The Watchman (8 page)

Thinking now: Whose face among the suns of time-far Texas? No, I won't. Oh, mother lost in god-tints whose pigments are not fast-fixed on the half-breed's pasteboard heaven. Oh, God, I will do it because I have to do that or else do the other but no, God, I won't do it because it will not quench forever the fang's renewing milk; the snake eternal, resurrected. Yes, thinking, I will do it, must do it, because there is no other doing but the other. Mother? No, not you, my darling and despised. Hearing dimly the rustle of her chaste, sheathing garments now and, far off, her own despairing, hungering sob and thud of knees as sorrowfully she slid and knelt.

Kitten, he said.

Clenching now her eyes safe into the chastity of dark and nothing-feeling. Corpus Christi? Yes. And mother, one-breasted, vanquished, too: and the proud, nippled lift of once firm life gone slack and forever unfeeding in the tinted Texas earth.

Just don't touch me, she mumbled. I'm a virgin—remember that. Don't touch me. Not any part of me. Don't ever touch me with your hands.

Cole Blake's funeral took place two days later. For Thomas Peace they had been trying days of rude surprises, confounding changes, abrupt switches of program production, public announcements, phone calls, freighting orders, fresh staging requirements and potfuls of wreath-black coffee more bitter

even than the limpid, simple preservatives which were, in a manner of speaking, the lifeblood of Peace the Undertaker's somber art. The executed convict, naturally enough, had no Viewing—he was boxed up and shipped away to his widow down state at Hundred. Thomas Peace had quite enough on his hands getting Cole Blake patched up and ready to be put on exhibit. Never before had his ingenuity risen to such heights of resourcefulness and imagination. The tricks of his trade with wax and wire and make-up had been the least of the problem.

The awkward question was where the services might properly be held. Ordinarily the boy's funeral would have taken place in his home. But Cole Blake had no home—no house, at least. And so there was no parlor. As for holding the ceremony in that cramped, austere hotel room which was, in fact, his home, that was out of the question. It would not accommodate the throngs of Adena mourners who would come. Still, the Mound Hotel had been the place Cole Blake had lived. And funerals were always held where men had lived—it was a custom of inviolable, immemorial tradition. And so Peace racked his wits for two days and nights, pacing sleepless, chewing his thumbnail, pondering, until, providently, the answer came to him. And so on the night before Cole Blake's funeral Thomas Peace and his assistant sons went to work. The Rotary plaque, the calendar, some chairs, tables, and the merchandise of tourist souvenirs were stored away in the cellar beneath the big kitchen. The chromed, leather stools and the long marble counter were blanketed with sheets of gray muslin; the juke box by the door was softened and re-stacked with hymns. And so, on the morning of the third day after his murder the funeral of Cole Blake began in the dining room of the Mound Hotel. When the lobby clock struck eight o'clock the doors opened and Thomas Peace, after a showmanly bow to the enterprising faces of those first come, stepped back drily into the shadows to let the pilgrimage commence.

Good morning. Good morning. Peck. Good morning. Miss Beulah. Good morning. Master Danny.

His voice: the mannered, modulated baritone of his own school of theater. It was hke a bell toUing softly, muffled by distances.

Good morning, Johnny. Morning. Morning. Good morning, Miss Octavia. Morning. Good morning.

