The greatest temptation of the new day, David perceived, was to see himself as the dramatic center of this life. How young he was, how it proved him in the great world he had entered, to stand bowed before all this death yet be so vividly, so luxuriously strong and alive. The autumn air was sweet, the edges of clouds or of houses, telephone wires, whatever cut the blue, cut with such honed sharpness he wanted to cry out for the joy of seeing. In the clear air on the hills surrounding Leah, ledge and spruce, maple and birch were so fine in all their striatums, their dapplings, he felt he might have seen a wasp land on a leaf three miles away.
And even his sorrow, when the eyes closed like lead and his throat burned because he could not undo time and make the young people alive, as he was…See? How kind, how full of sorrow he considered himself to be. Were his tears beautifully his tears for his own compassion? Alone in the woods, Horace had died slowly from the buckshot wounds.
In the dingy Baptist Church, at Susie’s funeral, David sat with Wood and his mother upon the varnished benches. Nails had started from the lath racks that held the back-broken hymnals. The minister was an old man about to retire, and he spoke in a cracked, weepy voice one knew was his only voice—the same voice for breakfast or for baptism—to Susie’s aunt and cousins. “Our dear one, called home to Thy mysterious will, Lord, in the bloom of youth, on the verge of life…” David felt the old man’s weariness and fear. The relatives sat wooden-shouldered. Sam Davis was a prisoner between two husky cousins who were not about to let the old drunk mess things up. The two-toned, brown-enameled coffin was closed, the flowers lush yet somehow minimal, penurious.
His eyes hurt from their avidity. The cut flowers were mashed together thick as cake; their perfume was the smell of death in Leah. Dead inside the eternal darkness of the coffin was a body he had made love to. David Whipple was now connected in deep ways to death itself. Her midnight-blue eyes were cold and closed, the cream of her flesh faded into clay. Yet he was alive and could remember her warmth. Then came, with the memory of her kind, quirky smile, sorrow he had to believe was real. Or almost could believe was real. No danger of her being knocked up now, was there? How could he stop his vile brain, its parade of freakish questions?
An old lady in a shiny black dress, rigid as a soldier, played the organ. From the rear of its jigsawed, varnished box came the rowing clunk of the bellows lever. Chords sighed and whined together with the remoteness of utter familiarity. When they were asked to pray, David looked from his slightly bowed head at Sam Davis’ back. Sam was limp within his blue suit; the husky cousins were holding him up. They would have to carry Sam out like a pedestal clock.
David’s mother wiped tears from her face. One hand held her glasses wrapped in tissue, the other stayed at her eyes and cheeks. Wood sat at her other side, the inorganic crease angular across his left knee at the hinge of his steel and plastic leg. David knew the funeral was over when Wood’s hand made the cocking movement that locked his leg. He got up with the others then, and they walked out of the heaviness of the church into clear daylight, yellow and green. The relatives would go to the grave, and they would go home.
David drove. When they came to Bank Street Wood asked to be let off at Sally’s, where Peggy was. Sally seemed to have taken the news well, but she was an old, old woman, and Peggy wanted to stay with her. Kate was at home with Harvey. He’d let them put him to bed, but hadn’t spoken a word since his fit of the night before. He had retired. He was calm; he ate, he drank, he went to the bathroom. Dr. Winston’s opinion was that he was taking a vacation.
When they reached home, David decided to have a drink. He couldn’t go on vacation at the moment because he had something he had to do. The state had lost interest in the body of Horace Whipple, and also in Wood’s shotgun. But before he began his round of errands he would have a drink. He went to the refrigerator and got ice cubes, amazed by their glimmer and sparkle, diamond-hard and blue. In the glass their refractions were miraculous, the tiny rainbows winking from the edges of prisms. The amber whiskey whispered down through the ice, then swirled ropily in the water before it joined that other liquid. If he was kidding himself, he was kidding himself, but…He spoke to the kitchen. “If I kid myself, why then I kid myself; a foolish rationality is the monster of small love.” No, no, wait a minute, cat-killer, lover boy. He took a drink and immediately felt the alien presence in his brain—would it be good to him, or not? Would it help him go to Horace’s room, where he must find the suit Horace would spend eternity in? Too late not to find out: he swigged the whiskey down and went up the narrow back stairs, wary as a thief.
