CHAPTER 28 There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it

CHAPTER 28

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator. She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the kniferack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, halfcurious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist. At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own. She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, not to mention a song she had learned in Vacation Bible School-"I'll Be a Sunbeam for Him." —before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye— But it wasn't an eye; it was a pie. She turned to it and saw there was a fly crawling on her pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye-bye, Mr. Fly, say so long to Frannie's pie. She regarded the piece of pie for a long time. Her mother and father were both dead, she knew. Her mother had died in the Sanford Hospital and her father, who had once made a little girl feel welcome in his shop, was lying dead in bed above her head. Why did everything have to keep coming in rhymes? Coming and going in such dreadful cheap jingles and jangles, like the idiot mnemonics that recur in fevers? My dog has fleas, they bite his knees— She came to her senses suddenly, and a kind of terror twisted through her. There was a hot smell in the room. Something was burning. Frannie jerked her head around, saw a skillet of french fries in oil she had put on the stove and then forgotten. Smoke was billowing up from the pan in a stinking cloud. Grease was flying out of the pan in angry splatters, and the splatters that landed on the burner were flaring alight and then going out, as if an invisible butane lighter was being flicked by an invisible hand. The cooking surface of the pan was black. She touched the handle of the pan and drew her fingers back with a little gasp. It was now too hot to touch. She grabbed a dish-towel, wrapped it around the handle, and quickly carried the utensil, sizzling like a dragon, out through the back door. She set it down on the top step of the porch. The smell of honeysuckle and the droning of the bees came to her, but she barely noticed. For a moment the thick, dull blanket which had swaddled all her emotional responses for the last four days was pierced, and she was acutely frightened. Frightened? No-in a state of low terror, only a pace away from panic. She could remember peeling the potatoes and putting them into the Wesson Oil to cook. Now she could remember. But for a while there she had just... whew! She had just forgotten. Standing on the porch, dish-towel still clutched in one hand, she tried to remember exactly what her train of thought had been after she had put the french fries on to cook. It seemed very important. Well, first she had thought that a meal which consisted of nothing but french fries wasn't very nutritious. Then she'd thought that if the McDonald's down on Route 1 had still been open, she wouldn't have had to cook them herself, and she could have had a burger, too. Just take the car and cruise up to the take-out window. She would get a Quarter Pounder and the large-size fries, the ones that came in the bright red cardboard container. Little grease-spots on the inside. Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. And besides—pregnant women get strange cravings.

117 That brought her to the next link in the chain. Thoughts of strange cravings had led to thoughts of the strawberry pie lurking in the fridge. Suddenly it had seemed to her that she wanted a piece of that strawberry pie more than she wanted anything in the world. So she had gotten it, but somewhere along the line her eye had been caught by the knife-rack her father had made for her mother (Mrs. Edmonton, the doctor's wife, had been so envious of that knife-rack that Peter had made one for her two Christmases ago), and her mind had just... short-circuited. Motes... beams... flies... "Oh God," she said to the empty back yard and her father's unweeded garden. She sat down and put the apron over her face and cried. When the tears dried up, she seemed to feel a little better... but she was still frightened. Am I losing my mind? she asked herself. Is this the way it happens, the way it feels, when you have a nervous breakdown or whatever you want to call it? Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her ability to focus mentally seemed to have gotten fragmented. She would forget things she had been doing, her mind would go off on some dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage. After her father died she had sat beside his bed for a long time. At last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV. No particular reason; like the man said, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. The only station broadcasting had been the NBC affiliate in Portland, WCSH, and they seemed to be broadcasting some sort of crazy trial show. A black man, who looked like a Ku Klux Klansman's worst nightmare of headhunting Africans, had been pretending to execute white men with a pistol while other men in the audience applauded. It had to be pretend, of course-they didn't show things like that on TV if they were real-but it hadn't looked like pretend. It reminded her crazily of Alice in Wonderland, only it wasn't the Red Queen yelling "Off with their heads!" in this case, but... what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince. Later in the program (how much later she could not have said), some other men broke into the studio and there was a fire-fight which was even more realistically staged than the executions had been. She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy-caliber bullets, thrown backward with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps. She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that warned parents to put the kiddies to bed or change the channel. She also remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted all the same; it really was an awfully bloody program. She switched it off when the camera swung up, showing only the studio-lights hanging down from the ceiling, and lay back on the couch, looking at her own ceiling. She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating— anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in Alice, things just got curiouser and curiouser. There had been a special town meeting which her father had attended even though he had been getting sick by then himself. Frannie, feeling drugged and unreal-but physically no different than ever-had gone with him. The town hall had been crowded, much more crowded than it was for town meetings in late February or early March. There was a lot of sniffling and coughing and kerchooing. The attendees were frightened and ready to be angry at the least excuse. They spoke in loud, hoarse voices. They stood up. They shook their fingers. They pontificated. Many of them-not just the women, either-had been in tears. The upshot had been a decision to close off the town entirely. No one would be allowed in. If people wanted to leave, that was fine, as long as they understood that they couldn't come in again. The roads leading in and out of town-most notably US 1-were to be barricaded with cars (after a shouting match that lasted half an hour, that was amended to town-owned Public Works trucks), and volunteers would stand watches at these roadblocks with shotguns. Those trying to use US 1 to go north or south would be directed up north to Wells or down south to York, where they could get on Interstate 95 and thus detour around Ogunquit. Anyone who still tried to get through would be shot. Dead? Someone asked. You bet, several others answered. There was a small contingent of about twenty which maintained that those already sick should be put out of town at once. They were overwhelmingly voted down because by the evening of the twenty-fourth, when the meeting was held, almost everyone in town who was not sick had close relatives or friends who were. Many of them believed the newscasts, which said that a vaccine would be available soon. How, they argued, would they ever be able to look each other in the face again if it all turned out to be just a scary close call, and they had overreacted to it by putting their own out like pariah dogs?

