He completed his turn, now away from us, and walked over to the house and out of sight around the corner. There was a kind of lanky, loping dignity about him that was pretty touching, and he was quite a puzzlement besides.
“I wonder why he really came here,” I said, “and I wonder why he told us what he did. I can’t see any sense in it. If Beth tricked him about the divorce and made a bigamist of him, it seems to me that the sensible thing would simply have been to keep quiet about it, and chances are, now that Beth’s dead, that no one would ever have known. Some people can’t live peacefully alone with something like that on their mind, however. They just have to get rid of it by talking, and maybe Wilson’s one of them. It’s a kind of catharsis.”
“Well,” said Sid, “I’m most relieved to know that there is a fatter suspect in this business than you, and I’m pleased, moreover, to discover that he has behaved, all in all, with even less intelligence. It’s very encouraging.”
“He seemed sad and confused,” I said. “I felt sorry for him.”
“If he had popped his God-damn knuckles one more time,” Sid said, “I’d surely have screamed.”
CHAPTER 9
On Saturday we buried Beth.
Charlie Paley moved her up from the rear room to the chapel for the occasion, and I don’t think it took more than twenty minutes to get the service finished from first to last. There was a minister who said a few words about hope everlasting, which I had heard before with minor variations, and a semipro tenor about town sang a song with organ accompaniment, and the song he sang was “Somewhere the Sun Is Shining.”
Well, it was shining right outside, although not for Beth, and after the service I drove out in it to the cemetery. Sid was with me, and maybe a dozen other people in other cars. Wilson Thatcher was there, but not his wife, and Cotton McBride was there, and so was Sara Pike. The others were people who had known her and may have been sorry that she was dead, and we all gathered around the fresh grave in the little place that Wilson had provided. It was in a corner of the cemetery where the graves came to an end, and just across a fence there was a field full of white clover. A locust tree cast a pattern of light shade on the clipped grass and turned earth, and altogether it was as pretty a place as one could wish to be dead in, although I’m sure Beth wouldn’t have wished, if she could have, to be dead in any place whatever.
Sid stood beside me and held my hand, and when it was all over we turned and left. I still didn’t feel, walking away, that I had said good-by to anyone, or that I had finished anything that needed finishing. What I felt was at odds ends, the strange disconsolate sense of leaving undone what I would never get back to do. Sid and I had not spoken since leaving Charlie Paley’s Chapel, and we didn’t speak now until we had left the cemetery and were back into town. Then she asked me if there was anything I especially wanted to do, and I said I especially wanted to go home.
“I thought you might feel like going somewhere and doing something,” she said.
“Home is somewhere,” I said, “and anything I want to do can be done there.”
“Do you have anything particular in mind?”
“Yes, I do. I have it in mind to mow the yard.”
“That’s a rather odd thing to want particularly to do. Why do you?”
“There are several reasons. For one thing, I find mowing the yard a comfort. It is almost mathematically neat, and you can always measure so exactly what is left to be done by what has been done already. For another thing, the grass is getting high. Finally, mowing is a domestic task, and I’m feeling domestic. It’s a kind of recession, I think. A need for sanctuary. A modified retreat to the womb. Only the other evening I was wanting to live in a jungle or on a beach or corruptly in someplace like Paris, but now Hoolihan’s Addition suits me fine as a place to live and someday die. Provided, of course, that you agree to live there with me and let me die first.”
“I don’t know about that. I may insist upon dying first myself. I don’t believe I’d care much for Hoolihan’s Addition as a place to live alone.”
“Never mind. The decision may not be left in our hands, and so there is no need for us to disagree about it. I don’t want to disagree with anybody about anything. All I want to do is mow the yard and be domestic.”
“Now that you’ve made such a case for it, I feel inclined to be domestic too. You have made it sound delightful.”
“Aren’t you afraid being domestic will make you feel like a wife?”
“Not necessarily. It’s a matter of attitude and inner control. One may feel like a wife at a spring dance and like a mistress in the kitchen. You only need a little ingenuity.”
“I’d say that ingenuity is something you have more than a little of. I’ve noticed it more than once. What particular form is your domesticity going to take?”
“In order to keep you company, I plan to do something outside. Perhaps I could clip around the edges of things while you’re mowing.”
“Good. That will be constructive, as well as domestic, and I’ll appreciate the company.”
We rode along silently until we turned onto our street and approached our drive. Sid was sitting with her legs folded under her and her nylon knees showing below the skirt of the plain black dress she had worn in deference to a funeral, and I could see from the corners of