Horace’s door opened upon the room that was so uncluttered Horace might have moved into it yesterday. The room was a mirror image of David’s own, and he saw himself in it removed, purified of his possessions. The bed was made, a little lumpy in places beneath the brown spread, but neither sloppy nor meticulous. The fireplace was never used. Dust was all it contained, a gray powder over the andirons and bricks. Old carbon, generations old, had turned silvery with dust. No books or papers were out of shelves or drawers; they were sealed by disuse into their places. Horace’s alarm clock, on his bed table, still ticked. Strange, because Horace had been gone from this room for how many hours? That tick seemed all of Horace that was left here, because this had never really been Horace’s room. He’d never had a room the way the rest of them had rooms. He’d slept here, or tried to sleep here. Now no more. Now he really slept. He was no more here than anywhere. Even than in my memory, David thought. Was that true? No, but the memory was inadequate, and couldn’t stay. But Horace was a force, a needful push crowding him, shoving him off balance. He could even see himself resenting that force as it slowly decayed. Light was dusty across the threadbare rug, a lonely north light thin as whey.
The room was too silent. It was the clock. It had stopped! It nonticked, antiticked, pulled him with a force like vacuum toward it. Say something! The clock said 3:31. Its black face and green numerals stared without pulse like a dead animal. Little Ben was printed above the hand shaft. He wondered with dread and sorrow if Horace had ever read those words; it was, in small, the kind of question he had never asked Horace.
All this time he knew that Horace, if he had been the survivor, would have been adequate in his sorrow.
This room was ominous, as though it still contained the ghosts of Horace’s fright. The yellow-browns of ceiling and paneling were different, colder than the other rooms—maybe because of the northern light coming down dimly through the thickest of the trees. He had to remember what a warm, bright day it was outside. He had never been alone in this room before. Horace had been here alive the few times he had ever come here. The wallpaper was the same pattern of small flowers as on his room’s walls, but here it seemed to writhe, the thorns and stalks crowding the faded blossoms. No pictures hung across the wide spaces, only one oval mirror with silvery old glass like a passage of vision back through its fadings into the past.
He shivered, yet something reminiscent of duty kept him from hurrying out of here. It was too late to exorcise Horace’s ghosts. Perhaps he had now inherited them. Perhaps Horace and Susie walked innocent and free in the Elysian Fields, hand in hand, without fear or degradation. Perhaps, shit.
He should not indulge himself in that tone, not here in this empty shrine. With panic a cool touch at the small of his back he went to the first of the two closets. It was the right one; he wouldn’t have to open the door to the other. Horace’s dark suit fell from the wire hanger into his hands, the hanger bending like a willow branch to let it fall. As he took the cloth from the deep closet it was as though he pulled it from hands, little fowl-cold claws that tried to keep it back. He shut the door quickly and went to the bureau to find a white shirt. He found a shirt all right, but now he had to find a necktie. The closets again. Why were the closets so hard to look into? If he opened that door would there be a mouth as big as a wagon wheel waiting for his hand? Even so, he had to look, one door and then the other. The mouths were there, of course, but slyly invisible. He grabbed all three neckties from Horace’s rack and walked, his mind crawling, from the room.
He took Horace’s clothes to his truck. Kate had driven him out at noon to retrieve it and get some clothes appropriate for Susie’s funeral. She had been subdued, thinking hard all the time. He wondered if she noticed, as he did, the sharpness of color and light.
“You knew Susie pretty well, didn’t you?” she had said.
“You know I went out with her a few times.”
“Yes,” she said. “You must be very sad.”
“I am, Katie.”
“I don’t know who I’m crying about. It’s all so mixed up.”
“Gordon too,” he said.
