فصل سی و چهار

THIRTY-FOUR

Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head, several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them, Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), and baleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during recess. The flu epidemic passed.

They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton. Mr Humperton puked while lying on his back in his infirmary bed and very nearly strangled.

Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blonde bag-boy at the A&P in Brewer and rhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. ‘It’s probably just toilet paper,’ she added. ‘Squeeze it sometime,’ Louis suggested. ‘If he screams, it’s probably not.’ Rachel had laughed until she cried.

The blue, still, subzero mini-season of February passed, and brought on the alternating rains and freezes of March, and potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP.

The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six weeks in most cases like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call ‘deep winter’. But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow.

Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes remembrance a process that may take from six months to three years and still be considered normal.

The day of Gage’s first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son’s hair growing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning but only in his heart.

Spring came, and it stayed a while.