Henry walked out on the front-door steps with Doc Cathey and closed the door behind him. There Doc Cathey paused and got out his vestpocket watch and opened it and looked longer than he needed to at the time. He said at last, “They’re funny damn people.” He shook his head.
Henry looked past him at the diner and the valley and the hills beyond, but he was seeing none of it. He saw, instead, Simon Bale as he’d sat nearly all day on the bench in the garden, like a man in a daze, with Jimmy at his feet. He walked down the steps with Doc Cathey and slowly along the gravel walk that led around the diner to the front, where Doc had his car. He said at last: “You don’t still think he set that fire himself?”
“I dunno,” Doc Cathey said. “I suppose I don’t.”
“You wouldn’t if you’d seen him this morning,” Henry said. He opened the car door and Doc Cathey got in, very slowly, pulling himself up in with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the seat back, and drew the door shut behind him and hunted in his coat pocket for his key ring.
“Likely not,” Doc Cathey said at last. Then for a minute he stopped hunting for his keys and sat perfectly still, thinking. He tilted his head and looked over his glasses at Henry. “You be careful,” he said. It wasn’t as if he knew something more than he cared to say or even as if he had an uneasy hunch. It was some kind of half-pitiful, half-revolting plea, an old man pretending the years brought wisdom they hadn’t brought, wanting to be first to have given the warning if anything bad should come of all this, but wanting it without the faintest notion of whether what was coming would be bad or good.
“Oh, don’t worry, Doc,” Henry said. He slapped the old man’s shoulder.
Doc Cathey went back to hunting for his keys and found them at last and started up the car. Oil smoke bloomed up from underneath as if the car had caught fire. Henry stood with his arms folded, watching the old man pull away. Then, taking his time, brooding, he went back to the diner. He’d no sooner closed the door than the bell rang, calling him back to the pumps.
It was after six when Henry drove down to the hospital in Slater. He drove slowly, ponderously erect in the seat, as always, the steering wheel rubbing against his belly, and all the way down the winding road he wondered what the devil he was going to do. It wasn’t right that the woman should be shoveled away into a pauper’s grave and forgotten: Sooner throw her on a manure spreader like the carcass of a calf and haul her away to some gulley. He’d said to Callie’s mother, “What do you think? Would the Church have money for that sort of thing?” and she’d said, “The Baptist Church?” He’d pursed his lips and drummed on the tabletop. “No, I guess they wouldn’t,” he’d said. “The County handles hundreds of cases like that,” Callie’s mother had said. “It’s no shame, these days. Since buryings have gotten to be so expensive, some people get the County to do it even when they truly don’t need to. Some people think it’s a shame to spend money on the dead instead of the living. You should hear Frank talk about that!” Henry had nodded. He’d heard. There wasn’t anybody in this half of the state that hadn’t heard Frank Wells on funerals. But you could bet your bottom dollar old Frank would go in style: She’d see to it for spite.
The white guard posts curved down and down, on his right, and he could look off and see the whole valley like a painting, the river smooth and silent as mercury, reflecting the trees. This side of the trees there were flat acres of winter wheat and peas and hay and stretches of new-plowed ground. It was like a garden, in the gold light of late afternoon; it was exactly what Paradise ought to be like: a tractor humming along, far below him, small, on the seat a boy with a wide straw hat; to the right of the tractor, red and white cows moving slowly down the lane to a big gray barn with clean white trim. With a little imagination a man could put angels in the sky, the kind in Bible illustrations, and great golden clouds like those. Except of course that eternity wasn’t going to be like that. No tractors, in any case, or trees, or fields. Whatever good you might say of the spirit, you had to give the things of earth their due — silver cords and golden bowls and whatever else it was. He thought all at once of the old country cemetery up on the hillside behind his house, where his father and mother were buried. There’d been a road through there twenty, twenty-five years ago, but they’d moved the highway now and the place was isolated, you couldn’t reach it in a car except by driving down a two-rut lane like a cowpath through overgrown meadow. He would see it sometimes when he went up onto the ridge to hunt, and each time — especially in late afternoon, when the light was queerly charged, the way it was now — it would be as if he were discovering the place for the first time: a natural garden that had been the same for a thousand thousand years. All at once he said to himself, startled, “Why not?” The reasons why not rushed over him like August rain, and he put the thought out of his head and kept it out until he stepped into the long, tiled hall in the basement of the Enloe Memorial Hospital, where the smell of formaldehyde made his stomach turn, and the girl in white and blue beside him — she couldn’t be more than seventeen, no more than a baby — said, “You think this is bad, you should watch them do an autopsy! Glaagh!” He looked at her in alarm. “Have you seen an autopsy?” he said. She shrugged. “Dozens of times. They take this saw—” she drew a line around her forehead from ear to ear “—and they lift off the top of the head like a bottlecap.”
They showed him the body. Henry Soames stood huge and sagging, his skin gray, and stared in disbelief at the woman’s indignity. Her burnt flesh smelled like hoof rot. The doctor or attendant (he couldn’t tell which) at the desk said, “Who’ll be handling the funeral?”
“Wiegerts’ Funeral Home,” he said. The words came out calm and flat, but his heart was racing and the skin of his neck tingled.
“You a relative?” the man asked.
“No, a friend,” Henry said. “But I’m to take charge of it.”
The man got out papers, and Henry thought again of Callie and, worse, of Callie’s mother, and he shut his eyes for a quick, dead serious prayer to whatever might be up there to watch over fools and children.
It wasn’t until he faced his wife, two hours later — he’d stopped at Wiegerts’ before coming home — that he fully realized the magnitude of what he’d done. “Callie,” he said at once, bravely, but his knees went weak underneath him, and he said only, “how is he by now?”
“All right, I guess,” she said. “I really can’t tell.”
She was in the dining room, sewing. Scraps were spread from one end of the room to the other. “He surely is good with Jimmy, I’ll have to hand it to him.” She pressed on the sewing machine pedal, and Henry waited for the noise to finish.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, “just the way Jimmy’s taken to him. You never have to wonder where Jimmy is at all. It’s like having a full-time baby-sitter.”
Henry laughed, but hollowly, his heart sinking with the returning thought of the money Callie believed they still had sitting in the bank. He swallowed.
She said, “But I can’t say Mom’s very happy about it.”
He thought with a sudden leap of excitement that he still might stop the check. At least he could have paid on “time.” He was sweating. “Well, good,” he said. He smiled, white.
“Good?” She looked up. “—That Mom’s not happy?”