The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Ernie’s depleted blue eyes—his whites as yellow as cheap mustard—found me standing back on shore. For an instant, he gaped at me, his bony visage tricked and sad and too well loved. “What the fuck’s this, Frank? What’s going on?” He said this to me, but to everyone else, too. “What the fuck’re you assholes doing to me?” It was at this point that they immersed him in the cold water, cradling him like a man already dead. He howled, “Ooooooowwoooo. Goddamn it’s cold!”

  “It’s good, Ernie,” Thor droned in his ear. “Just let it happen to you. Go down into it. It’s g-o-o-d.” Ernie’s mouth turned down like a cartoon character’s. His shoulders went limp, his head lolled, his dismayed gaze found the sky. Once they had him immersed, they touched his face, his chest, his head, his hands, his legs, I guess his ass.

  “I’m dying of goddamn cancer,” Ernie suddenly cried out, as if his dignity had suddenly been refound. “Cut this shit out!”

  I didn’t take part. Though there was a moment just as they lowered poor Ernie into the Atlantic’s damp grasp (nobody stopped to think he might catch pneumonia) when he looked back at me again on the beach, his eyes helpless and resigned but also full of feeling, a moment when I realized they were doing for Ernie all the living can do, and that it was stranger that I was on the sideline and, worse yet, that Ernie knew it. You usually don’t think about these things until it’s too late. Even so, I’d never let anything like that happen to me, no matter how far gone I was or how beneficial it might be for somebody else.

  I mean, who let who down, for crap sake?” Bud Sloat says. “If you can’t win your own goddamn home state, and the Dow’s at ten forty-two, and your state’s as dumb-ass as Tennessee, I’d quit. I’d just fuckin’ quit.”

  Bud’s not talking in the hushed tones appropriate to the dead-lying-inside-the-big-frosted-double-doors, but just jabbering on noisily about whatever pops into his head. The election. The economy. Bud’s a trained attorney—Princeton and Harvard Law—but owns a lamp company in Haddam, Sloat’s Decors, and has personally placed pricey one-of-a-kind designer lighting creations in every CEO’s house in town and made a ton of money doing it. He’s sixty, small, fattish and yellow-toothed, a dandruffy, burnt-faced little pirate who wears drug-store half glasses strung around his neck on a string. If he wasn’t wearing his Irish knock-about hat, you could see his strawberry-blond toupé, which looks about as real on his cranium as a Rhode Island Red. Bud is a hard-core Haddam townie and would ordinarily be wearing regulation Haddam summer dress: khakis, nubble-weave blue blazer, white Izod or else a pink Brooks’ button-down with a stained regimental tie, canvas belt, deck shoes and a little gold lapel pin bearing the enigmatic letters YCDBSOYA, which Bud wants everybody to ask him about. But the day’s chill and solemnity have driven him back to baggy green cords, the dumbbell saddle oxfords and an orange wool turtleneck under his London Fog, so he looks like he’s headed to a late-season Princeton game. He only lacks a pennant.

  Bud’s a blue-dog Democrat (i.e., a Republican) even though he’s yammering, trying to act betrayed by fellow Harvard-bore Gore, as if he voted for him. Bud, though, absolutely voted for Bush, and if I wasn’t here, he’d admit right now that he feels damn good about it—“Oh, yaas, made the practical businessman’s choice.” Most of my Haddam acquaintances are Republicans, including Lloyd, even if they started out on the other side years back. None of them wants to talk about that with me.

  “How’s old Mr. Prostate, Franklin?” Bud’s worked up an unserious glum-mouth frown, as if everybody knows prostate cancer’s a big rib tickler and we need to lighten up about it. My Mayo procedure came to light (regrettably) during our men’s “sharing session” on the cold beach with Ernie in October, just before he got dunked in the ocean for his own good. We all agreed to tell a candid story, and that was the only one I had, not wanting to share the one about my wife hitting the road with her dead husband. I know Bud wants to ask me how it feels to walk down the street with hot BBs in your gearbox, but doesn’t have the nerve. (For the most part it’s unnoticeable—except, of course, you never don’t know it.)

