From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 29

MONDAY MORNING, far above Joe Lampion's grave, the translucent blue California sky shed a rain of light so pure and clear that the world seemed to have been washed clean of all its stains.

An overflow crowd of mourners had attended the services at St. Thomas's Church, standing shoulder to shoulder at the back of the nave, through the narthex, and across the sidewalk outside, and now everyone appeared to have come to the cemetery, as well.

Assisted by Edom and Jacob, Agnes-in a wheelchair-was rolled across the grass, between the headstones, to her husband's final resting place. Although no longer in danger of renewed hemorrhaging, she was under doctor's orders to avoid strain.

In her arms she held Bartholomew. The infant was not heavily bundled, for the weather was unseasonably mild.

Agnes wouldn't have been able to bear her ordeal without the baby.

This small weight in her arms was an anchor dropped in the sea of the future, preventing her from drifting back into memories of days gone by, so many good days with Joey, memories which, at this critical moment, would strike like hammer blows upon her heart. Later, they would comfort her. Not yet.

The mound of earth beside the grave had been disguised by piles of flowers and cut ferns. The suspended casket was skirted with black material to conceal the yawning grave beneath it.

Although a believer, Agnes was not at the moment able to spread the flowers and ferns of faith over the hard, ugly reality of death. Cowled and skeletal, Death was here, all right, scattering his seeds among all her gathered friends, one day to reap them.

Flanking the wheelchair, Edom and Jacob spent less time watching the graveside service than studying the sky. Both brothers frowned at that cloudless blue, as though seeing thunderheads.

Agnes supposed Jacob trembled in anticipation of the crash of an airliner or at least a light aircraft. Edom might be calculating the odds that this serene place-at this specific hour-would be the impact point for one of those planet-killing asteroids that reputedly wiped most life off the earth every few hundred thousand years or so.

A spirit-shredding bleakness clawed at her, but she couldn't permit it to leave her in tatters. If she traded hope for despair, as her brothers had done, Bartholomew would be finished before he'd begun. She owed him optimism, lessons in the joy of life.

After the service, among those who came to Agnes at graveside, trying to express the inexpressible, was Paul Damascus, the owner of Damascus Pharmacy on Ocean Avenue. Of Mideastern extraction, he had dark olive skin and, incredibly, rust—red hair. With his rust-red eyebrows, lashes, and mustache, his handsome face looked like that of a bronze statue with a curious patina.

Paul knelt on one knee beside her wheelchair. “This momentous day, Agnes. This momentous day, with all of its beginnings. Hmmm?"

He said this as though confident Agnes would understand what he meant, with a smile and with a glint in his eyes that almost became a wink, as if they were members of a secret society in which these three repeated words were code, embodying a complex meaning other than what was apparent to the uninitiated.

Agnes was able to respond, Paul sprang up and moved away. Other friends knelt and crouched and bent to her, and she lost sight of the pharmacist as he moved off through the dispersing crowd.

This momentous day, Agnes. This momentous day, with all of its beginnings.

What odd thing to say.

A sense of mystery overcame Agnes, unnerving but not entirely or even primarily unpleasant.

She shivered, and Edom, thinking that she had caught a chill ripped off his suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

This Monday morning in Oregon was bleak, with the swollen, dark bellies of rain clouds swagging low over the cemetery, a dreary send-off for Naomi, even though rain was not yet falling.

Standing at graveside, Junior was in a foul mood. He was weary of pretending to be deep in grief.

Three and a half days had passed since he'd pushed his wife off the tower, and in that time he'd had no real fun. He was gregarious by nature, never one to turn down a party invitation. He liked to laugh, to love, to live, but he couldn't enjoy life when he must remember at all times to appear bereft and to keep sorrow in his voice.

Worse, to make credible his anguish and to avoid suspicion, he would have to play the devastated widower for at least another couple weeks, perhaps for as long as a month. As a dedicated follower of the self-improvement advice of Dr. Caesar Zedd, Junior was impatient with those who were ruled by sentimentality and by the expectations of society, and now he was required to pretend to be one of them-and for an interminable period of time.

Being uniquely sensitive, he had mourned Naomi with his entire body, with violent emesis and pharyngeal bleeding and incontinence. His grief had been so racking that it might have killed him. Enough was enough.

Only a small group of mourners gathered for this service. Junior and Naomi had been so intensely involved with each other that, unlike many young married couples, they had made few friends.

The Hackachaks were present, of course. Junior had not yet agreed to join them in their pursuit of blood money. They would give him little privacy or rest until they had what they wanted.

