The Last Adam (16 page)

She thought: "If I killed myself, would Doctor Wyck make a fuss about having a nice service for me? I'll bet he wouldn't." Exhilarated by her own cynicism regarding Doctor Wyck's attitude, she let her eyes slide away to the atrocious coloured glass of the window at the beginning of the nave. It commemorated her great-great-grandparents, who, in 1823, had been largely responsible for erecting the church. A plump, vacant-faced Gabriel seemed to be fanning the Blessed Virgin with an object perhaps visible to the eye of faith as a lily. The Virgin Herself sat absorbed in a patch of dirt with two stones and thirteen—such were the desperate resources of long ago Sunday mornings— blades of grass painted on in superficial black. The mantle, Virginia noted now, was of precisely the blue used for medicine bottles whose contents may be injured by natural light.

The next window—Virginia felt strong enough to bear the boredom of a quick look at it—showed the ox-eyed, curly-bearded apostles giving forth the lots which fell upon Matthias. It stood to the Glory of God and in loving Memory of Paul Banning, twenty-one years Senior Warden of this Church; and of Mathilda, his wife. Virginia had an early, uncertain memory of Mathilda, his wife—by that time, his relict; a small, sedentary figure with a black shawl and a distinctive odour, much like a linen closet, which she associated with the phrase—"a very old lady."

By the third window, Doctor Hall, a former rector, was remembered; but that, Virginia felt, she could not look at. To mix with the pleasures of impending departure, the coloured glass brought back the old ache of time slowing to a stop within these walls. The watch on her left wrist, half hidden by her glove, seemed for a dreadful moment to be measuring again the world-without-end minutes of a child's Sunday morning. Made up of them, the mere hour of a service could seem worship as everlasting as the awful reiteration of the six-winged beasts, the repetitious falling down of the four-and-twenty elders. Doctor Wyck's voice reached her ears, proceeding urgently: "Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual —"

Virginia shook herself a little, pronouncing: "I am going away from this damn hole. I am going to Santa Fé a week from Monday. It doesn't matter because whatever happens I'm going away a week from Monday."

This was a success, but she felt, almost as bad as boredom, the insupportable compulsion of her desire, the impatience for what would be then to be now, forthwith. Her throat constricted in the agony of having to put off; there was a nervous congestion in her breast; her veins were cloyed with lukewarm blood; her very bones itched through her flesh and she found herself actually praying:
God, make it a week from Monday
—

Howard Upjohn was uncomfortably clad in the clothes he reserved for funerals, complete to dreadful black gloves covering his prominently large hands. When he was younger he had kept also a silk hat. Whether time had finally ruined it, or Howard had simply decided that its shape made him look too much like the symbolic figure of Prohibition in hostile cartoons, he had some time changed to a derby. This he felt for on the pew seat beside him now. Inconspicuously turning, he worked along until he could step into the side aisle and go briskly back, motioning up his four pall-bearers. To each he presented a pair of dark grey gloves, and waited while they put them on. Apparently the church part of it was over. May Tupping, not quite certain what was to happen next, wished that she knew the time. She had explained to Doris Clark that she might be a little late relieving her; but she didn't want to be. The Divisional Superintendent was supposed to be coming through to-day. If he happened to come before she got there, he would do nothing about it, but he would naturally notice that she wasn't very punctual. She turned her head a little to see the pall-bearers, who, after several tries, had got stiffly into step, tramping down the aisle. Harry Weems had on a good and expensive blue serge suit. He was paired with Lester Dunn, whose suit, though cut with remarkable jauntiness, was appropriately dark, too. Eric Cadbury, who must have been picked up and pressed into service by Howard directly before the ceremony began, was dressed with much less elegance, but being older than any of the others, he could contribute a certain gravity. The fourth man was Ed Darrow, son of Mrs. Talbot's sister-in-law at Banning's Bridge. Doubtless he only had one good suit, and it happened to be a very light pepper-and-salt tweed. Sympathetic, May guessed that it was the cause for his face getting redder and redder as he came down.

