’t completely reacclimated to the constant chatter, the yelling over each other, the frankness. That had always been the style of speaking, but certain topics, such as politics and the church, used to be off limits. He was still unsure how much he could say about the historical role of the priests, their support of the dictatorship, the lies they told, the damage they did.

Merce, the baker, pulled into the square and swung open the back door as Juan and the women gathered around. Baguettes could be large or slightly smaller, crusty or softer, and Merce already knew everybody’s preference. Juan always bought a large loaf, soft rather than hard because the crusts could leave cuts in the roof of your mouth. Some people preferred that, which he couldn’t understand. Shel, his grandson, ate most of the bread, but wasn’t picky about the hardness of the crust.

“When is the funeral?” Merce asked. “For Doña Anabel?” She clapped the flour from her hands and closed the doors.

“Tomorrow, and here” they told her, motioning toward the church.

“Not Beade?”

“No, because she taught here, in Regadas, so she wanted to be buried here.”

“We were all her students,” Juan added. He swallowed hard to keep his face from revealing the secret he shared with the deceased teacher. It belonged only to him now that she was gone.

Loly and Estrella smiled sadly and nodded, but Laura said, “Not me, I’m too old! You were the lucky ones, when I was in school it was Doña Dolores. Heaven above, between her and Don Marco!”

Merce said, “I was in school in Ribadavia. We had one nice teacher, but she moved away when I was only ten. You all are lucky to have had such a nice lady, and she stayed for so long!”

Merce pulled herself into the cab and drove off as the small crowd dispersed. Juan walked the few meters to the fountain. He rinsed the water jug and propped it under the pipe from which flowed the clearest, most delicious water he’d ever drunk. He thought of the years he’d spent in America, drinking bottled water, filtered, tap, none of it as tasty and quenching as this. When the bottle was full, he carried it and the bread up the hill to the house, where lunch was already made.

The next morning, Father Jimenez recited the funeral mass for Doña Anabel. Juan smiled because he was just as the women had described: Vowels kicked consonants out of words as they spilled like lazy smoke from his mouth.

The church had always been cold and damp, no matter how hard the sun battered the orange-tiled roof, how long the dry summer months wore on, grass dried to husk and fires over the border in Portugal. Still, inside was damp and musty as a tomb. Don Marco, the old priest, had said mass with an oppressive expression halfway between glaring and boredom.

It was still cool and dark and rather oppressive, but at least Father Jimenez had a smile, a face that conveyed he was human, no better and no worse than anyone. He looked out over the congregation, his hand on the coffin, and Juan remembered all the funerals he’d attended. The memories layered one on top of the other, blending and melding and going backwards, from his wife to his mother, finally to his father, when he was only ten. Like he was looking through a kaleidoscope and the shapes that tumbled as it turned were stained glass and coffins and blackened granite.

At the far end of the scope, which was the beginning, was Juan’s grandfather, but Juan could barely remember that funeral. He remembered his grandfather in the bodega, pressing corks into bottles of wine, forever cleaning barrels and fixing machinery. Next was his father, the first funeral he could remember well. There were all the military honors sewn into the Spanish flag that covered the coffin. On one side of him sat his mother, angry at the government and convinced her husband had died for no good reason; on the other, his sister, crying quietly. Finally, and most recently, his wife, Martha, had been dispatched from an airy wooden Episcopalian church in New Hampshire, a church so different from this, so much ... drier.

Now the young Argentinian smiled kindly, and his accent was strange but not too hard to follow, and Doña Anabel was dead, eternal rest inside this cloth-draped coffin.

Juan had been told that Sunday masses were sparsely attended, but for Doña Anabel there wasn’t enough room between people to stash a purse or a hat. Those things had to be put on the floor because people were crammed in like kernels on a cob of corn, and through the open doors people leaned into the darkness until their eyes adjusted from the bright sun, while others, many of whom refused to enter the church on principle, stood outside, to be there, to pay their respects.

Beside Juan, Shel sat tall, looking more confident than Juan would have expected. His Spanish was quite good, but there was a lot of antiquated vocabulary, and he had only ever been to church on a handful of occasions. Juan looked back up at the priest, at the casket. His grandson leaned his shoulder into Juan’s and squeezed his hand. It was as if he, Shel, were the grandparent and Juan a small child. It was only then that Juan realized he’d been crying.