"What's that picture you got there?"
For a moment Louis thought she would hold it, refuse to show him, and then with a painful shyness she passed it to Jud. He held it in his big fingers, fingers that were so splayed and somehow clumsy-looking, fingers that looked fit mostly for grappling with the transmissions of big road machines or making couplings on the B amp; M Line-but they were also the fingers that had pulled a bee stinger from Gage's neck with all the offhand skill of a magician... or a surgeon.
"Why, that's real nice," Jud said. "You pullin him on a sled. Bet he liked that, didn't he, Ellie?"
Beginning to weep, Ellie nodded.
Rachel began to say something, but Louis squeezed her arm-be still awhile.
"I used to pull im a lot," Ellie said, weeping, "and he'd laugh and laugh. Then we'd go in and Mommy would fix us cocoa and say, 'Put your boots away,' and Gage would grab them all up and scream 'Boots! Boots!' so loud it hurt your ears.
Remember that, Mom?"
Rachel nodded.
"Yeah, I bet that was a good time, all right," Jud said, handing the picture back. "And he may be dead now, Ellie, but you can keep your memories of him."
"I'm going to," she said, wiping at her face. "I loved Gage, Mr. Crandall."
"I know you did, dear." He leaned in and kissed her, and when he withdrew, his eyes swept Louis and Rachel stonily. Rachel met his gaze, puzzled and a little hurt, not understanding. But Louis understood well enough: What are you doing for her? Jud's eyes asked. Your son is dead, but your daughter is not. What are you doing for her?
Louis looked away. There was nothing he could do for her, not yet. She would have to swim in her grief as best she could. His thoughts were too full of his son.
42
By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall.
"Where you going, Lou?" Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching "Little House on the Prairie" with Gage's picture on her lap.
"I thought I'd pick up a pizza."
"Didn't you get enough to eat earlier?"
"I just didn't seem hungry then," he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie: "I am now."
That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gage's funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburger-and-noodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche. "It will keep until you want it, if it doesn't all get eaten,"
she told Rachel. "Quiche is easy to warm up." The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appeared-neither of them would speak to Louis or even come close to him, for which he was not sorry-with a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheese-a large wheel of his old favorite, Mr.
Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples.
The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences.
This was the funeral party, and although it was quiet, it was not quite subdued.
There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some.
After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago) Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told him-that at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased's shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love; that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceased's ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying D. O. A. tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong.
Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her.