فصل سی و شش

PART TWO:

THE MICMAC BURYING GROUND

When Jesus came to Bethany, he found that Lazarus had lain in the grave four days already. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she hurried to meet him.

‘Lord,’ she said, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But now you are here, and I know that whatever you ask of God, God will grant.’

Jesus answered her: ‘Your brother shall rise again.’

– John’s Gospel (paraphrase)

THIRTY-SIX

It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls – as little as we may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, that one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate, evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins to either save itself or to buckle and break down; that point when one’s sense of humor begins to resurface.

Louis Creed might have harbored such thoughts if he had been thinking rationally following the funeral of his son, Gage William Creed, on May 17th, but any rational thought – or attempt at it – ceased at the funeral parlor, where a fistfight with his father-in-law (bad enough) resulted in an event even more terrible, a final bit of gothic melodrama outrageous enough to shatter whatever remained of Rachel’s fragile self-control. That day’s penny-dreadful events were only complete when she was pulled, screaming, from the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Funeral Home, where Gage lay in his closed coffin. She was sedated in the foyer by Surrendra Hardu.

The irony of it was that she would not have experienced that final episode at all, that comic-book extravagance of horror, one might say, if the fistfight between Louis Creed and Mr Irwin Goldman of Dearborn had taken place at the morning visiting hours (10 a.m. to 11.30) instead of at the afternoon visiting hours (2 p.m to 3.30). Rachel had not been in attendance at the morning visiting hours; she simply had not been able to come. She sat at home with Jud Crandall and Steve Masterton. Louis had no idea how he ever could have gotten through the previous forty-eight hours or so without Jud and Steve.

It was well for Louis – well for all three of the remaining family members – that Steve had shown up as promptly as he had, because Louis was at least temporarily unable to make any kind of decision, even one so minor as giving his wife a shot to mute her deep grief. Louis hadn’t even noticed that Rachel had apparently meant to go to the morning viewing in her housecoat, which she had misbuttoned. Her hair was uncombed, unwashed, tangled. Her eyes, blank brown orbits, bulged from sockets so sunken that they had almost become the eyes of a living skull. Her flesh was doughy. It hung from her face. She sat at the breakfast table that morning, munching unbuttered toast and talking in disjointed phrases that made no sense at all. At one point she had said abruptly, ‘About that Winnebago you want to buy, Lou—’ Louis had last spoken about buying a Winnebago in 1981.

Louis only nodded and went on eating his own breakfast. He was having a bowl of Cocoa Bears. Cocoa Bears had been one of Gage’s favorite cereals, and this morning Louis wanted them. The taste of them was appalling, but he still wanted them. He was neatly turned out in his best suit – not black, he didn’t have a black suit, but it was at least a deep charcoal gray. He had shaved, showered and combed his hair. He looked fine, although he was lost in shock.

Ellie was dressed in blue jeans and a yellow blouse. She had brought a picture to the breakfast table with her. She would not be parted from it. This picture, an enlargement of a Polaroid Rachel had taken with the SX-70 Louis and the kids had given her for her last birthday, showed Gage, grinning from the depths of his Sears ski parka, sitting on her Speedaway sled as Ellie pulled him. Rachel had caught Ellie looking back over her shoulder and smiling at Gage. Gage was grinning back at her.

Ellie carried the picture, but she didn’t talk much. It was as if the death of her brother in the road in front of the house had shocked away most of her vocabulary.

Louis was unable to see the condition of either his wife or his daughter; he ate his breakfast and his mind replayed the accident over and over and over, except in this mind-movie the conclusion was different. In the mind-movie he was quicker and all that happened was that Gage got a spanking for not stopping when they yelled.

It was Steve who really saw how it was going with Rachel, and with Ellie as well. He forbade Rachel to go to the morning viewing (although viewing was really a misnomer because of the closed coffin; if it was open, Louis thought, they’d all run screaming from the room, me included) and forbade Ellie to go at all. Rachel protested. Ellie only sat, silent and grave, with the picture of her and Gage in one hand.

