“COME ON, LAMBIE,” Mrs. Tuttle said from the doorway to Tim’s bedroom. “It’s after ten.”
Tim responded by putting his pillow over his head.
“We’ve only got an hour, Tim. Surely you don’t want to miss it—you of all people.”
The pillow remained firmly in place. Mrs. Tuttle turned with a sigh and went back downstairs to the kitchen. Dr. Tuttle and John Henry were sitting at the table in their Sunday best, even though it was Saturday.
“He won’t budge,” Mrs. Tuttle said.
“He’s scared of the graveyard,” said John Henry, looking up from the box scores. “He always hated it when kids sang that one about worms crawling all over your snout.”
Mrs. Tuttle’s nose wrinkled up as if a worm was crawling on it. “Will you try, Trev?”
“I don’t see as you can make somebody go to a funeral, sweetheart.”
“But there’ll be so few people there as it is.”
Dr. Tuttle trudged upstairs, not feeling very hopeful. He’d gotten Winifred to the hospital alive, but she’d died shortly thereafter. This hadn’t been a big surprise to the paunchy on-call doctor in the emergency room. He’d already contacted Winifred’s personal physician and learned that for the past year she’d had an inoperable heart-valve condition. She hadn’t broadcast it because she hadn’t wanted people making a fuss. When Dr. Tuttle tried to explain this to Tim later that night, the boy shrugged and walked out of the room as if the subject interested him no more than going to the hospital had. Mrs. Tuttle said Tim was adopting the “ostrich approach”: sticking his head in a hole in the ground.
At the moment, Dr. Tuttle saw, Tim was sticking his head under his pillow. But he didn’t try to roust the boy out of bed. He just went up and laid a hand on his shoulder and said:
“Try not to feel too bad, son. We’ll see you in a while.”
Mrs. Tuttle was right about the crowd at the funeral. Living on her secluded hilltop, Great-aunt Winifred hadn’t had a wide circle of friends, and there were only about a dozen people on hand in the Unitarian church in Burlington. The minister said some comforting words about how Winifred was surely smiling down on them from heaven, but not many looked as if they put much stock in this—least of all Dr. Tuttle, who firmly believed that people live on after death only in the genes they pass down to their children. This made him all the sadder, since his aunt had been childless. He decided then and there to leave her paintings of The View up on the walls of his lab.
Small as the group at the funeral was, every one of them, including Jeb, the grocer’s son, and Pandora Potts, the owner of Pandora’s Paints, followed the hearse to the cemetery on Colchester Avenue and watched with damp eyes as the casket was lowered into the earth. Even John Henry shed a few tears, thinking of the joke he’d made about the cemetery the last time he saw his great-aunt alive. Now that she was dead, he also felt a bit guilty about having always thought of her as weird and fat and old.
But Tim never shed a single tear over her. While the grave digger was shoveling earth onto her casket, Tim was sitting at the kitchen table munching on his second stale sugar donut in a row, studying a grainy photo of the wreckage of a plane crash on the front page of the paper. When his mother and father and brother pulled into the driveway, he was raking leaves in the backyard.
“You don’t have to do any chores today, Tim,” Dr. Tuttle said.
Tim shrugged and went right on raking as if it was a day like any other.