Miss Georgie was blowing a sizable bubble. Few men or boys had ever seen her smile, though your mother might admit she’d caught her at it a time or two. And now her lips were still thin as paper, but the corners were plainly lifting in a grin, and between them an actual bubble was growing.
I fell back a step; it shook me that hard. Then I said “One of us has got to run, Simp, for reinforcements.”
He didn’t even face me. “The hell you say. I’m not leaving you, Hub; you can’t leave me.”
I understood him; the bubble had trapped us. As both of us stood there, it swelled on slowly to the size of a tangerine and more or less stopped. From that point forward it would sometimes grow a quarter-inch, then shrink back again. But it always stayed a little murky with a yellow hue, not the rainbow skin of a clean soap-bubble.
We had our work cut out for us then. Either it would keep on swelling and shrinking and keep us thinking Miss Georgie was somehow coming to life, green all over as we knew she was; or any second, it would burst and be done, a final gas attack from a lady who launched a number of memorable such. If the latter, then fine; we could sit back down and continue the night. The former didn’t even bear thinking through. What would Jarvis say when he walked in at sunrise and found Miss Georgie frying our breakfast?
Neither thing happened. Simp and I stood there, give or take a step backward, an hour more. When nothing dramatic occurred either way, I reminded Simp it was he who must button her collar again and pin the cameo. He heard the news with bald-faced terror; but knowing his duty, he shut both eyes and managed someway. The bubble survived. So finally we sat down again in easier chairs and took turns shutting our eyes to rest. While the other snoozed, the one on guard would stay awake by hook or crook (I mostly sang hymns) and make sporadic checks on the bubble. I dreaded my turns and prayed between them that, next time, the thing would have dried and burst. Simp must have done the same—everytime he woke and went on duty, he’d say first thing, “Hub, tell me it’s gone” and turn ashy pale when I shook my head.
Toward the end of my truly last watch, toward dawn, I made one more check, found the bubble intact and Miss Georgie no less dead than before. Then I sat back to wait and fell into sleep like an open well in strange woods at night. I didn’t even wake at the sound of Jarvis’s key in the back door, his feet in the kitchen. Thank God, Simp did and shook me hard. So we were upright, if not clear-eyed, when Jarvis came up the long hall to meet us.
His disgusted face showed he knew we’d shirked, but what he said was “Is she all right?”
Simp looked at me.
I didn’t know what Jarvis had in mind; so I said “First-rate,” which was what Father said if you asked how he felt on a sunny day.
Jarvis all but spit on the floor, then swallowed his bile and stepped to the coffin. If we had both shot him at point-blank range, he couldn’t have jerked any harder than he did. When his body calmed he didn’t turn to face us. He kept looking at her; but he said “What please, in the name of Jesus, have you fools done?”
We faced each other and together said “Nothing.” But then we joined him at the coffin rail; and oh Lord God, the bubble had grown since my last check to the size of a healthy navel orange. The surface was still a jaundice yellow, but the cloudy air inside had darkened like a captive storm. And as we watched, before even Jarvis could reach with his handkerchief and wipe it away, the bubble burst and spread its remains across Miss Georgie from brow to chin.
We got our money all the same; and a few years ago, I heard my own wife’s undertaker say that such things were not that rare in the inner sanctums of mortuaries, though they seldom happen now that the trade has learned its lesson and sews lips shut. The odd thing was, for a first experience, you might have thought it would balk Simp and me from further such jobs. Not a bit, or so I thought at first. Once word on the bubble got out in town, we were pitied and praised for our ordeal; and within three weeks, we were called to “set” with Brigadier General Matthew Husky’s enormous remains. I thought we were both stronger boys for the test.
But that second night—as the house stilled down except for the general’s widow upstairs, snoring her way through thick plaster walls—Simp said to me “Hub, did we learn our lesson?”
It was not his usual cast of mind; and while I’d always thought I was smarter, I knew Simp was some months nearer to manhood, so I asked what lesson he had in mind.