It was Steve who gave Rachel the shot she needed, and who gave Ellie a teaspoon of a colorless liquid to drink. Ellie usually whined and protested about taking medicine – any kind of medicine – but she drank this silently and without a grimace. By ten o’clock that morning she was asleep in her bed (the picture of her and Gage still held in her hand) and Rachel was sitting in front of the television set, watching Wheel of Fortune. Her responses to Steve’s questions were slow and considered and calm. She was stoned – but her face had lost that thoughtful look of madness which had so worried – and frightened – the PA when he came in that morning at quarter past eight.

Jud, of course, had made all the arrangements. He made them with the same calm efficiency that he had made them for his wife three months before. But it was Steve Masterton who took Louis aside just before Louis left for the funeral home.

‘I’ll see that she’s there this afternoon, if she seems capable of handling it,’ he told Louis.

‘Okay.’

‘The shot will have worn off by then. Your friend Mr Crandall says he’ll stay with Ellie during the afternoon viewing hours—’

‘Right.’

‘—and play Monopoly or something with her—’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘But—’

‘Right.’

Steve stopped. They were standing in the garage, Church’s stomping ground, the place where he brought his dead birds and dead rats. The ones that Louis owned. Outside was May sunshine, and a robin bopped across the head of the driveway, as if it had important business somewhere.

‘Louis,’ Steve said, ‘you’ve got to get hold of yourself.’

Louis looked at Steve, politely questioning. Not much of what Steve had said had gotten through – he had been thinking that if he had been a little quicker he could have possibly saved his son’s life – but a little of this last had registered.

‘I don’t think you’ve noticed,’ Steve said, ‘but Ellie isn’t vocalizing. Not at all. And Rachel has had such a bad shock that her very conception of time seems to have been twisted out of shape.’

‘Right!’ Louis said. More force in reply seemed to be indicated here. He wasn’t sure why.

Steve put a hand on Louis’s shoulder. ‘Lou,’ he said, ‘they need you more now than they ever have in their life. Please, man … I can give your wife a shot, but … you … see, Louis, you gotta … oh, Christ, Louis, what a cock-knocking, motherfucking mess this is!’

Louis saw with something like alarm that Steve was starting to cry. ‘Sure,’ he said, and in his mind he saw Gage running across the lawn toward the road, and they were yelling at him to come back, but Gage wouldn’t. Lately the game was run away from Mommy-Daddy, and then they were chasing him, Louis quickly outdistancing Rachel, but Gage had a big lead, Gage was laughing, Gage was running away from Daddy, that was the game, and Louis was closing the distance but too slowly, Gage was running down the mild slope of the lawn now to the verge of Route 15, and Louis prayed to God that Gage would fall down, when little kids run fast they almost always fall down because a person’s control over his legs didn’t get really cool until he was maybe seven or eight. Louis prayed to God Gage would fall down, fall down, yes, fall down bloody his nose crack his skull need stitches whatever, because now he could hear the drone of a truck coming toward them, one of those big ten-wheelers that went back and forth endlessly between Bangor and the Orinco plant in Bucksport, and he had screamed Gage’s name then, and he believed that Gage had heard him and tried to stop. Gage seemed to realize that the game was over, that your parents didn’t scream at you when it was just a game, and he had tried to put on the brakes, and by then the sound of the truck was very loud, the sound of it filled the world. It was thundering. Louis had thrown himself forward in a long flying tackle, his shadow tracking the ground beneath him as the shadow of the Vulture had tracked the white late-winter grass of Mrs Vinton’s field that day in March, and he believed (but was not sure) that the tips of his fingers had actually brushed the back of the light jacket Gage had been wearing, and then Gage’s forward motion had carried him out into the road, and the truck had been thunder, the truck had been sunlight on high chrome, the truck had been the deep-throated, shrieking bellow of an air-horn, and that had been Saturday, that had been three days ago.

‘I’m okay,’ he said to Steve. ‘I ought to go now.’