To the rear of the long dining room, flanking the kitchen

doors and at a distance appropriately remote from the bier, aluminum tables groaned beneath their burden of food and drink, home-cooked and home-fetched. Since daylight they had come in ceaseless caravan: the food-bearers, until, at last, the two tables, teeter-legged and crying out beneath their towering load, threatened to collapse beneath the weight of so much bounty: chicken salad, pies, peach cobblers and meat loaves, chilled brown crocks of potato salad, muffins, biscuits, ham, apple sauce and enormous pots of scalding coffee, their speckled blue enamel spouts huffing steam like gigantic hens in the morning freeze of some bitter winter, while beside them stood willowware pitchers of thick, faintly souring cream. The front of the room was lavished with flowers and wreaths in such profusion that the atmosphere round about them reeked with a feverish fragrance, like the boudoir of a honeymooning gangster. And yet the room was in many ways ideal. Because it was, after all, a dining room. And because everyone of that morning's swelling mob seemed incessantly eating: seized with a savage, insatiable appetite. It would seem that it is not easy to look sad and to chew at the same time: between the stuffed cheeks and the mournful eyes there exists a certain paradox. Perhaps the trick of it is possible only at funerals. And perhaps only at funerals because it is there that a man must eat in order to reassure himself of his own aliveness in the presence of somebody else's deadness. The munching, murmuring horde that morning thronged filing through the Mound Hotel dining room in such close-shouldered press that Thomas Peace feared that, at last, they would burst splintering through the plate-glass window in the front and into the shoulders of the crowds which waited their turn in even greater number along the sidewalks. Thoughtlessly, someone had forgotten to take away two chairs and a table in the front. Still and all, the morning was nearly perfect. Mingling modestly among the others, Peace the Undertaker's haggard face showed still a pleased flush of impresario-zeal.

Good morning. Morning. How are you, Ort Dobey. Morning. Good morning.

Seeing sometimes the awe-struck pan-flash of decision in someone's face which meant invariably that this or that one had suddenly committed himself to Thomas Peace's ultimate easel.

Morning, Captain. Morning. Morning, Fizzer. Good morning.

There had been but one accident to flaw the performance and that had been no real fault of Thomas Peace, The big juke box was the responsibility of his two sons—Davey and Humber—and they that morning had turned its volume down and restocked all of its hundred discs (but one) with suitable hymns and dirges. Consequently, the hushed, whispering room that morning was momentarily shocked to hear the sudden twanging outcry of an Elvis Presley blues. Peace charged through the shoulders and swiftly stilled it. Few would remember it later; some even failed to notice: they were too busy eating. And so nothing was really spoiled.

Sharp on the stroke of noon the pantomime happily approached its climax. Under an autumn sky of limpid blue the people of Mound County stood tight-clustered across the trimmed, green lawn of Mount Rose Cemetery. His face blanched with grief, Jason Hunnicutt stood by the trench-side of the fresh and ugly wound in the tended, velvet grass. At grave edge he could not keep his eyes away from the struggling twelve black shoe-tops of the pallbearers. He watched the carved bronze box descend, clasped in the clutch of those canvas straps which seemed in mortal contest with the men whose hands gripped them tightly and uneasily: men edgy as if they sensed a competition between themselves and the earth, something rigged and unfair: an event whose decision could be, at best, postponed. When the last drumming spadeful of sod was scattered across the mound the Most Reverend Doctor G. Robert Godd, Minister at the Adena Episcopalian Church and Chaplain at the penitentiary, recited the static monotony of the last rites. There was an instant aftermath of almost frightened stillness. And then, incredibly, someone belched. It was the most honest human utterance made that day. In the shocked silence after no one looked at his neighbor's face. None of them ever knew who had belched. It did not matter. In fact, no one wanted ever to know who it had been who belched. Because, in a sense, that stomach had spoken for each of them there. Humanness returned; the crowd stirred and moved back. Reporters from the Adena and Wheeling papers came forward with their cameras. And, since he had been the doctor who had ushered Cole Blake into life, O. T. Snedeker M.D. stepped forward to pose at graveside holding a dime-store framed baby picture of the dead boy, staring down at it stiffly with an expression of clinical acceptance and mild pro-

fessional melancholy. The people stood for a spell, then moved away, homeward bound.

Only Jason stayed by the fresh mound. And presently, lifting his eyes, he saw, far in the distance, the unwelcome ones; the two uninvited: Sheriff Luther Alt and his girl Jill. Jason stooped by the grave, fussed with the wreaths and the flowers, thinking, waiting. After a while he looked up to see the two again. But now there was only one. Far off down the cemetery road, shuffling in the wake of his townsmen, his tortiu-ed face bowed, went Luther Alt. Jill stood expressionless, her pale hands dangling limp at each side of h&[ mother's short, outmodish coat. Jason looked at the fresh earth, the flowers again, his eyes blurred with angry tears.

Rest easy. Cole. Sooner or later. Rest easy, he whispered.

He brushed the tears angrily from his face.

One of these nights, he went on in a breath of words, they'll strap the one who did it in that chair. Rest easy, Cole. We'll get even.