Rudy's blue suit, as usual, pinched and shorted his shambling frame. Here in a boneyard, he appeared to be not just a man with a bad tailor, but a grave robber who looted the dead for his wardrobe.

Against the backdrop of granite monuments, Kaitlin hulked like a moldering presence from Beyond, risen out of a rotting box to take vengeance on the living.

Rudy and Kaitlin frequently glared at Junior, and Sheena most likely gouged him with her gaze, too, but he couldn't quite see her eyes through her black veil. A stunning figure in her tight black dress, a bereaved mother was likewise hampered by this accessory of grief, because she had to hold her wristwatch close to her face to see the time, when more than once the service seemed interminable.

Junior intended to capitulate later today, at a gathering of family and friends. Rudy had organized a buffet in the showroom at his new Ford dealership, which he'd closed for business until three o'clock: lamentations, lunch, and moving reminiscences of the deceased shared among the shiny new Thunderbirds, Galaxies, and Mustangs. That venue would provide Junior with the witnesses he required for his reluctant, tearful, and perhaps even angry concession to the Hackachaks' insistent materialism.

Elsewhere in the cemetery, about 150 yards away, another interment service-with a much larger group of mourners-had begun prior to this one for Naomi. Now it was over, and the people were dispersing to their cars.

From a distance and through a scattering of trees, Junior wasn't able to discern much about the other funeral, but he was pretty sure many if not most of that crowd were Negroes. He surmised, therefore, that the person being buried was a Negro, too.

This surprised him. Of course, Oregon was not the Deep South. It was a progressive state. Nevertheless, he was surprised. Oregon wasn't home to many Negroes, either, a handful compared to those in other states, and yet until now Junior supposed that they had their own cemeteries.

He had nothing against Negroes. He didn't wish them ill. He wasn't prejudiced. Live and let live. He believed that as long as they stayed with their own kind and abided by the rules of a polite society, like everyone else, they had a right to live in peace.

This colored person's grave, however, was uphill of Naomi's. Over time, as the body decomposed up there, its juices would mix with the soil. When rain saturated the ground, subsurface drainage would carry those juices steadily downslope, until they seeped into Naomi's grave 'let mingled with her remains. This seemed highly inappropriate to Junior.

Nothing he could do about it now. Having Naomi's body moved to another grave, in a cemetery without Negroes, would cause a lot of talk. He didn't want to draw more attention to himself.

He decided, however, to see an attorney about a will—-and soon. He wanted to specify that he was to be cremated and that his ashes were to be entombed in one of those memorial walls, well above ground level, where nothing was likely to seep into them.

Only one member of the distant funeral party did not disperse toward the line of cars on the service road. A man in a dark suit headed downhill, between the headstones and the monuments, directly toward Naomi's grave.

Junior couldn't imagine why some Negro stranger would want to intrude. He hoped there wouldn't be trouble.

The minister had finished. The service was over. No one came to Junior with condolences, because they would see him again shortly, at the Ford dealership buffet.

By now he recognized that the man approaching from the other graveside service was neither a Negro nor a stranger. Detective Thomas Vanadium was annoying enough to be an honorary Hackachak.

Junior considered leaving before Vanadium-still seventy-five yards away-arrived. He was afraid he would appear to be fleeing.

The funeral director and his assistant were the only people, other than Junior, remaining at the grave. They asked if they might lower the casket or if he would rather that they wait until he was gone.

Junior gave them permission to proceed.

The two men detached and rolled up the pleated green skirt that hung from the rectangular frame of the graveyard winch on which the casket was suspended. Green, rather than black, because Naomi loved nature: Junior had been thoughtful about the details of the service.

Now the hole was revealed. Damp earthen walls. In the shadow of the casket, the bottom of the grave was dark and hidden from view.

Vanadium arrived and stood beside Junior. His black suit was cheap, but it fit better than Rudy's.

The detective carried a single long-stemmed white rose.

Two cranks operated the winch.. The mortician and his assistant turned the handles in unison, and as the mechanism creaked softly, the casket slowly descended into the hole.

Finally Vanadium said, “According to the lab report, the baby she was carrying was almost certainly yours."

Junior said nothing. He was still upset with Naomi for hiding the pregnancy from him, but he was delighted that the baby would have been his. Now Vanadium couldn't claim that Naomi's infidelity and the resultant bastard had been the motive for murder.

Even as this news pleased Junior, it also saddened him. He was not merely interring a lovely wife, but also his first child. He was burying his family.

Refusing to give the cop the satisfaction of a reply to the news of the unborn baby's paternity, Junior stared unwaveringly into the grave and said, “Whose funeral were you attending?"

“A friend's daughter. They say she died in a traffic accident down in San Francisco. She was even younger than Naomi."