‘If you can get yourself together and help them,’ Steve said, swiping at his eyes with the arm of his jacket, ‘you’ll be helping yourself, too. The three of you have got to get through it together, Louis. That’s the only way. That’s all anybody knows.’

‘That’s right,’ Louis agreed, and in his mind it all started to happen again, only this time he leaped two feet further right at the end, and snagged the back of Gage’s jacket, and jerked him back, and none of this was happening.

Ellie missed the scene in the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Funeral Home, but Rachel did not. At the time it happened, Ellie was pushing her Monopoly marker aimlessly – and silently – around the board with Jud Crandall. She shook her dice with one hand and clutched the Polaroid of her pulling Gage on her Speedaway sled with the other.

Steve Masterton had decided it would be all right for Rachel to attend the afternoon viewing – in the light of later developments, it was a decision he came to deeply regret.

The Goldmans had flown into Bangor from Chicago that morning and were staying at the Holiday Inn on Odlin Road. Her father had called four times by noon, and Steve had to be increasingly firm – almost threatening, by call four – with the old man. Irwin Goldman wanted to come out and not all the dogs of hell could keep him from his daughter in her time of need, he said. Steve responded that Rachel needed this time before going to the funeral parlor to get over as much of her initial shock as she could. He didn’t know about all the dogs of hell, he said, but he knew one Swedish-American physician’s assistant who had no intention of allowing anyone into the Creed home until Rachel had appeared in public, of her own volition. After the viewing in the afternoon, Steve said, he would be more than happy to let the relatives’ support system take over. Until then, he wanted her left alone.

The old man swore at him in Yiddish and banged the phone down at his end, breaking the connection. Steve waited to see if Goldman would indeed show up, but Goldman had apparently decided to wait. By noon, Rachel did seem a little better. She was at least aware of the time-frame she was in, and she had gone out to the kitchen to see if there were sandwich-makings or anything for after. People would probably want to come back to the house after, wouldn’t they? she asked Steve.

Steve nodded.

There was no bologna or cold roast beef, but there was a Butterball turkey in the freezer, and she put it on the drainboard to thaw. Steve looked into the kitchen a few minutes later and saw her standing by the sink, looking fixedly at the turkey on the drainboard, and weeping.

‘Rachel?’

She looked toward Steve. ‘Gage really liked these. He especially liked the white meat.’ She smiled a wan, terrible smile. ‘It was just occurring to me that he was never going to eat another Butterball turkey.’

Steve sent her upstairs to dress – the final test of her ability to cope, really – and when she came down wearing a simple black dress belted at the waist and carrying a small black clutch-bag (an evening bag, really), Steve decided she was all right, and Jud concurred.

Steve drove her into town. He stood with Surrendra Hardu in the lobby of the East Room and watched Rachel drift down the aisle toward the flower-buried coffin like a wraith.

‘How is it going, Steve?’ Surrendra asked quietly.

‘Going fucking terrible,’ Steve said in a low, harsh voice. ‘How did you think it was going?’

‘I thought it was probably going fucking terrible,’ Surrendra said, and sighed.

The trouble really began at the morning viewing when Irwin Goldman refused to shake hands with his son-in-law.

The sight of so many friends and relatives had actually forced Louis out of the web of shock a little; had forced him to notice what was going on and be outward. He had reached that stage of malleable grief that funeral directors are so used to handling and turning to its best advantage. Louis was moved around like a pawn.

Outside the East Room was a small foyer where people could smoke and sit in overstuffed easy chairs. The chairs looked as if they might have come directly from a Distress Sale at some old Englishmen’s club that had gone broke. Beside the door leading into the viewing room was a small easel, black metal chased with gold, and on this easel was a small sign which said simply GAGE WILLIAM CREED. If you went across this spacious white building that looked misleadingly like a comfortable old house, you came to an identical foyer, this one outside the West Room, where the sign on the easel read ALBERTA BURNHAM NEDEAU. At the back of the house was the River-Front Room. The easel to the left of the door between the foyer and this room was blank; it was not in use on this Tuesday morning. Downstairs was the coffin showroom, each model lit by a baby spotlight mounted on the ceiling. If you looked up – Louis had and the funeral director had frowned severely at him – it looked as though there were a lot of strange animals roosting up there.

