Gramma had been a witch, just like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. And now she was dead. That gargling sound, George thought with increasing horror. That gargling, snoring sound had been a… a… a “death rattle.”
“Gramma?” he whispered, and crazily he thought: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead.
No response. He held his cupped hand in front of Gramma’s mouth. There was no breeze stirring around inside Gramma. It was dead calm and slack sails and no wake widening behind the keel. Some of his fright began to recede now, and George tried to think. He remembered Uncle Fred showing him how to wet a finger and test the wind, and now he licked his entire palm and held it in front of Gramma’s mouth.
Still nothing.
He started for the phone to call Dr. Arlinder, and then stopped. Suppose he called the doctor and she really wasn’t dead at all? He’d be in dutch for sure.
Take her pulse.
He stopped in the doorway, looking doubtfully back at that dangling hand. The sleeve of Gramma’s nightie had pulled up, exposing her wrist. But that was no good. Once, after a visit to the doctor when the nurse had pressed her finger to his wrist to take his pulse, George had tried it and hadn’t been able to find anything. As far as his own unskilled fingers could tell, he was dead.
Besides, he didn’t really want to… well… to touch Gramma. Even if she was dead. Especially if she was dead.
George stood in the entryway, looking from Gramma’s still, bedridden form to the phone on the wall beside Dr. Arlinder’s number, and back to Gramma again. He would just have to call. He would —
— get a mirror!
Sure! When you breathed on a mirror, it got cloudy. He had seen a doctor check an unconscious person that way once in a movie. There was a bathroom connecting with Gramma’s room and now George hurried in and got Gramma’s vanity mirror. One side of it was regular, the other side magnified, so you could see to pluck out hairs and do stuff like that.
George took it back to Gramma’s bed and held one side of the mirror until it was almost touching Gramma’s open, gaping mouth. He held it there while he counted to sixty, watching Gramma the whole time. Nothing changed. He was sure she was dead even before he took the mirror away from her mouth and observed its surface, which was perfectly clear and unclouded.
Gramma was dead.
George realized with relief and some surprise that he could feel sorry for her now. Maybe she had been a witch. Maybe not. Maybe she had only thought she was a witch. However it had been, she was gone now. He realized with an adult’s comprehension that questions of concrete reality became not unimportant but less vital when they were examined in the mute bland face of mortal remains. He realized this with an adult’s comprehension and accepted with an adult’s relief. This was a passing footprint, the shape of a shoe, in his mind. So are all the child’s adult impressions; it is only in later years that the child realizes that he was being made; formed; shaped by random experiences; all that remains in the instant beyond the footprint is that bitter gunpowder smell which is the ignition of an idea beyond a child’s given years.
He returned the mirror to the bathroom, then went back through her room, glancing at the body on his way by. The setting sun had painted the old dead face with barbaric, orange-red colors, and George looked away quickly.
He went through the entry and crossed the kitchen to the telephone, determined to do everything right. Already in his mind he saw a certain advantage over Buddy; whenever Buddy started to tease him, he would simply say: I was all by myself in the house when Gramma died, and I did everything right.
Call Dr. Arlinder, that was first. Call him and say, “My Gramma just died. Can you tell me what I should do? Cover her up or something?”
No.
“I think my Gramma just died.”