  “I’m all locked and loaded, Bud.” I stand beside them at the bottom of the steps and give Bud a mirthless line-mouth smile of no tolerance, which re-informs him I don’t like him. Haddam used to be full of schmoes like Bud Sloat, yipping little Princetonians who never missed New Year’s Eve at the Princeton Club, showed up for every P-rade, smoker, ball game and fund-raiser, and wore their orange-and-black porkpie hats and tiger pajamas to bed. These guys are all into genealogy and Civil War history, and like to sit around quoting Mark Twain and General Patton, and arguing that a first-rate education as prelude to a life in retail was exactly what old Witherspoon had in mind back in 17-whatever. Bud’s business card, in collegiate Old Gothic embossed with the Princeton crest and colors (I admit to admiring it), reads, There’s the Examined Life. And Then There’s the Lamp Business.

  “Nothing’s really happening inside now, Frank,” Lloyd murmurs in his seasoned mourner’s voice, cupping a smoke down by his coat pocket and letting a drag leak out his big nose. From where I stand, I can see right inside Lloyd’s nostrils, where it’s as dark as bituminous coal. Lloyd buried my son Ralph from out of this same house nineteen years ago, and we’ve always shared a sadness (something he’s probably done with eight thousand people, many of whom he’s also by now been called on to bury). Every time he sees me, Lloyd lays a great heavy mitt on my shoulder, lowers his bluish face near mine and in a Hollywood baritone says, “How’re those kids, Frank?” As if Clarissa and Paul, my surviving children, had stayed eternally five and seven in the same way Ralph is eternally nine. Lloyd’s as big, tall, sweet and bulky as Bud is fat, weasly and lewd—a great, potato-schnozzed, coat hanger–shouldered galoot who years ago played defensive end for the Scarlet Knights, has soulful mahogany eyes deep-set in bony blue-shaded sockets and always smells like a cigarette. It’s as if Lloyd became an undertaker because one day he gazed in a mirror and noticed he looked like one. I’d be happy to be buried by Lloyd if I felt okay about being buried—which I don’t. “We put Ernie in a viewing room for an hour, Frank, just in case, but we need to get him along now. You know. Not that he’d care.” Lloyd nods professionally and looks down at his wide black shoe toes. A burning Old Spice cloud mingled with tobacco aroma issues from somewhere in the middle of Lloyd. I didn’t intend to view Ernie, or even the box he’s going out in.

  From the side of the building, the headlights of a long black Ford Expedition glow out through the weather’s gloom, ready to transfer Ernie to the boneyard, where a grave’s probably already opened. Lloyd always uses SUVs for unattended interments. Without pageantry or a hushed ruffle, life’s last performance becomes as matter-of-fact as returning books to the library.

  “Do you know what the death woman said?” Bud Sloat’s round pink face is tipped to the side, as though he’s hearing music, his shrewd retailer’s eyes hooded to convey self-importance.

  “What woman? What’s a death woman?” I say.

  Lloyd exhales a disapproving grunt, shifts back in his undertaker brogans. Squeaky, squeaky.

  “Well, you know, Ernie agreed to let this psychologist woman from someplace out in Oregon be present when he died. Actually died.” Bud keeps his face cocked, as if he’s telling an off-color joke. “She wanted to ask him things right up to the last second, okay? And then say his name for ten minutes to see if she could detect any efforts of Ernie wanting to come back to life.” Bud frowns, then grins—his thin, purple and extremely un-kissable lips parted in distaste, indicating Ernie was indisputably not our sort (Old Nassau, etc.) and here’s final proof. “Great idea, huh? Wouldn’t you say?” Bud blinks, as if it’s too astonishing for words.

  “I guess I’d have to think about that,” I say. Though not for long. This is news I don’t need to hear. Though, of course, it’s exactly what people who stand outside funeral homes while the body’s inside cooling always yak about. Now it can be told: Who he fucked, are
n’t we glad we’re smarter, where’d the money go, isn’t it a credit to us he’s in there and we’re out here.

  Bud wheezes a little laughlike noise down in his throat. “You need to hear what she said, though. This Professor Novadradski. Naturally it’d be a Ruskie.”

  I think a moment about Ernie mugging his “Rooshan” accent and pounding the table at the Manasquan Bar years and years behind us now, when Russian meant something. “Nyet, nyet, nyet,” he’d growled and shouted that night about some crazy thing, took off one of his loafers and pounded it like Khrushchev, sweated and drank vodka like a Cossack. We all laughed till we cried.