Jud had come with him on Sunday, the day after Gage had died, to pick out a coffin. They had gone downstairs, and instead of immediately turning right into the coffin showroom, Louis, dazed, had continued straight on down the hallway toward a plain white swinging door, the sort you see communicating between restaurant dining rooms and the kitchen. Both Jud and the funeral director had said quickly and simultaneously, ‘Not that way,’ and Louis had followed them away from that swinging door obediently. He knew what was behind that door, though. His uncle had been an undertaker.

The East Room was furnished with neat rows of folding chairs – the expensive ones with plushy seats and backs. At the front, in an area that seemed a combination of nave and bower, was Gage’s coffin. Louis had picked the American Casket Company’s rosewood model – Eternal Rest, it was called. It was lined with plushy pink silk. The mortician agreed that it was really a beautiful coffin, and apologized that he did not have one with a blue lining. Louis responded that he and Rachel had never made such distinctions. The mortician had nodded. The mortician asked Louis if he had thought about how he would defray the expenses of Gage’s funeral. If not, he said, he could take Louis into his office and go quickly over three of their more popular plans— In Louis’s mind, an announcer suddenly spoke up cheerfully: I got my kid’s coffin free, for Raleigh coupons!

Feeling like a creature in a dream, he said: ‘I’m going to pay for everything with my MasterCharge.’

‘Fine,’ the mortician said.

The coffin was no more than four feet long – a dwarf coffin. Nonetheless, its price was slightly over six hundred dollars. Louis supposed it rested on trestles, but all the flowers made it difficult to see, and he hadn’t wanted to go too close. The smell of all those flowers made him want to gag.

At the back of the aisle, just inside the door giving on the foyer-lounge, was a book on a stand. Chained to the stand was a ballpoint pen. It was here that the funeral director positioned Louis, so he could ‘greet his friends and relatives’.

The friends and relatives were supposed to sign the book with their names and addresses. Louis had never had the slightest idea what the purpose of this mad custom might be, and he did not ask. He supposed when the funeral was over he and Rachel would get to keep the book. That seemed the maddest thing of all. Somewhere he had a high school yearbook and a college yearbook and a med school yearbook; there was also a wedding book, MY WEDDING DAY stamped on the imitation leather in imitation gold leaf, beginning with a photo of Rachel trying on her bridal veil before the mirror that morning with her mother’s help and ending with a photo of two pairs of shoes outside a closed hotel door. There was also a baby book for Ellie – they had tired of adding to it rather quickly, though; that one, with its spaces for FROM MY FIRST HAIRCUT (add a lock of baby’s hair) and WHOOPS! (add a picture of baby falling on her ass), had been just too relentlessly cute.

Now, added to all the others, this one. What do we call it? Louis wondered as he stood numbly beside the stand waiting for the party to begin. MY DEATHBOOK? FUNERAL AUTOGRAPHS? THE DAY WE PLANTED GAGE? Or maybe something more dignified, like A DEATH IN THE FAMILY?

He turned the book back to its cover, which, like the cover to the MY WEDDING DAY book, was imitation leather.

The cover was blank.

Almost predictably, Missy Dandridge had been the first to arrive that morning, good-hearted Missy who had sat with Ellie and Gage on dozens of occasions. Abruptly Louis found himself remembering it had been Missy who had taken the kids on the evening of the day Victor Pascow had died. She had taken the kids and Rachel had made love to him, first in the tub, then in bed.

Missy had been crying, crying hard, and at the sight of Louis’s calm, still face, she burst into fresh tears and reached for him – seemed to grope for him. Louis embraced her, realizing that this was the way it worked, or was supposed to work, anyway – some kind of human charge that went back and forth, loosening up the hard earth of loss, venting it, breaking up the rocky pack of shock with the heat of sorrow.