He was used to my being the wordsmith among us, and it took him awhile to fix his reply; but when I’d nearly forgot my question, Simp said “Well, you can’t turn your back on the dead.”
I said “If you’re speaking of ghosts, forget it. Poor Miss Georgie didn’t blow that bubble; it was gas, a normal chemical event.” My older brother Tump was studying chemistry; the words were his. But the next were mine, prepared in private to steel my resolve, “And it’s unchristian anyhow. God wouldn’t let good souls hang back here to flummox boys and scare old Negroes.”
Simp said “I’m white and I’m scared to death. You’ve heard a lot more from God than me. The Bible’s got way more ghosts than good women.”
Simp was a Bible scholar; I knew he was right on the matter of women, so I didn’t risk faulting his count of the ghosts. I waited awhile till Simp started nodding. By then I’d pulled my wisdom together. I said “The lesson is nothing but this. Keep the corpse as cool as you can, no more bugs than you can help, and don’t go touching their burial clothes.”
Simp said “I beg to God you’re right; but until further notice, my eyes are peeled. One false move out of this old joker, and stand aside or I’ll stampede you down.”
I knew when to humor him and shut down a quarrel. But through that peaceful night by the general, I had more than one inspiration on the subject of what we ought to have learned from the bubble and its, after all, tempting hint at a prank by something out there, if not at a frank demonic stab at scaring us dead. But despite the fact that it filled the largest ready-made coffin like melted wax, General Husky’s corpse behaved with spotless dignity. The peace in fact was too great for me; and sad to report, I slept a good part of that second night.
Not Simp Dockett—he meant what he said; and for weeks to come, he would suddenly throw me a note in class with some new flash of purported memory from his sleepless watch: The general sang two bars of “Dixie” at first sunrise. I’d look back and laugh till the day I had to swallow one note (it bore the word fart) to keep Miss Miriam Bailey from seizing it—she taught us grammar and was martyred by flatulence. After that I made Simp keep his own so-called memories till recess.
But the time I started out to describe, and have yet to tell, was truly the last. We learned the lesson and it changed my life—I learned it anyhow and Simp was impressed at the very least. As we left the room on that bright morning after such a strange night, we eyed each other, white as paste. And both of us knew we’d silently retired. It had been that final, that wondrous and—worst—it has proved untellable in my life till now. I know Simp died with his half untold except to me; he confessed as much when I left his deathbed in 1939. Not one of his three chatterbox wives had prised a word about it from him, though each had tried.
Who died was a beautiful woman, a girl really. She was even a distant cousin of mine, Mariana Adams. She’d married at sixteen, three years before—an absolute scoundrel from up on the river, named Kennon Walters. The scoundrel part was owing to liquor; otherwise he was handsome as she was lovely, with his stiff black hair and eyes that could tell you a lie and make it stick like knives through your face. He was also at times a practicing lawyer, though honest to a fault in that respect. For all his regular quarterly drunks, nobody ever claimed Kennon was cruel. He was just so proud that once he was drinking, he’d ride away and hide his shame, till sanity returned, in an old fishing-camp his father had built ten miles from home on the Clannish River.
The last time Kennon rode off and left her, he stayed gone upward of two winter weeks. And finally Mariana lit out to
find him. Her heart nor mind would let her wait longer; she had the news they’d both waited for. Kennon had always publicly said he would end his drinking the day his first child saw safe light, and now she was pregnant. Still she went on horseback alone in the cold. There was no other way to get there then, no passable road for a gentler conveyance. She’d ridden brilliantly all her life, and the horse was as tame as a thornless rose. But she hadn’t told anybody she was leaving, and she left at sunup with just two saddlebags of provisions and a smallish lantern in case dark overtook her return—she truly hoped to return with Kennon but was wise enough to allow for failure.
Whether she got there or not is unsure. Late the next morning when the horse came home and the searchers beat the woods and found her, her frozen body lay crosswise in the track, aimed neither way. And though her stiff right hand was pointed as if to aim herself at a goal, the way she had fallen, nobody could guess which way she meant. Some said they found her provisions by Kennon where he lay in a stupor; some say no, he was in his own filth, no food in sight and no memory of her.
