Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Comfort

Nina had been playing tennis in the late afternoon, on the high-school courts. After Lewis had left his job at the school she had boycotted the courts for a while, but that was nearly a year ago, and her friend Margaret-another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis’s-had talked her into playing there again.

“Better get out a bit while you still can.”

Margaret had already been gone when Lewis’s trouble occurred. She had written a letter from Scotland in support of him. But she was a person of such wide sympathies, such open understanding and far-reaching friendships, that the letter perhaps did not carry much weight. More of Margaret’s good-heartedness.

“How is Lewis?” she said, when Nina drove her home that afternoon.

Nina said, “Coasting.”

The sun had already dropped nearly to the rim of the lake. Some trees that still held their leaves were flares of gold, but the summer warmth of the afternoon had been snatched away. The shrubs in front of Margaret’s house were all bundled up in sacking like mummies.

This moment of the day made Nina think of the walks she and Lewis used to take after school and before supper. Short walks, of necessity as the days got dark, along out-of-town lanes and old railway embankments. But crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis. Bugs, grubs, snails, mosses, reeds in the ditch and shaggy-manes in the grass, animal tracks, nannyberries, cranberries-a deep mix stirred up a little differently every day. And every day a new step towards winter, an increased frugality, a withering.

The house Nina and Lewis lived in had been built in the 1840s, close up to the sidewalk in the style of that time. If you were in the living room or dining room you could hear not only footsteps but conversations outside. Nina expected that Lewis would have heard the car door close.

She entered whistling, as well as she could. See the conquering hero comes.

“I won. I won. Hello?”

But while she was out, Lewis had been dying. In fact, he had been killing himself. On the bedside table lay four little plastic packets, backed with foil. Each had contained two potent painkillers. Two extra packets lay beside these, inviolate, the white capsules still plumping up the plastic cover. When Nina picked these up, later, she would see that one of them had a mark on the foil, as if he had started to dig in, with a fingernail, then had given up as if he’d decided he had already had enough, or had at that moment been drawn into unconsciousness.

His drinking glass was nearly empty. No water spilled.

This was a thing they had talked about. The plan had been agreed to, but always as a thing that could happen-would happen-in the future. Nina had assumed that she would be present and that there would be some ceremonial recognition. Music. The pillows arranged and a chair drawn up so that she could hold his hand. Two things she had not thought of-his extreme dislike of ceremony of any sort, and the burden such participation would put on her. The questions asked, the opinions passed, her jeopardy as a party to the act.

In doing it this way he had given her as little as possible that was worth covering up.

She looked for a note. What did she think it would say? She didn’t need instructions. She certainly did not need an explanation, let alone an apology. There was nothing a note could tell her that she didn’t know already. Even the question, Why so soon? was one she could figure out the answer for by herself. They had talked-or he had-about the threshold of intolerable helplessness or pain or self-disgust, and how it was important to recognize that threshold, not slide over it. Sooner, rather than later.

Just the same, it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her. She looked first on the floor, thinking that he might have swiped the paper off the bedside table with his pajama sleeve when he set the water glass down for the last time. Or he could have taken special care not to do that-she looked under the base of the lamp. Then in the drawer of the table. Then under, and in, his slippers. She picked up and shook loose the pages of the book he had lately been reading, a paleontology book about what she believed was called the Cambrian explosion of multi-celled life-forms.

Nothing there.

She began rifling through the bedclothes. She stripped off the duvet, then the top sheet. There he lay, in the dark-blue silk pajamas which she had bought for him a couple of weeks ago. He had complained of feeling cold-he who had never been cold in bed before-so she went out and bought the most expensive pajamas in the store. She bought them because silk was both light and warm, and because all the other pajamas she saw-with their stripes, and their whimsical or naughty messages-made her think of old men, or comic-strip husbands, defeated shufflers. These were almost the same color as the sheets, so that little of him was revealed to her. Feet, ankles, shins. Hands, wrists, neck, head. He lay on his side, facing away from her. Still intent on the note, she moved the pillow, dragged it roughly away from under his head.

No. No.

Shifted from pillow to mattress, the head made a certain sound, a sound that was heavier than she would have expected. And it was that, as much as the blank expanse of the sheet, that seemed to be saying to her that the search was futile.

The pills would have put him to sleep, taken all his workings by stealth, so that there was no dead stare, no contortion. His mouth was slightly open, but dry. The last couple of months had altered him a great deal-it was really only now that she saw how much. When his eyes had been open, or even when he had been sleeping, some effort of his had kept up the illusion that the damage was temporary-that the face of a vigorous, always potentially aggressive sixty-two-year-old man was still there, under the folds of bluish skin, the stony vigilance of illness. It had never been bone structure that gave his face its fierce and lively character-it was all in the deep-set bright eyes and the twitchy mouth and the facility of expression, the fast-changing display of creases that effected his repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience, suffering disgust. A classroom repertoire-and not always confined there.

No more. No more. Now within a couple of hours of death (for he must have got down to business as soon as she had left, not wanting to risk the job’s not being finished when she returned), now it was plain that the wasting and crumbling had won out and his face was deeply shrunken. It was sealed, remote, aged and infantile-perhaps like the face of a baby born dead.

The disease had three styles of onset. One involved the hands and arms. The fingers grew numb and stupid, their clasp awkward and then impossible. Or it could be the legs that weakened first, and the feet that started stumbling, soon refusing to lift themselves up steps or even over carpet edges. The third and probably the worst sort of attack was made on the throat and tongue. Swallowing became unreliable, fearful, a choking drama, and speech turned into a clotted flow of importunate syllables. It was the voluntary muscles that were affected, always, and at first that did indeed sound like a lesser evil. No misfirings in the heart or brain, no signals gone awry, no malicious rearrangements of the personality. Sight and hearing and taste and touch, and best of all intelligence, lively and strong as ever. The brain kept busy monitoring all the outlying shutdown, toting up the defaults and depletions. Wasn’t that to be preferred?

Of course, Lewis had said. But only because of the chance it gives you, to take action.