Mrs. Darrow, sitting on the other side of Mrs. Talbot, looked at Ed with a trusting approval, however; at least, until Howard had got the wheeled conveyance into motion, and the bearers fell in behind, to escort the coffin with its low heap of flowers—all rather shoddy except the sheaf of lilies which had come up from Waterbury, professionally  packed and expedited, with the Bannings' card—uncertainly towards the door. Mrs. Darrow then began to weep and lament with annoying facility, causing Mrs. Talbot, heretofore contented with occasional sniffs, to break out, too.

May got them both to their feet and into the aisle with the handful of the congregation. From the far side, Mrs. Banning said quietly, "May," and May stopped. "Larry has the car outside," Mrs. Banning whispered. "You take Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Darrow down to the cemetery in it, will you? We'll see you there."

They came into the warm sunlight on the steps of the church. Doctor Wyck, who had gone to the sacristy for a cloak and biretta, was waiting for them. Howard and his assistants had just eased the flower-topped coffin into the half-ton truck which served him now that he no longer kept horses, and business did not warrant buying a motor-hearse. Mat Small was driving the truck. He was in working clothes, for he had spent the morning with Albert Foster digging the grave and would afterwards fill it in.

May said to Mrs. Talbot: "Mrs. Banning has been kind enough to offer us her car to go down in —"

Larry Ward, sitting bored at the wheel, in a cap and old chauffeur's uniform, got out reluctantly, waving rather than helping them in. From the clock on the dashboard May could see that it was quarter to twelve; and, glancing across the green to the telephone office, she was dismayed to find that the coupé with the telephone company's round bell-marked seals on the doors was already parked there. The superintendent would undoubtedly wait until twelve and observe her tardiness.

The others had formed a straggling group following Doctor Wyck around the stone side of the church to walk the few hundred yards. Harry Weems and Lester brought up the rear, with Doctor Bull, whose presence had been severely ignored by everyone else. There would be no satisfying people on that point, May recognized. If he hadn't come, there would have been a general outraged criticism of his callousness. When he did come, the criticism was to the effect that one wondered how he had the face, considering that he'd done everything he could to kill Mamie. Doctor Bull, however, didn't need her sympathy. Standing well above, and twice as big as, Lester or Harry, he moved with an assurance which was almost blithe. He blinked cheerfully in the warm sunlight; he stared with obvious robust contempt now at Doctor Wyck's wind-stirred vestments and the biretta, now at the roll of fine silver fox fur draped over Mrs. Banning's erect shoulders, concealing her neck, piling high as the lower edge of her neat black hat.

By the cemetery gate, surmounted by a curved iron scroll and small cross, Larry ran the car off the road. May helped Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Darrow out. The others, waiting for them, let them now lead, following Doctor Wyck and the coffin down the path past the weighty granite and marble monuments, the substantial blocks—Coulthard, Cardmaker, Allen, Bull, Banning— dominating railed plots, most of them already thick with small markers. Among lesser stones, and graves planted with the iron star of the G.A.R. holding a stick and faded tatter of cheap flag left from last Memorial Day, a grave had been dug for Mamie. The turned-up earth was elaborately covered by mats of coarse, bright green imitation grass. Stretched across the pit were the bands of the device for lowering; and laboriously the coffin was placed upon them, the flowers removed and laid to one side where Albert Foster waited patiently, leaning on his shovel.

They were all gathered together now, forming a semi-circle—Doctor Bull on one end, the Bannings on the other. Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Darrow had quieted again. Doctor Wyck's distinct voice was the only sound while they stood, no one looking at anyone else, until Howard startled them all by making a motion to Albert Foster.

Albert drove his spade into a heap of dry gravel, plainly brought there for the purpose, since the excavated earth was dark and damp. Shaking off any that was loose, he advanced clumsily, proffering the shovelful. Doctor Wyck took a little, hardly stopping his recitation except for the measure of emphasis. Fastidiously, he dropped it, in lieu of dust or ashes, on the coffin.

