DEERFIELD, Mass. -- At graveside, each woman, in her turn, laid a single yellow rose on the dead soldier's coffin.
First came his sister, Allison Belanger, a student at Roger Williams University; in her eulogy she had described her big brother, Gregory, as a protector, a man of wisdom, her hero. She'd said, "The emptiness that is left will last forever."
Next, Sgt. Gregory Belanger's fiancée, Tara Woundy, set her rose on the maple coffin. She had eulogized her husband-to-be by reading an e-mail she'd written at their Narragansett apartment two weeks ago, on their second anniversary: "I feel so blessed every day to be loved by a man like you. . . . We have a lot of happy days ahead of us."
Then came his mother, Kathleen, a nurse who volunteers for the town's ambulance corps. She recalled her 24-year-old son as a kind-hearted lady's man with "killer lashes" framing cool blue eyes. As a boy, he'd had two passions: cooking and soldiering. He'd steal his little sister's toy dishes to play at cooking; and he loved to play "G.I. O.," his little boy's way of saying G.I. Joe.
As an adult, he found a way of merging his passions: he joined an Army Reserve unit to earn tuition money for culinary studies at Johnson & Wales. He earned an associate's degree in culinary arts, and landed a chef's job at the Coast Guard House near his Narragansett home. He was in the first semester of his junior year at Johnson & Wales when his unit, the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion, was called to active duty and shipped to Iraq. He died there on Aug. 26, after volunteering to fill in for a friend granted an emergency leave to see her sick mother. His vehicle was the last one in a convoy headed for Kuwait; an unseen enemy hit it with a rocket-launched grenade, killing Belanger.
Each woman, in turn, placed a yellow rose; his mother caressed the smooth coffin lid, and his fiancée stole a last glance over her shoulder at her rose on the coffin.
Then more family and friends filed by, heaping red roses on Belanger's coffin, and a bearded bagpiper began blowing a dirge. His pipes wailed across Laurel Hill Cemetery, where some of the iron markers in the mossy ground mark the graves of men who fought in the American Revolution.
The tombstones in Laurel Hill are too close together to bring in a backhoe, and it took a grave-digger five hours to dig Belanger's grave on a hillside, beneath an old oak. Mourners were so numerous they were bused into the old graveyard from a memorial service.
The service took place in the auditorium of Frontier Regional High School, where Belanger graduated five years ago. The school has a modern edifice of brick and glass; it borders Bloody Brick, where Indian warriors ambushed a convoy of settlers in 1695, killing 77 men.
Funeral director Lawrence Wrisley said there wasn't a church hall or meeting room in Deerfield big enough to hold the service, so he settled on the school auditorium.
At 5 past noon, Army pallbearers from Fort Drum, N.Y., pulled Belanger's coffin from the hearse. The colors of the American flag on the coffin looked bright against the school parking lot, the black hearse, and the gloom of a cloudy day.
The service was not scheduled to start till 1:30 p.m., so only a few student athletes who remained after an early school closing were there to see the coffin come through the glass doors. Even so, the pallbearers, wearing black berets and green dress uniforms, performed with ritualistic pageantry, their polished black shoes clicking a cadence on the pavement.
Deerfield is a small town -- the 2000 census put the population at 4,750 -- but people filled every one of the 650 seats in the Frontier High auditorium. They stood against the walls, two or three deep in places, and spilled out into the foyer.
Wrisley said he and his brother, Harold, have been handling funerals in town for 36 years, and they'd never seen one this big. The one that came closest, Wrisley said, was the funeral for Richard Scott, one of two sons of Deerfield killed in Vietnam. The town got lucky in Korea, where 116 served without dying, but in World War II it lost 14 of its men.
Belanger's sister and fiancée managed to speak their eulogies in tight, grief-stricken voices; his mother had a pastor read hers, the Rev. Andrea La Sonde Anastos. She remembered Greg building the camp on Dead Dog Hill, playing Marco Polo with his cousins in the pool, cresting Mill Village Hill on his bicycle. She remembered him as a wrestler, captain of his high school team, constantly chewing Winterfresh gum to dull his appetite; he had to keep his wrestling weight at a muscular 140 pounds.
"There are tears," the minister read. "But the tears cannot destroy his love. They can only water it, and keep it fresh."
A phalanx of state police on quietly purring motorcycles led the caravan; a large American flag fluttered from the family's limousine, trailed by a column of mini-buses grumbling up Laurel Hill.
An Army honor guard fired three sharp volleys over Belanger's grave. The echoes died and a trumpeter, high on the hill, blew taps. As the mourners filed by the coffin, heaping it high with flowers, a white-haired man approached the six men and lone woman in the color guard, standing at attention. In the barrel of the woman's rifle he placed a white carnation.