His own problems had started with the muscles of his legs. He had enrolled in a Seniors Fitness class (though he hated the idea) to see if strength could be bullied back into them. He thought it was working, for a week or two. But then came the lead feet, the shuffling and tripping, and before long, the diagnosis. As soon as they knew that much, they had talked about what would be done when the time came. Early in the summer, he was walking with two canes. By the end of summer he was not walking at all. But his hands could still turn the pages of a book and manage, with difficulty, a fork or spoon or pen. His speech seemed to Nina almost unaffected, though visitors had trouble with it. He had decided anyway that visitors should be banned. His diet had been changed, to make swallowing easier, and sometimes days passed without any difficulty of that kind.

Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they-or he-might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.

The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.

That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis. Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn’t others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?

No.

She picked up the bedside phone book and looked for “Undertakers,” which was a word that of course did not occur. “Funeral Directors.” The exasperation she felt at that was of the sort she usually shared with him. Undertakers, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with undertakers? She turned to him and saw how she had left him, helplessly uncovered. Before she rang the number she got the sheet and the duvet back on.

A young man’s voice asked her if the doctor was there, had the doctor been yet?

“He didn’t need a doctor. When I came in I found him dead.”

“When was that, then?”

“I don’t know-twenty minutes ago.”

“You found him passed away? So-who is your doctor? I’ll phone and send him over.”

In their matter-of-fact discussions of suicide, Nina and Lewis had never, as she remembered, talked about whether the fact was to be kept secret or made known. In one way, she was sure, Lewis would have wanted the facts known. He would have wanted to make it known that this was his idea of an honorable and sensible way to deal with the situation he had found himself in. But there was another way in which he might have preferred no such revelation. He would not want anybody to think that this resulted from the loss of his job, his failed struggle at the school. To have them think he had caved in like this on account of his defeat there-that would have set him raging.

She scooped the packets off the bedside table, the full ones as well as the empties, and flushed them down the toilet.

The undertaker’s men were big local lads, former students, a bit more flustered than they wanted to show. The doctor was young, too, and a stranger-Lewis’s regular doctor was on holiday, in Greece.

“A blessing, then,” the doctor said when he had been filled in on the facts. She was a bit surprised to hear him so openly admit that, and thought that Lewis, if he could have heard, might have caught an unwelcome whiff of religion. What the doctor said next was less surprising.

“Would you like to talk to anybody? We have people now who can, just, you know, help you sort out your feelings.”

“No. No. Thank you, I’m all right.”

“You’ve lived here a long time? You have friends you can call on?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“Are you going to call somebody now? “

“Yes,” said Nina. She was lying. As soon as the doctor, and the young bearers, and Lewis, had left the house-Lewis borne like a piece of furniture wrapped to protect it from knocks-she had to resume her search. It seemed now that she had been a fool to restrict it to the vicinity of the bed. She found herself going through the pockets of her dressing gown, which hung on the back of the bedroom door. An excellent place, since this was a garment she put on every morning before scurrying to make coffee, and she was always exploring its pockets to find a Kleenex, a lipstick. Except that he would have had to rise from his bed and cross the room-he who had not been able to take a step without her help for some weeks.

But why would the note have had to be composed and put in place yesterday? Would it not have made sense to write and hide it weeks ago, especially since he didn’t know the rate at which his writing would deteriorate? And if that was the case it could be anywhere. In the drawers of her desk-where she was rummaging now. Or under the bottle of champagne, which she had bought to drink on his birthday and set on the dresser, to remind him of that date two weeks hence-or between the pages of any of the books she opened these days. He had in fact asked her, not long ago, “What are you reading on your own now?” He meant, apart from the book she was reading to him-Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford. She chose to read him entertaining history-he wouldn’t put up with fiction-and left the science books for him to manage himself. She had told him, “Just some Japanese stories,” and held up the book. Now she threw books aside to locate that one, to hold it upside down and shake the pages out. Every book she had pushed away then got the same treatment. Cushions on the chair where she habitually sat were thrown to the floor, to see what was behind them. Eventually all the cushions on the sofa were dispersed in the same way. The coffee beans shaken out of their tin, in case he had (whimsically?) concealed a farewell in there.

She had wanted no one with her, no one to observe this search-which she had been conducting, however, with all the lights on and the curtains open. No one to remind her that she had to get hold of herself. It had been dark for some time and she realized that she ought to have something to eat. She might phone Margaret. But she did nothing. She got up to close the curtains but instead turned out the lights.

Nina was slightly over six feet tall. Even when she was in her teens, gym teachers, guidance counselors, concerned friends of her mother’s had been urging her to get rid of her stoop. She did her best, but even now, when she looked at photographs of herself, she was dismayed to see how pliant she had made herself-shoulders drawn together, head tilted to the side, her whole attitude that of a smiling attendant. When she was young she had got used to meetings being arranged, friends bringing her together with tall men. It seemed that nothing else much mattered about the man-if he was well over six feet tall, he must be paired off with Nina. Quite often he would be sulky about this situation-a tall man, after all, could pick and choose-and Nina, still stooping and smiling, would be swamped with embarrassment.

Her parents, at least, behaved as if her life was her own business. They were both doctors, living in a small city in Michigan. Nina lived with them after she had finished college. She taught Latin at the local high school. On her vacations she went off to Europe with those college friends who had not yet been skimmed off to marry and remarry, and probably wouldn’t be. Hiking in the Cairngorms, she and her party fell in with a pack of Australians and New Zealanders, temporary hippies whose leader appeared to be Lewis. He was a few years older than the rest, less a hippie than a seasoned wanderer, and definitely the one to be called on when disputes and difficulties arose. He was not particularly tall-three or four inches shorter than Nina. Nevertheless, he attached himself to her, persuaded her to change her itinerary and go off with him-he himself cheerfully leaving his pack to their own devices.

It turned out that he was fed up with wandering, and also that he had a perfectly good Biology degree and a teaching certificate from New Zealand. Nina told him about the town on the east shore of Lake Huron, in Canada, where she had visited relatives when she was a child. She described the tall trees along the streets, the plain old houses, the sunsets over the lake-an excellent place for their life together, and a place where, because of Commonwealth connections, Lewis might find it easier to get a job. They did get jobs, both of them, at the high school-though Nina gave up teaching a few years later, when Latin was phased out. She could have taken upgrading courses, preparing herself to teach something else, but she was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it.