May, her attention thus attracted, saw Mrs. Banning moisten her lips. One hand against the fox fur on her breast, she had found a small handkerchief with the other. She brought it inconspicuously first to her mouth, and then, turning her face away, to her eyes. Virginia's arm was through hers, and she held it a moment. Suddenly close to tears herself, May thought: she's just imagining if it were Virginia there instead of Mamie. Mr. Banning, composed and serious, slipped a hand under her other arm. Doctor Wyck was reading: "Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world—"

May looked sadly at Albert with his spade, aware of the possible horrid irony in the words, thinking how unlikely it was that anything remained for Mamie except the earth Albert was waiting to shovel back. Now that she was right up against it, Mrs. Banning could probably feel that, too; and May looked back to see her still holding Virginia's arm, her face still averted and the small handkerchief tight in her gloved fingers.

From big wooden drums deposited along the transmission line, wiring crews were drawing sixty-one-strand aluminium steel core wire over the great spans. Six conductors, caught up to the pendent insulator strings; two grounded guard wires; now joined the delicately shaped, strong towers with an airy warp of metal more delicate still. New and untarnished, these spun filaments hung hardly more substantial than so many threads of light, dipping from tower to tower across the valley, mounting the hill in fine, shining fines. On the high cross girders men worked hatless, in their shirts. The fields under them were growing green; there were already a few dandelions.

Monday and Tuesday, it was agreed that this could not last; everyone who saw Mamie buried commented on it and said so. Wednesday and Thursday, most people said that they had never seen anything like it. By Friday, this spring in the midst of winter became as natural as life in the midst of death. Sunday would be the first day of March; and once it was March, a mere change of name could change what was wrong and amazing for February into what was right for spring.

The light, the length of day, which had lasted ten hours and fifty-five minutes on Monday, lasted, Saturday, eleven hours and nine minutes; so anyone could see that it was spring. Snowdrops were open everywhere, and on Sunday Mr. Banning found two of his purple crocuses out. Behind the stables, the leafless forsythia was about to break in sprays of yellow blossoms. There were buds on the wild goose plums; in a few more days there would obviously be blossoms.

3

At eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, Doctor Bull, sitting in the old swivel chair at his office desk, grunted as he bent in the long process of lacing up a pair of hobnailed knee-boots. His shabby old bag stood open on a heap of not read copies of the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
Next to it he had laid out a couple of patent rubber ligatures, a cased scalpel, a hypodermic syringe, a pint bottle of whisky and a bottle containing a chloride of lime solution. Finished with his boots, he checked these articles over and added them to the contents of the bag. Rumbling contentedly: "
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall
—" he pawed through the closet in the corner until he was able to produce a roughly finished oak bludgeon and a forked stick. Taking a fold of his jacket, he wiped the dust off them, laid them beside a pair of worn leather gauntlets. The telephone rang then and he could hear Susie shuffling to answer it. "Hell!" he remarked, stopping his singing, for Harry Weems and Lester were due any minute and he wanted to get up to North Truro fairly early.

Susie shrieked: "Doctor Bull, Mrs. Kimball says Ralph is sick; could you come right away."

"Tell her to wait a moment," he said, shutting up the bag. He went into the hall and took the receiver from her. "Hello," he said. "What's wrong with Ralph? Oh! Take his temperature? Well, how do you know he's feverish? Oh, he says so, does he? Give him a dose of castor-oil and make him stay home. If I get back from North Truro early, I'll look in."

He started to hang up, but Doris Clark's voice interrupted: "Oh, Doctor Bull, I have another call for you."

"Who is it?" —

"Mr. Ordway."

"Well, all right —" His eyes swung around to find Susie listening anxiously. "Beat it!" he roared. "Oh, hello! What's the trouble?"

"Well, I'll step in a minute and look at her," he agreed. "I'm trying to get off to North Truro. No, I thought I'd take Lester and Harry and try to clean out some of the snakes up on the ridge. Been so warm a lot of them may be out —" He heard the front-door bell and added, "Guess they're here now; but they can wait a minute. I'll be over. Come in, come in!" he shouted, hanging up.

Lester and Harry stood on the steps and he said, "You'll have to wait a while. Molly Ordway's had to get sick. Be right along." Harry had his car at the end of the path. "Might as well get my things in now," Doctor Bull observed, turning back to his office. Out in the hall again with them, he called, "All right, Aunt Myra. I'm leaving."