Toward the End of Time - By John Updike Page 0,109

bother yourself about it,” she said. “But i worked.”

And in my feebleness and maimed self-esteem I assente to her mastery of our arrangements, here on this hill, in on post-war, post-law-and-order twilight; I let it slide over me as one gravitational field, with only the slightest grinding of Stardust, slides over another.

Signs: the cicadas’ monotone at night, and one bright-scarlet leaf on the slowly ruddying euonymus bush that I look down upon as I shakily shave, and white asters, early fall’s signature bloom, everywhere—at the gravel edges of the driveway, and in the shadows beneath the hemlocks, and on into the woods, white asters with their woody stems and rather raggy-looking serrated leaves. How strange it must be, being an autumn flower, waiting while the others—the snowdrops and crocuses, the daisies and loosestrife, the Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod—all have their go at romancing the busy pollinators; and then, as the days shorten and the insect population grows sluggish and terminal, but for a few darting, reconnoitering dragonflies and aimlessly bobbing cabbage butterflies, to unfurl their modest, virginal, starlike attractions. What patience Nature possesses, I thought, as with grotesque caution, my rectum protesting every tensed muscle, I made my way down into the woods, terrified of slipping on a patch of pine needles or some loose dirt that would send me and my hypersensitive wound tumbling.

Gloria is watchfully home most of the days now. Her two associates—the other two-thirds of ownership—have taken up the slack at the gift: shop. Her gossipy get-togethers at the Calpurnia Club, her shopping flings at the Chestnut Hill Mall, her Tuesday book group, her Thursday bridge afternoons over at the Willowbank have all been put on hold as she hovers about me like a cheerful, soigné vulture. She has found a new hairdresser, on Newbury Street, who has achieved a perfect tint, a pale platinum blond with a tinge of copper, which blends with the gray so subtly that her hair does not look dyed at all, just faintly unearthly: a halo, a crest for the emerging widow. Around the house, except when fresh from gardening, she dresses with an ominous formality—shoes rather than sneakers, dresses rather than slacks or jeans. Not quite church clothes, but clothes fit for the gracious reception of an unannounced, distinguished guest, whom I take to be the inanimate version of myself that I am hatching—the solid, peglike, ultimate Russian doll inside a succession of hollow ones.

But today she had to go off for an hour of dental hygiene in Swampscott, and I felt strong enough—barely—to make it out into the woods and down the rocks to the shack by the path. I keep fighting fantasies of falling and the catheter being rammed deep up into my bowels. As I gripped a beech sapling to halt my slithery descent, I saw over the shaggy shoulder of a granite outcropping that the kids’ shack was gone. Not only was it gone, I observed as I drew near, but the ground for thirty feet all around it had been cleared as if by a lawnmower. A furious lawnmower: the old dry limbs and even the plywood and wire screening the boys had stolen for their little haven was shredded into bits, as if chewed and spit out. The ground was coated with fragments the size of my palm—tarpaper, aluminum mesh, laminated wood, corrugated plastic, cloth, rubber, and leather. It took me a minute to realize that these fragments were not from a rag heap but had been torn from bodies, bodies that were—where There was in the air a smell not only of rotting mulch in at autumn woods, or of the boggy creek that seeped through cattails a stone’s throw away, but of sweetly putrefying mam mal. And, now that I knew what to look for, I had no trouble finding, in the evenly spread layer of debris, splinters of bone, withered shreds of skin barely distinguishable from the leaves that were starting to drift across the decaying layers of earlier years’ leaf-fall, and blackened strips of what had been internal organs. I remembered the snake I had wounded. As best I could judge from the state of decomposition, a week or two had gone by; organic scavengers ranging from ants to foxes must have carried off much of the carrion.

How many bodies were here going back to nature (as if they had ever left) I could not estimate. My rectum was screaming, affronted by the effort of getting down the