They had left it rather late to have a child. And she suspected that they were both a little too vain-they didn’t like the thought of wrapping themselves up in the slightly comic and diminished identities of Mom and Dad. Both of them-but particularly Lewis-were admired by the students for being unlike the adults around home. More energetic mentally and physically, more complex and vivid and capable of getting some good out of life.

She joined a choral society. Many of its recitals were given in churches, and it was then that she learned what a deep dislike Lewis had of these places. She argued that there often wasn’t any other suitable space available and it didn’t mean that the music was religious (though it was a bit hard to argue this when the music was the Messiah). She said that he was being old-fashioned and that there was little harm any religion could do nowadays. This started a great row. They had to rush around slamming down the windows, so that their roused voices might not be heard out on the sidewalk in the warm summer evening.

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles.

Can’t you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?

If this isn’t important, nothing is.

The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear-hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.

That was not the last time. Nina, brought up to be so peaceable, wondered if this was normal life. She couldn’t discuss it with him-their reunions were too grateful, too sweet and silly. He called her Sweet Nina-Hyena and she called him Merry Weather Lewis.

A few years ago, a new sort of sign started appearing on the roadside. For a long time there had been signs urging conversion, and those with large pink hearts and the flattening line of beats, meant to discourage abortion. What was showing up now were texts from Genesis.

In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.

God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light.

God created Man in his own image. Male and Female created he them.

Usually there was a rainbow or a rose or some symbol of Edenic loveliness painted alongside the words.

“What is the meaning of all this?” said Nina. “It’s a change anyway. From ‘God so loved the world.’”

“It’s creationism,” said Lewis.

“I could figure that. I mean, why is it up on signs all over the place? “

Lewis said there was a definite movement now to reinforce belief in the literal Bible story.

“Adam and Eve. The same old rubbish.”

He seemed not greatly disturbed about this-or any more affronted than he might be by the crèche that was put up every Christmas not in front of a church but on the lawn of the Town Hall. On church property was one thing, he said, town property another. Nina’s Quaker teaching had not put much emphasis on Adam and Eve, so when she got home she took out the King James Bible and read the story all the way through. She was delighted by the majestic progress of those first six days-the dividing of the waters and the installation of the sun and moon and the appearance of the things that creep upon the earth and the fowls of the air, and so on.

“This is beautiful,” she said. “It’s great poetry. People should read it.”

He said that it was no better and no worse than any of the whole parcel of creation myths that had sprung up in all corners of the earth and that he was sick and tired of hearing about how beautiful it was, and the poetry.

“That’s a smoke screen,” he said. “They don’t give a piss in a pot about the poetry.”

Nina laughed. “Corners of the earth,” she said. “What kind of talk is that for a scientist? I bet it’s out of the Bible.”

She would take a chance, once in a while, to tease him on this subject. But she had to be careful not to go too far. She had to watch out for the point at which he might sense the deadly threat, the dishonoring insult.

Now and then she found a pamphlet in the mail. She didn’t read them through, and for a while she thought that everybody must be getting this sort of thing, along with the junk mail offering tropical holidays and other gaudy windfalls. Then she found out that Lewis was getting the same material at school-”creationist propaganda” as he called it-left on his desk or stuffed into his pigeonhole in the office.

“The kids have access to my desk, but who the hell is stuffing my mailbox in here?” he had said to the Principal.

The Principal had said that he couldn’t figure it out, he was getting it too. Lewis mentioned the name of a couple of teachers on the staff, a couple of crypto-Christians as he called them, and the Principal said it wasn’t worth getting your shirt in a knot about, you could always throw the stuff away.

There were questions in class. Of course, there always had been. You could count on it, Lewis said. Some little sickly saint of a girl or a smart-arse of either sex trying to throw a monkey wrench into evolution. Lewis had his tried-and-true ways of dealing with this. He told the disrupters that if they wanted the religious interpretation of the world’s history there was the Christian Separate School in the next town, which they were welcome to attend. Questions becoming more frequent, he added that there were buses to take them there, and they could collect their books and depart this day and hour if they had a mind to.

“And a fair wind to your-” he said. Later there was controversy-about whether he actually said the word “arse” or let it hang unspoken in the air. But even if he had not actually said it he had surely given offense, because everybody knew how the phrase could be completed.

The students were taking a new tack these days.

“It’s not that we necessarily want the religious view, sir. It’s just that we wonder why you don’t give it equal time.”

Lewis let himself be drawn into argument.

“It’s because I am here to teach you science, not religion.”

That was what he said he had said. There were those who reported him as saying, “Because I am not here to teach you crap.” And indeed, indeed, said Lewis, after the fourth or fifth interruption, the posing of the question in whatever slightly different way (“Do you think it hurts us to hear the other side of the story? If we get taught atheism, isn’t that sort of like teaching us some kind of religion?”), the word might have escaped his lips, and under such provocation he did not apologize for it.

“I happen to be the boss in this classroom and I decide what will be taught.”

“I thought God was the boss, sir.”

There were expulsions from the room. Parents arrived to speak to the Principal. Or they may have intended to speak to Lewis, but the Principal made sure that did not happen. Lewis heard about these interviews only later, from remarks passed, more or less jokingly, in the staff room.

“You don’t need to get worried about it,” said the Principal-his name was Paul Gibbings, and he was a few years younger than Lewis. “They just need to feel they’re being listened to. Need a bit of jollying along.”

“I’d have jollied them,” Lewis said.

“Yeah. That’s not quite the jollying I had in mind.”

“There should be a sign. No dogs or parents on the premises.”

“Something to that,” said Paul Gibbings, sighing amiably. “But I suppose they’ve got their rights.”

Letters started to appear in the local paper. One every couple of weeks, signed “Concerned Parent” or “Christian Taxpayer” or “Where Do We Go From Here?” They were well written, neatly paragraphed, competently argued, as if they might all have come from one delegated hand. They made the point that not all parents could afford the fees for the private Christian school, and yet all parents paid taxes. Therefore they deserved to have their children educated in the public schools in a way that was not offensive to, or deliberately destructive of, their faith. In scientific language, some explained how the record had been misunderstood and how discoveries that seemed to support evolution actually confirmed the Biblical account. Then came citing of Bible texts that predicted this present-day false teaching and its leading the way to the abandonment of all decent rules of life.