He looked up at the far figure of Jill. She was staring at him. And so with a forced smile stiff on his mouth the boy stood up and walked slowly off among the scrolled stones and cold angels to where she stood.

From the table by the window of the hotel dining room Jason watched in the fog for her coming. Every evidence of the morning's ceremonies had thoroughly, astonishingly vanished from the long dark chamber—every remnant, that is, save two: gone, whisked away; flowers, wreaths, tables, food, and the shrouding yards of gray muslin gone as well: like the tents of a circus which has struck, pulled up stakes, carted up its beasts and freaks and disappeared with the roustabout, raging swiftness with which circuses, in morning darkness, strike and go. Even the funeral smells were gone: flowers and coffee and the faint scent of restrained human morbidity. The dining room was as it had been: ready for tomorrow noon's Kiwanis.

Jason sat sweating Ughtly, his pale, searching face moist in the neon-hemorrhaging illumination at that table, that widow. That place. But Jill would have it no other way, would meet him that night in no other place. He had not argued the point. When he had walked to her among the stone angels and hmestone slabs he had simply taken her hand and they had walked back to town together. In si-

lence. Silence because there was nothing to be said or for the reason that there was far too much. They had both loved him; each in his way, and there might, for them, be time for each to tell what way it had been. It seemed very natural, he thought, holding Cole's girl's hand and walking beside Cole's girl all the way home and saying nothing, like old lovers, who have constructed sweetly the intricate and eloquent vocabulary of stillnesses. Very natural, he thought, with a nudge of guilt at his shoulder like the cooling touch of someone freshly ghosted and new gone into the land. Natural. And yet it always seemed she hated me. And how, he thought, could she have loved somebody like Cole and not have anything but sick contempt for somebody like me? Grief is the magnet. Yes, only the loss and sorrow they both felt could have made him go to her that day in that place after the funeral and only these things could have made her let him take her hand and walk her back to town and only those bonds could have made her promise to come to him that night.

He turned his eyes to the darkness behind him and stared at the big juke box all fired-up again with drifting amber lights and bubbles rising in its golden tubes; he had tried to turn it off, tried to tug the socket from its fixture in the wall. And he looked again at the single residue of the morning's somber carnival, stared at it a moment with a crawl of curious distaste, unable to touch it, remove it: a single white rose stuck upright in a half-emptied Dixie cup of stale, warm Doctor Pepper. It stood upon the sill of the big front window, its long stem already bowing mortally into the pane of glass, the flesh of its petals already dying, browning, while yet the shine from the neon gave it a flush of cruelly spurious livingness. He turned his eyes back to the window, the night; and taking shape slowly in the milky mists he saw her come, crossing Lafayette Avenue beneath the darkened theater marquee, coming closer across the bricks of the street glistening like patent-leather beneath the night, the quaint dark silhouette of that beauty of young womanhood cloaked in the shabby cut of her mother's old coat. For a moment under the gold-red sign she looked and saw him and then disappeared up the old stone steps into the hotel lobby and it seemed to him that he saw in her face in that swift glimpse a flushed glitter of excitement as if she were bravely on her way to face a danger. He said: I'm glad you could make it.

I said I would be here, didn't I? she said. I never say I'll do something and then not do it.

She stood a moment in the half-living twilight of the juke box and unloosed the old fox collar, letting it fall from her white neck and stared at him with a curious, gentle smile.

Why did you think I might not come? she said.

I don't know, he said. I reckon the kind of day this has been. This place. This room.

You thought I wouldn't come because you think I am frightened of you, she said.

He was still, turning his eyes again to the rose, dying in the cold soft drink in the waxed cup. She slipped into the chair across from him as she had done so often in the nights when Cole was across from her. She sat a while staring back into the shadows of the long room.

Everything's gone, she said. Every single thing. Everyone is gone, too.

The juke box, like a gigantic and transparent samovar filled with light and moving clouds and a wine of madmen among which bubbles rose in slow, turgid stillness to break and return, remarkably, to their source: its light touched the glistening softness of the girl's face, moist with the mists of the night.

All the people, all the roses and the lilies, she said. And all of him. Gone.