“Yes, it’s all horrible.” She glanced at him and her eyes were glossy with tears. “Davy? Maybe we can begin talking about it sometime.”
That was about all they said. He always felt good with Kate, and he thought of telling her that, but by then they had arrived at the cabin, where she let him off.
Now the little truck started at the touch of his foot, feeling like freedom. He fully intended to take Horace’s clothes to Balchers’ Funeral Home, and then on the way back stop at the police station and pick up Wood’s shotgun. But he didn’t drive toward Balchers’ Funeral Home at all, he drove to the lake, made himself a drink and stood on the dock, watching the lively blue waves, feeling the slightly nippy wind across his face. “Essentially,” he said to the lake, the blue sky, the lovely pulsing of the weather, “David Whipple is procrastinating. He chooses this nice place to be.”
But it was not his right to choose, so he had another drink, his eyes becoming a little spastic, he noticed. The blue lake was too piercingly, beautifully blue. He must go back to Leah, to that mortician’s lair. How many funerals a day were sufficient unto the Lord? Tomorrow would be Gordon Ward’s, Wednesday Horace’s. No mass ceremonies in Leah, at least for the time being. So he drove back toward the town, feeling the close embrace of Leah as though he drove toward a dense cloud, deeper and deeper into it. Not a storm cloud, but a foglike miasma of knowledge and relationships. Even the clarity of vision dimmed in that direction, and he thought of it as a place, now, where one avoided eyes. At every crossroad he wanted to turn the little Ford’s wheel and climb toward hills and freedom, stop maybe at a little store and buy a beer to sip. But he went on, because he had to.
Then he came to a gravel road leading off to the right. It was familiar in a startling way; he had passed it all summer with no twinge of recognition at all, as though time past were a different landscape altogether. It was the road to Dark Hill Farm he’d first climbed when he was sixteen. This sudden recognition seemed to be a sign, so he turned and began the long climb. It had been five years since he’d taken this road, and it seemed narrower, the trees larger. The way seemed too short, and he passed the old landmarks too quickly on his way—the millpond, Cilley’s mailbox, unmarked lesser crossroads. Above the last, steepest hill the saplings had grown in diameter, and beyond the saplings the thick groves of spruce were still impenetrable, soft green cliffs imprisoning the road. Then he came to the clearing of the farm. His engine had heated up a little, so he stopped to let it idle as he looked around at the house and barns. His act of stopping declared him, as much as he wanted to be declared, a visitor to this place he had run from long ago.
A subtle feeling of unuse emanated from the barns and barnyard. The fields beyond had been hayed this summer, but something ragged about the edges of things, the earth not trodden enough where it should have been along the paths to chores, gave him some courage. Perhaps no one was here at all. He had no nostalgia about this place that he could detect; it had been one of the few times in his life when absolutely everything he’d done had been inadequate. Memory could usually salvage something or other from a time or place, but here all had been loss and frustration. Maybe he should carefully hold onto that time, and examine it well. He had played mooncalf to Tucker Cross; that should remain a warning. And he had run away after having come too close to murder. Did Lucifer still skulk about the gray barns, or had he died of internal ruptures? David could feel in his hands the sting of the two-by-four, and in his chest the deep, free breath of murder.
Soon he became convinced that no one lived in the red house beneath the pines, and the final proof was an empty windowpane in a downstairs window that was so soft a black, so furry and deep, it glowed its emptiness out at him across the pine needles. He drove on past the clearing, wondering why he hadn’t merely turned around. It wasn’t procrastination any more—he seemed to be looking for something up beyond, where the road went like an open door into the spruces again. It wasn’t Diddleneck Pond. At least he didn’t think it was. But some little manifestation or other drew him on until he remembered what it was, and the warm afternoon of late summer when he had seen it. Forneau’s beer-can tree. Somehow he stopped at exactly the right place, walked a few yards through brush that was now solid leaves and stalks, and found the little maple tree. It was still small, now dead, and some of the rusted cans were immobile on the brittle branches. Most had fallen and begun to disappear into the rotten leaves of all those seasons. He shrugged and turned to go back, and it was then he remembered what he’d seen here—Joe Cilley bending Tucker’s frail back as he French-kissed her, his brutal mouth over her delicate one. A beautiful stab of jealousy slid under his ribs, fresh as it had been then. “Ow!” he said happily.
