“That group getting out of the cruiser?” he asked her. “That’s Sarah, the short one. Jody and Chub Blount are the others, and their boys, Alfred and Alvin. Twins. If you want to go to the graveyard for the burial, ride out with Sarah and her husband, Mooney. Sam Mooney. He’s probably inside the church, getting set to ring the bell. He’s a deacon.”
“Is it all right?” She had opened her door and had one foot on the ground.
“All right? Well, I guess you’ll have to ask them. Sarah and Mooney. They’re the ones to tell you if it’s all right. Not me.”
She decided to risk it. She had got out of the car completely and was peering in at him through the open door. “Hamilton, I’m sorry, but please, tell me why you aren’t going to the funeral.”
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Go,” he said stiffly, not looking at her. “Go on. You haven’t imagined being dead, so you go on. It’ll help you keep from imagining it a while longer.” He paused a second and pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle, then went on. “To me, not imagining being dead is like believing in Santa Claus, you ought to do it as long as you can. So go ahead, you deserve it,” he said, suddenly smiling into her puzzled face. “We all do.”
So she did go, as he instructed, first to the funeral service, which was appropriately somber and brief, and, after the ceremony, she left her seat at the back and paraded with the others past the coffin and looked down, once, at the embalmed, parchmentlike face of the old woman, and then filed out of the church, where she joined the rest of the people at the roadside and where she introduced herself to the stout woman Hamilton had pointed out and who had by then been joined by her husband, also stout and as short as his wife.
When Dora asked if she could ride with them to the cemetery, it was the man, Mooney, who smiled and said, “Of course,” and when they had driven the three miles out of town to the cemetery on the hillside overlooking the frozen, lead-gray Suncook River, it was the husband, Mooney, who briefly told her what she by then suspected, that Hamilton and the rest of the family had been engaged in a “feud” for over ten years, “maybe even longer, maybe since he was born,” Mooney added. But he hadn’t enough time to tell her much more than that, so in many ways, and in a few new ways, as she got out of Mooney’s car and crossed the narrow cemetery lane to where half a dozen people she recognized from the church and the pallbearers and the minister were gathered around the casket and open grave, she was as confused as she had been back in front of the church when she had first stepped out of Hamilton’s car.
There was a sharp, steady wind blowing off the river. The mourners had positioned themselves at the head of the grave, behind the waist-high granite gravestone, with their backs to the wind. Dora walked quickly around the grave and the four or five floral arrangements at the foot, noticing as she passed the large fan of white chrysanthemums among them, and took a place at the end of the line, next to Mooney, who, like most of the others in the group, had jammed his hands into his coat pockets and was staring at the ground. One or two of the men had folded their arms over their chests and were staring into the sour sky, but all of them were standing in postures that to Dora seemed more defiant than mournful, more angry than grieving, Mooney’s face was set, his soft chin and cheeks held tightly back, almost as if he were wincing. Next to him Sarah, far from indulging in the expected filial weeping, was scowling darkly down at the bleached-out ground, and beyond her, Jody, too, scowled and worked her lips against her teeth. Chub was one of the men whose thick arms were crossed over their beefy chests and who looked up at the sky and flexed the muscles in their jaws. Even the twin boys, Alfred and Alvin, in their awkward way, stood angrily at the head of their grandmother’s grave and looked as if they were about to have a tantrum.
Dora didn’t know what to make of this show of apparent anger. She felt as if she had walked into the middle of a play, one of those modern plays where the characters never speak and act in the ways you expect them to speak and act. Even the minister looked angry, standing there at the foot of the grave, his Bible in his hand, glaring down at the gravestone and then scowling into the book as he read the half-dozen sentences that committed Alma Stark’s mortal remains to the earth. Was this how the people of this town expressed their grief? Who were they angry at? It almost seemed they were angry with God Himself for having taken the old woman from them. But she knew that couldn’t be true — surely, Alma had not been that passionately loved a mother and grandmother, that steadfast and selfless a friend and neighbor. Surely, she could not have been so desperately mourned that her survivors would blaspheme the God who had taken her from them.
The minister, having completed the requisite benediction, gave the signal to the two men from Heywoods’ Funeral Home to lower the casket, and then he spun around and stalked across the roadway to the car, with the others immediately following. As the casket hissed hydraulically into the cold, dark earth, Dora suddenly found herself alone, and she started to rush after Mooney and his wife Sarah, who were already grimly getting into their car. Glancing back at the gravestone as she passed alongside the grave, she saw with mild surprise that the single large stone had been put there to mark two graves, not one. On the left of the polished face of the stone it read HORACE MOORE STARK, with the dates 1892–1963, and on the right half of the face it read ALMA BRAITHWAITE STARK, with the year of her birth, 1893– and a blank space left for the year of her death, 1973.
Was there something about this stone, Dora wondered, that had angered them? Why? What was wrong with the stone? It seemed perfectly appropriate to her — the husband, Horace, had died first, in 1963, she could see that, and naturally the wife, knowing she would someday be buried next to him, had placed a single stone to mark both graves, leaving blank the place where the year of her own death would eventually be carved. Dora was sure that many surviving wives and husbands handled the matter precisely in this manner. The alternative, she thought, as she got into the back seat of Mooney’s car, was to employ two separate stones and to leave the selection of each stone and its placement entirely in the hands of the survivors of each partner, which, she reasoned, would probably be a slightly more expensive and complicated way of doing it, but at least it would have the advantage of not trying to anticipate the order in which the various members of a family would die, who would be the survivors and who would not. And one would not, year after year, every time one came out to the cemetery, to pay one’s respects to the memory of one’s dead husband, have to look on one’s own gravestone, with that blank space for the date of one’s death beckoning to one, impatiently reminding one who was next, suggesting by its very incompleteness that one was late, was overdue, urging one to rush, to come down sooner to the earth.
They were almost back to the church, and none of the three in the car had said a word. Then, in a low, frightened voice, Dora asked, “Did Hamilton have that gravestone installed on his own?” knowing that the answer would be yes, and knowing that he had done it without ever having mentioned it to any of them, not to his mother and not to either of his sisters, and knowing, too, that they had discovered its presence one afternoon, doubtless one Memorial Day, when they all had gone out to the cemetery with Alma to place flowers on the old man’s grave, which up to then had probably been marked by a modest brass plaque laid flat in the ground, the conventional way for survivors to put off the expense and the usually painful negotiations with one another that accompany the selection and purchase of a large, permanent, granite marker.