by Stephen King
Another pickup truck came around Sirois Hill and almost slammed into the back of Mrs. Parker’s Studebaker. It was Fernald DeWitt, who had promised to help George with the digging that day. He jumped from the cab, ran to Mrs. Parker, and looked at the woman kneeling in the road. Then he ran on toward the site of the collision.
“Where are you going?” Mrs. Parker screamed. “Help her! Help this woman!”
Fernald, who had fought with the Marines in the Pacific and seen terrible sights there, did not pause, but he did call back over his shoulder, “She and the kid are gone. George might not be.”
Nor was he wrong. Patsy was dead long before the ambulance arrived from Castle Rock, but Lonesome George Barton lived into his eighties. And never got behind the wheel of a motor vehicle again.
You say, “How could you know all that, Jamie Morton? You were only nine years old.”
But I do know it.
• • •
In 1976, when my mother was still a relatively young woman, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was attending the University of Maine at the time, but took the second semester of my sophomore year off, so I could be with her at the end. Although the Morton children were children no more (Con was all the way over the horizon in Hawaii, doing pulsar research at the Mauna Kea Observatories), we all came home to be with Mom, and to support Dad, who was too heartbroken to be useful; he simply wandered around the house or took long walks in the woods.
Mom wanted to spend her final days at home, she was very clear about that, and we took turns feeding her, giving her her medicine, or just sitting with her. She was little more than a skeleton by then, and on morphine for the pain. Morphine’s funny stuff. It has a way of eroding barriers—that famous Yankee reticence—which would otherwise be impregnable. It was my turn to sit with her on a February afternoon a week or so before she died. It was a day of snow flurries and bitter cold, with a north wind that shook the house and screamed beneath the eaves, but the house was warm. Hot, really. My father was in the heating oil business, remember, and after that one scary year in the mid-sixties when he looked bankruptcy in the face, he became not just successful but moderately wealthy.
“Push down my blankets, Terence,” my mother said. “Why are there so many? I’m burning up.”
“It’s Jamie, Mom. Terry’s out in the garage with Dad.” I turned down the single blanket, exposing a hideously gay pink nightgown that seemed to have nothing inside it. Her hair (all white by the time the cancer struck) had thinned to almost nothing; her lips had fallen away from her teeth, making them look too big, and somehow equine; only her eyes were the same. They were still young, and full of hurt curiosity: What’s happening to me?
“Jamie, Jamie, that’s what I said. Can I have a pill? The pain is awful today. I’ve never been in such a hole as this one.”
“In fifteen minutes, Mom.” It was supposed to be two hours, but I couldn’t see what difference it made at that point. Claire had suggested giving her all of them, which shocked Andy; he was the only one of us who had remained true to our fairly strict religious upbringing.
“Do you want to send her to hell?” he had asked.
“She wouldn’t go to hell if we gave them to her,” Claire said—quite reasonably, I thought. “It isn’t as if she’d know.” And then, nearly breaking my heart because it was one of our mother’s favorite sayings: “She doesn’t know if she’s afoot or on horseback. Not anymore.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Andy said.
“No,” Claire sighed. She was closing in on thirty by then, and was more beautiful than ever. Because she was finally in love? If so, what a bitter irony. “I don’t have that kind of courage. I only have the courage to let her suffer.”
“When she’s in heaven, her suffering will only be a shadow,” Andy said, as if this ended the matter. For him I suppose it did.
• • •
The wind howled, the old panes of glass in the bedroom’s single window rattled, and my mother said, “I’m so thin, so thin now. I was a pretty bride, everyone said so, but now Laura Mackenzie is so thin.” Her mouth drew down in a clown-moue of sorrow and pain.
I had three more hours in the room with her before Terry was due to spell me. She might sleep some of that time, but she wasn’t sleeping now, and I was desperate to distract her from the way her body was cannibalizing itself. I might have seized on anything. It just happened to be Charles Jacobs. I asked if she had any idea where he’d gone after he left Harlow.
“Oh, that was a terrible time,” she said. “A terrible thing that happened to his wife and little boy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
My dying mother looked at me with stoned contempt. “You don’t know. You don’t understand. It was terrible because it was no one’s fault. Certainly not George Barton’s. He simply had a seizure.”
She then told me what I have already told you. She heard it from the mouth of Adele Parker, who said she would never get the image of the dying woman out of her head. “What I’ll never get out of mine,” Mom said, “was the way he screamed at Peabody’s. I didn’t know a man could make a sound like that.”
• • •
Doreen DeWitt, Fernald’s wife, called my mother and gave her the news. She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first. “You’ll have to tell him,” she said.
My mother was horrified at the prospect. “Oh, no! I couldn’t!”
“You have to,” Doreen said patiently. “This isn’t news you give over the phone, and except for that old gore-crow Myra Harrington, you’re his closest neighbor.”
My mother, all her reticence washed away by the morphine, told me, “I gathered up my courage to do it, but I was caught short as I was going out the door. I had to turn around and run to the toidy and shit.”