It seemed clear to me, though I barely knew her, that if Mariana had truly found him, she wouldn’t have left with Kennon unconscious and in his own waste. But maybe he rallied and said something dreadful that cast her off, or maybe his mind was so far gone that he mistook her for some kind of threat and raised a hurtful hand against her. Her skin was not marked, except at the temple; and that was a bruise she sustained in falling from the horse, whenever, and striking a white flint rock in the ground.
Whatever—and God alone still knows—when half of the search party brought her home, Kennon’s brother Phil pushed on and found him, told him the worst and brought him back too. It was not till the doctor searched Mariana’s body that anybody knew what had sent her off on a risky mission in weather that cold. She was somewhere between three and four months pregnant. When they told poor Kennon, he first tried to kill himself, then the horse; then the doctor laid him out with morphine. Nobody thought he would wake for the funeral; but Simp and I could vow, though we didn’t, that he saw her body one final time and that she saw him or knew he was there.
Because Mariana’s wealthy father was long since dead, and her mother was too overcome by grief, again we were summoned to watch through the night. By then Simp and I were so well-seasoned that we had no trouble spelling each other in staying awake and dignified. And since our premier night with Miss Georgie, we’d had no untoward incident to spook us. But every white male in town, from twelve up, knew that Mariana Adams was a beauty surpassing mythical perfection; and men and women, white and black, had joined in ruing the day she flung her life away at the feet of Kennon Walters. So however hardened Simp and I were, when we entered that parlor and took our instructions from the weeping mother, we were thrilled to the sockets at the near prospect of a chance to guard this famous beauty as her body spent its last night above ground.
Mariana’s mother only thanked us profusely, then asked us not to disturb the netting. Since it was winter, with insects asleep, we didn’t know why she took the precaution; but we nodded agreement and, once she was gone, sat back to do our calculus lesson (we were both near failing). We hadn’t exchanged a word on the subject of viewing the corpse and had worked at least an hour in silence when Simp rose, stretched, silently walked to the coffin rail and stood a long minute before he said “She’s an angel by now; any fool could see—.” Most Christians then as now believed that souls become bright angels in a flash at the moment of death, with harp and wings.
It was not their worst error; but it always disturbed me, even that young, and I told Simp the truth, “Right now her soul’s in dreamless sleep and will stay that way till the trump of doom. Then God will shake her and decide where she goes.” I was referring to Judgment Day; that far back, it was my favorite date. I expected it often and would search most sunsets for trumpet notes and the glint of wings. I felt that guilty, though I’d hurt nothing worse than bugs in the dirt beneath my shoes.
Simp didn’t even turn. He gazed on at her and said “No fool but a blind man, with both hands missing, could say such a thing.”
It made me mad and I stood up hot to see for myself.
She was every atom of what he said. Her mother had wanted her buried “as she lived,” so the undertaker was not allowed to embalm and paint her. She lay before us in a white nightgown with her throat and shoulders bare. She’d always worn her black hair loose, not plaited or tucked; and it flared out beside her like a whole other creature, entirely alive. It was only her skin that assured us she was gone. Ever white, it was still paler now; and it all but quivered with a low phosphorescence that truly came from deep within her, a final remnant of the goodness she showed in every move. I thought through the moment in that way later, years later in fact; but even that night I felt no fear, no strange attraction—I was proud to be near her.
Nothing about her tempted me or Simp to lift the net and touch any part of that splendid a sight. I finally said “Simp, angels wish they looked good as this.” And with no more words, we both went back to the calculus lesson, though more than once we rose up separately and stood to watch her.
I can’t speak for Simp, but I know I was memorizing the sight and also teaching myself a hard truth—that this much beauty can still be stopped by a stumbling horse or a limb from a tree. Till then I’d nursed a boy’s common notion that beauty counts in the eyes of Nature and will be protected by the ground itself, if not bright angels.
