loose. “Charles, don’t do that.” And, as if he had been one of her children instead of a grown man: “Don’t, honey.”
“No.” He banged his forehead again. “No!” Yet again. “No!”
This time she took hold of him with both hands and pulled him away from the wall. “Stop that! You stop it right now!”
He looked at her, dazed. A bright red mark dashed across his brow.
“Such a look,” she told me years later, as she lay dying. “I couldn’t bear it, but I had to. Once a thing like that is started, you have to finish it.”
“Walk back to the house with me,” she told him. “I’ll give you a drink of Dick’s whiskey, because you need something, and I know there’s nothing like that here—”
He laughed. It was a shocking sound.
“—and then I’ll drive you to Gates Falls. They’re at Peabody’s.”
“Peabody’s?”
She waited for it to sink in. He knew what Peabody’s was as well as she did. By that time Reverend Jacobs had officiated at dozens of funerals.
“Patsy can’t be dead,” he said in a patient, instructional tone of voice. “It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, that’s what Morrie says.”
“Come with me, Charles.” She took him by the hand and tugged him first to the door and then into the gorgeous autumn sunshine. That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.
When they reached Route 9—sunwashed and silent, empty of traffic as it almost always was—he cocked his head, doglike, toward the sound of sirens in the direction of Sirois Hill. On the horizon was a smudge of smoke. He looked at my mother.
“Morrie, too? You’re sure?”
“Come on, Charlie.” (“It was the only time I ever called him that,” she told me.) “Come on, we’re in the middle of the road.”
• • •
They went to Gates Falls in our old Ford wagon, and they went by way of Castle Rock. It was at least twenty miles longer, but my mother was past the worst of her shock by then, and able to think clearly. She had no intention of driving past the scene of the crash, even if it meant going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn.
Peabody’s Funeral Home was on Grand Street. The gray Cadillac hearse was already in the driveway, and several vehicles were parked at the curb. One of them was Reggie Kelton’s boat of a Buick. Another, she was enormously relieved to see, was a panel truck with MORTON FUEL OIL on the side.
Dad and Mr. Kelton came out the front door while Mom was leading Reverend Jacobs up the walk, by then as docile as a child. He was looking up, Mom said, as if to gauge how far the foliage had to go before it would reach peak color.
Dad hugged Jacobs, but Jacobs didn’t hug back. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking up at the leaves.
“Charlie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Kelton rumbled. “We all are.”
They escorted him into the oversweet smell of flowers. Organ music, low as a whisper and somehow awful, came from overhead speakers. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw to everyone in West Harlow—was already there, probably because she had been listening in on the party line when Doreen called my mother. Listening in was her hobby. She heaved her bulk from a sofa in the foyer and pulled Reverend Jacobs to her enormous bosom.
“Your dear sweet wife and your dear little boy!” she cried in her high, mewling voice. Mom looked at Dad, and they both winced. “Well, they’re in heaven now! That’s the consolation! Saved by the blood of the Lamb and rocked in the everlasting arms!” Tears poured down Me-Maw’s cheeks, cutting through a thick layer of pink powder.
Reverend Jacobs allowed himself to be hugged and made of. After a minute or two (“Around the time I began to think she wouldn’t stop until she suffocated him with those great tits of hers,” my mother told me), he pushed her away. Not hard, but with firmness. He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I’ll see them now.”
“Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said. “You need to hold on for a bit. Just until Mr. Peabody makes them presenta—”
Jacobs walked through the viewing parlor, where some old lady in a mahogany coffin was waiting for her final public appearance.