22

This day is the beginning of sorrow.

James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848

Carl Bucky died on a warm Saturday night in September, while the fan droned in the bedroom window and the faded stars above the Buckys’ house withdrew behind’ damp blankets of heat. Snuggled against her husband, Betsy woke next morning to find his body cold.

Instantly she shrank away with a little cry. Then she sat up and stared at the man she had been married to for forty-seven years. Carl’s eyes were open. So was his mouth. His chest was not rising and falling. Betsy put her hand on his soft belly. It was flabby and chill. The blood heat was gone. Putting her head down on Carl’s chest, she could detect no heartbeat.

Exultant, hardly able to believe it, Betsy bounced out of bed and put on her robe and slippers, congratulating herself. It was the pie! The lemon-chiffon pie! The pie had done the trick! Last night she had mounded Carl’s plate three times with spaghetti, and then she had forced on him second and third helpings of lemon-chiffon pie for dessert. Carl had begged her to stop. “Gosh, Betsy, I’m really stuffed. I can’t eat another bite.” But he had finished it all, somehow or other, and then he had downed two mugs of Betsy’s special coffee. No wonder he had passed away, the greedy pig! It was his own fault!

Betsy had looked forward to this moment a thousand times, and planned what to do. But it had never occurred to her it might be a Sunday morning. Too bad! Betsy hated to miss church. She loved singing the hymns in her piercing soprano; she loved leaning over one way to hear what Mollie Pine and Mabel Smock were up to, and the other way to get the latest news from Priscilla Worthy. Was it true the minister’s wife was back in the hospital? Had Arlene Pott really walked out on Wally? Betsy stared at her dead husband and regretted the necessity of missing church. What a shame! Her fresh-baked pan of cinnamon swirls would go to waste. She had made them last night while Carl was watching TV, so she could pass them around during the after-church coffee hour while everybody oohed and aahed. And there was her new idea for the Christmas Fair, crocheted ruffles you could tie around candlesticks. They’d sell like hotcakes, Betsy was sure of it, and she wanted to tell Mollie and Priscilla. But here was Carl, passed away in bed! It was just like him, even now, to be in the way.

Then it occurred to Betsy that she could just leave Carl right here on the bed and go off to church anyway. Why couldn’t she call Dr. Spinney when she got home? She could say Carl had wanted to sleep late because he wasn’t feeling well, so she had gone to church without him, and then when she got back she had found him like this. Why not?

So Betsy Bucky went to church on the morning after her husband’s death, and enjoyed every minute of it. She soared with the Virgin Mary and gossiped with Mabel Smock and learned that Wally Pott was indeed living in that big fancy house all by himself and didn’t know where Arlene. had gone, and then after the service she passed around her cinnamon swirls in the common room downstairs, and everybody said, “Scrumptious!” and “Delicious!” and Agatha Palmer said, “Betsy Bucky, is there anything you can’t do?” and Betsy tittered in joyous high spirits, “No, not a single thing!”

Ed and Lorraine Bell were helping out in the common room too, making small talk with other members of the congregation in the company of Joseph Bold. This necessary parish duty of Sunday-morning sociability had become almost intolerable to Joe. But when Ed Bell said, “Say, Joe, did you hear Bob Ott hit that high note? Bob, you ought to be in grand opera, right, Joe?” the task was easier.

So the Bells were late getting home after the service on the day Carl Bucky died. In fact they were still changing into their old clothes when they heard a car speeding past the house, whanging into a pothole with a suspension-busting jolt. “Good heavens, who’s that?” said Lorraine, running to the window.

Ed looked out too, just in time to see the doctor’s little VW careen around the bend. “It’s Arthur Spinney. I wonder where he’s going in such a hurry?”

But the VW wasn’t the first car to pull into Betsy Bucky’s driveway. Betsy had also called the police. While the doctor was racing past Ed Bell’s house, the emergency medical technician from the Nashoba police department was already tumbling out of the ambulance.

But as soon as he took a look at Carl Bucky, he put down his equipment. “How long has he been like this?” he asked Betsy.

“Well, the truth is,” said Betsy, thinking quickly, anxious to protect herself, “I left him sleeping when I got up this morning, and I didn’t check on him before I went to church.”

When Dr. Spinney ran up the stairs into the bedroom, he too could see at a glance that it was too late. He made an examination anyway. Then he straightened up and looked sadly at Betsy, and told her he was sorry.

“Cremation,” said Betsy firmly, leading the way downstairs. “That’s what Carl always wanted. He told me so, jillions of times.” Betsy had figured out this part long ago. A container of ashes wouldn’t require an expensive cemetery plot. It wouldn’t need a big stone monument. Betsy would put Carl’s ashes in a nice jar she had inherited from her mother, a really dignified and handsome sort of cooky jar, with shepherds and shepherdesses on it, and lords and ladies in white wigs. She would seal the jar with hot paraffin, the way she did with her preserve jars, and bury it under the shrine to the Virgin Mary in the front yard and surround it next summer with red salvia and orange marigolds.