Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,125
responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the great frame yearning against her. Mrs. Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height sees. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a member with her of an ancient abused slave race, and then she had realized that, having restored her son to herself, she too must be deserted.
He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her arms tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness, they of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, “My daughter,” recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.
And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.
Eccles comes, panting from some drugstore or tormented home, and the seven of them file with Nelson into the room of flowers and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, with a strange deep soft probe of guilt, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
The angular words walk in Harry’s head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility. Eccles doesn’t; his face is humorless and taut. His voice is false. All these people are false: except his dead daughter, the white box with gold trim.
“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom.”
Shepherd, lamb, arms: Harry’s eyes fill with tears. It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at last the saltwater gets into his eyes. His daughter is dead; June gone from him; his heart swims in grief, that had skimmed over it before, dives deeper and deeper into the limitless volume of loss. Never hear her cry again, never see her marbled skin again, never balance her faint weight in his arms again and watch for the blue knives of her eyes to widen at his words. Never, the word never stops, there is never a gap in its thickness.
They go to the cemetery. He and his father and Janice’s father and the undertaker’s man carry the white box to the hearse. There is weight to it but the weight is all wood. The cemetery is beautiful at four o’clock. Its nurtured green nap slopes down somewhat parallel to the rays of the sun. Tombstones cast long slate shadows. Up a crunching blue gravel lane moves the careful procession; their destination a meek green canopy smelling of earth and ferns. Beyond them at a distance a crescent sweep of black woods; the cemetery is high on the hill, between the town and the forest. Below their feet chimneys smoke. Harry can see across the valley but from here it looks different, more blue. A man on a power lawnmower rides between the worn teeth of tombstones far off. Swallows in a wide ball dip and toss themselves above a stone cottage, a crypt. The white coffin is artfully rolled on casters from the hearse’s deep body onto crimson straps that hold it above the small nearly square-mouthed but deep-dug grave. The small creaks and breaths of effort scratch on a pane of silence. Silence. A cough. The flowers have followed them; here they are under the tent. Behind Harry’s feet a neat mound of dirt topped with squares of sod waits to be replaced and meanwhile breathes a deep word of earth. The undertaking men look pleased, fold their pink hands in front of their flies. Silence.
“The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing.”
Eccles’ voice made fragile by the outdoors; the distant buzz of the power mower halts respectfully. Rabbit’s chest vibrates with excitement and