Night Freight (31 page)

That was when I knew for certain.

My first impulse was to rush over and confront Grace Selkirk straight out. But it would have been pure folly and I came to my senses before I gave in to it. I went to see Abe Bedford instead. He was my best friend and I thought if anybody in town would listen to me, it was Abe.

I was wrong. He backed off from me same as if I'd just told him I was a leper. Why, it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, he said. I must be deranged to put stock in such an evil notion. Drive her out of town? Take a rope or a gun to her? "You go around urging such violence against a poor spinster, George Cranmer," he said, "and you'll be the one driven out of town."

He was nearly right, too. The ministers of our three churches wouldn't listen, nor would the mayor or the town council or anyone else in Little River. The truth was too dreadful for them to credit; they shut their minds to it. Folks stopped trading at my store, commenced to shunning me on the street. Wasn't anything I could do or say to turn even one person to my way of thinking.

Finally I quit trying and put pen to paper and wrote it all out here. I pray someone will read it later on, someone outside Little River, and believe it for the pure gospel truth it is. I have no other hope left than that.

S
he calls herself Grace Selkirk but that isn't her name. She has no name, Christian or otherwise. She isn't a mortal woman. And coffin-trimming isn't just work she's good at—it's her true work, it's what she is. The Coffin Trimmer.

The Angel of Death.

I don't know if she's after the whole town, every last soul in Little River, but I suspect she is. Might get them too. One other fact I do know: This isn't the first town she's come to and it won't be the last. Makes a body tremble to think how many must have come before, all over the country, all over the world, and how many will come after.

But that is not the real reason I'm so scared. No, not even that. Last night I worked late and walked home by way of Oak Street. Couldn't help myself, any more than I could help glancing through Abe Bedford's show window. And there she was in a fresh-trimmed coffin, the silk and satin draped just so around her, face all pale and waxy and dead. But the face wasn't hers; I looked at it close to make sure.

It was mine. A shadow vision of my own fresh corpse waiting to be put into the ground.

I'm next.

This little tale of psychosexual obsession brought yelps of protest from more than one faithful reader when it first appeared. The story seems to push some people's buttons, and not because of the act referred to in the final sentence; the phrase containing reference to said act was left out of the originally published version. The yelps pleased me. I hope there'll be more from readers who catch "Funeral Day" here for the first time. Pushing buttons, after all, is what fiction is all about—from the writer's point of view, anyway.

I
t was a nice funeral. And easier to get through than he'd imagined it would be, thanks to Margo and Reverend Baxter. They had kept it small, just a few friends; Katy had had no siblings others than Margo, no other living relatives. And the casket had been closed, of course. A fall from a two-hundred-foot cliff . . . it made him shudder to think what poor Katy must have looked like when they found her. He hadn't had to view the body, thank God. Margo had attended to the formal identification.

The flowers were the worst part of the service. Gardenias, Katy's favorite. Dozens and dozens of gardenias, their petals like dead white flesh, their cloyingly sweet perfume filling the chapel and making him a little dizzy after a while, so that he couldn't concentrate on Reverend Baxter's mercifully brief eulogy.

At least
he
hadn't been pressed to stand up next to the bier and speak. He couldn't have done it. And besides, what could he have said about a woman he had been married to for six years and stopped loving—if he had ever really loved her—after two? It wasn't that he'd grown to hate or even dislike her. No, it was just that he had stopped caring, that she had become a stranger. Because she was so weak . . . that was the crux of it. A weak, helpless stranger.

Afterward, he couldn't remember much of the ride to the cemetery. Tearful words of comfort from Jane Riley, who had been Katy's closest friend; someone patting his hand—Margo?—and urging him to bear up. And later, at the gravesite . . . "We therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . ." and Reverend Baxter sprinkling a handful of dirt onto the coffin while intoning something about subduing all things unto Himself, amen. He had cried then, not for the first time, surely not for the last.

The ride home, to the small, two-story house he had shared with Katy a half mile from the college, was a complete blank to him. One moment he was at the gravesite, crying; the next, it seemed, he was in his living room, surrounded by his books and the specimen cases full of the insects he had collected during his entomological researches. Odd, he realized then, how little of Katy had gone into this room, into any of the rooms in the house. Even the furniture was to his taste. The only contributions of hers that he could remember were frilly bits of lace and a bright seascape she had bought at a crafts fair. And those were gone now, along with her clothing and personal effects; Margo had already boxed them up so that he wouldn't have to suffer the task, and had had them taken away for charity.

Nine or ten people were there, Katy's and his friends, mostly from the college. Mourners who had attended the funeral and also been to the cemetery. Jane Riley and Evelyn Something—Dawson? Rawson? a woman he didn't know well that Katy had met at some benefit or other—had provided food, and there were liquor and wine and hot beverages. Margo and the Reverend had referred to the gathering as a "final tribute"; he called it a wake. But Katy wouldn't have minded. Knowing that, he hadn't objected.

Katy. Poor, weak, sentimental Katy . . .

The mourners ate and drank, they talked, they comforted and consoled. He ate and drank nothing; his stomach would have disgorged it immediately. And he talked little, and listened only when it seemed an answer was required.

"You
are
taking a few more days off, aren't you, George?" Alvin Corliss, another professor at the college. English Lit.

"Yes."

"Take a couple of weeks. Longer, if you need it. Go on a trip, someplace you've always wanted to visit. It'll do you a world of good."

"Yes. I think I might . . ."

