Two Graves

+ Ninety-One Hours

THE SUN STOOD HIGH IN A SKY WHITE WITH HEAT. A DUST devil whirled across the empty expanse. Blue mountains serrated the distant horizon. Scenting death, a turkey vulture rode a thermal overhead, turning lazily in a tightening gyre.

Pendergast dropped the last shovelful of sand onto the grave, slapped it down with the flat of the rusty blade, and smoothed the sand into place. It had taken him a long time to dig the hole. He had gone deep, deep into the dry clay. He did not want the grave disturbed by animal or man.

He paused, leaning on the shovel, taking shallow breaths. The wound in his leg was once again bleeding freely from the exertion, soaking through the last of his bandages. Beads of sweat, mixed with the mud, trickled down his expressionless face. His shirt was torn, slack, brown with dust; his jacket shredded, his pants ripped. He stared at the patch of disturbed ground, and then—moving slowly, like an old man—bent down and took hold of the rude marker he’d fashioned from a board he had taken from the same abandoned ranch house where he’d found the shovel. He did not wish it to be too obviously a grave. He took the knife from his pocket and scratched, in an unsteady hand:

H. E. P.

Aeternum vale

Limping to the head of the grave, he pressed the sharpened base of the marker into the earth. Taking a step back and raising the shovel, he took careful aim, then brought the head down onto the marker’s top with a bone-jarring impact.

Whang!

… He was sitting before a small fire, deep in the heavily wooded flanks of Cannon Mountain. On the far side of the fire sat Helen, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and hiking boots. They had just completed the third day of a week’s backpacking trip through the White Mountains. Beyond a glacial tarn, the sun was going down—a ball of scarlet fire—highlighting the peaks of the Franconia Range. Faintly, from far below on the mountain, rose voices and snatches of song from Lonesome Lake Hut. A pot of espresso sat on the fire, its aroma mingling with the scents of wood smoke, pine, and balsam. As Helen turned the pot on the fire, she glanced up at him and suddenly smiled—her unique smile, half shy, half assured—then set two tiny porcelain espresso cups on the firestone, one beside the other, with a neat precision that was totally her own…

Pendergast swayed, gasping with the effort of the shovel’s blow. He wiped one unsteady forearm across his brow. Mud and sweat smeared the tattered sleeve of his suit. He waited, standing in the blazing heat of the sun, trying to catch his breath, to summon the final dregs of his strength. Then, once again, with a gasp of effort, he lifted the shovel. The weight of it caught him off balance and he staggered back, fighting to steady himself. His knees started to buckle, and before he tottered yet again he brought the shovel head down onto the marker with all the strength he could muster:

Whang!

… London, early fall. The leaves on the shade trees lining Devonshire Street were kissed with yellow. They were walking toward Regent’s Park, having just exited Christie’s. Rising to a dare of Helen’s, he had just bought at auction two works of artwork he’d loved at first sight: a seascape by John Marin, and a painting of Whitby Abbey that the Christie’s catalog had listed as being by a “minor Romantic painter” but that he thought might be an early Constable. Helen had smuggled a silver flask of cognac into the auction, and now—as they crossed Park Crescent and headed into the park proper—she began to quote in a full voice the poem “Dover Beach” for all to hear: “The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair…”

He had dropped the shovel without realizing it. It lay across his shoes, askew, the point half buried in the loose soil. He knelt to pick it up, then quite abruptly fell to his knees; he reached a hand out to steady himself but it slipped and he collapsed to the ground, the side of his face in the dirt.

It would be easy, remarkably easy, to stay like this, lying here above Helen’s body. But he could hear the slow drip, drip, drip of blood onto the sand and he realized he could not let go until the work was complete. He raised himself to a sitting position. After a few minutes, he felt just strong enough to stand. With supreme effort, using the shovel as a crutch, he stood—first the left leg rising, then the right. The pain in his injured calf had gone away; he felt nothing at all. Despite the fierce glare of the sun, darkness was creeping in around the periphery of his vision: he had but one more chance to set the marker permanently in the ground before he lapsed into unconsciousness. Taking a deep breath, he grasped the handle of the shovel as hard as he could, raised it with shaking hands, and—with a final spark of strength—swung it down against the headpost.

Whang…!

… A warm summer night, the trill of crickets. He and Helen were sitting on the back veranda at Penumbra Plantation, tall glasses in their hands, watching the evening fog creep in from the bayou, glowing in the moonlight. The mists rolled first over the marshy verge, then the formal garden, then the carpet of grass leading up toward the big house; they eddied about the lawn, tendrils licking at the steps like a slow-motion tide, whitened to ghostliness by the orb of the moon.

On a wheeled server nearby sat a pitcher of iced lemonade, half full, and the remains of a plate of crevettes rémoulade. From out of the kitchen came the scent of grilling fish: Maurice was preparing pompano Pontchartrain for dinner.

Helen looked over at him. “Can’t it just stay like this forever, Aloysius?” she asked.

He took a sip of lemonade. “Why not? Our entire life lies ahead of us. We can do with it what we like.”

She smiled, glanced skyward. “Do with it what we like… Promise on the moonrise?”

Gazing in mock solemnity at the amber moon, he put a playful hand across his breast. “Cross my heart.”

He stood in the middle of that vast, empty, brutal, and alien desert. The darkness crept deeper across his vision, as if he were looking down a dark tunnel, the end of which was moving farther and farther away. The shovel slipped from his nerveless fingers and clattered to the stony soil. With a last, half-audible sigh, he sank to his knees and then—after a swaying pause—fell across the grave of his dead wife.