by Saul Bellow
The laborers took over from us, setting Humboldt’s coffin on the canvas bands of the electrical lowering device. The dead were now side by side in their bulky boxes.
“Did you know Bess?” said Waldemar.
“Once I saw her, on West End Avenue,” I said.
He may have been thinking of money taken from her purse and lost in horse races long ago, of quarrels and scandalous scenes and curses.
In the long years since I had last attended a burial, many mechanical improvements had been made. There stood a low yellow compact machine which apparently did the digging and bull-dozed back the earth. It was also equipped as a crane. Seeing this, I started off on the sort of reflection Humboldt himself had trained me in. The machine in every square inch of metal was a result of collaboration of engineers and other artificers. A system built upon the discoveries of many great minds was always of more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which of itself can do little. So spoke old Dr. Samuel Johnson, and added in the same speech, that the French writers were superficial because they were not scholars and had proceeded upon the mere power of their own minds. Well, Humboldt had admired these same French writers and he too had proceeded for some time upon the mere power of his own mind. Then he began to look, himself, toward the collective phenomena. As his own self, he had opened his mouth and uttered some delightful verses. But then his heart failed him. Ah, Humboldt, how sorry I am. Humboldt, Humboldt—and this is what becomes of us.
The funeral director said, “Does anybody have a prayer to say?”
Nobody seemed to have or to know a prayer. But Menasha said he would like to sing something. He then did so. His style had not changed.
He announced, “I’m going to sing a selection from Aida, ‘In questa tomba oscura.’ “ Aged Menasha now prepared himself. He turned up his face. The Adam’s apple thus revealed was not what it had been when he was a young man operating a punch press in a Chicago factory, but it was there still. So was the old excitement. He clasped his hands, rising on his toes, and as emotionally as in our kitchen on Rice Street, weaker in voice, missing the tune still, and crowing but moved, terribly moved, he sang his aria. But this was only the warm-up. When he was done, he declared that he was going to perform “Coin’ Home,” an old American spiritual—used by DvoMk in the New World Symphony, he added as a program note. Then, oh Lord! I remembered that he had been homesick for Ypsilanti, and that he had pined for his sweetheart, back in the Twenties, longing for his girl, singing “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a’goin’ home,” until my mother said, “For heaven’s sake, go then.” And when he came back with his obese, gentle, weeping bride, this girl who sat in the tub, her arms too fat and defeating her efforts to bring the water as high as her head, Mama came into the bathroom and washed her hair for her, and toweled it.
They were all gone but ourselves.
And looking into open graves was no pleasanter than it had ever been. Brown clay and lumps and pebbles—why must it all be so heavy. It was too much weight, oh, far too much to bear. I observed, however, another innovation in burials. Within the grave was an open concrete case. The coffins went down and then the yellow machine moved forward and the little crane, making a throaty whir, picked up a concrete slab and laid it atop the concrete case. So the coffin was enclosed and the soil did not come directly upon it. But then, how did one get out? One didn’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed! There was a dry light grating as of crockery when contact was made, a sort of sugar-bowl sound. Thus, the condensation of collective intelligences and combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt with the individual poet. The same was done to the poet’s mother. A gray lid was set upon her too and then Waldemar took the spade and weakly dug out clods and threw one into each grave. The old gambler wept and we turned aside to spare him. He stood beside the graves while the bulldozer began its work.
Menasha and I went toward the limousine. The side of his foot brushed away some of last autumn’s leaves and he said, looking through his goggles, “What’s this, Charlie, a spring flower?”
“It is. I guess it’s going to happen after all. On a warm day like this everything looks ten times deader.”
“So it’s a little flower,” Menasha said. “They used to tell one about a kid asking his grumpy old man when they were walking in the park, ‘What’s the name of this flower, Papa?’ and the old guy is peevish and he yells, ‘How should I know? Am I in the millinery business?’ Here’s another, but what do you suppose they’re called, Charlie?”
“Search me,” I said. “I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.”
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