In time the tone changed; it grew wrathful. Agents of the Antichrist in charge of the government and the classroom. The claws of Satan stretched out towards the souls of children, who were actually forced to reiterate, on their examinations, the doctrines of damnation.

“What is the difference between Satan and the Antichrist, or is there one?” said Nina. “The Quakers were very remiss about all that.”

Lewis said that he could do without her treating all this as a joke.

“Sorry,” she said soberly. “Who do you think is really writing them? Some minister?”

He said no, it would be better organized than that. A masterminded campaign, some central office, supplying letters to be sent from local addresses. He doubted if any of it had started here, in his classroom. It was all planned, schools were targeted, probably in areas where there was some good hope of public sympathy.

“So? It’s not personal?”

“That’s not a consolation.”

“Isn’t it? I’d think it would be.”

Someone wrote “Hellfire” on Lewis’s car. It wasn’t done with spray paint-just a finger-tracing in the dust.

His senior class began to be boycotted by a minority of students, who sat on the floor outside, armed with notes from their parents. When Lewis began to teach, they began to sing.

All things bright and beautiful

All creatures great and small

All things wise and wonderful

The Lord God made them all-

The principal invoked a rule about not sitting on the hall floor, but he did not order them back into the classroom. They had to go to a storage room off the gym, where they continued their singing-they had other hymns ready as well. Their voices mingled disconcertingly with the hoarse instructions of the gym teacher and the thump of feet on the gym floor.

On a Monday morning a petition appeared on the Principal’s desk and at the same time a copy of it was delivered to the town newspaper office. Signatures had been collected not just from the parents of the children involved but from various church congregations around the town. Most were from fundamentalist churches, but there were some from the United and Anglican and Presbyterian churches as well.

There was no mention of hellfire in the petition. None whatever of Satan or the Antichrist. All that was requested was to have the Biblical version of creation given equal time, considered respectfully as an option.

“We the undersigned believe that God has been left out of the picture too long.”

“That’s nonsense,” Lewis said. “They don’t believe in equal time-they don’t believe in options. Absolutists is what they are. Fascists.”

Paul Gibbings had come round to Lewis and Nina’s house. He didn’t want to discuss the matter where spies might be listening. (One of the secretaries was a member of the Bible Chapel.) He hadn’t much expectation of getting around Lewis, but he had to give it a try.

“They’ve got me over the bloody barrel,” he said.

“Fire me,” said Lewis. “Hire some stupid bugger of a creationist.

The son of a bitch is enjoying this, Paul thought. But he controlled himself. What he seemed mostly to do these days was control himself.

“I didn’t come over here to talk about that. I mean a lot of people will think this bunch is just being reasonable. Including people on the Board.”

“Make them happy. Fire me. March in Adam and Eve.”

Nina brought them coffee. Paul thanked her and tried to catch her eye, to see where she stood on this. No go.

“Yeah sure,” he said. “I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. The Union would be after my ass. We’d have it all over the province, could even be a strike issue, we have to think of the kids.”

You’d think that might get to Lewis-thinking of the kids. But he was off on his own trip as usual.

“March in Adam and Eve. With or without the fig leaves.”

“All I want to ask is a little speech indicating that this is a different interpretation and some people believe one thing and some people believe the other. Get the Genesis story down to fifteen or twenty minutes. Read it out loud. Only do it with respect. You know what it’s all about, don’t you? People feeling disregarded. People just don’t like to feel they’re being disregarded.”

Lewis sat silent long enough to create a hope-in Paul, and maybe in Nina, who could tell?-but it turned out that this long pause was just a device to let the perceived iniquity of the suggestion sink in.

“What about it?” Paul said cautiously.

“I will read the whole book of Genesis aloud if you like, and then I will announce that it is a hodgepodge of tribal self-aggrandizement and theological notions mainly borrowed from other, better cultures-”

“Myths,” said Nina. “A myth after all is not an untruth, it is just-

Paul didn’t see much point in paying attention to her. Lewis wasn’t.

Lewis wrote a letter to the paper. The first part of it was temperate and scholarly, describing the shift of continents and the opening and closing of seas, and the inauspicious beginnings of life. Ancient microbes, oceans without fish and skies without birds. Flourishing and destruction, the reign of the amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs; the shifting of climates, the first grubby little mammals. Trial and error, primates late and unpromising on the scene, the humanoids getting up on their hind legs and figuring out fire, sharpening stones, marking their territory, and finally, in a recent rush, building boats and pyramids and bombs, creating languages and gods and sacrificing and murdering each other. Fighting over whether their God was named Jehovah or Krishna (here the language was heating up) or whether it was okay to eat pork, getting down on their knees and howling out their prayers to some Old Codger in the sky who took a big interest in who won wars and football games. Finally, amazingly, working a few things out and getting a start on knowing about themselves and the universe they found themselves in, then deciding they’d be better off throwing all that hard-won knowledge out, bring back the Old Codger and force everybody down on their knees again, to be taught and believe the old twaddle, why not bring back the Flat Earth while they were at it?

Yours truly, Lewis Spiers.

The editor of the paper was an out-of-towner and a recent graduate of a School of Journalism. He was happy with the uproar and continued to print the responses (“God Is Not Mocked,” over the signatures of every member of the Bible Chapel congregation, “Writer Cheapens Argument,” from the tolerant but saddened United Church minister who was offended by twaddle, and the Old Codger) until the publisher of the newspaper chain let it be known that this kind of ruckus was old-fashioned and out of place and discouraged advertisers. Put a lid on it, he said.

Lewis wrote another letter, this one of resignation. It was accepted with regret, Paul Gibbings stated-this too in the paper-the reason being ill health.

That was true, though it was not a reason Lewis himself would have preferred to make public. For several weeks he had felt a weakness in his legs. At the very time when it was important for him to stand up before his class, and march back and forth in front of it, he had felt himself trembling, longing to sit down. He never gave in, but sometimes he had to catch hold of the back of his chair, as if for emphasis. And now and then he realized that he could not tell where his feet were. If there had been carpet, he might have tripped over the least wrinkle, and even in the classroom, where there was no carpet, a piece of fallen chalk, a pencil, would have meant disaster.

