Yeah. I will be.
You’re not going to keel over, are you? Tell me if you feel like you’re going to.
I ain’t going to keel over.
He sat breathing with his head down. After a while he looked up and began to survey the objects in the high silent sanctuary—the outsized wooden cross attached to the wall behind the pulpit, the colored windows where the sun streamed in—and now he saw that his brother’s casket was resting on a wheeled trestle at the head of the center aisle. The casket was closed. Raymond looked at it for some time. Then he said: Let me out of here.
Where you going? Guthrie said. If you need something, let me go get it for you.
I want to see what they done to him.
Guthrie stepped out of the way and Raymond grabbed the back of the pew ahead of him, pulling himself upright, and fit the crutches in place and hobbled out into the aisle up to the casket. He stood at the long smooth side of it. He set his hands on the dark satiny wood and then tried to raise the top half of the lid but couldn’t manage to move it without dropping his crutches. He turned his head to one side. Tom, he said. Come help me with this damn thing, would you?
Guthrie came forward and raised the upper half of the polished lid and propped it back. There before Raymond was his brother’s dead body, stretched out lying on his back, his eyes sunken in the waxy-looking face, his eyes closed forever under the thin-veined eyelids, his stiff iron-gray hair combed flat across his pale skull. At the funeral home they had called Victoria to ask her to bring them something appropriate for them to put on him, and she had located the old gray wool suit in the back of his closet, the only one he had ever owned, and when she had brought it to them they had had to cut the coat down the back seam to get him into it.
Raymond stood and looked at his brother’s face. His thick eyebrows had been trimmed and they had dabbed powder and makeup on his cheeks over the scratches and bruises, and they had wound a tie around his neck under the shirt collar. He didn’t know where they had gotten the tie, it wasn’t anything he remembered. And they had folded his brother’s hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.
You can shut it again, he said to Guthrie. That ain’t him in there. My brother wouldn’t let himself look like that even for a minute if he was still alive. Not if he still had breath to prevent them from doing him like that. I know what my brother looks like.
He turned and hobbled back to the pew and sat down and laid his crutches out of the way. Then he shut his eyes and never looked at the dead face of his brother again.