admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.
Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank,
died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the
fire.
In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke
his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the
process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the
slats on the Levolor blind.
The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we
returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to
Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby
attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian,
was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.
Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs.
Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon
our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.
We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had
never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s
mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that
was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as
rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had
the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs.
Acquilain but had never seen her.
Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a
cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected,
swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in
hours.
As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features
were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact her mouth was curved
slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.
When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain
into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw
that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of
words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we
didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.
She looked so young.
She looked immortal.
The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be
unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the
dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the
back of one hand against his left eye and then his right. It was not
perspiration that he wiped away.
During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost
continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This
night, they spoke hardly at all.
Bobby and I were silent, too.
We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s
property.
After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of
its darkest streets.
We went to the beach.
At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted.
Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and
fluttering through a wealth of trees, were the town lights. In front
of us lay the inky wash of the vast Pacific.
The surf was gentle. Widely spaced, low breakers slid to shore, lazily
spilling their phosphorescent crests, which peeled from right to left
like a white rind off the dark meat of the sea.
Sitting in the sand, watching the surf, I kept thinking how near we
were to Christmas. Two weeks away. I didn’t want to think about
Christmas, but it twinkled and jingled through my mind.
I don’t know what Bobby was thinking. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to
talk. Neither did he.
I brooded about what Christmas would be like for little Devlin
Acquilain without his mother. Maybe he was too young to understand
what death meant.
Tom Acquilain, her husband, knew what death meant, sure enough.
Nevertheless, he would probably put up a Christmas tree for Devlin.
How would he find the strength to hang the tinsel on the boughs?