The brilliant edges of leaves cut his eyes; suddenly his ears popped open, and the buzz and whine of all the woods insects assaulted him with the benevolent violence of an orchestra.
“Well!” he said. There was his little truck waiting faithfully, but with Horace’s folded clothes on the front seat. He had to go back to Leah.
Balchers’ Funeral Home was an old Victorian mansion nearly as large and omate as the Whipples’ house. Its smooth modern improvements of paint and siding, and of heavy, somnolent plantings, proved it no residence, however. The chaste sign hung by the walk on a miniature scaffold, lighted at night by small floodlights sunken into the turf.
He knew Phil Balcher, the son, pretty well. In high school Phil had been one of those quiet, solitary yet unlonesome people everyone knew were destined to grow up and become what they had always intended to become.
David parked among quite a few other cars in the carefully tended gravel parking lot next to the big house and walked, bearing Horace’s clothes, toward what he took to be the side entrance. The weight of the whiskey had lodged in the back of his head, still working because he felt his imagination to be too free and dangerous, too eager for any new sights he might feed into it. He had to choose Horace’s coffin, for one thing. Should he look at them all, he wondered, ponder this and that advantage, this color against that? Phil would be proud of his wares, he knew.
Last night he had been too late to see Horace. As he ran through the woods behind the dim beam of his flashlight, he missed a turn in the trail, lost the trail altogether and had to climb slowly toward the reservoir through the ten-year-old blow-down from the 1938 hurricane. When he got to the old air-raid tower, only a few of the vigilantes still hunkered around the place where Horace had died, talking it over, reliving their excitement. None of the men recognized him. They sat around a small fire, the huge pine columns of the tower looming up like a giant’s legs, their rifles and shotguns, the tools of hunters and soldiers, familiar in their hands, in their laps or leaning against their necks. David’s rifle, if he had been armed, would have lain as easily cradled against his own body. He stood at the periphery of the light. The stairs to the tower had rotted, he noticed, in the humidity of the woods. He soon learned that Horace’s body had already been taken away.
Now Horace was in this building somewhere, embalmed, he supposed, or whatever they did now. It was not a subject that had ever before been of immediacy for him. The side entrance was rigged for deliveries, with a ramp. He opened the wide door and went into a hallway. Gray gun-metal coffins were stacked along one side on brackets made of ordinary galvanized plumbing pipe. He knew he was not in a place for visitors, yet a ghostlike push of momentum made him walk aggressively forward. He would go anywhere, open any door. At the end of the hall was a door with a window of frosted glass, the glass glowing with the antiseptic white of fluorescent light in the place beyond. He would always know that he had read that lucid, clinical light for what it was, known and chosen to enter in order to sear his eyes.
He pushed the door open and entered the bright room. Color on his left, among whites and the busy chrome of table legs, tubes and faucets, made him turn toward lively reds and oranges. On a table lay a long body, on its back, legs slightly spread. It was Horace’s face there, its crude bones beneath the silent skin, mouth gaped open like a retch so the broad upper teeth were visible. But the whole body was open, from crotch to neck, and the inside of that vessel gleamed as fresh as any meat on display. The insides of the ribs were silvery clean against the rare red meat, the wide columns arching upward toward the slit, tough binding of skin. The chemical reek was not from the body; it came from the walls or ceiling, so strong it seemed to disinfect vision itself. He could not stop the cataloguing, never thought of turning away. There was no heart in the splayed body, no liver or lights, no orts. The gaping mouth seemed to scream silently, the whole body protesting, as though the split chest itself were a toothed mouth. It had been cleaned like a beef, like a sheep, emptied to the neck. There was the pale esophagus cut off, a perfect O. There were the spine’s knuckles, the hollow of belly, the bush of blond hair and the slack penis, the wormy bag of testicles dark as though bruised between the great gray thighs. But it was the red meat, the naked muscles glowing fresh red, that he would take with him like a treasure to ponder over. The scars on legs and arms, the old healed scars, were white basted seams. Below the bulge of brow the eyes were darkly sunken like dried puddles. It was all so silent, that meat. Horace’s big hands, palms up, never closed. Away from the empty place, as they were, they still seemed capable, as did the feet with their working calluses, of human movement. But all was still as a photograph, now merely dead extensions of the red center.
