The Watchman (4 page)

Beautiful just like it was brand new! she was saying, pleased at his praise of the dress far more than anything he could have said of her. And wouldn't you just swear it was made for me. Cole? And nobody would ever guess—would they, Cole?

Guess what, honey? he said. 

About this dress, she said. It was Mama's.

Mister Thomas Peace, the Adena Undertaker, was from time to time subject to nightmare premonitions of total public health. Some would have thought, to hear certain men talk, that Peace willed them to die. It was true that he did not will them to live—not forever, that is. But what landscape painter would not stagger at the news that cows, river willows, and weather-beaten rural slums were to be abolished? Hence Peace the Undertaker's obsessive vision of professional apocalypse: public fatalities on the decline, longevity run out of hand, an epidemic of deathlessness, the demise of demise, the antiquation of that most fragrant of literary forms—the obituary—an abrupt and gay silliness about lilies, the gloomy hymns gone humdrum, grave diggers turned gardeners, and Peace's own black hearse painted taffy-colored in its conversion to a tinkling wagon of good-humor. That very night he was in such a mood—and certainly for no good reason. The truck from the penitentiary was late coming with the body of the executed man. But that sometimes happened. No reason to be so damned depressed. In the morning everything would go well.

At seven o'clock sharp the doors of Peace's Parlors would open to the throngs that would be waiting. The queue for the Viewing of bodies of condemned men was an Adena tradition. It made up for the little fee the State paid Thomas Peace for the labors involved. Sometimes on such mornings Peace would fix one fatigued and oysterish eye to the parted lace curtains of his parlor and see the line of them stretching so far as to be lost in the morning mists. Sometimes after the execution of a particularly notorious criminal it would seem that every man, woman, and child in all Mound County stood yonder on the brick sidewalk, shuffling and impatient. Their morning faces would thin off into the dwindling obscurity of mists like dull and mismatched beads upon a dirty string of sleepy yet savage curiosity. It paid little, it was sometimes tedious, but it was nice publicity. Peace was rather a student of human nature. He would watch their faces as they filed past. All the town there it would seem sometimes. The faint scents of his trade: formaldehyde scarcely perceptible and among its wisps the paradox of flowers. Smells of the living human queue as well: mortal, morning smells, sleep smells, the

fragrances of life that rises early and hurries to stand in wait for a glimpse of never-quite-credible death. Peace would speculate: They come to see and say to themselves: Why, no. It's not me yet. Smells of breakfast: bacon-smoke still whispering in their work shirts and house dresses. Scent of shaving soap. They come to look quickly and say: How natural. He's asleep just like I was asleep an hour before now. But I woke. I really woke up. So it's not me yet. And so this night, on the eve of a Viewing, Peace the Undertaker anxiously paced his parlors waiting for the truck from the prison. Something was amiss. He could feel it in his bones. It was late—later than they had ever been before in arriving. He was not nervous about the job of embalming the executed man. Nothing complicated: simplicity itself. Cosmetics over electrode bum marks, a wig for the shaved head, flesh tints to conceal usual discoloring flush of face. Star-fracture of optic lens but that never shows: lids gummed down. Simpler certainly than in the old hanging-days. Occasional decapitation problem then. Remember time head of Sissonville axe slayer got misplaced. Never found. Used head of Angel Swamp pauper destined for Potter's Field. Nice effect. A real triumph. Even the widow didn't seem to notice difference. O, beauty. Poor Matthew Hood. Always came. Victim of Progress. Back in his hanging heyday a proud man. Thomas Peace wrung his moist hands nervously. They itched to be about their art. The truck from the penitentiary. Late. Late. Something surely amiss. Peace longed to get to work. It was not that Peace the Undertaker was an unkindly, malevolent, death-wishing man. He was a businessman. He was no greedy misanthrope; no clammy-spaded, morbid grave digger, dogging the steps of his fellow man, fevering shamelessly for him to drop down cold as soon as possible so that Peace might clap him into a scrolled box and turf him away snugly to snooze till the horn-shout of Doomsday. Peace was an artist. He hungered for his canvas, his pigments. Still and all, he was frequently seized by these unnerving moods of professional pessimism. Fortunately, man's manifest mortality was always there to reassure him.

