Testament (7 page)

They went down a hall past a room with a casket at the far end, a young man’s face projecting from it while a black-clad woman knelt before it, her shoulders heaving as she cried. Another woman stood awkwardly beside her, half raising her hands, then lowering them, uncertain if she should interrupt to touch and comfort her.

They continued softly to the next room, and this time at the far end there was Ethan in his casket. He felt a chill that almost kept him from going in. The detective stood just inside the room, his coat open, where he could still see the front door while they went over and the organ went on playing. The casket was rich dark oak; like the house, he thought, and short and shallow like a toy. In it Ethan lay on stuffed white satin, dressed in a blue wool nursing gown, his best, that Claire had spent hours selecting from his drawer and then had given silently to the undertaker.

“He’ll look like a doll?” Sarah had asked. But Ethan didn’t look like a doll. He just looked dead. And the undertaker had used the wrong kind of makeup, the sort that fills in wrinkles on the face of an adult. But Ethan’s face had already been smooth, so the extra surface made his skin seem thickly covered with pale wax. So small, so tiny featured.

He turned away, glanced back, turned away again, and gradually he became accustomed to this stranger who once had been his son.

Claire looked, and kept on looking, and beneath her black veil her face was heavy and old. She had her long black hair tied severely back, her features stark. Cry, he thought. Why doesn’t she cry and get this out before it all eats her away?

And what about yourself? he thought. He’s your son. Why don’t
you
cry?

The wreath of carnations he had ordered. The sickly sweet musty smell of flowers going stale. Death. Everywhere death.

The organ would not stop playing.

He shook his head and turned entirely away, and the undertaker was still with them. What does he want? A compliment? Don’t tell me he wants a compliment on Ethan’s face.

“Is everything satisfactory?” the undertaker said.

“The casket is very nice.”

“It’s our best. You need never have second thoughts about that. You’ve done everything you can for him.” The rug and the drapes absorbed the undertaker’s voice so that he sounded as if he spoke from another room. “May I offer you and your wife some coffee perhaps?”

He thought of poison and answered, “No.”

“Some wine or perhaps something stronger? We sometimes find that helps.”

“No. No, thank you.”

“Anything you wish, please let us know.” The undertaker sounded disappointed. Slowly, smoothly, he left the room.

At least as far as the door. The heavy man who stumbled past had his tie open and was red-faced, breathing hard.

The detective lunged over, pinning the man face to the wall.

“Dear God,” the undertaker said. “My God, what is it?”

The detective had his revolver out, the undertaker gasping at it, and the red-faced man was mumbling, “What the hell? Hey Jesus,” while the detective told him, “Quiet,” searching him for weapons, up and down his pant legs, at his crotch, under his arms.

“What do you want?” the detective demanded.

“My friend.”

“What friend?”

“He’s dead. I’ve come to see my friend. They hit him with a train and now he’s dead.”

“Oh,” the undertaker said. “That’s in the next room.”

“And now he’s dead,” the man repeated.

The detective smelled his breath and turned his face away, “Let’s go find out about your friend. And while we’re at it, let’s find out how drunk you are.”

“No.” He stepped forward, overcoming his surprise enough to plead, “Don’t leave us.”

“Only for a second. I need to check this out.”

“But what if they sent this guy to distract you? What if while you’re gone they come for us?”

“No matter what, I need to check him out. I won’t leave this door out of sight.”

The sudden fright had started him shivering. As he watched them go, he feared he would be sick. Claire had seen it all, her face blank, and now she was watching Ethan again. Looking at Ethan made him sicker. Even when the detective came back and shrugged, he didn’t feel any better. He couldn’t go and sit down and leave Claire standing alone. He had to wait with her, fighting to control his nausea, and ten minutes later when she spoke for the first time that day, her voice was thin and quiet, and she never took her eyes away from the body as she told him, “You can’t know how much I wish that you and your slut had gone away.”

