Chapter Fifty-three

Keller has inadvertently taken the local, so his journey to Great Harbor is painfully slow, interrupted every few minutes with pauses at outlying stations along the route. The slowness of the journey is actually not a bad thing. He’s in no rush to get there, to go through the motions of the funeral and the pretense of caring, but he’d make darn sure to get the express on the return trip. He’d called Miss Jacobs to let her know he’d be there but hadn’t prolonged the conversation much beyond telling her which train he’d be on and that he’d get Great Harbor’s only taxi to take him to the funeral home. No religion for Clayton Britt, not at this late date.

He’s got a paper cup of coffee cooling in his hands and a cruller in a bag on his lap. Every now and again, he reaches into the bag and breaks off a piece of the cruller. He’s being careful not to get crumbs on his suit. Rick’s suit. He’s wearing the striped tie of fashionable width that the Stantons gave him for Christmas. He runs his hand down it every now and again to make sure that it’s still in place. Keller has his reading assignment beside him on the seat, but he can’t make himself pick it up. He just watches out the window as the urban landscape begins to give way to country, but he isn’t really paying attention to the scenery.

A funny thing happened a week ago and Keller is still thinking about it. He was out shoveling the walk when one of the neighbors ventured over. This was a guy he’d waved to a couple of times, a businessman who kept long hours, coming home after five and leaving just as Keller was taking Pax out for his morning walk at sunrise. Early train into town, late train home.

“Hey neighbor.” It was a Saturday, and the guy was dressed like Keller, ready for chores. “Bob Tuthill. Insurance.”

“Keller, Keller Nicholson.” Keller jabbed the shovel into the snow, put out his hand. He didn’t have a ready job title to toss back.

“Nice to have you folks in the neighborhood. Sorry I haven’t been by before this, but you know how it is,” Tuthill said.

“I believe that Francesca and Mrs. Tuthill know each other.” Bob’s wife was one of the few neighborhood ladies who occasionally dropped by for midmorning coffee with Francesca. “Lady time,” he and Rick called it, and Keller would break out the chessboard and keep clear of the kitchen.

“Yeah, wives are good about those things. Always borrowing sugar. Right?”

“Right.” Keller knew that he had a foolish grin on his face and that he should enlighten Tuthill, but for some reason he didn’t, and he was relieved when Pax came bounding over, curious about the newcomer.

“Nice dog. Always like a big dog.” Tuthill reached out to pat Pax, but one look at the dog’s face and he pulled his hand away. “Say, that her dad or yours I see you wheeling around?”

Before Keller could answer, Tuthill jumped topics and asked if Keller had a second shovel. The handle of his, it seemed, had snapped off.

There was something so lovely about Tuthill’s mistake. He’d validated a barely concocted fantasy, that Keller and Francesca were a couple. A fantasy that Keller was ashamed of but nonetheless let rise out of empty moments; a fantasy he could never wish into reality. To do so would be to lose Rick. Despite the bumpy nature of their acquaintance, he and Rick had become friends of a sort.

*   *   *

Somewhere along the way, Keller has fallen asleep, the crumpled bag of cruller crumbs still gripped in his hand. The conductor shakes him awake. He can see the railway sign: GREAT HARBOR. Despite all his intentions never to come back, here he is. It seems like a hundred years since he boarded this train at this station and headed to war. He left here a boy, and now he’s a grown man, a veteran of war, and, against all predictions, a college student. Despite the slow train, he’s an hour early for the funeral, so he decides to walk. He’s over the causeway bridge from Great Harbor in fifteen minutes and on the main street of Hawke’s Cove in twenty.

Nothing has changed. He may have been gone for years, but Hawke’s Cove has sat, like Brigadoon, in a time warp. The storefronts haven’t changed, their businesses existing in some kind of stasis of moderate success, the hardware store, the grocery store, Linda’s Restaurant. The only suggestion that it isn’t still 1942 or 1938 or 1893 is the late-model Oldsmobile parked along the curb, all fins and chrome. There’s Joe Green from the dairy, and the Sunderland boys—even in their sixties, the bachelor brothers have always been called the Sunderland boys. Neither of them looks a day older than the last time he saw them. Keller waves from across the street and they wave back without a moment’s hesitation in figuring out who he is. Maybe he hasn’t changed all that much. The feeling that he’s returned to Hawke’s Cove a grown man dissipates, until Keller thinks that maybe he’s dreamed it all. Maybe he’s still that ruddy-faced adolescent hauling lobster pots out of the cove with his great-uncle, who’s heaping abuse on him because he’s dropped a marlin spike overboard. Maybe it’s all been a fever dream filled with the energy of war and the contentment of living in a small Cape-style house with his dog and the people who seem to care about him. And he’s about to waken. Even dead, Clayton Britt has a power over him, the power to make him feel worthless.