I’m so sorry, Missy was saying, brushing her dark blonde hair back from her pallid face. Such a dear, sweet little boy. I loved him so much, Louis, I’m so sorry, it’s an awful road, I hope they put that truck-driver in jail for ever, he was going much too fast, he was so sweet, so dear, so bright, why would God take Gage, I don’t know, we can’t understand, can we, but I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.

Louis comforted her, held her and comforted her. He felt her tears on his collar. The press of her breasts against him. She wanted to know where Rachel was and Louis told her that Rachel was resting. Missy promised to go see her, and that she would sit with Ellie any time, for as long as they needed her. Louis thanked her.

She had started away, still sniffing, her eyes redder than ever above her black handkerchief. She was moving toward the coffin when Louis called her back. The funeral director, whose name Louis could not even remember, had told him to have them sign the book, and damned if he wasn’t going to have them do it.

Mystery guest, sign in please, he thought, and came very close to going off into cackles of bright, hysterical laughter.

It was Missy’s woeful, heartbroken eyes that drove the laughter away.

‘Missy, would you sign the book?’ he asked her, and because something else seemed to be needed, he added: ‘For Rachel.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Poor Louis, and poor Rachel.’ And suddenly Louis knew what she was going to say next, and for some reason he dreaded it; yet it was coming, unavoidable, like a black bullet of large caliber from a killer’s gun, and he knew that he would be struck over and over by this bullet in the next interminable ninety minutes, and then again in the afternoon, while the wounds of the morning were still trickling blood: ‘Thank God he didn’t suffer, Louis. At least it was quick.’

Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her – ah; how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that’s why the coffin’s closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there in the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers’ house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers’ barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard-line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard-line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.

Abruptly the world went dove-gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly, he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.

‘Louis?’ Missy’s voice. Distant. The mystery-sound of pigeons in his ears.

‘Louis?’ Closer now. Alarmed.

The world swam back into focus.

‘You all right?’

He smiled. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m okay, Missy.’

She signed for herself and her husband – Mr and Mrs David Dandridge – in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address, Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road, and then raised her eyes to Louis’s and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.

‘Be well, Louis,’ she whispered.

David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.

Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark-gray suitcoat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood – that mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn’t suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he’s with the angels now: a total of twelve times.

It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother- and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.

His first thought was that Rachel had been right, and how Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was – what? fifty-eight? fifty-nine? – today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told him he had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louis had not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn’t been this bad at Thanksgiving. The old man hadn’t lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.

Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two – possibly three – layers of heavy black netting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the color favored by elderly ladies of an upper-class American persuasion. She held her husband’s arm. All Louis could really see behind the veil was the glitter of her tears.

Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge any longer. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.

‘Irwin. Dory,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for coming.’

He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel’s father and hug her mother simultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way, he felt his own tears start for the first time, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all of their fences, that Gage would do that much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies’ novel he had stepped into where the wages of death were reconciliation, where it could cause something more constructive than this endless, stupid, grinding ache which just went on and on and on.

Dory started toward him, making a gesture, beginning, perhaps, to hold out her own arms. She said something – ‘Oh, Louis—’ and something else that was garbled – and then Goldman pulled his wife back. For a moment the three of them stood in a tableau that no one noticed except themselves (unless perhaps the funeral director, standing unobtrusively in the far corner of the East Room, saw – Louis supposed that Uncle Carl would have seen), Louis with his arms partly out-stretched, Irwin and Dory Goldman standing as stiff and straight as a couple on a wedding cake.

Louis saw then that there were no tears in his father-in-law’s eyes; they were bright and clear with hate. (Does he think I killed Gage to spite him? Louis wondered.) Those eyes seemed to measure Louis, to find him the same small and pointless man who had kidnapped his daughter and brought her to this sorrow … and then to dismiss him. His eyes shifted to Louis’s left – to Gage’s coffin, in fact – and only then did they soften.

Still, Louis made a final effort, ‘Irwin,’ he said. ‘Dory. Please. We have to get together on this.’

‘Louis,’ Dory said again, kindly, he thought, and then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suitcoat pocket.

You didn’t sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain.