“Tragic. Her string's been cut too soon. Her music's ended prematurely,” Junior said, feeling confident enough to dish a serving of the maniac cop's half-baked theory of life back to him. “There's a discord in he universe now, Detective. No one can know how the vibrations of that discord will come to affect you, me, all of us."

Repressing a smirk, feigning a respectful solemnity, he dared to glance at Vanadium, but the detective stared into Naomi's grave as though he hadn't heard the mockery-or, having heard it, didn't recognize it for what it was.

Then Junior saw the blood on the right cuff of Vanadium's shirt. Blood dripping from his hand, too.

The thorns had not been stripped from the long stem of the white rose. Vanadium clutched it so tightly that the sharp points punctured his meaty palm. He seemed to be unaware of his wounds.

Suddenly and seriously creeped out, Junior wanted to get away from this nut case. Yet he was frozen by morbid fascination.

“This momentous day,” Thomas Vanadium said quietly, stiff gazing into the grave, “seems full of terrible endings. But like every day, it's actually full of nothing but beginnings."

With a solid thump, Naomi's fine casket reached the bottom of the hole.

This sure looked like an ending to Junior.

“This momentous day,” the detective murmured.

Deciding that he didn't need an exit line, Junior headed toward the service road and his Suburban.

The pendulous bellies of the rain-swollen clouds were no darker than when he had first come to the cemetery, yet they appeared more ominous now than earlier.

When he reached the Suburban, he looked back toward the grave.

The mortician and his assistant had nearly finished dismantling the frame of the winch. Soon a worker would close the hole.

While Junior watched, Vanadium extended his right arm over the open grave. In his hand: the white rose, its thorns slick with his blood. He dropped the bloom, and it fell out of sight, into the gaping earth, atop Naomi's casket.

On this Monday evening, with both Phimie and the sun having traveled into darkness, Celestina sat down to dinner with her mother and her father in the dining room of the parsonage.

Other members of the family, friends, and parishioners were all gone. Uncanny quiet filled the house.

Always before, this home had been full of love and warmth; and still it was, although from time to time, Celestina felt a fleeting chill that couldn't be attributed to a draft. Never previously had this house seemed in the least empty, but an emptiness invaded it now-the void left by her lost sister.

In the morning she would return to San Francisco with her mom.

She was reluctant to leave Daddy to adapt to this emptiness alone.

Nevertheless, they must leave without delay. The baby would be released from the hospital as soon as a minor infection cleared up. Now that Grace and the reverend had been granted temporary custody pending adoption, preparations had to be made for Celestina to be able to fulfill her commitment to raise the child.

As usual, dinner was by candlelight. Celestina's parents were romatics.

Also, they believed that gracious dining has a civilizing effect on children, even if the fare is frequently simple meat loaf.

They were not among those Baptists who forsook drink, but they served wine only on special occasions. At the first dinner following a funeral, after the prayers and the tears, family tradition required a toast to the dearly departed. A single glass. Merlot.

On this occasion, the flickering candlelight contributed not to a romantic mood, not to merely a civilizing ambience, but to a reverential hush.

With slow, ceremonial grace, her father opened the bottle and served three portions. His hands trembled.

Reflections of lambent candle flames gilded the curved bowls of the long-stemmed glasses.

They gathered at one end of the dining table. The dark purple wine shimmered with ruby highlights when Celestina raised her glass.

The reverend made the first toast, speaking so softly that his tremulous words seemed to bloom in Celestina's mind and heart rather than to fall upon her ears. “To gentle Phimie, who is with God."

Grace said, “To my sweet Phimie ... who will never die."

The toast now came to Celestina. “To Phimie, who will be with me in memory every hour of every day for the rest of my life, until she is with me again for real. And to ... to this most momentous day."

“To this momentous day,” her father and mother repeated.

The wine tasted bitter, but Celestina knew that it was sweet. The bitterness was in her, not in the legacy of the grape.

She felt that she had failed her sister. She didn't know what more she could have done, but if she'd been wiser and more insightful and more attentive, surely this terrible loss would not have come to pass.

What good was she to anybody, what good could she ever hope to be, if she couldn't even save her little sister?

Candle flames blurred into bright smears, and the faces of her good parents shimmered like the half-seen countenances of angels in dreams.

I know what you're thinking,” her mother said, reaching across the table and placing one hand over Celestina's. “I know how useless you feel, how helpless, how small, but you must remember this . . .

Her father gently closed one of his big hands over theirs.

Grace, proving again the aptness of her name, said the one thing most likely, in time, to bring true peace to Celestina. “Remember Bartholomew."