Someone gasped. He turned to see Phil Balcher, pale, in a white apron stained pink, staring at him. Phil’s lips moved as he tore the apron off. A string broke, David noticed, clearly understanding Phil’s dismay. He felt his expression turn into the calm friendliness of meeting. A smile signaled itself to his eyes and cheeks—friendly, more than polite. Phil stared in awe.
“Hi, Phil,” David’s voice said. “I’ve brought the suit and shirt.” He was aware of the meat there on the table, the non-witness.
“Come!” Phil said, pointing to a door. “Come!”
Phil looked sick, and David wanted to reassure him. “I guess I came in the wrong door,” he said, walking calmly toward the door Phil had pointed to.
“I’ve got to wash my hands!” Phil nearly cried. “Wait out there! Danger of disease, you know!”
Near the door, David noticed another table with chromed legs on casters as large as the wheels of a child’s wagon. A sheet covered the obvious form of a body—the cliff of feet, the heavy mounds of torso and head.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Wait outside!” Phil’s dismayed voice cried. When David looked again, matter-of-factly, reassuringly, at Horace’s table, Phil stared, horrified. How could he tell Phil it was all right? He himself was gravely calm, nonchalant.
“This door?” he enquired politely, taking the handle.
Phil grimaced as he nodded.
David entered an ordinary office furnished with desks and filing cabinets, calendar, clock, typewriter. He sat in a comfortable old swivel chair; the suit, shirt and ties in his lap. He had brought all three ties, thinking that Phil could choose the one he preferred. He wanted to be considerate of Phil, who was not a bad guy, really.
Phil came out, frowning. He’d combed his black hair smoothly away from his pale forehead, and he looked somehow lacquered, hair and skin. Even his white shirt and black necktie gleamed. That necktie could never be untied, David was certain. The glassy knot must have been molded into it.
Phil stared at him. “You were never very close?” he asked.
“Close?”
“You and Horace.”
“You mean just now?” David asked.
“No, I mean…in life.”
“Why?”
“He’s not ready. They did a complete autopsy, you know. They always do in such cases.” Phil was still horrified by what David had so calmly seen, and David observed this with wonder.
“I’ve seen dead bodies before,” he said. He counted them: three soldiers lying beside the deuce-and-a-half that had been hit by the short round. One arm was several feet away, still looking exactly like an arm and a hand, wrist watch and wedding ring attached. An old lady hit by a car in Seattle, her silver-rimmed glasses in her gray hair as though she had just pushed them up, her pocketbook strap still around her arm. The grammar-school janitor, the only Negro in Leah, lying in the satin sheets of his coffin. A million in the newsreels and movies, blown apart, shot, bumed, starved to death. So why was Phil upset?
“Here are the clothes. You can pick the necktie you like best,” he said.
Phil took the clothes and put them on a hanger, the shirt neatly over the suit coat. “You weren’t very close to Horace, then?”
Phil evidently implied that the pile of meat in there was Horace. Why must he say that? Did the son of a bitch want to make him admit something?
“Are you going to sell me a coffin?”
“A casket,” Phil said, correcting him. Phil put on his suit coat before he led David into the next room. Here were soft carpets, reddish warm lights, flowers, coffins—caskets—sedately elevated to chest level. Each had a discreet small price tag hanging on one of its handles.