The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve.

‘If she can dress herself, I’m going to let her come this afternoon,’ Steve said. ‘Okay by you?’

‘Yes.’ Louis said.

‘How are you, Lou? No bullshit and straight on – how are you?’

‘All right,’ Louis said briefly. ‘Coping.’ I had all of them sign the book. All of them except Dory and Irwin, and they wouldn’t.

‘All right,’ Steve said. ‘Look, shall we meet you for lunch?’

Lunch. Meeting for lunch. This seemed such an alien idea that Louis thought of the science-fiction novels he had read as a teenager – novels by Robert Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Gordon Dickson. The natives here on Planet Quark have an odd custom when one of their children dies, Lieutenant Abelson: they ‘meet for lunch’. I know how grotesque and barbaric that sounds, but remember, this planet has not been terraformed yet.

‘Sure,’ Louis said. ‘What’s a good restaurant for half-time between funeral viewings, Steve?’

‘Take it easy, Lou,’ Steve said, but he didn’t seem entirely displeased. In this state of crazy calm, Louis felt better able to see into people than ever before in his life. Perhaps it was an illusion, but right now he suspected Steve was thinking that even a sudden spate of sarcasm, squirted out like an abrupt mouthful of bile, was preferable to his earlier state of disconnection.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Steve now. ‘What about Benjamin’s?’

‘Sure,’ Steve said. ‘Benjamin’s would be fine.’

He had made the call from the office of the funeral director. Now, as Louis passed the East Room on his way out, he saw that the room was almost empty, but Irwin and Dory Goldman sat down in the front row, heads bowed. They looked to Louis as if they might sit there for ever.

Benjamin’s was the right choice. Bangor was an early-lunch town, and around one o’clock it was nearly deserted. Jud had come along with Steve and Rachel, and the four of them ate fried chicken. At one point Rachel went to the ladies’ room and remained in there so long that Steve became nervous. He was on the verge of asking a waitress to check on her when she came back to the table, her eyes red.

Louis picked at his chicken and drank a lot of Schlitz beer. Jud matched him bottle for bottle, not talking much.

Their four meals went back almost uneaten, and with his preternatural insight, Louis saw the waitress, a fat girl with a pretty face, debating with herself about whether or not to ask them if their meals had been all right, finally taking another look at Rachel’s red-rimmed eyes, and deciding it would be the wrong question. Over coffee Rachel said something so suddenly and so baldly that it rather shocked them all – particularly Louis, who at last was becoming sleepy with the beer. ‘I’m going to give his clothes to the Salvation Army.’

‘Are you?’ Steve said after a moment.

‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘There’s a lot of wear in them yet. All his jumpers … his corduroy pants … his shirts. Someone will be glad to get them. They’re all very serviceable. Except for the ones he was wearing, of course. They’re … ruined.’

The last word became a miserable choke. She tried to drink coffee, but that was no good. A moment later she was sobbing into her hands.

There was a queer moment then. There were crossing lines of tension then, and they all seemed to focus on Louis. He felt this with the same preternatural insight he’d had all this day, and of them all, this was the clearest and surest. Even the waitress felt those converging lines of awareness. He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood: they were waiting for him to comfort his wife.

He couldn’t do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldn’t. It was the cat that got in his way. Suddenly, and with no rhyme or reason. The cat. The fucking cat. Church with his ripped mice and the birds he had grounded for ever. When he found them, Louis cleaned up the messes promptly, with no complaint or comment; certainly without protest. He had, after all, bought them. But had he bought this?

He saw his fingers. Louis saw his fingers. He saw his fingers lightly skating over the back of Gage’s jacket. Then Gage’s jacket had been gone. Then Gage had been gone.

He looked into his coffee cup and let his wife cry beside him, uncomforted.

After a moment – in terms of clock-time probably quite short, but both then and in retrospect it seemed long – Steve put an arm around her and hugged her gently. His eyes on Louis’s were reproachful and angry. Louis turned from them toward Jud, but Jud was looking down, as if in shame. There was no help there.