He was furious about this ailment, thinking it psychosomatic. He had never suffered from nerves in front of a class, or in front of any group. When he was given the true diagnosis, in the neurologist’s office, what he felt first-so he told Nina-was a ridiculous relief.

“I was afraid I was neurotic,” he said, and they both began to laugh.

“I was afraid I was neurotic, but I only have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.” They laughed, stumbling along the silent plush-floored corridor, and got into the elevator where they were stared at with astonishment-laughter being most uncommon in this place.

The LakeShore Funeral Home was an extensive new building of golden brick-so new that the field around it had not yet been transformed into lawns and shrubbery. Except for the sign, you might have thought it a medical clinic, or government office building. The name LakeShore did not mean that it overlooked the lake but was instead a sly incorporation of the family name of the undertaker-Bruce Shore. Some people thought this tasteless. When the business had been conducted in one of the large Victorian houses in town and had belonged to Bruce’s father, it had been simply the Shore Funeral Home. And it had in fact been a home, with plenty of room for Ed and Kitty Shore and their five children on the second and third floors.

Nobody lived in this new establishment, but there was a bedroom with kitchen facilities, and a shower. This was in case Bruce Shore found it more convenient to stay overnight instead of driving fifteen miles to the country place where he and his wife raised horses.

Last night had been one of those nights because of the accident north of town. A car full of teenagers had crashed into a bridge abutment. This sort of thing-a newly licensed driver or one not licensed at all, everybody wildly drunk-usually happened in the spring around graduation time, or in the excitement of the first couple of weeks at school in September. Now was the time when you looked more for the fatalities of newcomers-nurses fresh from the Philippines last year-caught in the first altogether unfamiliar snow.

Nevertheless, on a perfectly fine night and dry road, it had been two seventeen-year-olds, both from town. And just before that, in came Lewis Spiers. Bruce had his hands full-the work he had to do on the kids, to make them presentable, took him far into the night. He had called up his father. Ed and Kitty, who still spent the summers in the house in town, had not yet left for Florida, and Ed had come in to tend to Lewis.

Bruce had gone for a run, to refresh himself. He hadn’t even had breakfast and was still in his jogging outfit when he saw Mrs. Spiers pull up in her old Honda Accord. He hurried to the waiting room to get the door open for her.

She was a tall, skinny woman, gray-haired but youthfully speedy in her movements. She didn’t appear too cut up this morning, though he noticed she hadn’t bothered with a coat.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he said. “I just got back from a little exercise. Shirley’s not in yet, I’m afraid. We sure feel bad about your loss.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Mr. Spiers taught me Grade Eleven and Twelve Science, and he was one teacher I’ll never forget. Would you like to sit down? I know you must have been prepared in a way, but it’s still an experience you’re never prepared for when it happens. Would you like me to go through the paperwork with you now or would you like to see your husband?”

She said, “All we wanted was a cremation.”

He nodded. “Yes. Cremation to follow.”

“No. He was supposed to be cremated immediately. That’s what he wanted. I thought I could pick up his ashes.”

“Well, we didn’t have any instructions that way,” said Bruce firmly. “We prepared the body for viewing. He looks very good, actually. I think you’ll be pleased.”

She stood and stared at him.

“Don’t you want to sit down?” he said. “You did plan on having some sort of visitation, didn’t you? Some sort of service? There’s going to be an awful lot of people want to pay their respects to Mr. Spiers. You know, we have conducted other services here where there wasn’t any religious persuasion. Just somebody to give a eulogy, instead of a preacher. Or if you don’t even want it that formal, you can just have people getting up and voicing their thoughts. It’s up to you whether you want the casket open or closed. But around here people usually seem to like to have it open. When you’re going for cremation you don’t have the same range of caskets, of course. We have caskets that look very nice, but they are only a fraction of the cost.”

Stood and stared.

The fact was that the work had been done and there had been no instructions that the work was not to be done. Work like any other work that should be paid for. Not to mention materials.

“I am just talking about what I think you’ll want, when you’ve had time to sit down and consider it. We are here to follow your wishes-”

Maybe saying that was going too far.

“But we went ahead this way because there were no instructions to the contrary.”

A car stopped outside, a car door closed, and Ed Shore came into the waiting room. Bruce felt an enormous relief. There was still a lot he had to learn in this business. The dealing-with-the-survivor end of it.

Ed said, “Hello, Nina. I saw your car. I thought I’d just come in and say I’m sorry.”

Nina had spent the night in the living room. She supposed she had slept, but her sleep was so shallow that she had been aware all the time of where she was-on the living-room sofa-and where Lewis was-in the funeral home.

When she tried to speak now, her teeth were chattering. This was a complete surprise to her.

“I wanted to have him cremated immediately,” was what she was trying to say, and what she started to say, thinking that she was speaking normally. Then she heard, or felt, her own gasps and uncontrollable stuttering.

“I want-I want-he wanted-”

Ed Shore held her forearm and put his other arm around her shoulders. Bruce had lifted his arms but didn’t touch her.

“I should’ve got her sitting down,” he said plaintively.

“That’s all right,” Ed said. “You feel like walking out to my car, Nina? We’ll get you a bit of fresh air.”

Ed drove with the windows down, up into the old part of town and onto a dead-end street which had a turnaround overlooking the lake. During the day people drove here to look at the view-sometimes while eating their takeout lunches-but at night it was a place for lovers. The thought of this might have dawned on Ed, as it did on her, when he parked the car.

“That enough fresh air?” he said. “You don’t want to catch cold, out without a coat on.”

She said carefully, “It’s getting warm. Like yesterday.”

They had never sat together in a parked car either after dark or in the daylight, never sought out such a place to be alone together.

That seemed a tawdry reflection to be having now.

“I’m sorry,” said Nina. “I lost control. I only meant to say that Lewis-that we-that he-”

And it began to happen again. All over again the chattering of her teeth, the shaking, the words splitting apart. The horrid piteousness of it. It was not even an expression of what she was really feeling. What she felt before was anger and frustration, from talking to-or listening to-Bruce. This time she felt-she had thought she felt-quite calm and reasonable.

