Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: “Oh, excuse me, I forgot.”
Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.
Standing on the dark threshold, he said, “This must be terrible for you, but at least he isn’t suffering anymore.”
Sandy’s eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles’ shells.
Studying his eyes, I said, “Could I see him?”
“What — your father?”
“I didn’t turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn’t have the heart for it, didn’t think I needed to. Now…I’d really like just one last look.”
Sandy Kirk’s eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.
His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved. “Oh, Christopher…I’m sorry, but the process has begun.”
“You’ve already put him in the furnace?”
Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”
“Wasn’t that terribly quick?”
“In our work, there’s no wisdom in delay. If only I’d known you were coming…”
I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.
I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
I managed not to recoil.
“My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But truthfully — I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear.”
I wanted to kick his ass.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.
“What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes you’d never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat them to you, not to you of all people.”
Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you.”
“You didn’t bother me. Of course you didn’t. I only wish you’d called ahead. I’d have been able to… delay.”
“Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”
Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.
Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, “Have you given any thought to the service — when you want to hold it, how you want it conducted?”
“No. No, not yet. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are you all right?”
Facing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”
“I wish you had called ahead.”
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.
6
The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The
Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.
Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventy-foot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardens — none of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this business — plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.
The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks. Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.
When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.
The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front. The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy’s personal vehicles — but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me — especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction — correct, as it turned out — that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen….
A decade and a half ago, I’d had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker’s property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
I can’t recall what we expected — or hoped — to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of