Peace the Undertaker was well thought of in Mound County and when, as once occurred, he was heard to remark in a voice of hushed alarm: "Have you noticed how the death rate has been falUng off lately?" it seemed, to those who overheard him, an imiocently fiscal comment:

something a grocer might say in a bad year for turnips. Moreover, it would be a mean mind indeed which could think cynically of a man so warmhearted as to have embalmed his wife Elma's adored Irish setter Herbert in a posture so movingly lifelike that its lifted, lacquered nose seemed at times fixed upon poor, grieving Elma's eyes and at others that nose might well have been snuffling for the spoor of Heaven itself, as if the Almighty were the illusive Bird of Salvation after which all hunters searched vainly in the shrubbery of this life. The dog was cunningly mobile, as well: Peace having provided Herbert with steel foot-rollers like a child's Christmas bear by Steiff, so that Elma could move it about the house in her wake of chores. And it was only those few townsmen of hasty and quarrelsome vision who fancied they saw in the setter's cocked, agate eyes a light of despairing wildness and imagined upon its trumped-up face a wounded expression of outraged disbelief in the incessant, hounding chatter of its little iron wheels. It was perhaps small children—natural skeptics—who were the least appreciative of the art of Peace the Undertaker. Almost all of these, not yet hooked by their elders' festive addiction to funerals, saw Peace the Undertaker as a kind of creeping landslide, a human glacier moving with inexorable approach across the green playground of their world: grinding uncles under grass, immuring aunts like butterflies in amber, absorbing grandpas, parents, and pleasant candy storekeepers, and leaving in its wake nothing but the trackless memory of vanished school chums.

None remembered it now but, had there been any to remember, one of them surely would have made something of the clue that, as a child, Thomas Peace was forbidden to play with dolls but that he did so anyway, secretly, in the shadows of his father's carriage-house. They were never new dolls, they were old dolls—dead dolls, so to speak: broken dolls, sawdust-trickling dolls, dolls with an arm gone, dolls with melted wax faces or splintered china faces, decidedly dead dolls. To this clue they might add the spectacle of young Tom Peace plaguing old Jake Booher for every empty shoe box he could spare. But no one remembers. In an age, two thousand years from this, when bewildered archaeologists unearth myriad dolls from the sand loam and humus of a vanished river village—but let them do their guessing. No one remembers—and that's just as well. There is trouble enough now for now. Thomas Peace

hears, at last, the whine of tires and the rumble of a truck in the driveway at the rear of Peace's Parlors. He hurries to the back door, flings it open, peers anxiously into the headlights as he searches for the familiar face of the penitentiary's Captain of Guards. Yes, he had been right—something clearly amiss. In the half-light Peace could see that it was not the prison van that had backed up to his rear door. Before he snapped on the back porch lights he saw the slowly revolving Grimes' light of the Mound County Sheriffs truck. Luther Alt's deputy Tzchak and two other men were struggling with a sheet-covered figure on a stretcher at the truck's rear doors.

Where's the boys from the pen? called Thomas Peace uneasily. I've been waiting up for that convict half the night.

Tzchak grunted, eased his end of the stretcher up onto the concrete ledge of the porch.

Got a little surprise for you, Mister Peace, he said.

What surprise? said Peace the Undertaker. Where's the body of the electrocuted convict? Deputy, what are you doing here? I don't understand all this. See here, deputy, I've got a full night's work ahead of me to be ready for the Viewing by seven this morning.

Oh, you'll have your Viewing all right. Mister Peace, said Tzchak. I reckon it'll draw a better crowd than any burned con ever did. You'll have your Viewing. Don't never worry about that.

What are you talking about, deputy?

I'm talking about our little surprise here under the sheet. Mister Peace, Tzchak said. Somebody went and got himself murdered tonight.

Murdered, said Peace the Undertaker. Murdered?

Cold dead murdered. Mister Peace, Tzchak said.

Murdered, said Thomas Peace again as if he had never come across the word before. Is this some sort of joke, deputy? Nobody ever gets murdered in Mound County.

Somebody sure as hell did tonight, Mister Peace, Tzchak said.

Who? breathed the undertaker.

We're working on that now, chuckled Tzchak.

What do you mean by that?—working on it? cried Peace the Undertaker. See here, deputy, if this is some sort of prank I'll take it up with Sheriff Alt.

Sheriff's not available right now, smiled Tzchak. In fact, nobody knows just rightly where Sheriff Alt is at right now.

Well, whose body is that yonder on the stretcher then? snapped Peace the Undertaker.

