The Stand

“What’s that line? I’ll be in your dream if you’ll be in mine? We’re not crazy, Harold.”

“Maybe it would be better if we were.”

“Someone will come,” Frannie said. “After a while. After this disease, whatever it is, burns itself out.”

“Who?”

“Somebody in authority,” she said uncertainly. “Somebody who will… well… put things back in order.”

He laughed bitterly. “My dear child… sorry, Fran. Fran, it was the people in authority who did this. They’re good at putting things back in order. They’ve solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot—by cutting it in two with his sword.”

“But it’s just a funny strain of the flu, Harold. I heard it on the radio—”

“Mother Nature just doesn’t work that way, Fran. Your somebody in authority got a bunch of bacteriologists, virologists, and epidemiologists together in some government installation to see how many funny bugs they could dream up. Bacteria. Viruses. Germ plasm, for all I know. And one day some well-paid toady said, ‘Look what I made. It kills almost everybody. Isn’t it great?’ And they gave him a medal, and a pay-raise, and a time-sharing condo, and then somebody spilled it.

“What are you going to do, Fran?”

“Bury my father,” she said softly.

“Oh… of course.” He looked at her for a moment and then said, very swiftly, “Look, I’m going to get out of here. Out of Ogunquit. If I stay much longer, I really will go crazy. Fran, why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Well, if you think of a place, come ask me again.”

Harold brightened. “All right, I will. It… you see, it’s a matter of…” He trailed off and began to walk down the porch steps in a kind of daze. His new cowboy boots gleamed in the sun. Fran watched him with sad amusement.

He waved just before climbing behind the wheel of the Caddy. Fran lifted a hand in return. The car jerked unprofessionally when he put it in reverse, and then he was backing down the driveway in fits and starts. He wandered to the left, crushing some of Carla’s flowers under the offside wheels, and nearly thumped into the culvert ditch as he turned out onto the road. Then he honked twice and was gone. Fran watched until he was out of sight, and then went back to her father’s garden.

Sometime after four o’clock she went back upstairs with dragging footsteps, forcing herself along. There was a dull headache in her temples and forehead, caused by heat and exertion and tension. She had told herself to wait another day, but that would only make it worse. Under her arm she carried her mother’s best damask tablecloth, the one kept strictly for company.

It did not go as well as she had hoped, but it was also nowhere near as bad as she had feared. There were flies on his face, lighting, rubbing their hairy little forelegs together and then taking off again, and his skin had gone a dusky dark shade, but he was so tanned from working in the garden that it was hardly noticeable… if you made your mind up not to notice it, that was. There was no smell, and that was what she had been most afraid of.

The bed he had died in was the double he had shared for years with Carla. She laid the tablecloth out on her mother’s half, so that its hem touched her father’s arm, hip, and leg. Then, swallowing hard (her head was pounding worse than ever), she prepared to roll her father onto his shroud.

Peter Goldsmith was wearing his striped pajamas, and that struck her as jarringly frivolous, but they would have to do. She could not even entertain the thought of first undressing and then dressing him again.

Steeling herself, she grasped his left arm—it was as hard and unyielding as a piece of furniture—and pushed, rolling him over. As she did so, a hideous long burping sound escaped him, a belch that seemed to go on and on, rasping in his throat as if a locust had crawled down there and had now come to life in the dark channel, calling and calling.

She screeched, stumbling away and knocking over the bedtable. His combs, his brushes, the alarm clock, a little pile of change and some tieclips and cufflinks all jingled and fell to the floor. Now there was a smell, a corrupted, gassy smell, and the last of the protective fog which had wrapped her dissipated and she knew the truth. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her head and wailed. She was not burying some life-sized doll; it was her father she was burying, and the last of his humanity, the very last, was the juicy, gassy smell that now hung on the air. And it would be gone soon enough.

The world went gray and the sound of her own grief, braying and constant, began to seem distant, as if someone else was uttering those sounds, perhaps one of the little brown women you see on the TV newsclips. Some length of time went by, she had no idea how long, and then, little by little, she came back to herself and to the knowledge of all that still remained to be done. They were the things she could not have brought herself to do before.

She went to him and turned him over. He uttered another belch, this one small and dwindling. She kissed his forehead.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I love you, Frannie loves you.” Her tears fell on his face and gleamed there. She removed his pajamas and dressed him in his best suit, hardly noticing the dull throb in her back, the ache in her neck and arms as she lifted each part of his weight, dressed it, dropped it, and went on to the next part. She propped his head up with two volumes of The Book of Knowledge to get his tie right. In his bottom drawer, under the socks, she found his army medals—Purple Heart, good conduct medals, campaign ribbons… and the Bronze Star he had won in Korea. She pinned them to his lapel. In the bathroom she found Johnson’s Baby Powder and powdered his face and neck and hands. The smell of the powder, sweet and nostalgic, brought the tears on again. Sweat slicked her body. There were pitted dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes.

She folded the tablecloth over him, got her mother’s sewing kit, and closed the seam. Then she doubled the seam and sewed again. With a sobbing, whistling grunt, she managed to get his body to the floor without dropping it. Then she rested, half-swooning. When she felt she could go on, she lifted the top half of the corpse, got it to the head of the stairs, and then, as carefully as she could, down to the first floor. She stopped again, her breath coming in quick, whining gasps. Her headache was sharp now, needling into her with quick hard bursts of pain.

She dragged the body down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the porch. Down the porch steps. Then she had to rest again. The golden light of early evening was on the land now. She gave way again and sat beside him, her head on her knees, rocking back and forth, weeping. Birds twittered. Eventually she was able to drag him into the garden.

At last it was done. By the time the last sods were back in place (she had fitted them together down on her knees, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle) it was a quarter of nine. She was filthy. Only the flesh around her eyes was white; that area had been washed clean by her tears. She was reeling with exhaustion. Her hair hung against her cheeks in matted strings.

“Please be at peace, Daddy,” she muttered. “Please.”

She dragged the spade back to her father’s workshop and slung it inside indifferently. She had to rest twice as she climbed the six steps to the back porch. She crossed the kitchen without turning on the lights and kicked off her low-topped sneakers as she entered the living room. She dropped to the couch and slept immediately.

In the dream she was climbing the stairs again, going to her father, to do her duty and see him decently under the ground. But when she entered the room the tablecloth was already over the body and her sense of grief and loss changed to something else… something like fear. She crossed the darkened room, not wanting to, suddenly wanting only to flee, but helpless to stop. The tablecloth glimmered in the shadows, ghostly, ghastly, and it came to her:

It wasn’t her father under there. And what was under there was not dead.

Something—someone—filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she… couldn’t… stop her feet.

Her hand reached out, floated over the tablecloth—and snatched it back.

He was grinning, but she couldn’t see his face. A wave of frigid cold blasting up at her from that