It was four in the morning, my turn to guard while Simp caught a nap, when I thought I heard footfalls on the porch. They seemed to climb the eight high steps and stop at the door, then a long silent wait. I still wasn’t scared. If you were white, in that town then, the chances of meeting with harm from a human were practically nil. I guessed it might be Talcot Briley, an affable moron who seldom slept and made late harmless inspection tours of yards and houses.
But the front door creaked, slowly opened and shut.
And before I could move or call to Simp, a man strode past me and went to the coffin. I didn’t so much see him as smell him, a strong good scent of leather and the night. It was then I said my single word; I think it was “Please,” some syllable that begged for mercy to Simp and me and for honor at least to dead Mariana.
He didn’t look back but made a huge downward sweep with his hand that shut me up from five yards’ distance and seated me fast. All I was good for after that was a silent reach to press Simp’s knee. I wanted a witness.
Simp came to, saw my hushing finger and watched like me in frozen quiet from then on out.
I hadn’t seen Kennon Walters for years, maybe not since my boyhood; but next I knew him. No man born around here since Kennon looks anything like as rank, wild and good. By good I only mean handsome, magnetic. You had to watch him and, as with Mariana, you worked to record his memory clearly as a future standard for strength and waste. Otherwise you knew he could take one hand and separate your leg from your hip; you also knew that he very well might.
By then he’d laid the netting back; and I almost thought Mariana’s light, her peculiar shine, outlined his right profile that was toward me. He hadn’t reached in and all he’d said so far was whispers that I couldn’t catch. But finally, still not facing us, he said “Come here.”
Simp and I stayed put, astonished.
So Kennon said “Come stand by me this instant, or I’ll cut you both.”
One way or the other, on liquid legs we both obeyed; and after what happened in the next long seconds, I’ve always guessed he meant us for witnesses, the way I’d wanted Simp with me. Kennon thought he could change the laws of Nature—he’d pretty well managed to do it till then—and he wanted us to judge. Whether he already knew the outcome, I still can’t say. But he forced our hand; and hard as it’s been to shut my lips on what I saw, I never once doubted I owed Kennon Walters at least that silence for the gift I got in sharing his deed.
Even that early in my long life, my sense
of possibility could stretch. The fact that I did so badly in science, not to mention math, through all grades of school was my best early blessing. It kept me from stringing the barbed-wire fences that rational men put up against truth, the shapeless grandeur of what may be.
Next Kennon put both hands on the coffin and kept on watching Mariana’s face for maybe a minute. If I’d been watched with half that force, I’d have burst into flame in under a minute. But nothing changed. So then he spoke to the body in a whisper that was clear in the room as any shout, “Come back long enough to say if I live.”
I know he said exactly that; he spoke very slowly in a clear bass voice. I seized each word as it came through the air and pressed it hard on my mind that then was still uncrowded. I thought “He’s planning to die if she fails him.” I never wondered if he caused her death in direct fashion. That close to his shadow, his fine-smelling body, I knew he hadn’t killed this Mariana, not against her will in any case.
Her eyes didn’t open—Simp always agreed, the few times we ever mentioned it later. And for a good while she stayed dead still. Even the pulsing light from inside her withdrew and dimmed.
Kennon spoke again. This time I understood it was God he begged for help. He said “I need this word. Let her answer.” Desperate as he sounded, he never said please; it was all commands.
Then something obeyed him—our Maker or a demon or Mariana her shining self, wherever she roamed. She went on waiting till I quit hoping and knew that even Kennon couldn’t summon her back with all the fury of his parched soul. But then her pale lips worked to part in what I thought would be a slow smile. It proved to be sound, her earthly voice. I’d heard her say my name four times in earlier years and will know her tones in Heaven if I get there. What she said was “No.”
By then I’d nearly forgot Kennon’s question.
He had not. He issued a sob like nothing I’d heard on Earth till then or have met with since, and I’ve heard much grief. He said “Again,” another order.
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price Page 9