"Is Margo staying on awhile longer, George?" Helen Vernon, another of Katy's friends. They had gone walking together often, along the cliffs and elsewhere. But she hadn't been with Katy on the day of her fall. No, not on that day.

"Yes, Helen, she is."

"Good. You shouldn't be alone at a time like this."

"I don't mind being alone."

"A man needs a woman to do for him in his time of grief. Believe me, I know . . ."

 
On and on, on and on. Why didn't they leave? Couldn't they see how much he wanted them to go? He felt that if they stayed much longer he would break down—but of course he didn't break down. He endured. When his legs grew weak and his head began to throb, he sank into a chair and stared out through a window at his garden. And waited. And endured.

Dusk came, then full dark. And finally—but slowly, so damned slowly—they began to leave by ones and twos. It was necessary that he stand by the door and see them out. Somehow, he managed it.

"You've held up so well, George . . ."

"You're so brave, George . . ."

"If you need anything, George, don't hesitate to call . . ."

An interminable time later, the door closed behind the last of them. Not a moment too soon; he was quite literally on the verge of collapse.

Margo sensed it. She said, "Why don't you go upstairs and get into bed? I'll clean up here."

"Are you sure? I can help—"

"No, I don't need any help. Go on upstairs."

He obeyed, holding onto the banister for support. He and Katy had not shared a bedroom for the past three years; there had been no physical side to their marriage in almost four, and he had liked to read at night, and she had liked to listen to her radio. He was grateful, now that she was gone, that he did not have to occupy a bed he had shared with her. That would have been intolerable.

He undressed, avoided looking at himself in the mirror while he brushed his teeth, and crawled into bed in the dark. His heart was pounding. Downstairs in the kitchen, Margo made small sounds as she cleaned up after the mourners.

You're so brave, George
. . .

No
, he thought,
I'm not. I'm weak—much weaker than poor Katy. Much, much weaker.

He forced himself to stop thinking, willed his mind blank.

Time passed; he had no idea how many minutes. The house was still now. Margo had finished her chores.

He lay rigidly, listening. Waiting.

A long while later, he heard Margo's steps in the
hall. They approached, grew louder . . . and went on past. The door of her room opened, shut again with a soft click.

He released the breath he had been holding in a ragged sigh. Not tonight, then. He hadn't expected it to be tonight, not this night. Tomorrow? The need in him was so strong it was an exquisite torture. How he yearned to feel her arms around him, to be drawn fiercely, possessively against the hard nakedness of her body, to succumb to the strength of her, the overpowering dominant
strength
of her! She had killed Katy for him; he had no doubt of it. When would she come to claim her prize?

Tomorrow?

Please
, he thought as he began to masturbate,
please let it be tomorrow
.

Some titles are irresistible. Or rather; from a writer's perspective, some lines and phrases are such perfect titles that they cry out for stories to be created for them. "Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg," for instance, a don marquis quote that inspired a "Nameless Detective" novelette. "The Mayor of Asshole Valley "—I haven't found the right story for that one yet, but I will eventually. And "I Think I Will Not Hang Myself Today," all thanks to G. K Chesterton. As I wrote in an earlier headnote, fictioneers are notoriously poor judges of their own work; so I realize I'm inviting disagreement when I say that this little title-generated tale is among the two or three best, if not the best, of the three-hundred-plus shorts I've written. So be it. That's the reason I've saved it as the final entry in these pages.

T
he leaves on the trees were dying.

She had noted that before, of course; neither her mind nor her powers of observation had been eroded by the passing years. But this morning, seen from her bedroom window, it seemed somehow a sudden thing, as if the maples and Japanese elms had changed color overnight, from bright green to red and brittle gold. Just yesterday it had been summer, now all at once it was autumn.

John had been taken from her on an October afternoon. It would be fitting if autumn were her time, too.

Perhaps today, she thought. Why not today?

For a while longer, Miranda stood looking out at the cold morning, the sky more gray than blue. Wind rattled the frail leaves, now and then tore one loose and swirled it to the ground. Even from a distance, the maple leaves resembled withered hands, their veins and skeletal bone structure clearly visible. The wind, blowing from east to west, sent the fallen ones skittering across the lawn and its bordering flower beds, piled them in heaps along the wall of the old barn.

Looking at the barn this morning filled her with sadness. Once, when John was alive, the skirling whine of his power saws and the fine, fresh smells of sawdust and wood stain and lemon oil made the barn seem alive, as sturdy and indestructible as the beautiful furniture that came from his workshop. Now it was a sagging shell, a lonely place of drafts and shadows and ghosts, its high center beam like the crosspiece of a gallows.

So little left, she thought as she turned from the window. John gone these many years. Moira gone—no family left at all. Lord Byron gone six months, and as much as she missed the little Sealyham's companionship, she hadn't the heart to replace him with another pet. Gone, too, were most of her friends. And the pleasures of teaching grammar and classic English literature, the satisfaction that came from helping to shape young minds. ("We're sorry, Mrs. Halliday, but you know the mandatory retirement age in our district is sixty-five.") For a time there had been a few students to privately tutor, but none had come since last spring. County library cutbacks had ended her volunteer work at the local branch. The arthritis made it all but impossible for her to continue her sewing projects for homeless children. Even Mrs. Boyer in the next block had found someone younger and stronger to babysit her two preschoolers.

The loneliness had been endurable when she was needed, really needed. Being able to help others had given some meaning and purpose to her life. Now, though, she had become the needy one, requiring help with the cleaning, the yardwork, her weekly grocery shopping. All too soon, she would no longer be able to drive her car, and then she would be housebound, totally dependent on others. If that happened...