“What’s the cheapest one?” David asked. He smiled at Phil, the slightest edge of cruelty flickering like a knife in his mind. He thought of the possibilities. He wanted to laugh because Phil was all puckered up in distaste. The possibilities seemed enormously interesting.
“How about a plain old pine box, Phil? I always liked the shape of a good old coffin. Pardon me—casket. You know, the kind that’s wider at the shoulders? I mean all these here are too round. They all look like Pullman cars—you know what I mean?”
“We’ve never carried anything like that. You want a metal interior lining to keep out—”
“To keep out what, Phil? Why do you want to keep anything out?”
“And a cement vault,” Phil said with no apparent expression. “The vault keeps the turf from sinking. The vault only costs a hundred and fifty dollars, and it’s a good investment.”
Suddenly David was confused. The possibilities had come jumbling through his mind—all the old, sick undertaker jokes—and he could no longer entertain any of them. It was too late, of course, for poor Phil’s approval, but he would not continue. He would not discuss investment, the etymology of the word. He would invest Horace’s body in a vault that was, or was not, vaulted. He would place his deciding hand upon one of these streamlined, pompously decorated caskets, all of which, upon closer examination, resembled new Buicks. He would not—could not—invest his guilt within the soft satin interiors that looked so comfortable until he felt his own butt cold and dead down in there. The logic of that comfort nauseated him. He would rather take Horace into the woods and dig him a good, deep hole. He and Kate and Peggy would lower him down on ropes, and Wood would say the proper words over his empty brother while Harvey and Henrietta Whipple stood with bowed heads and understanding hearts. Just the family, who would understand why it had been necessary for Horace to blow Gordon Ward’s head into fragments. Sometimes such things were just. But what a gruesome weight of his own murderous failure pressed down upon this vision.
He grew dizzy, and under the pretext of looking along the bottom of a fat casket lowered his head so the blood could return to it. Mainly he had to get out of here.
Phil took his arm in a surprisingly strong hand. “I’ll show you what we can do,” he said, and led David out of the showroom, down a carpeted hallway and through a curtained arch. Soft organ music murmured from behind purple curtains, and on a dais in soft pastel lights was an open casket surrounded by cut flowers. The lights were peach-colored, warm as were all the colors of the room. Urns of pastel metal and pastel glass grew lush ferns in all the corners of the raised dais, and the sleeping head of a plump young man lay on a silken pillow at the very center of all the warmth. The still face, eyes closed and hair neatly combed, glowed as though lighted from within by real blood.
There were murmuring voices behind him, and Phil turned him toward the chairs at the rear of the little theater, where somberly dressed people stood muted or sat with heads bowed. The organ squeaked, high as the smallest mouse above the basal hum of its chords. The soft lights themselves, coming from hidden sources, seemed to press the sweet perfume into his nose and mouth. He looked at his own hand, and it was peach-colored, glowing as waimly as the cheek of the dead young man.
Standing at the rear of the room, among the live people, was someone he recognized—Mr. Caswell, the mailman. And next to him was Mrs. Caswell, short and bundled by her flesh. She was the main person, the one the others came toward with formal, dipping steps, to touch her hand and move their lips above her. He looked back to the center of the lights. Was that Ben there in the casket, silently glowing? They all glowed in this heady light, everybody. Even Mr. Caswell’s ordinarily pale, skinny face seemed to have fleshed out in the numinous light.
“See?” Phil said in his ear. “Doesn’t he look well? Do you see how it comforts them to see him for the last time looking well?”
God, it was Ben, his friend, once the friend he used to fight practically to the death, whose bony strength used to frighten him—strength that came, he always believed, from the ice-sharp will in the skinny body. Maybe it was that will that had kept him alive all these years in the hospital. He turned to Phil, who wouldn’t let him go or let him turn. “Oh,” he said.
“Straighten your tie and go give your condolences to his mother,” Phil ordered. “Ben was your friend.”
David turned on him, suddenly furious beyond words. “Who the! How the!” he whispered, choking on the air in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”
“Shame,” said the just, unctuous voice.