118 It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then. The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town's schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn't break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin. By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty- fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panicstupid. Some of them went back to York to get on the turnpike willingly enough, but others were too crazy to understand and tried to either ram the barriers or swing around them on the soft shoulders of the road. They were dealt with. But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died. By yesterday morning Frannie's father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, had taken to his bed and Frannie was staying in to nurse him. He wouldn't allow her to take him to the infirmary. If he was going to die, he told Frannie, he wanted to do it here at home, decently, in private. By afternoon, the flow of traffic had mostly dried up. Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendent, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move. It was just as well, because by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth there had been less than three dozen men capable of standing watch. Gus, who felt perfectly fine until yesterday, had come down with a runny nose himself. In fact, the only person in town besides herself who seemed all right was Amy Lauder's sixteen-year- old brother Harold. Amy herself had died just before that first town meeting, her wedding dress still hung in the closet, unworn. Fran hadn't been out today, hadn't seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the closetogether double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality. And now there were these questions to consider. Flies... eyes... pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic icemaker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube. She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, halfquestioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind-two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator's ice- making gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that. The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer's day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don't come to swim because the water's never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day. The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one? She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back. It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead. That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow. At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose. You can't keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer. The-apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again

119 She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin. She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It ...it... "No!" she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would... would... "Stop backing away from it!" she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. "Who's going to bury him?" And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was . perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole-she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuces—and turned around, a little afraid. The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn't like Harold and didn't know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn't like. Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars-that was Harold's style. "He whacks off in his pants," Amy had once confided to Fran. "How's that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they'll just about stand up by themselves." Harold's hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn't care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him,-she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn't think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so. He hadn't seen her. He was looking up at the house. "Anybody home?" he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac's window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie's nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away. Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He's another living human being, anyway. "Over here, Harold," she called. Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold's eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her. "Say, Fran," he said happily. "Hi, Harold." "I'd heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I'm canvassing the township." He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush. "I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father—?"

