I thought of the old man with the starburst hemorrhage and how fearsome he had seemed to Bobby and me. That was nothing compared to this. That had been only nature’s impersonal work, while this was human viciousness.
During that long-ago October and November, Bobby Halloway and I periodically returned to the crematorium window. Creeping through the darkness, trying not to trip in the ground ivy, we saturated our lungs with air redolent of the surrounding eucalyptuses, a scent that to this day I identify with death.
During those two months, Frank Kirk conducted fourteen funerals, but only three of those deceased were cremated. The others were embalmed for traditional burials.
Bobby and I lamented that the embalming room offered no windows for our use. That sanctum sanctorum —“where they do the wet work,” as Bobby put it — was in the basement, secure against ghoulish spies like us.
Secretly, I was relieved that our snooping would be restricted to Frank Kirk’s dry work. I believe that Bobby was relieved as well, although he pretended to be sorely disappointed.
On the positive side, I suppose, Frank performed most embalmings during the day while restricting cremations to the night hours. This made it possible for me to be in attendance.
Although the hulking cremator — cruder than the Power Pak II that Sandy uses these days — disposed of human remains at a very high temperature and featured emission-control devices, thin smoke escaped the chimney. Frank conducted only nocturnal cremations out of respect for bereaved family members or friends who might, in daylight, glance at the hilltop mortuary from lower in town and see the last of their loved ones slipping skyward in wispy gray curls.
Conveniently for us, Bobby’s father, Anson, was the editor in chief of the
We always knew when Frank Kirk had a fresh one, but we couldn’t be sure whether he was going to embalm it or cremate it. Immediately after sunset, we would ride our bikes to the vicinity of the mortuary and then creep onto the property, waiting at the crematorium window either until the action began or until we had to admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.
Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank, died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the fire.
In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the slats on the Levolor blind.
The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian, was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.
Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs. Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.
We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs. Acquilain but had never
Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected, swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in hours.
As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact, her mouth was curved slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.
When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.
She looked so young.
She looked immortal.
The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the back of one hand against his left eye and then his right. It was not perspiration that he wiped away.
During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This night, they spoke hardly at all.
Bobby and I were silent, too.
We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s property.
After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of its darkest streets.
We went to the beach.
At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted. Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and fluttering through a wealth of trees, were the town lights. In front of us lay the inky wash of the vast Pacific.
The surf was gentle. Widely spaced, low breakers slid to shore, lazily spilling their phosphorescent crests, which peeled from right to left like a white rind off the dark meat of the sea.
Sitting in the sand, watching the surf, I kept thinking how near we were to Christmas. Two weeks away. I didn’t want to think about Christmas, but it twinkled and jingled through my mind.
I don’t know what Bobby was thinking. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to talk. Neither did he.
I brooded about what Christmas would be like for little Devlin Acquilain without his mother. Maybe he was too young to understand what death meant.
Tom Acquilain, her husband, knew what death meant, sure enough. Nevertheless, he would probably put up a Christmas tree for Devlin.
How would he find the strength to hang the tinsel on the boughs?
Speaking for the first time since we had seen the sheet unfolded from the woman’s body, Bobby said simply, “Let’s go swimming.”
Although the day had been mild, this was December, and it wasn’t a year when El Nino — the warm current out of the southern hemisphere — ran close to shore. The water temperature was inhospitable, and the air was slightly chilly.
As Bobby undressed, he folded his clothes and, to keep the sand out of them, neatly piled them on a tangled blanket of kelp that had washed ashore earlier in the day and been dried by the sun. I folded my clothes beside his.
Naked, we waded into the black water and then swam out against the tide. We went too far from shore.
We turned north and swam parallel to the coast. Easy strokes. Minimal kicking. Expertly riding the ebb and flow of the waves. We swam a dangerous distance.
We were both superb swimmers — though reckless now.
Usually a swimmer finds cold water less discomfiting after being in it awhile; as the body temperature drops, the difference between skin and water temperatures becomes much less perceptible. Furthermore, exertion creates the impression of heat. A reassuring but false sense of warmth can arise, which is perilous.
This water, however, grew colder as fast as our body temperatures dropped. We reached no comfort point, false or otherwise.
Having swum too far north, we should have made for shore. If we’d had any common sense, we would have walked back to the mound of dry kelp where we’d left our clothes.
Instead, we merely paused, treading water, sucking in deep shuddery breaths cold enough to sluice the precious heat out of our throats. Then as one, without a word, we turned south to swim back the way we had come, still too far from shore.
