A sudden low and rhythmic thudding noise began, not far to George’s left, and he started, a little yipping cry escaping him. It was the storm door, which Buddy had put on just last week. Just the storm door, unlatched and thudding back and forth in the freshening breeze.
George opened the inside door, leaned out, and caught the storm door as it swung back. The wind — it wasn’t a breeze but a wind — caught his hair and riffled it. He latched the door firmly and wondered where the wind had come from all of a sudden. When Mom left it had been almost dead calm. But when Mom had left it had been bright daylight and now it was dusk.
George glanced in at Gramma again and then went back and tried the phone again. Still dead. He sat down, got up, and began to walk back and forth through the kitchen, pacing, trying to think.
An hour later it was full dark.
The phone was still out. George supposed the wind, which had now risen to a near-gale, had knocked down some of the lines, probably out by the Beaver Bog, where the trees grew everywhere in a helter-skelter of deadfalls and swamp water. The phone dinged occasionally, ghostly and far, but the line remained blank. Outside the wind moaned along the eaves of the small house and George reckoned he would have a story to tell at the next Boy Scout Camporee, all right… just sitting in the house alone with his dead Gramma and the phone out and the wind pushing rafts of clouds fast across the sky, clouds that were black on top and the color of dead tallow, the color of Gramma’s claw-hands, underneath.
It was, as Buddy also sometimes said, a Classic.
He wished he was telling it now, with the actuality of the thing safely behind him. He sat at the kitchen table, his history book open in front of him, jumping at every sound… and now that the wind was up, there were a lot of sounds as the house creaked in all its unoiled secret forgotten joints.
She’ll be home pretty quick. She’ll be home and then everything will be okay. Everything
(you never covered her)
will be all r
(never covered her face)
George jerked as if someone had spoken aloud and stared wide-eyed across the kitchen at the useless telephone. You were supposed to pull the sheet up over the dead person’s face. It was in all the movies.
Hell with that! I’m not going in there!
No! And no reason why he should! Mom could cover her face when she got home! Or Dr. Minder when he came! Or the undertaker!
Someone, anyone, but him.
No reason why he should.
It was nothing to him, and nothing to Gramma.
Buddy’s voice in his head:
If you weren’t scared, how come you didn’t dare to cover her face?
It was nothing to me.
Fraidy cat!
Nothing to Gramma, either.
CHICKEN-GUTS fraidy cat!
Sitting at the table in front of his unread history book, considering it, George began to see that if he didn’t pull the counterpane up over Gramma’s face, he couldn’t claim to have done everything right, and thus Buddy would have a leg (no matter how shaky) to stand on.
Now he saw himself telling the spooky story of Gramma’s death at the Camporee fire before taps, just getting to the comforting conclusion where Mom’s headlights swept into the driveway — the reappearance of the grown-up, both reestablishing and reconfirming the concept of Order — and suddenly, from the shadows, a dark figure arises, and a pine-knot in the fire explodes and George can see it’s Buddy there in the shadows, saying: If you was so brave, chicken guts, how come you didn’t dare to cover up HER FACE?
George stood up, reminding himself that Gramma was out of it, that Gramma was wasted, that Gramma was laying chilly. He could put her hand back in bed, stuff a tea bag up her nose, put on earphones playing Chuck Berry full blast, etc., etc., and none of it would put a buzz under Gramma, because that was what being dead was about, nobody could put a buzz under a dead person, a dead person was the ultimate laid-back cool, and the rest of it was just dreams, ineluctable and apocalyptic and feverish dreams about closet doors swinging open in the dead mouth of midnight, just dreams about moonlight skating a delirious blue on the bones of disinterred skeletons, just —