120 "More everything," Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy. "Harold, if you'll excuse me—" "But whatever can you be doing, my child?" The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike-I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it-I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord. I just don't know. "Harold," she said patiently. "I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physically impossible for me to be your child." "Just a figure of speech," he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. "Anyway, what is it? That hole?" "A grave. For my father." "Oh," Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice. "I'm going in to get a drink of water before I finish up. To be blunt, Harold, I'd just as soon you went away. I'm upset." "I can understand that," he said stiffly. "But Fran... in the garden" She had started toward the house, but now she rounded on him, furious. "Well, what would you suggest? That I put him in a coffin and drag him out to the cemetery? What in the name of God for? He loved his garden! And what's it to you, anyway? What business is it of yours?" She was starting to cry. She turned and ran for the kitchen, almost running into the Cadillac's front bumper. She knew Harold would be watching her jiggling buttocks, storing up the footage for whatever X-rated movie played constantly in his head, and that made her angrier, sadder, and more weepy than ever. The screen door whacked flatly shut behind her. She went to the sink and drank three cold glasses of water, too quickly, and a silver spike of pain sank deeply into her forehead. Her surprised belly cramped and she hung over the porcelain sink for a moment, eyes slitted closed, waiting to see if she was going to throw up. After a moment her stomach told her it would take the cold water, at least on a trial basis. "Fran?" The voice was low and hesitant. She turned and saw Harold standing outside the screen, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He looked concerned and unhappy, and Fran suddenly felt badly for him. Harold Lauder tooling around this sad, ruined town in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, Harold Lauder who had probably never had a date in his life and so affected what he probably thought of as worldly disdain. For dates, girls, friends, everything. Including himself, most likely. "Harold, I'm sorry." "No, I didn't have the right to say anything. Look, if you want me to, I can help." "Thank you, but I'd rather do it alone. It's..." "It's personal. Of course, I understand." She could have gotten a sweater from the kitchen closet, but of course he would have known why and she didn't want to embarrass him again. Harold was trying hard to be a good guy-something which must have been a little like speaking a foreign language. She went back out on the porch and for a moment they stood there looking at the garden, at the hole with the dirt thrown up around it. And the afternoon buzzed somnolently around them as if nothing had changed. "What are you going to do?" she asked Harold. "I don't know," he said. "You know..." He trailed off. "What?" "Well, it's hard for me to say. I am not one of the most loved persons in this little patch of New England. I doubt if a statue would ever have been erected in my memory on the local common, even if I had become a famous writer, as I had once hoped. Parenthetically speaking, I believe I may be an old man with a beard down to my beltbuckle before there is another famous writer." She said nothing; only went on looking at him. "So!" Harold exclaimed, and his body jerked as if the word had exploded out. "So I am forced to wonder at the unfairness of it. The unfairness seems, to me at least, so monstrous that it is easier to believe that the louts who attend our local citadel of learning have finally succeeded in driving me mad." He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and she noticed with sympathy how really horrible his acne problem was. Had anyone ever told him, she wondered, that soap and water would take care of

121 some of that? Or had they all been too busy watching pretty, petite Amy as she zoomed through the University of Maine with a 3. 8 average, graduating twentythird in a class of over a thousand? Pretty Amy, who was so bright and vivacious where Harold was just abrasive. "Mad," Harold repeated softly. "I've been driving around town in a Cadillac on my learner's permit. And look at these boots." He pulled up the legs of his jeans a little, disclosing a gleaming pair of cowboy boots, complexly stitched. "Eightysix dollars. I just went into the Shoe Boat and picked out my size. I feel like an imposter. An actor in a play. There have been moments today when I've been sure I was mad." "No," Frannie said. He smelled like he hadn't had a bath in three or four days, but this no longer disgusted her. "What's that line? I'll be in your dream if you'll be in mine? We're not crazy, Harold." "Maybe it would be better if we were." "Someone will come," Frannie said. "After a while. After this disease, whatever it is, bums itself out." "Who?" "Somebody in authority," she said uncertainly. "Somebody who will... well... put things back in order." He laughed bitterly. "My dear child .. sorry, Fran. Fran, it was the people in authority who did this. They're good at putting things back in order. They've solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot by cutting it in two with his sword." "But it's just a funny strain of the flu, Harold. I heard it on the radio—" "Mother Nature just doesn't work that way, Fran. Your somebody in authority got a bunch of bacteriologists, virologists, and epidemiologists together in some government installation to see how many funny bugs they could dream up. Bacteria. Viruses. Germ plasm, for all I know. And one day some well-paid toady said, `Look what I made. It kills almost everybody. Isn't it great?' And they gave him a medal, and a pay-raise, and a time-sharing condo, and then somebody spilled it. "What are you going to do, Fran?" "Bury my father," she said softly. "Oh... of course." He looked at her for a moment and then said, very swiftly, "Look, I'm going to get out of here. Out of Ogunquit. If I stay much longer, I really will go crazy. Fran, why don't you come with me?" "Where?" "I don't know. Not yet." "Well, if you think of a place, come ask me again." Harold brightened. "All right, I will. It... you see, it's a matter of..." He trailed off and began to walk down the porch steps in a kind of daze. His new cowboy boots gleamed in the sun. Fran watched him with sad amusement. He waved just before climbing behind the wheel of the Caddy. Fran lifted a hand in return. The car jerked unprofessionally when he put it in reverse, and then he was backing down the driveway in fits and starts. He wandered to the left, crushing some of Carla's flowers under the offside wheels, and nearly thumped into the culvert ditch as he turned out onto the road. Then he honked twice and was gone. Fran watched until he was out of sight, and then went back to her father's garden. Sometime after four o'clock she went back upstairs with dragging footsteps, forcing herself along. There was a dull headache in her temples and forehead, caused by heat and exertion and tension. She had told herself to wait another day, but that would only make it worse. Under her arm she carried her mother's best damask tablecloth, the one kept strictly for company. It did not go as well as she had hoped, but it was also nowhere near as bad as she had feared. There were flies on his face, lighting, rubbing their hairy little forelegs together and then taking off again, and his skin had gone a dusky dark shade, but he was so tanned from working in the garden that it was hardly noticeable... if you made your mind up not to notice it, that was. There was no smell, and that was what she had been most afraid of. The bed he had died in was the double he had shared for years with Carla. She laid the tablecloth out on her mother's half, so that its hem touched her father's arm, hip, and leg. Then, swallowing hard (her head was pounding worse than ever), she prepared to roll her father onto his shroud. Peter Goldsmith was wearing his striped pajamas, and that struck her as jarringly frivolous, but they would have to do. She could not even entertain the thought of first undressing and then dressing him again. Steeling herself, she grasped his left arm-it was as hard and unyielding as a piece of furniture- and pushed, rolling him over. As she did so, a hideous long burping sound escaped him, a belch that seemed to go on and on, rasping in his throat as if a locust had crawled down there and had now come to life in the dark channel, calling and calling.

