“Why, that’s real nice,” Jud said. “You pullin him on a sled. Bet he liked that, didn’t he, Ellie?”

Beginning to weep, Ellie nodded.

Rachel began to say something, but Louis squeezed her arm-be still awhile.

“I used to pull im a lot,” Ellie said, weeping, “and he’d laugh and laugh. Then we’d go in and Mommy would fix us cocoa and say, ‘Put your boots away,’ and Gage would grab them all up and scream ‘Boots! Boots!’ so loud it hurt your ears.

Remember that, Mom?”

Rachel nodded.

“Yeah, I bet that was a good time, all right,” Jud said, handing the picture back. “And he may be dead now, Ellie, but you can keep your memories of him.”

“I’m going to,” she said, wiping at her face. “I loved Gage, Mr. Crandall.”

“I know you did, dear.” He leaned in and kissed her, and when he withdrew, his eyes swept Louis and Rachel stonily. Rachel met his gaze, puzzled and a little hurt, not understanding. But Louis understood well enough: What are you doing for her? Jud’s eyes asked. Your son is dead, but your daughter is not. What are you doing for her?

Louis looked away. There was nothing he could do for her, not yet. She would have to swim in her grief as best she could. His thoughts were too full of his son.

42

By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall.

“Where you going, Lou?” Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching “Little House on the Prairie” with Gage’s picture on her lap.

“I thought I’d pick up a pizza.”

“Didn’t you get enough to eat earlier?”

“I just didn’t seem hungry then,” he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie: “I am now.”

That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gage’s funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburger-and-noodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche. “It will keep until you want it, if it doesn’t all get eaten,”

she told Rachel. “Quiche is easy to warm up.” The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appeared-neither of them would speak to Louis or even come close to him, for which he was not sorry-with a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheese-a large wheel of his old favorite, Mr.

Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples.

The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences.

This was the funeral party, and although it was quiet, it was not quite subdued.

There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some.

After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago) Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told him-that at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased's shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love; that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceased’s ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying D. O. A. tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong.

Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her.

Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, let-it-all-go way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gage’s death or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar half-world of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter's. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachel’s shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis.

Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canapes, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm.

Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing… only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied.

It was not as if he intended to do anything.

Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two six-packs of cold beer, and called ahead to Napoli’s for a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza.

“Want to give me a name on that, sir?”

Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, Louis thought.

“Lou Creed.”

“Okay, Lou, we’re real busy, so it’ll be maybe forty-five minutes-that okay for you?”

“Sure,” Louis said and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh-He cut that thought off.

He drove past Napoli’s to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None.

He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semicircle, were wrought-iron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louis’s mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills; there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry water) and a few isolated weeping willows. It wasn’t quiet. The turnpike was near-the drone of traffic came on the steady, chill wind-and the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport.

He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking, They’ll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenage neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men (there’s that word again) were over. The right-hand gate swung in with a faint screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through.

He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch.

He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around.

A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who?

Andrew Marvel? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway?

Jud’s voice spoke up in his mind then, worried and-frightened? Yes. Frightened.

Louis, what are you doing here? You’re looking up a road you don’t want to travel.