17

Then two days later, in the morning, they had the funeral. The priest said that various general prayers were allowed, but no mention of salvation, and no holy water could be sprinkled on the coffin, nor any dust spread out in a cross upon the lid. The priest also said that unbaptized infants were not allowed past the antechamber to the church. He told the priest, “All the way in or nothing,” and the funeral, what there was of it, was conducted at the undertaker’s.

There were fold-down metal chairs arranged in rows. He and Claire and Sarah sat in front. Behind them, more friends had come than he expected. He wondered if any of them had been a part of Ethan’s death. Two detectives were watching the door.

The priest read his salvationless prayers, closed his book, and told them, “The death of the aged we can understand. They have lived out their time and done their work, and God in His wisdom has judged them ready to be called…. But the death of the young, that is one way of God that we find most difficult to accept and comprehend. We look at this child in his coffin, and we are heartsick at the waste, at his lost chance to feel joy in the goodness of living. Never to relish food and drink, to take pride in his body, to know friends, love his family. Never to have the chance to do great things, to be a good man, an example to his generation, a privilege to be with. All denied to him by God. The waste, we say.

“I could tell you to rejoice, that God has seen fit to call him early to eternal ecstasy. But for reasons we do not yet know, God did not permit this child to be baptized. The stain of original sin still makes up the character of his soul, and he now exists in limbo. That is another kind of waste, his lost chance to witness glory, and that waste we find even harder to accept.

“We sit at night in the silence of our rooms, and we ask why, hoping for solace, and we conclude—that God in His infinite foresight knew perhaps of this child’s failure to achieve salvation and put him in limbo to save him from the fires of hell. Then too, if life can be joy, it can also be pain, and fear and sickness and grief, and perhaps we can find consolation in knowing that he never had to go through it all, that he never had to be like the rest of us, that his death was mercifully for the best.”

The gravesite was in a far fenced-off corner of the cemetery under a large sheltering chestnut tree, no crosses on any of the graves, a deep hole with concrete walls and a floor. To keep the grave from sinking once the casket and the body decompose, he thought. After they lower the coffin, they’ll top it with a concrete slab and bury it all. Earth was piled by, covered with imitation grass. When I die, let them cremate me, he thought.

The day was hot and bright, and he smelled the warm moist air. The priest entrusted the body to the earth from which it came, which seemed a lie considering the concrete, and then the undertaker said that it was time to leave, but Claire would not budge.

“I’m staying until the end,” she said, the only time she had spoken since the night at the funeral home.

So there was some discussion between the undertaker and the attendants, and just as they finally lowered the tiny casket by straps into the man-sized hole, Sarah came forward and set a wreath of flowers on the lid. He knew that it was not her idea, that she would never have thought of it by herself. It was Claire. It was Claire who had made her do it. He looked at Claire, and she was staring at him through the veil. He looked at the casket descending, and when he could not see the small dark lid or the white wreath of flowers on it anymore, he turned away.

18

What took the longest was for Claire to let him sleep in the same bed with her again. She spoke to him now, but only to ask what pants he needed ironed, to say that supper was ready. They bought their food at a different supermarket each time. They stopped having milk delivered. They drove Sarah to and from school instead of allowing her to walk, and they never let her play outside without them. Even with the cruiser in front of the house, every car that slowed made them stare.

But nothing happened, and the more nothing happened, the more he tensed in dread of answering the phone and hearing the man’s voice rasp at him again. The abrupt harsh ring never stopped unnerving him. He concentrated to forget by working, but it wasn’t any use: he knew all about the position he was in, he had written about it too many times. If somebody wants to get you bad enough, there simply isn’t any way to stop them. They have too many ways to do it. It’s all just a matter of time.

He went upstairs to the closet in the hall and arranged the rifle, pistol, and revolver on the top shelf, with a box of ammunition for each of them. Webster had warned him not to think like that, but Webster wasn’t the one in fear of dying. The guns were normally kept in a locked dressing cabinet in the bedroom, hard to get at, secure from any accident with Sarah. Now he had to show her where they were, tell her, order her not to touch them, and he believed her when she promised.