122 She screeched, stumbling away and knocking over the bedtable. His combs, his brushes, the alarm clock, a little pile of change and some tieclips and cufflinks all jingled and fell to the floor. Now there was a smell, a corrupted, gassy smell, and the last of the protective fog which had wrapped her dissipated and she knew the truth. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her head and wailed. She was not burying some life-sized doll; it was her father she was burying, and the last of his humanity, the very last, was the juicy, . gassy smell that now hung on the air. And it would be gone soon enough. The world went gray and the sound of her own grief, braying and constant, began to seem distant, as if someone else was uttering those sounds, perhaps one of the little brown women you see on the TV newsclips. Some length of time went by, she had no idea how long, and then, little by little, she came back 'to herself and to the knowledge of all that still remained to be done. They were the things she could not have brought herself to do before. She went to him and turned him over. He uttered another belch, this one small and dwindling. She kissed his forehead. "I love you, Daddy," she said. "I love you, Frannie loves you." Her tears fell on his face and gleamed there. She removed his pajamas and dressed him in his best suit, hardly noticing the dull throb in her back, the ache in her neck and arms as she lifted each part of his weight, dressed it, dropped it, and went on to the next part. She propped his head up with two volumes of The Book of Knowledge to get his tie right. In his bottom drawer, under the socks, she found his army medals- Purple Heart, good conduct medals, campaign ribbons... and the Bronze Star he had won in Korea. She pinned them to his lapel. In the bathroom she found Johnson's Baby Powder and powdered his face and neck and hands. The smell of the powder, sweet and nostalgic, brought the tears on again. Sweat slicked her body. There were pitted dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes. She folded the tablecloth over him, got her mother's sewing kit, and closed the seam. Then she doubled the seam and sewed again. With a sobbing, whistling grunt, she managed to get his body to the floor without dropping it. Then she rested, half-swooning. When she felt she could go on, she lifted the top half of the corpse, got it to the head of the stairs, and then, as carefully as she could, down to the first floor. She stopped again, her breath coming in quick, whining gasps. Her headache was sharp now, needling into her with quick hard bursts of pain. She dragged the body down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the porch. Down the porch steps. Then she had to rest again. The golden light of early evening was on the land now. She gave way again and sat beside him, her head on her knees, rocking back and forth, weeping. Birds twittered. Eventually she was able to drag him into the garden. At last it was done. By the time the last sods were back in place (she had fitted them together down on her knees, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle) it was a quarter of nine. She was filthy. Only the flesh around her eyes was white; that area had been washed clean by her tears. She was reeling with exhaustion. Her hair hung against her cheeks in matted strings. "Please be at peace, Daddy," she muttered. "Please." She dragged the spade back to her father's workshop and slung it inside indifferently. She had to rest twice as she climbed the six steps to the back porch. She crossed the kitchen without turning on the lights and kicked off her low-topped sneakers as she entered the living room. She dropped to the couch and slept immediately.

In the dream she was climbing the stairs again, going to her father, to do her duty and see him decently under the ground. But when she entered the room the tablecloth was already over the body and her sense of grief and loss changed to something else... something like fear. She crossed the darkened room, not wanting to, suddenly wanting only to flee, but helpless to stop. The tablecloth glimmered in the shadows, ghostly, ghastly, and it came to her: It wasn't her father under there. And what was under there was not dead.

Something-someone-filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she... couldn't... stop her feet. Her hand reached out, floated over the tablecloth-and snatched it back. He was grinning, but she couldn't see his face. A wave of frigid cold blasting up at her from that awful grin. No, she couldn't see his face, but she could see the gift this terrible apparition had brought for her unborn baby: a twisted coathanger. She fled, fled from the room, from the dream, coming up, surfacing briefly—

Surfacing briefly in the three o'clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half- waking: Him, it's him, the Walkin Dude, the man with no face.

123 Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn't remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.