The funeral home is an unimpressive square building that once held the livery stable. A white clapboard facade dresses it up, and a canvas canopy suggests that those who enter here should be humbled. Keller removes his fedora and hangs it on the hat rack by the door. He can hear voices, and he walks toward them. A small group is gathered in one of the viewing rooms. At the far end is a casket, and for the first time Keller realizes that he’s going to have to look at his uncle. Somehow, he had overlooked that part of the American ritual. The last look. Keller had hoped that he’d had his last look at Clayton Britt that day at the Great Harbor railroad station. You can come back, you know.

“Keller, how nice to see you.” Miss Jacobs has come up beside him as he stands flummoxed in the doorway of the viewing room. She takes his face in her hands and draws him down to her for a kiss on the cheek. “You look well.”

“So do you.” Miss Jacobs, like everything else in this town, hasn’t changed. “You’re still the most beautiful girl at the dance.”

“Keller, when did you learn to flirt?” But she’s not displeased; she blushes girlishly and takes him by the arm.

He wants to resist, but he knows that he must carry out this awkward task, so Keller lets Miss Jacobs lead him to the head of the short line of those paying their respects to a hard, cold, solitary fisherman.

It’s as if the undertaker has played a joke on Clayton. If the man never smiled in life, the mortician has him smiling in death. Keller feels a little sick. This waxy smiling effigy of Clayton Britt is just plain ghoulish. Even the undertaker hasn’t been able to disguise the work-worn hands serenely folded over Clayton’s breast, the gnarly grayish knuckles, the blackened thumbnail, the cut alongside one finger from his last haul. Keller stares at those hands, recalling the only time he ever touched them, one of them—the handshake Clayton offered the day he left for war. No. Keller remembers that Clayton used both hands that day, covering Keller’s right with his left, as close to an affectionate gesture as the man had ever made. You can come back, you know.

Keller finds himself staring blindly at those hands until Miss Jacobs nods toward the kneeler. He sinks down to offer an unpracticed prayer. He has no idea what thought to loft to a God he’s never been introduced to, so he just closes his eyes and thinks, Go where you belong, old man. May God have mercy on your soul. He tries to think of Clayton, but Rick and Francesca come to mind instead, and he finds himself praying for them. All of them.

*   *   *

Hawke’s Cove’s cemetery occupies a rise and is filled with the bad-teeth remnants of ancient slate headstones cheek by jowl with more modern and durable granite ones. Even though the temperature hovers just above freezing, the sandy soil is no obstacle in Hawke’s Cove for a winter funeral and the gravesite is ready to accept Clayton. Keller shoulders the casket along with three others, two of whom are employees of the funeral home. The other pallbearer is the fish market owner, Stan Long. He keeps patting Keller on the shoulder and muttering, “A shame. A real shame.” Keller isn’t quite sure what shame there is in an old man’s dying. It wasn’t as if Stan was a friend. Or at least Keller had never thought of him as Clayton’s friend, but he supposes that, living in such a small place and having daily contact, qualifies a person as a friend, even if that friend was never once invited to darken the doors of Clayton’s French’s Cove Road house.

Keller is surprised at the number of folks who have turned out on a blustery January day for the funeral of a near hermit. They don’t hang around long after the final words are said, climbing back into cars and trucks or walking down the hill to the collation Miss Jacobs has arranged at the new VFW hall. Free lunch. No one has sniffed into a handkerchief. Released from the solemnity inherent in a graveside service, the attendees quickly fall back into the normal pitches of chat and laughter. They’ve shaken his hand and patted his shoulder, done their duty, and are now happy to have an excuse to stay away another hour from work or household.

Two headstones away is a granite slab engraved with the name of a kid Keller went to school with. KILLED IN ACTION. Not far from where Keller had been in the war. There but for the Grace of God … He’d noticed a couple of other casualties of war, but this was a kid he’d played a little basketball with on those rare occasions when Clayton gave him a little off time after school. Days when, like today, it was too windy to go out on the water. Keller bets that the mourners surrounding those graves didn’t so quickly cast off their grief.