And this time, because they were alone together, he didn’t touch her. He simply began to talk. Don’t worry about all that. I’ll take care of it. Right away. I’ll see that it goes all right. I understand. Cremation.

“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe in. Now hold it. Now out.”

“I’m all right.”

“Sure you are.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter.”

“The shock,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I’m not like this.”

“Look at the horizon. That helps too.”

He was taking something out of his pocket. A handkerchief? But she didn’t need a handkerchief. She had no tears. All she had was the shakes.

It was a tightly folded piece of paper.

“I put this away for you,” he said. “It was in his pajama pocket.”

She put the paper in her purse, carefully and without excitement, as if it was a prescription. Then she realized all of what he was telling her.

“You were there when he was brought in.”

“I looked after him. Bruce called me up. There was the car accident and he had a bit more than he could handle.”

She didn’t even say, What accident? She didn’t care. All she wanted now was to be alone to read her message.

The pajama pocket. The only place she hadn’t looked. She hadn’t touched his body.

She drove her own car home, after Ed had returned her to it. As soon as he had waved her out of sight she pulled over to the curb.

One hand had been working the paper out of her purse even while she drove. She read what was written on it, with the engine running, then proceeded.

On the sidewalk in front of her house there was another message.

The Will of God.

Hasty, spidery writing, in chalk. It would be easy to wipe off.

What Lewis had written and left for her to find was a poem. Several verses of scathing doggerel. It had a title-”The Battle of the Genesisites and the Sons of Darwin for the Soul of the Flabby Generation.”

There was a Temple of Learning sat

Right on Lake Huron shore

Where many a dull-eyed Dunce did come

To listen to many a Bore.

And the King of the Bores was a Right Fine Chap

Did Grin from Ear to Ear

A Jerk with One Big Thought in his Head-

Tell ‘em All What They’d Like to Hear!

One winter Margaret had got the idea of organizing a series of evenings at which people would talk-at not too great length-on whatever subject they knew and cared most about. She thought of it being for teachers (“Teachers are always the ones standing up blabbing away at a captive audience,” she said. “They need to sit down and listen to somebody else telling them something, for a change”), but then it was decided that it would be more interesting if nonteachers were invited as well. There would be a potluck dinner and wine, first, at Margaret’s house.

That was how, on a clear cold night, Nina found herself standing outside Margaret’s kitchen door in the dark entry way packed with the coats and schoolbags and hockey sticks of Margaret’s sons-it was back when they were all still at home. In the living room-from which no sound could reach Nina anymore-Kitty Shore was going on about her chosen subject, which was saints. Kitty and Ed Shore were among the “real people” invited into the group-they were also Margaret’s neighbors. Ed had spoken on another night, about mountain climbing. He had done some himself, in the Rockies, but mostly he talked of the perilous and tragic expeditions he liked to read about. (Margaret had said to Nina, when they were getting the coffee that night, “I was a little worried he might talk about embalming,” and Nina had giggled and said, “But that’s not his favorite thing. It’s not an amateur thing. I don’t suppose you get too many amateur embalmers.”)

Ed and Kitty were a good-looking couple. Margaret and Nina had agreed, confidentially, that Ed would have been a notable turn-on if it weren’t for his profession. The scrubbed pallor of his long, capable hands was extraordinary and made you think, Where have those hands been? Curvy Kitty was often referred to as a darling-she was a short, busty, warm-eyed brunette with a voice full of breathy enthusiasm. Enthusiasm about her marriage, her children, the seasons, the town, and especially about her religion. In the Anglican church, which she belonged to, enthusiasts like her were uncommon, and there were reports that she was a trial, with her strictness and fanciness and penchant for arcane ceremonies such as the Churching of Women. Nina and Margaret, also, found her hard to take, and Lewis thought she was poison. But most people were smitten.

This evening she wore a dark-red wool dress and the earrings that one of her children had made for her for Christmas. She sat in a corner of the sofa with her legs tucked under her. As long as she stuck to the historical and geographical incidence of saints it was all right-that is, all right for Nina, who was hoping that Lewis might not find it necessary to go on the attack.

Kitty said that she was compelled to leave out all the saints of Eastern Europe and concentrate mostly on the saints of the British Isles, particularly those of Cornwall and Wales and Ireland, the Celtic saints with the wonderful names, who were her favorites. When she got into the cures, the miracles, and especially as her voice became more joyous and confiding and her earrings tinkled, Nina grew apprehensive. She knew that people might think her frivolous, Kitty said, to talk to some saint when she had a cooking disaster, but that was what she really believed the saints were there for. They were not too high and mighty to take an interest in all those trials and tribulations, the details of our lives that we would feel shy about bothering the God of the Universe with. With the help of the saints, you could stay partly inside a child’s world, with a child’s hope of help and consolation. Ye must become as little children. And it was the small miracles-surely it was the small miracles that helped prepare us for the great ones?

Now. Were there any questions?

Somebody asked about the status of saints in an Anglican church. In a Protestant church.

“Well, strictly speaking I don’t think the Anglican is a Protestant church,” said Kitty. “But I don’t want to get into that. When we say in the creed, ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,’ I just take it to mean the whole big universal Christian church. And then we say, ‘I believe in the Communion of Saints.’ Of course we don’t have statues in the church, though personally I think it would be lovely if we did.”

Margaret said, “Coffee?” and it was understood that the formal part of the evening was over. But Lewis shifted his chair closer to Kitty and said almost genially, “So? Are we to understand that you believe in these miracles?”

Kitty laughed. “Absolutely. I couldn’t exist if I didn’t believe in miracles.”

Then Nina knew what had to follow. Lewis moving in quietly and relentlessly, Kitty countering with merry conviction and what she might think of as charming and feminine inconsistencies. Her faith was in that, surely-in her own charm. But Lewis would not be charmed. He would want to know, What form do these saints take at the present moment? In Heaven, do they occupy the same territory as the merely dead, the virtuous ancestors? And how are they chosen? Isn’t it by the attested miracles, the proven miracles? And how are you going to prove the miracles of someone who lived fifteen centuries ago? How prove miracles, anyway? In the case of the loaves and fishes, counting. But is that real counting, or is it perception? Faith? Ah, yes. So it all comes down to faith. In daily matters, in her whole life, Kitty lives by faith?