  “What she said was—and I got this from Thor Blainer” (the defrocked Unitarian minister). “He said the male nurse out at Delaware-Vue came in and gave Ernie the big shot because he’d been having a pretty rough time there for a day or so. Just walked in and did the deed. And in about three minutes, Ernie quit breathing, without ever saying anything. Then this Russian woman—right down in his face—starts saying his name over and over. ‘Er-nie, Er-nie. Vat’re you tinking? How dus you feel? Dus you see some colors? Vich vunz? Are you colt? Dus you hear dis voice?’ She said it, of course, in a soothing way, so she wouldn’t scare him out of coming back if he wanted to.”

  Lloyd’s heard enough and heads off around the side of the building to check on the Expedition, its headlights still shining into the mist. Some sound audible only to undertakers has reached his ears, alerting him that a new matter needs his expertise. He ambles away, hands down in his topcoat pockets, leaning forward like he’s curious about something. Lloyd’s heard these stories a jillion times: corpses suddenly sitting up on the draining table; fingers clutching out for a last touch before the fluid gurgles in; bodies inexplicably rearranged in the casket, as if the occupant had been capering about when the lights were out. The human species isn’t supposed to go down willingly. Lloyd knows this better than Kierkegaard.

  “Okay, Lawrence,” I hear Lloyd say from around the side. “Let’s get ’er going now.”

  A tall young black man dressed in a shiny black suit, white shirt and skinny tie, and bundled into a bulky green-and-silver Eagles parka with a screaming eagle over the left breast, emerges from the porte-cochère beside the building. He’s flashing a big knowing grin, as if something supposed to be serious—but not really—has gone on inside. He stops and shares whatever it is with Lloyd, who’s facing down, listening, but who then just shakes his head in small-scale amazement. I know this young man. He is Lawrence “Scooter” Lewis, surviving son of the deceased Everick Lewis, and nephew of the now also deceased Wardell, enterprising brothers who made buckets of dough in the early nineties gentrifying beaten-up Negro housing in the Wallace Hill section of town and selling it to newcomer white Yuppies. I sold them two houses on Clio Street myself. Lawrence, I happen to know, went to Bucknell on a track scholarship but didn’t last, then entered the Army Airborne and came home to find his niche in town. It’s not an unusual narrative, even in Haddam. Scooter, who’s younger-looking than his years, gives me a sweet smile and a small wave of unexpected recognition across the lawn, then turns and walks back toward his waiting Expedition before he’s seen that I’ve waved back.

  “Now hear me out, Frank.” Bud’s short upper lip begins to curl into a sneer. I’m not going to be glad to have heard this story, whatever it is. I hope Ernie has had the good grace in death to be still and not make a fool of himself. “The second this Ruskie gal quits saying ‘Ernie, Er-nie,’ she puts her ear down close to him, where she can hear the slightest sound. And when the room’s quiet, she hears—she swears—what sounds like a voice. But it’s coming from Ernie’s stomach!” Bud flashes another astonished smile, which wipes away his sneer. “I swear to God, Frank. She swears the voice was saying ‘I’m here. I’m still here.’ Out of his goddamn stomach.” Bud looks exactly like the old-time actor Percy Helton, round, raspy-voiced, craven and mean, his fishy eyes saucered in mock horror that is actually gleeful. “Doesn’t that beat the shit out of everything you ever heard?”

  Bud, for some reason, opens his mouth as if a sound was meant to emerge, but none does, so that (having already looked in Lloyd’s nose) I now have to see his short, thick, mealy, café au lait–colored tongue, broad across as Maryland, and, I’m sure, exuding vapors I don’t want to get close to. Men. Sometimes the world is way too full of them. What I’d give this second for a woman’s ministering smell and touch. Men can be the worst companions in the world. Dogs are better.

  “She also said he was alive in a sexual sense. What do you think about that?” Bud blinks his sulfurous little peepers while fingering his half-glasses-on-a-string outside his black overcoat.

  “Death’s like turning off the TV, Bud. Sometimes a little light stays on in the middle. It’s not worth wondering about. It’s like where does the Internet live? Or can hermits have guests?”

  “That’s bullshit,” Bud snarls.

  “You probably hear more bullshit than I do, Bud.” I smile another mirthless, unwelcoming smile.