She walked down our hill, across Route 9, and to the parsonage. She didn’t say, but I imagine it was the longest walk of her life. She knocked on the door, but at first he didn’t come, although she could hear the radio inside.
“Why would he have heard me?” she inquired of the ceiling as I sat there beside her. “The first time, my knuckles barely grazed the wood.”
She knocked harder the second time. He opened the door and looked at her through the screen. He was holding a large book in one hand, and all those years later she remembered the title: Protons and Neutrons: The Secret World of Electricity.
“Hello, Laura,” he said. “Are you all right? You’re very pale. Come in, come in.”
She came in. He asked her what was wrong.
“There’s been a terrible accident,” she said.
His look of concern deepened. “Dick or one of the kids? Do you need me to come? Sit down, Laura, you look ready to faint.”
“All of mine are all right,” she said. “It’s . . . Charles, it’s Patsy. And Morrie.”
He set the big book carefully on a table in the hall. That was probably when she saw the title, and I’m not surprised that she remembered it; at such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.
“How badly are they hurt?” And before she could answer: “Are they at St. Stevie’s? They must be, it’s the closest. Can we take your station wagon?”
St. Stephen’s Hospital was in Castle Rock, but of course that wasn’t where they had been taken. “Charles, you must prepare yourself for a terrible shock.”
He took her by the shoulders—gently, she said, not hard, but when he bent to look into her face, his eyes were blazing. “How bad? Laura, how badly are they hurt?”
My mother began to cry. “They’re dead, Charles. I am so sorry.”
He let go of her and his arms dropped to his sides. “No they’re not,” he said. It was the voice of a man stating a simple fact.
“I should have driven down,” my mother said. “I should have brou
ght the station wagon, yes. I wasn’t thinking. I just came.”
“They’re not,” he said again. He turned from her and put his forehead against the wall. “No.” He banged his head hard enough to rattle a nearby picture of Jesus carrying a lamb. “No.” He banged it again and the picture fell off its hook.
She took his arm. It was floppy and loose. “Charles, don’t do that.” And, as if he had been one of her children instead of a grown man: “Don’t, honey.”
“No.” He banged his forehead again. “No!” Yet again. “No!”
This time she took hold of him with both hands and pulled him away from the wall. “Stop that! You stop it right now!”
He looked at her, dazed. A bright red mark dashed across his brow.
“Such a look,” she told me years later, as she lay dying. “I couldn’t bear it, but I had to. Once a thing like that is started, you have to finish it.”
“Walk back to the house with me,” she told him. “I’ll give you a drink of Dick’s whiskey, because you need something, and I know there’s nothing like that here—”
He laughed. It was a shocking sound.
“—and then I’ll drive you to Gates Falls. They’re at Peabody’s.”
“Peabody’s?”
She waited for it to sink in. He knew what Peabody’s was as well as she did. By that time Reverend Jacobs had officiated at dozens of funerals.
“Patsy can’t be dead,” he said in a patient, instructional tone of voice. “It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, that’s what Morrie says.”
“Come with me, Charles.” She took him by the hand and tugged him first to the door and then into the gorgeous autumn sunshine. That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.
When they reached Route 9—sunwashed and silent, empty of traffic as it almost always was—he cocked his head, doglike, toward the sound of sirens in the direction of Sirois Hill. On the horizon was a smudge of smoke. He looked at my mother.
“Morrie, too? You’re sure?”
“Come on, Charlie.” (“It was the only time I ever called him that,” she told me.) “Come on, we’re in the middle of the road.”
• • •
They went to Gates Falls in our old Ford wagon, and they went by way of Castle Rock. It was at least twenty miles longer, but my mother was past the worst of her shock by then, and able to think clearly. She had no intention of driving past the scene of the crash, even if it meant going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn.
Peabody’s Funeral Home was on Grand Street. The gray Cadillac hearse was already in the driveway, and several vehicles were parked at the curb. One of them was Reggie Kelton’s boat of a Buick. Another, she was enormously relieved to see, was a panel truck with MORTON FUEL OIL on the side.
Dad and Mr. Kelton came out the front door while Mom was leading Reverend Jacobs up the walk, by then as docile as a child. He was looking up, Mom said, as if to gauge how far the foliage had to go before it would reach peak color.
Dad hugged Jacobs, but Jacobs didn’t hug back. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking up at the leaves.
“Charlie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Kelton rumbled. “We all are.”
They escorted him into the oversweet smell of flowers. Organ music, low as a whisper and somehow awful, came from overhead speakers. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw to everyone in West Harlow—was already there, probably because she had been listening in on the party line when Doreen called my mother. Listening in was her hobby. She heaved her bulk from a sofa in the foyer and pulled Reverend Jacobs to her enormous bosom.
“Your dear sweet wife and your dear little boy!” she cried in her high, mewling voice. Mom looked at Dad, and they both winced. “Well, they’re in heaven now! That’s the consolation! Saved by the blood of the Lamb and rocked in the everlasting arms!” Tears poured down Me-Maw’s cheeks, cutting through a thick layer of pink powder.
