AGREED [said Galactic Central] YOU CAN DO AS WELL YOURSELF?
I CAN.
IT IS BEST, THEN, THAT YOU DO.
WILL THERE BE RELATIVES OR FRIENDS ARRIVING FOR THE RITES?
NO.
YOU WILL NOTIFY THEM?
FORMALLY, OF COURSE. BUT THEY ALREADY KNOW.
HE ONLY DIED A MOMENT OR TWO AGO.
NEVERTHELESS, THEY KNOW.
WHAT ABOUT A DEATH CERTIFICATE?
NONE IS NEEDED. THEY KNOW OF WHAT HE DIED.
HIS LUGGAGE? THERE IS A TRUNK.
KEEP IT. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TOKEN FOR THE SERVICES YOU PERFORM FOR
THE HONORED DEAD. THAT ALSO IS THE LAW.
BUT THERE MAY BE IMPORTANT MATTERS IN IT.
YOU WILL KEEP THE TRUNK. TO REFUSE WOULD INSULT THE MEMORY OF THE DEAD.
ANYTHING ELSE? [asked Enoch] THAT IS ALL?
THAT IS ALL. PROCEED AS IF THE VEGAN WERE ONE OF YOUR OWN.
Enoch cleared the machine and went back across the room. He stood above
the Hazer, getting up his nerve to bend and lift the body to place it on the
sofa. He shrank from touching it. It was so unclean and terrible, such a
travesty on the shining creature that had sat there talking with him.
Since he met the Hazers he had loved them and admired them, had looked
forward to each visit by them-by any one of them. And now he stood, a
shivering coward who could not touch one dead.
It was not the horror only, for in his years as keeper of the station,
he had seen much of pure visual horror as portrayed in alien bodies. And yet
he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward
appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as
people.
It was something else, he knew, some other unknown factor quite apart
from horror, that he felt. And yet this thing, he reminded himself, was a
friend of his. And as a dead friend, it demanded honor from him, it demanded
love and care.
Blindly he drove himself to the task. He stooped and lifted it. It had
almost no weight at all, as ii in death it had lost a dimension of itself,
had somehow become a smaller thing and less significant. Could it be, he
wondered, that the golden haze might have a weight all of its own?
He laid the body on the sofa and straightened it as best he could. Then
he went outside and, lighting the lantern in the shed, went down to the
barn.
It had been years since he had been there, but nothing much had
changed. Protected by a tight roof from the weather, it had stayed snug and
dry. There were cobwebs hanging from the beams and dust was everywhere.
Straggling clumps of ancient hay, stored in the mow above, hung down through
the cracks in the boards that floored the mow. The place had a dry, sweet,
dusty smell about it, all the odors of animals and manure long gone.
Enoch hung the lantern on the peg behind the row of stanchions and
climbed the laper to the mow. Working in the dark, for he dared not bring
the lantern into this dust heap of dried-out hay, he found the pile of oaken
boards far beneath the eaves.
Here, he remembered, underneath these slanting eaves, had been a
pretended cave in which, as a boy, he had spent many happy rainy days when
he could not be outdoors. He had been Robinson Crusoe in his desert island
cave, or some now nameless outlaw hiding from a posse, or a man holed up
against the threat of scalp-hunting Indians. He had had a gun, a wooden gun
that he had sawed out of a board, working it down later with draw-shave and
knife and a piece of glass to scrape it smooth. It had been something he had
cherished through all his boyhood days-until that day, when he had been
twelve, that his father, returning home from a trip to town, had handed him
a rifle for his very own.
He explored the stack of boards in the dark, determining by the feel
the ones that he would need. These he carried to the laper and carefully
slid down to the floor below.
Climbing down the laper, he went up the short flight of stairs to the
granary, where the tools were stored. He opened the lid of the great tool
chest and found that it was filled with long deserted mice nests. Pulling
out handfulls of the straw and hay and grass that the rodents had used to
set up their one-time housekeeping, he uncovered the tools. The shine had
gone from them, their surface grayed by the soft patina that came from long
disuse, but there was no rust upon them and the cutting edges still retained
their sharpness.
Selecting the tools he needed, he went back to the lower part of the
barn and fell to work. A century ago, he thought, he had done as he was
doing now, working by lantern light to construct a coffin. And that time it
had been his father lying in the house.
The oaken boards were dry and hard, but the tools still were in shape
to handle them. He sawed and planed and hammered and there was the smell of
sawdust. The barn was snug and silent, the depth of hay standing in the mow
drowning out the noise of the complaining wind outside.
He finished the coffin and it was heavier than he had figured, so he
found the old wheelbarrow, leaning against the wall back of the stalls that
once had been used for horses, and loaded the coffin on it. Laboriously,
stopping often to rest, he wheeled it down to the little cemetery inside the
apple orchard.
And here, beside his father’s grave, he dug another grave, having
brought a shovel and a pickax with him. He did not dig it as deep as he
would have liked to dig, not the full six feet that was decreed by custom,
for he knew that if he dug it that deep he never would be able to get the
coffin in. So he dug it slightly less than four, laboring in the light of
the lantern, set atop the mound of dirt to cast its feeble glow. An owl came
up from the woods and sat for a while, unseen, somewhere in the orchard,
muttering and gurgling in between its hoots. The moon sank toward the west
and the ragged clouds thinned out to let the stars shine through.
Finally it was finished, with the grave completed and the casket in the
grave and the lantern flickering, the kerosene almost gone, and the chimney
blacked from the angle at which the lantern had been canted.
Back at the station, Enoch hunted up a sheet in which to wrap the body.
He put a Bible in his pocket and picked up the shrouded Vegan and, in the
first faint light that preceded dawn, marched down to the apple orchard. He
put the Vegan in the coffin and nailed shut the lid, then climbed from the
grave.
Standing on the edge of it, he took the Bible from his pocket and found
the place he wanted. He read aloud, scarcely needing to strain his eyes in
the dim light to follow the text, for it was from a chapter that he had read
many times:
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have
told you…
Thinking, as he read it, how appropriate it was; how there must need be
many mansions in which to house all the souls in the galaxy-and of all the
other galaxies that stretched, perhaps interminably, through space. Although
if there were understanding, one might be enough.
He finished reading and recited the burial service, from memory, as
best he could, not being absolutely sure of all the words. But sure enough,
he told himself, to make sense out of it. Then he shoveled in the dirt.
The stars and moon were gone and the wind had died. In the quietness of
the morning, the eastern sky was pearly pink.
Enoch stood beside the grave, with the shovel in his hand.
“Good bye, my friend,” he said.
Then he turned and, in the first flush of the morning, went back to the
station.
16
Enoch got up from his desk and carried the record book back to the
shelf and slid it into place.
He turned around and stood hesitantly.
There were things that he should do. He should read his papers. He
should be writing up his journal. There were a couple of papers in the
latest issues of the Journal of Geophysical Research that he should be
looking at.
But he didn’t feel like doing any of them. There was too much to think
about, too much to worry over, too much to mourn.
The watchers still were out there. He had lost his shadow people. And