  Snow of the thin, stinging variety has begun to skitter before the burly November wind, turning the St. Augustine greener and crunchy. Sharp bits nick my ears, catch in my eyelids, sprinkle the jaunty-angled top of Bud’s tweed hat. Contrary to expectation, I wish I was inside, standing vigil beside Ernie in his box, and not out here. I remember a night years past when a young, lean but no less an asshole Buddy Sloat—still practicing divorce law and before the unexamined life of lamps caught his fancy—started a row over, of all things, whether a deaf man who rapes a deaf woman deserves a deaf jury. Bud’s view was he didn’t. The other guy, an otolaryngologist named Pete McConnicky, a member of the Divorced Men’s Club, thought the whole thing was a joke and kept looking around the bar for someone to agree with him and ease the pressure Bud felt about needing to be right about everything. Finally, McConnicky just smacked Bud in the mouth and left, which made everybody applaud. For a while, we all referred to Bud as “Slugger Sloat,” and laughed behind his back. It’d be satisfying now to hit Bud in the mouth and send him back to the lamp store crying.

  Bud, however, doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. He watches the Black-Mariah Expedition creep out from the porte-cochère, wipers flapping crusts of new snow, big headlight globes cutting the flurry, gray exhaust thickening in the cold. Ernie McAuliffe’s dark casket is in the windowed, curtained luggage-compartment, as lonely and uncelebrated as death itself—just the way Ernie wanted it, no matter how his belly ached to disagree. Scooter Lewis sits high in the driver’s seat, shining face solemn in self-conscious caution. Lloyd watches from the grass beside the driveway. He probably has another of these occasions in half an hour. The funeral business is not so different from running a restaurant.

  Unexpectedly, though, before Scooter can navigate the big Expedition out onto the street and turn up toward Constitution and the cemetery, a squad of Battle of Haddam re-enactors (Continentals) comes higgledy-piggledy, hot-footing it around the corner at the bottom end of Willow Street. These “patriots” are running, muskets in hand, heavy-gaited, their homespun socks ragged down to the ankles, shirttails flapping, beating a hasty retreat, or so it seems, from a smaller but crisply organized company of red-coated British Grenadiers hurrying around the same corner in a stiff little formation, their muskets at order arms, bayonets glinting, black regimental belts and boots, crimson tunics and high furry hats catching what muted light there is. They present an impressive aspect. The Continentals have been whooping and shouting warnings and orders on the run. “Get to the cemetery and deploy.” One’s waving an arm. “Don’t fire till you see the whites of your eyes.” From the funeral home lawn, I see this man is an Asian and small and rounded in his homespuns, though his command voice has real authority.

  The Redcoats, once onto the corner, very smartly form two lines of five, crosswise of the street, five kneeling, five standing behind. A tall, skeletal officer hurries up beside them and without any buildup barks an Englishy-sou
nding command, raises a bulky cutlass into the New Jersey air. The Grenadiers shoulder their weapons, cock their hammers, aim down their barrels and—right in the middle of Willow Street, in the cold misting snow, as it must’ve been back in 1780—cut loose up the street at the Americans, who’re just in front of Mangum & Gayden’s (in time to be shot) and blocking Scooter Lewis’s path in his Expedition.

  The English musketry produces a loud, unserious cracking sound and gives out a preposterous amount of white smoke from barrel and breech. The Continentals, swarming past the funeral home, turn as the volley goes off, and from various positions—kneeling, standing, crouching, lying on the yellow-striped asphalt—fire back with similar unserious cracks and smoke expenditures. And right away, two Brits go right over as stiff as duckpins. Three Continentals also get it—one who’s taken cover behind the hearse’s fender, with Ernie in the back. The Americans make a much more anguished spectacle out of dying than the English, who seem to know better how to expire. (It’s a strange sight, I’ll admit.) The remaining Grenadiers calmly begin to reload, using ramrods and flinting devices, while the Continentals—forefathers to guerrillas and terrorists the world over—just turn and begin hightailing it again, whooping and hoo-hawing up to Constitution, where they clamber around the corner and are gone. It hasn’t taken two minutes to fight the Battle of Willow Street.

  Lloyd Mangum, Bud Sloat and I, with Scooter behind the wheel of his hearse, have simply stood in the wet grass and borne silent witness. No humans have emerged from neighbor houses to inquire what’s what. Musket smoke drifts sideways in the snowy, foggy Willow Street atmosphere and engulfs for an instant my Suburban, parked on the other side. The sound of the Continentals, shouting orders and yahooing, echoes through the yards and silent sycamores. Other muskets discharge streets away, other manly shouts are audible above the muffled sound of campaign snares and a bugle. It is almost stirring, though I’m not in the mood. Ernie, once a combatant himself, would’ve gotten a charge out of it. He’d have wondered, as I do, if any of the soldiers were girls.