The view from this hillside cemetery is astounding. Keller looks at it with a new appreciation, as if by Clayton’s death, the scales have fallen from his eyes and he can see the beauty of his surroundings. His memories of this place are cast in black and gray, but today he sees Hawke’s Cove in brilliant Technicolor.

Keller thinks that he’ll just skip the collation and wander around the cemetery a little, see if there is anyone else he should be paying his respects to. Then, because it’s early enough, he won’t have to stay the night, but can head back to the station and catch the late train to Boston. Keller sucks in a deep breath; the salt air carries a hint of tomorrow’s weather. Yeah, head back tonight. Don’t take chances. It was hard enough leaving Francesca alone to care for Rick, but this low-grade temperature of his is worrisome. He’ll get back late, well after midnight, but he won’t wake anyone when he gets home. He has a key. Pax will greet him and they can have a little walk around the neighborhood. Pax was so distressed at his leaving, as if the dog thought he wasn’t coming back.

A lift in the breeze licks his cheek, and Keller thinks of Francesca’s lips against it just this morning. The soft breath as she kissed him. What discipline he’d shown in not turning that cheek to catch those lips against his. The breeze also speaks of the feel of her fingers on his other cheek, grazing it lightly.

Keller sets his hat on his head, tilts it just so. The grave diggers are patiently waiting at a remove to get to the second half of their job, closing the grave.

“Walk me down the hill, Keller.” Miss Jacobs is standing beside him, and she takes his arm but doesn’t let him turn away from the grave, the lowered coffin still glinting warmly in the thin January light. It is then that Keller realizes that Clayton’s grave already has a headstone. That seems odd. How can a gravestone arrive before the tenant?

FLORENCE BRITT 1893–1919. BELOVED WIFE.

“Is that his mother? No, it can’t be. The dates are wrong.”

“No, Keller. Florence was my sister.” Miss Jacobs leans over and dusts the top of the stone with her gloved hand. “I wanted the headstone to reflect that she was Florence Jacobs first. But he didn’t seem to remember that fact.”

“He was married?” Keller is incredulous. How could he not have known this?

“You didn’t know?” Miss Jacobs doesn’t sound surprised.

“He never said. You’d think he might have mentioned it.”

“It near killed him, losing her.” Miss Jacobs links her arm through Keller’s. “Influenza.”

“I simply cannot imagine him in love.” Keller shakes his head.

“Oh, he was. Head over heels. Keller, you have to understand that Clayton was a much different man then. He had everything going for him. He was a confirmed bachelor, had inherited his family’s property, was making a decent living for the times, dragging. Happy living life as it came to him. Then we came to town, two spinsters ready to teach school. Flo was my baby sister, and I always believed that she was too beautiful, too vivacious to resist, that spinsterhood for her was just a temporary state. Well, Clayton took one look and fell under her spell. He was everything my excitable sister needed, rock steady, loving, and kind.”

Keller shakes his head again. This is a story about someone else, not his uncle.

“It was like, having discovered real happiness, then losing it, Clayton turned against all happiness. Like so many then, she got sick, and there was nothing that could be done. It was over in forty hours. Clayton just never regained his spirit. It wasn’t that he grieved; it was that the grief poisoned him.”

“She was my age.”

“And he was twenty years older. I didn’t like it, but he was as good a husband to her as I could have wanted. Maybe I was jealous of her. I’ve often wondered if I was. I didn’t think so at the time; I was just being a cautious old bat. The problem was that he didn’t have her for very long, six months, maybe. Seven. He went from being a honeymooner to a widower. They hadn’t had enough life together for him to have anything but happy memories. And they haunted him, so he stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“Thinking, feeling, living.”

Why does that sound like Rick Stanton?

Keller doesn’t know what to say. He closes his elbow against Miss Jacobs’s arm and takes her back down the slope to the VFW. Keller tests the idea of losing someone you love and can only imagine Francesca, whom he does not truly have. Nonetheless, by that wholly imaginary circumstance can Keller understand the depth of feeling that Clayton had had once in his life, and how its loss turned him. He needs to get back. They need him.

“I’m going to keep going, Miss Jacobs. It was wonderful to see you.”

“You’ll get everything, you know. He died intestate, but the law will figure you for the heir.”

Keller gently squeezes the old woman’s fingers, which are encased in fine black lambskin gloves. “You have my address. Give it to the lawyers.”

“Keller. You remind me of him.”

“Don’t say that.” It frightens him, this idea that someday he could become that angry old man. That disappointment in love has that much power.