“Oh god,” I said. “That’s enough, Nora. Put it back now. Jesus god.”
But Nora lifted the sheet so that she could see all of Toni’s body. They had cut her clothes off. Our daughter looked very small and broken. Nora moved her fingers gently over the bruised arms and then she walked over to the counter and pulled a Kleenex from a box and moistened it with her tongue so she could removed the dried blood from Toni’s mouth. She bent and kissed the forehead and put the sheet back.
After that we went home again. It was beginning to be daylight now. And later in the morning John Baker, who owned the mortuary, came to the house and we made the arrangements for the funeral. A couple of days later Toni was buried in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.
It was a large funeral; all of her friends from school were there and many of their parents and various townspeople. There were a great many flowers at the altar of the church. The minister spoke and there was some music, I remember, and afterward, at the cemetery, after the brief prayers and rites, people filed past us to shake our hands while we stood in the shade under the green awning at the gravesite. For the funeral John Baker had done what he could with Toni’s face, but it was not recognizable. It was merely the mask of a dead child, caked with powder and waxen-looking. So we had not permitted the casket to be opened and we had not allowed anyone to view her at the mortuary in the evenings before the funeral. When it was all finished and everyone had driven away, Nora and I went home again to a house that seemed utterly quiet. None of the public ceremonies had helped.
*
But as it turned out Danny Pohlmeier did live, as Dr. Martin said he might. He was in the hospital in Denver for two or three months and then he was in a cast for another half year or so. When he was home again he came to the house one night to talk to us. He sat on the couch and cried into his hands while he told us about it. After he had stopped talking there was nothing more to say. We walked him to the front door and he left. Nora and I did not blame him for what had happened. We did not feel that way about it. He was a nice boy and it was obvious that he felt very badly. Still we never mentioned his name to one another again.
In fact we were hardly speaking at all. It was an awful summer. Nora was quieter and even more withdrawn than she had ever been. She couldn’t sleep at night and she had begun to take things to make her sleep. Then she would get up late in the morning with a headache and move silently about the house. In the evenings she would still garden a little, among her roses, pulling weeds and dusting the flowers with insecticide, but she wasn’t much interested in her roses anymore and she had begun to wear white gloves whenever she worked outside. They were the same gloves she had worn previously to church and for women’s society meetings; now she was using them to protect her hands from the soil in the backyard. It was as though she were afraid of being contaminated by even that much of Holt County. Finally at the end of summer we agreed that it would be better if she left town for a while.