“Where will I find you?”
Louis glanced down front. The other three pallbearers had assembled there, along with Jud. The rest of the congregation was filing out, some of them weeping.
“If you just go out on the steps, I’ll meet you there,” he said. “All right, Ellie?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just don’t forget me.”
“No, I won’t.”
He got up again, and she tugged his hand again.
“Daddy?”
“What, babe?”
“Don’t drop her,” Ellie whispered.
Louis joined the others, and Jud introduced him to the nephews, who were really second or third cousins . . . descendants of Jud’s father’s brother. They were big fellows in their twenties with a strong facial resemblance. Norma’s brother was somewhere in his late fifties, Louis guessed, and while the strain of a death in the family was on his face, he seemed to be bearing up well.
“Pleased to meet you all,” Louis said. He felt a trifle uncomfortable—an outsider in the family circle.
They nodded at him.
“Ellie okay?” Jud asked and nodded to her. She was lingering in the vestibule, watching.
Sure—she just wants to make sure I don’t go up in a puff of smoke, Louis thought and almost smiled. But then that thought called up another one: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. And the smile died.
“Yes, I think so,” Louis said and raised a hand to her. She raised hers in return and went outside then in a swirl of navy blue dress.
For a moment Louis was uneasily struck by how adult she looked.
It was the sort of illusion, no matter how fleeting, that could give a man pause.
“You guys ready?” one of the nephews asked.
Louis nodded; so did Norma’s younger brother.
“Take it easy with her,” Jud said. His voice had roughened. Then he turned away and walked slowly up the aisle with his head down.
Louis moved to the back left corner of the steel-gray American Eternal coffin Jud had chosen for his wife. He laid hold of his runner and the four of them slowly carried Norma’s coffin out into the bright still cold of February first. Someone—the church custodian, he supposed—had laid down a good bed of cinders over the slippery path of tamped snow. At the curb a Cadillac hearse idled white exhaust into the winter air. The funeral director and his husky son stood beside it, watching them, ready to lend a hand if anyone (her brother, perhaps) should slip or flag.
Jud stood beside him and watched as they slid the coffin inside.
“Goodbye, Norma,” he said and lit a cigarette. “I’ll see you in a while, old girl.”
Louis slipped an arm around Jud’s shoulders, and Norma’s brother stood close by on his other side, crowding the mortician and his son into the background. The burly nephews (or second cousins, or whatever they were) had already done a fade, the simple job of lifting and carrying done. They had grown distant from this part of the family; they had known the woman’s face from photographs and a few duty visits perhaps—long afternoons spent in the parlor eating Norma’s cookies and drinking Jud’s beer, perhaps not really minding the old stories of times they had not lived through and people they had not known, but aware of things they could have been doing all the same (a car that could have been washed and Turtle-waxed, a league bowling practice, maybe just sitting around the TV and watching a boxing match with some friends), and glad to be away when the duty was done.
Jud’s part of the family was in the past now, as far as they were concerned; it was like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass, dwindling, little more than a speck. The past. Pictures in an album. Old stories told in rooms that perhaps seemed too hot to them—they were not old; there was no arthritis in their joints; their blood had not thinned. The past was runners to be gripped and hefted and later let go. After all, if the human body was an
envelope to hold the human soul—God’s letters to the universe—
as most churches taught, then the American Eternal coffin was an envelope to hold the human body, and to these husky young cousins or nephews or whatever they were, the past was just a dead letter to be filed away.
God save the past, Louis thought and shivered for no good reason other than that the day would come when he would be every bit unfamiliar to his own blood—his own grandchildren if Ellie or Gage produced kids and he lived to see them. The focus shifted. Family lines degenerated. Young faces looking out of old photographs.
God save the past, he thought again and tightened his grip around the old man’s shoulders.
The ushers put the flowers into the back of the hearse. The electric rear window rose and thumped home in its socket. Louis went back to where his daughter was, and they walked to the station wagon together, Louis holding Ellie’s arm so she wouldn’t slip in her good shoes with the leather soles. Car engines were starting up.
“Why are they putting on their lights, Daddy?” Ellie asked with mild wonder. “Why are they putting on their lights in the middle of the day?”
“They do it,” Louis began and heard the thickness in his own voice, “to honor the dead, Ellie.” He pulled out the knob that turned on the wagon’s headlights. “Come on.”
They were going home at last, the graveside ceremony over—
actually it was held at the small Mount Hope Chapel; no grave would be dug for Norma until spring—when Ellie suddenly burst into tears.
Louis glanced at her, surprised but not particularly alarmed. “Ellie, what is it?”
“No more cookies,” Ellie sobbed. “She made the best oatmeal cookies I ever ate. But she won’t make them anymore because she’s dead. Daddy, why do people have to be dead?”
“I don’t really know,” Louis said. “To make room for all the new people, I guess. Little people like you and your brother Gage.”
“I’m never going to get married or do sex and have babies!” Ellie declared, crying harder than ever. “Then maybe it’ll never happen to me! It’s awful! It’s rn-rn-mean!”
“But it’s an end to suffering,” Louis said quietly. “And as a doctor I see a lot of suffering. One of the reasons I wanted the job at the university was because I got sick of looking at it day in and day out. Young people quite often have pain. . . bad pain, even but that’s not quite the same as suffering.”
He paused.
“Believe it or not, honey, when people get very old, death doesn’t always look so bad or so scary as it seems to you. And you have years and years and years ahead of you.”
Ellie cried, and then she sniffed, and then she stopped. Before they got home, she asked if she could play the radio. Louis said yes, and she found Shakin’ Stevens singing “This Ole House” on WACZ.
Soon she was singing along. When they got home she went to her mother and prattled about the funeral; to Rachel’s credit, she listened quietly, sympathetically, and supportively although Louis thought she looked pale and thoughtful.
Then Ellie asked her if she knew how to make oatmeal cookies, and Rachel put away the piece of knitting she’d been doing and rose at once, as if she had been waiting for this or something like it. “Yes,” she said. “Want to make a batch?”
“Yay!” Ellie shouted. “Can we really, Mom?”
“We can if your father will watch Gage for an hour.”
“I’ll watch him,” Louis said. “With pleasure.”
Louis spent the evening reading and making notes on a long article in The Duquesne Medical Digest; the old controversy concerning dissolving sutures had begun again. In the small world of those relatively few humans on earth concerned with stitching minor wounds, it appeared to be as endless as that old psychological squabbling point, nature versus nurture.
He intended writing a dissenting letter this very night, proving that the writer’s main contentions were specious, his case examples self-serving, his research almost criminally sloppy. In short, Louis was looking forward—with high good humor—to blowing the stupid fuck right off the map. He was hunting around in the study bookcase for his copy of Troutman’s Treatment of Wounds when Rachel came halfway down the stairs.
“Coming up, Lou?”
“I’ll be a while.” He glanced up at her. “Everything all right?”
“They’re deep asleep, both of them.”
Louis looked at her closely. “Them, yeah. You’re not.”
“I’m fine. Been reading.”
“You’re okay? Really?”
“Yes,” she said and smiled. “I love you, Louis.”
“Love you too, babe.” He glanced at the bookcase, and there was Troutman, right where he had been all along. Louis put his hand on the textbook.
“Church brought a rat into the house while you and Ellie were gone,” she said and tried to smile. “Yuck, what a mess.”