He went to his bank, withdrew five thousand dollars in twenties, and put the money in a knapsack in the same closet.

19

Early one morning, he came downstairs, and there was no detective in the hallway by the phone. The tape recorder, the earphones, the lead-in wires, all the surveillance equipment was gone. He hurried to the front window, and the police car was gone too. He was suddenly conscious of the thin loose pajamas he wore. Immediately he stepped clear of the window.

“I tried to get over here before you found out,” Webster came and said. “Understand I had nothing to do with it. The chief himself ordered it. Three shifts of men a day, one on the phone, two in the car outside, another two in three cruisers circling the district. Multiply that by the weeks we’ve been at this, he says, and figure the cost, figure the other places we need those men.”

His face was burning. It was all he could do to control himself. “But you’re supposed to be the police. If you can’t protect us, what good are you?”

“I know how you feel, but—”

“You don’t know how I feel at all.”

“Well, listen to me anyway. The chief has a point. He says if Kess and his people haven’t moved against you by now, it’s either because they’ve lost interest or else they’re waiting until we pull out. In any case, there’s no sense in our sticking around. If they’re really determined to wait for us to go, he says we could be here all year and still do no good. The day we left they’d be right back at you.”

“So why not save time and let them come for us today, is that it? What is he, one of Kess’s men or something?”

“Now you watch it. I spent all night arguing with him, and that kind of talk just makes me wish I hadn’t bothered. I’ve already talked to the guys who were out here guarding you, and they all agreed to come around from time to time and make it look like we’re still involved. You have my office number and my home. If anything happens, even if you think you’re only imagining it, you give me a call. I don’t care what time day or night, you call. With any luck, you won’t need to. The chief could very well be right. Maybe they lost interest. Maybe they’re satisfied now that they’ve scared you and killed your son.”

“Maybe nothing. They’re going to come all right.”

20

He left the car door open, running across the hot tar parking lot toward the entrance to the grade school. WOODSIDE, it said on top. Claire was hurrying behind him.

“What is it? What’s happened?” he shouted to the woman waiting nervously outside for them. She was pale in the sun, young like the doctor had been. Too young. Sarah’s teacher. Short. Dull brown hair cut even with the bottom of her ears. Green dress stretched out. Five months pregnant, maybe more.

“Tell me what it is,” he called, running up to her ahead of Claire.

“I. She.”

The building was new and clean and shiny, one long level of brick and glass. He swept past her, swinging open the bright front door. The place had the sharp sweet smell of floor polish.

“Which way?” he demanded, voice echoing. “Where have you got her? For God’s sake tell me where she is.”

“Down there,” she said and swallowed.

To the right, and he was hurrying along the corridor, past open-door classrooms, past drinking fountains low on the wall for children, too impatient to knock as he wrenched open the door marked PRINCIPAL, and there was Sarah weeping, wrapped in a blanket on a corner chair, a nurse beside her, the principal rising off-balance behind his desk.

“It was a mistake,” the man was saying. “You have to understand we had no way of knowing.”

He barely glanced at the man: thick glasses on the desk, squinting eyes, open tie, rolled-up shirtsleeves. He rushed immediately over to Sarah, holding her. Claire was right behind him. Sarah continued weeping.

“Sweetheart, tell us what it is. Are you all okay?”

She shook her head yes, she shook her head no.

Then he saw the blood on the floor.

“Jesus.”

“You’ve got to understand,” the principal was saying.

“Jesus, you’re hurt, Sarah. You’re cut. Who cut you? Where?”

He fumbled to open the blanket. The nurse tried to stop him, stronger than she looked.

“You keep out of this.”

“You’ve got to understand.” the principal was saying.

“All right then, damn it. Tell me. Tell me what it is I have to understand.”

Sarah wept louder.

“I had her calmed down,” the nurse said. “Now you’ve made her afraid again.”

“That’s a good idea,” the principal said and tried to smile. “I’m sure we’d all accomplish more if we all calmed down.”