She does.

She doesn’t rely on science in any way? Surely not. When her children are sick she doesn’t give them medicine. She doesn’t bother about gas in her car, she has faith-

A dozen conversations have sprung up around them and yet, because of its intensity and its danger-Kitty’s voice now hopping about like a bird on a wire, saying don’t be silly, and do you think I’m an absolute nutcase? and Lewis’s teasing growing ever more contemptuous, more deadly-this conversation will be heard through the others, at all times, everywhere in the room.

Nina has a bitter taste in her mouth. She goes out to the kitchen to help Margaret. They pass each other, Margaret carrying in the coffee. Nina goes straight on through the kitchen and out into the passage. Through the little pane in the back door she peers at the moonless night, the snowbanks along the street, the stars. She lays her hot cheek against the glass.

She straightens up at once when the door from the kitchen opens, she turns and smiles and is about to say, “I just came out to check on the weather.” But when she sees Ed Shore’s face against the light, in the minute before he closes the door, she thinks that she doesn’t have to say that. They greet each other with an abbreviated, sociable, slightly apologetic and disclaiming laugh, by which it seems many things are conveyed and understood.

They are deserting Kitty and Lewis. Just for a little while-Kitty and Lewis won’t notice. Lewis won’t run out of steam and Kitty will find some way-being sorry for Lewis could be one-out of the dilemma of being devoured. Kitty and Lewis won’t get sick of themselves.

Is that how Ed and Nina feel? Sick of those others, or at least sick of argument and conviction. Tired of the never-letting-up of those striving personalities.

They wouldn’t quite say so. They would only say they’re tired.

Ed Shore puts an arm around Nina. He kisses her-not on the mouth, not on her face, but on her throat. The place where an agitated pulse might be beating, in her throat.

He is a man who has to bend to do that. With a lot of men, it might be the natural place to kiss Nina, when she’s standing up. But he is tall enough to bend and so deliberately kiss her in that exposed and tender place.

“You’ll get cold out here,” he said.

“I know. I’m going in.”

Nina has never to this day had sex with any man but Lewis. Never come near it.

Had sex. Have sex with. For a long time she could not say that. She said make love. Lewis did not say anything. He was an athletic and inventive partner and in a physical sense, not unaware of her. Not inconsiderate. But he was on guard against anything that verged on sentimentality, and from his point of view, much did. She came to be very sensitive to this distaste, almost to share it.

Her memory of Ed Shore’s kiss outside the kitchen door did, however, become a treasure. When Ed sang the tenor solos in the Choral Society’s performance of the Messiah every Christmas, that moment would return to her. “Comfort Ye My People” pierced her throat with starry needles. As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight.

Paul Gibbings had not expected trouble from Nina. He had always thought that she was a warm person, in her reserved way. Not caustic like Lewis. But smart.

“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t have wanted it.”

“Nina. Teaching was his life. He gave a lot. There are so many people, I don’t know if you understand how many people, who remember just sitting spellbound in his classroom. They probably don’t remember another thing about high school like they remember Lewis. He had a presence, Nina. You either have it or you don’t. Lewis had it in spades.”

“I’m not arguing that.”

“So you’ve got all these people wanting somehow to say goodbye. We all need to say good-bye. Also to honor him. You know what I’m saying? After all this stuff. Closure.”

“Yes. I hear. Closure.”

A nasty tone there, he thought. But he ignored it. “There doesn’t need to be a hint of religiosity about it. No prayers. No mention. I know as well as you do how he would hate that.”

“He would.”

“I know. I can sort of master-of-ceremony the whole thing, if that doesn’t seem like the wrong word. I have a pretty good idea of the right sort of people to ask just to do a little appreciation. Maybe half a dozen, ending up with a bit by me. ‘Eulogies,’ I think that’s the word, but I prefer ‘appreciation’-”

“Lewis would prefer nothing.”

“And we can have your participation at whatever level you would choose-”

“Paul. Listen. Listen to me now.”

“Of course. I’m listening.”

“If you go ahead with this I will participate.”

“Well. Good.”

“When Lewis died he left a-he left a poem, actually. If you go ahead with this I will read it.”

“Yes?”

“I mean I’ll read it there, out loud. I’ll read a bit of it to you now.”

“Right. Go ahead.”

“There was a Temple of Learning sat

Right on Lake Huron shore

Where many a dull-eyed Dunce did come

To listen to many a Bore.”

“Sounds like Lewis all right.”

“And the King of the Bores was a Right Fine Chap

Did Grin from Ear to Ear-”

“Nina. Okay. Okay. I got you. So this is what you want, is it? Harper Valley P.T.A.?”

“There’s more.”

“I’m sure there is. I think you’re very upset, Nina. I don’t think you’d act this way if you weren’t very upset. And when you’re feeling better you’re going to regret it.”

“No.”

“I think you’re going to regret it. I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to have to say good-bye.”

‘Wow,” said Margaret. “How did he take that?”

“He said he was going to have to say good-bye.”

“Do you want me to come over? I could just be company.”

“No. Thanks.”

“You don’t want company?”

“I guess not. Not right now.”

“You’re sure? You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

She was really not so pleased with herself, about that performance on the phone. Lewis had said to her, “Be sure you scotch it if they want to bugger around with any memorial stuff. That candy-ass is capable of it.” So it had been necessary to stop Paul somehow, but the way she had done it seemed crudely theatrical. Outrage was what had been left up to Lewis, retaliation his specialty-all she had managed to do was quote him.

It was beyond her to think how she could live, with only her old pacific habits. Cold and muted, stripped of him.

Some time after dark Ed Shore knocked on her back door. He held a box of ashes and a bouquet of white roses.

He gave her the ashes first.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s done.”

She felt a warmth through the heavy cardboard. It came not immediately but gradually, like the blood’s warmth through the skin.

Where was she to set this down? Not on the kitchen table, beside her late, hardly touched supper. Scrambled eggs and salsa, a combination that she’d always looked forward to on nights when Lewis was kept late for some reason and was eating with the other teachers at Tim Horton’s or the pub. Tonight it had proved a bad choice.