David tore his arm loose, or was at the last moment let loose, and walked in slow motion toward the quiet group, toward the toothy murmurs of the old man who now leaned over Mrs. Caswell. He waited in line, knowing none of these old people with their soft colors and brittle hair, the women all fat and stooped. When it was his turn, Mrs. Caswell looked up, surprised, and smiled sadly at him. “Why, it’s David Whipple!” she said breathily. There were no tears in her wrinkled, powdery eyes, and suddenly David was on Ben’s side, overcome with grief for Ben. The skinny enemy and friend rode his freakish giraffe of a bike down High Street on the way to school again. David squeezed her white-gloved hand, and she said, “Oh! My arthritis, David!” He let go her hand and saw her count, calculate his tears. “David was Ben’s oldest friend,” she said to the others. Which was probably true. “Go up and see him, David,” she said. “He looks so well. It’s really a blessing. It’s really a blessing. And David, tell your mother how sorry we are about her loss.”
When he shook Mr. Caswell’s bony hand, as if in shy agreement they avoided each other’s eyes.
David approached the dais and cast his eyes upon the young waxen stranger. It was not the Ben who meant power and will, but an older, softer person who had somehow been corrupted by the compromising years. David was not moved; he would never let this soft, glowing imitation take Ben’s place in his memory.
He went home. At supper, unaware, he took meat upon his plate and stared down at the pale red juices. His intent to eat of the murdered flesh twisted in his throat until he had to leave the table.
The Whipples survived the week of the funerals. Wood and David attended Gordon Ward’s funeral at the Congregational Church. After the ceremony he was bome by the Legion to his grave, the Drum and Bugle Corps bravely executing the slow march in their blue and silver finery. Keith Joubert played taps in the bright, windy day, the silver echoes flying on the wind across the cemetery, around the white church and across the square. Mrs. Ward was either frozen or brave; her husband and her friends surrounded her whenever she had to stand. Harvey did not attend. That afternoon Wood spoke to Gordon, Sr., and later that evening Gordon, Sr., called Harvey on the telephone. They spoke for more than half an hour, and afterward Harvey found it possible to speak to his family again.
They all attended Horace’s funeral, again at the Congregational Church, Reverend Bledsoe officiating. The pallbearers were David, Wood, John Cotter, Foster Greenwood, Robert Paquette, and Joseph Foss, friends of David’s and Wood’s. After the church ceremony they carried Horace past Gordon’s fresh grave, the slit turf still clearly outlined, to the Whipple plot where people of other centuries, grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles were buried. Horace seemed a strange addition to that ancient company, none of whom he had ever known. Sally De Oestris didn’t walk the hundred yards to the grave, and when the last prayer was over, Peggy picked her up at the church.
They found themselves—Harvey, Henrietta, Wood, David, Kate, Peggy and Sally—in the great hall of the Whipples’ house. They were all alive, dry-eyed, and in each was the tiny guilt-flutter of relief. Waves of sorrow, that ebb tide, would wash over each of them at unexpected moments. The mother’s breast would suffer the ghost thumps of another’s need. They would close their eyes and be imperiled by visions of Horace as a child crying in pain and embarrassment, such as the time he walked toward them holding his arm above the place where it should not have bent. Henrietta would see his red, roaring face in the hallway, at the cellar door. She would jump to keep his ghost from tearing off hinges. But the tide of memory could only recede.
The sunlight fell through the high, arched windows in sedate, rather misty columns. The parquet floor, the oriental rugs, the heavy furniture—everything seemed to proclaim its substantiality. Henrietta, feeling the sweet ache of tiredness in her legs, sat down with the rest of them for a moment before seeing to the kitchen. She had nothing to see to there, but it was her place to keep track of. They were all silent for a while.
“So,” Harvey said at last, and they nodded, or at least breathed an easy breath of assent. They were all still alive. Though death might be the next welcome (Sally thought this, and looked at the young people for better news), all their own complications of fear and desire still operated on this bright September day. Already they had begun to look to themselves and to each other for signs and portents.