We'll know directly, Tzchak said. An hour or two and we'll know, Mister Peace. Maybe you can help us. Build up the face a little. We've got him printed already.

What do you mean—build up the face? said Thomas Peace.

Just what I said, Mister Peace, said the deputy. A little wax and wire. You're supposed to be pretty handy in that line. That's one reason we brung him here.

I—don't understand, said Thomas Peace.

It's simple enough, said Tzchak. Most of his face's been shot away by all five bullets from a Smith and Wesson Police special.

Cristi Alt called to him from her little kitchen: Don't you want me to fix you something to eat, Jason.

No, he said.

It was his birthday and he had come to her apartment late and pretty drunk and not wanting to go home.

It'll make you feel better, she called to him.

Thanks, he said. No thanks.

He could hear her moving around with her maddening efficiency: making coffee, putting things away, fetching down cups, spoons, saucers, washing up her few supper things, smoking a cigarette and humming under her breath. It was a quality he vaguely resented: her independence, her ability to do anything that needed doing and sometimes many things at once. She was like a man about this. But in this only. There were two Cristis within that flesh in which, it seemed to Jason Hunnicutt, only one should abide. It made him want to hit her sometimes when he would find her alone in her parlor with the coffee table littered with wood and tubes and razor blades building the little model of a boat. He often wondered why, in the times when they made love, that she did not take over and seduce him with the savage expertise of an amazon. But when he would look at her again; when they would say with their eyes that it was time again and when he would touch her hand or a breast or her lips, she was all sprawled female, softness and back-tumbling gift: her eyes sometimes laughing gay, some nights shameless and scalding, others dreamy and glazed with God-praise for the Earth-wonder of his flesh and for hers and for the one-flesh they made together. She was a riddle of many parts: no woman, at all, he would think

sometimes, but rather a whole village of women and each one confoundingly, unpredictably different.

Cream in your coffee? she called from the kitchen.

He did not bother to answer. She was deliberately poking at him tonight because he was drunk, because it was his birthday and because by the time he had got there all the candles had melted and spoiled the icing on the cake she had baked for him.

Well, I can't much blame her, he thought, closing his eyes and resting his head back on the studio couch and thinking about the many Cristis that she was. Jason liked sameness, predictability. In his childhood he had found it so: he felt without it that something in the scheme of life was about to ambush him. He had discovered early that consistency and uniformity were the best ways to escape being noticed. But then, since his failure in military school, his father rarely noticed him anyhow. And the few times he did were times when Jason had brought a book home from the library which was not .Right-Thinking or had worn a sport shirt which proved to be, to the retired Major, a red cape in the already bloody arena.

Thanks, Cris, he said, watching her put the steaming cup on the table before him. He drank hot coffee till his eyes watered and suddenly he thought he was going to have to go in the bathroom and be sick. He wanted suddenly to start a quarrel with her, to get her so mad that she would order him out and tell him never to come back. But she would not fight with him. And it seemed sometimes that this was the most dreadful kind of fighting back: the pacifying touch of love, the perhaps patronizing, kindly smile. Sometimes—rarely—her eyes would darken at something he would say and she would turn away but he could never be sure whether that was a dumb, answering anger or a still hurt. He kept his eyes closed, his head not spinning so much now: listening and feeling her move beside him on the couch as she fetched a nylon from a little wicker basket and set about mending the start of a run with nail polish.

Cris, have you got any aspirin? he said. I've got myself one fine headache.

Hold on, she said, rising. They're in the bedroom.

He watched her hips going, her fine slim heels looking grand and elegant even in the rundown sneakers, her grain-gold, whiskey-colored hair swinging loose like sleeves of silk

along the back of her many-laundcrcd cashmere sweater. And hating himself now because he had kruiwn well and good that the aspirin were always on the little stand beside her bed; that he had only wanted her to go there, that he really had the clearest head in the world. Hating himself, too, because he knew that she would probably not come back with the aspirin at all. She would stay, humming maybe in the dark, waiting in the dark for him to come to her, her cheap little plastic radio from the hardware store thrumming softly in the bedroom air which smelled like Cara Noma cologne, face creams, shampoo, girl, and clean sheets. He lighted a cigarette with trembling hands but there was something in him of restored boypride: for once he had predicted her. Still she spoiled it a little. Because suddenly he heard her hammering a nail into the wall plaster.