Not on the counter either. It would look like a bulky grocery item. And not on the floor, where it could more easily be disregarded but would seem to be relegated to a lowly position-as if it held something like kitty litter or garden fertilizer, something that should not come too close to dishes and food.

She wanted, really, to take it into another room, to set it down somewhere in the unlighted front rooms of the house. Better still, in a shelf in a closet. But it was somehow too soon for that banishment. Also, considering that Ed Shore was watching her, it might look like a brisk and brutal clearing of the decks, a vulgar invitation.

She finally set the box down on the low phone table.

“I didn’t mean to keep you standing,” she said. “Sit down. Please do.”

“I’ve interrupted your meal.”

“I didn’t feel like finishing it.”

He was still holding the flowers. She said, “Those are for me?” The image of him with the bouquet, the image of him with the box of ashes and the bouquet, when she opened the door-that seemed grotesque, now that she thought of it, and horribly funny. It was the sort of thing she could get hysterical about, telling somebody. Telling Margaret. She hoped she never would.

Those are for me?

They could as easily be for the dead. Flowers for the house of the dead. She started to look for a vase, then filled the kettle, saying, “I was just going to make some tea,” went back to hunting for the vase and found it, filled it with water, found the scissors she needed to clip the stems, and finally relieved him of the flowers. Then she noticed that she hadn’t turned on the burner under the kettle. She was barely in control. She felt as if she could easily throw the roses on the floor, smash the vase, squash the congealed mess in her supper plate between her fingers. But why? She wasn’t angry. It was just such a crazy effort, to keep doing one thing after another. Now she would have to warm the pot, she would have to measure the tea.

She said, “Did you read what you took out of Lewis’s pocket?”

He shook his head, not looking at her. She knew he was lying. He was lying, he was shaken, how far into her life did he mean to go? What if she broke down and told him about the astonishment she had felt-why not say it, the chill around her heart-when she saw what Lewis had written? When she saw that that was all that he had written.

“Never mind,” she said. “It was just some verses.”

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy. What had been between them, all these years, had been kept in balance because of their two marriages. Their marriages were the real content of their lives-her marriage to Lewis, the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life. This other thing depended on those marriages, for its sweetness, its consoling promise. It was not likely to be something that could hold up on its own, even if they were both free. Yet it was not nothing. The danger was in trying it, and seeing it fall apart and then thinking that it had been nothing.

She had the burner on, she had the teapot ready to warm. She said, “You’ve been very kind and I haven’t even thanked you. You must have some tea.”

“That would be nice,” he said.

And when they were settled at the table, the cups filled, milk and sugar offered-at the moment when there could have been panic-she had a very odd inspiration.

She said, “What is it really that you do?”

“That I do?”

“I mean-what did you do to him, last night? Or don’t you usually get asked that?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Do you mind? Don’t answer me if you mind.”

“I’m just surprised. I don’t mind.”

“I’m surprised I asked.”

“Well, okay,” he said, replacing his cup in its saucer. “Basically what you have to do is drain the blood vessels and the body cavity, and there you can run into problems depending on clots and so on, so you do what you should to get around that. In most cases you can use the jugular vein, but sometimes you have to do a heart tap. And you drain out the body cavity with a thing called a trocar, it’s more or less a long thin needle on a flexible tube. But of course it’s different if there’s been an autopsy and the organs taken out. You have to get some padding in, to restore the natural outline…”

He kept an eye on her all the time he was telling her this, and proceeded cautiously. It was all right-what she felt awaken in herself was just a cool and spacious curiosity.

“Is this what you meant you wanted to know?”

“Yes,” she said steadily.

He saw that it was all right. He was relieved. Relieved and perhaps grateful. He must be used to people shying away completely from what he did, or else making jokes about it.

“And then you inject the fluid, which is a solution of formaldehyde and phenol and alcohol, and often some dye added to it for the hands and the face. Everybody thinks of the face being important and there’s a lot to be done there with the eye caps and wiring the gums. As well as massage and fussing with the eyelashes and special makeup. But people are just as apt to care about the hands and to want them soft and natural and not wrinkled at the fingertips…”

“You did all that work.”

“That’s all right. It wasn’t what you wanted. It’s just cosmetic things we do, mostly. That’s what we’re concerned with today more than any long-term preservation. Even old Lenin, you know, they had to keep going in and re-injecting him so he wouldn’t dessicate or discolor-I don’t know if they do anymore.”

Some expansion, or ease, combined with the seriousness in his voice, made her think of Lewis. She was reminded of Lewis the night before last, speaking to her weakly but with satisfaction about the single-celled creatures-no nucleus, no paired chromosomes, no what else?-that had been the only form of life on earth for nearly two-thirds of life-on-earth’s history.

“Now with the ancient Egyptians,” Ed said, “they had the idea that your soul went on a journey, and it took three thousand years to complete, and then it came back to your body and your body ought to be in reasonably good shape. So the main concern they had was preservation, which we have not got today to anything like the same extent.”

No chloroplasts and no-mitochondria.

“Three thousand years,” she said. “Then it comes back.”

“Well, according to them,” he said. He put down his empty cup and remarked that he had better be getting home.

“Thank you,” said Nina. Then, hurriedly, “Do you believe in such a thing as souls? “

He stood with his hands pressed down on her kitchen table. He sighed and shook his head and said, “Yes.”

Soon after he had gone she took the ashes out and set them on the passenger seat of the car. Then she went back into the house to get her keys and a coat. She drove about a mile out of town, to a crossroads, parked and got out and walked up a side road, carrying the box. The night was quite cold and still, the moon already high in the sky.

This road at first ran through boggy ground in which cattails grew-they were now dried out, tall and wintry-looking. There were also milkweeds, with their pods empty, shining like shells. Everything was distinct under the moon. She could smell horses. Yes-there were two of them close by, solid black shapes beyond the cattails and the farmer’s fence. They stood brushing their big bodies against each other, watching her.

She got the box open and put her hand into the cooling ashes and tossed or dropped them-with other tiny recalcitrant bits of the body-among those roadside plants. Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion-calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body.