Reverend Jacobs allowed himself to be hugged and made of. After a minute or two (“Around the time I began to think she wouldn’t stop until she suffocated him with those great tits of hers,” my mother told me), he pushed her away. Not hard, but with firmness. He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I’ll see them now.”
“Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said. “You need to hold on for a bit. Just until Mr. Peabody makes them presenta—”
Jacobs walked through the viewing parlor, where some old lady in a mahogany coffin was waiting for her final public appearance. He continued on down the hall toward the back. He knew where he was going; few better.
Dad and Mr. Kelton hurried after him. My mother sat down, and Me-Maw sat across from her, eyes alight under her cloud of white hair. She was old then, in her eighties, and when some of her score of grandchildren and great-grandchildren weren’t visiting her, only tragedy and scandal brought her fully alive.
“How did he take it?” Me-Maw stage-whispered. “Did you get kneebound with him?”
“Not now, Myra,” Mom said. “I’m done up. I only want to close my eyes and rest for a minute.”
But there was no rest for her, because just then a scream rose from the back of the funeral home, where the prep rooms were.
“It sounded like the wind outside today, Jamie,” she said, “only a hundred times worse.” At last she looked away from the ceiling. I wish she hadn’t, because I could see the darkness of death close behind the light in her eyes. “At first there were no words, just that banshee wailing. I almost wish it had stayed that way, but it didn’t. ‘Where’s his face?’ he cried. ‘Where’s my little boy’s face?’”
• • •
Who would preach at the funeral? This was a question (like who cuts the barber’s hair) that troubled me. I heard all about it later, but I wasn’t there to see; my mother decreed that only she, Dad, Claire, and Con were to go to the funeral. It might be too upsetting for the rest of us (surely it was those chilling screams from Peabody’s preparation room she was thinking of), and so Andy was left in charge of Terry and me. That wasn’t a thing I relished, because Andy could be a boogersnot, especially when our parents weren’t there. For an avowed Christian, he was awfully fond of Indian rope burns and head-noogies—hard ones that left you seeing stars.
There were no rope burns or head-noogies on the Saturday of Patsy and Morrie’s double funeral. Andy said that if the folks weren’t back by supper, he’d make Franco-American. In the meantime, we were just to watch TV and shut up. Then he went upstairs and didn’t come back down. Grumpy and bossy though he could be, he had liked Tag-Along-Morrie as much as the rest of us, and of course he had a crush on Patsy (also like the rest of us . . . except for Con, who didn’t care for girls then and never would). He might have gone upstairs to pray—go into your closet and lock your door, Saint Matthew advises—or maybe he just wanted to sit and think and try to make sense of it all. His faith wasn’t broken by those two deaths—he remained a die-hard fundamentalist Christian until his death—but it must have been severely shaken. My own faith wasn’t broken by the deaths, either. It was the Terrible Sermon that accomplished that.
Reverend David Thomas of the Gates Falls Congo gave the eulogy for Patsy and Morrie at our church, and that caused no raised eyebrows, since, as my Dad said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Congregationalists and the Methodists.”
What did raise eyebrows was Jacobs’s choice of Stephen Givens to officiate at the Willow Grove Cemetery graveside services. Givens was the pastor (he did not call himself Reverend) of Shiloh Church, where at that time the congregants still held hard to the beliefs of Frank Weston Sandford, an apocalypse-monger who encouraged parents to whip their children for petty sins (“You must be schoolmasters of Christ,” he advised them) a
nd who insisted on thirty-six-hour fasts . . . even for infants.
Shiloh had changed a lot since Sandford’s death (and is today little different from other Protestant church groups), but in 1965, a flock of old rumors—fueled by the odd dress of the members and their stated belief that the end of the world was coming soon, like maybe next week—persisted. Yet it turned out that our Charles Jacobs and their Stephen Givens had been meeting over coffee in Castle Rock for years, and were friends. After the Terrible Sermon, there were people in town who said that Reverend Jacobs had been “infected by Shilohism.” Perhaps so, but according to Mom and Dad (also Con and Claire, whose testimony I trusted more), Givens was calm, comforting, and appropriate during the brief graveside ceremony.
“He didn’t mention the end of the world once,” Claire said. I remember how beautiful she looked that evening in her dark blue dress (the closest she had to black) and her grownup hose. I also remember she ate almost no supper, just pushed things around on her plate until it was all mixed together and looked like dog whoop.
“What scripture did Givens read?” Andy asked.
“First Corinthians,” Mom said. “The one about how we see through a glass darkly?”
“Good choice,” my older brother said sagely.
“How was he?” I asked Mom. “How was Reverend Jacobs?”
“He was . . . quiet,” she said, looking troubled. “Meditating, I think.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Claire said, pushing her plate away. “He was shell-shocked. Just sat there in a folding chair at the head of the grave, and when Mr. Givens asked him if he’d throw the first dirt and then join him in saying the benediction, he only went on sitting with his hands between his knees and his head hanging down.” She began to cry. “It seems like a dream to me, a bad dream.”
“But he did get up and toss the dirt,” Dad said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “After awhile, he did. A handful on each coffin. Didn’t he, Claire-Bear?”