Across the street, all the lights were on in the Crandall house. Cars were parked in Jud's driveway and up and down the shoulder of the highway on that side for a hundred feet in either direction. The official viewing hours would be tomorrow, at the mortuary, but tonight people had come to comfort Jud as well as they could, and to help him remember, and to celebrate Norma's passing-what Jud had referred to once that afternoon as "the foregoing." Between that house and this, a frigid February wind blew. The road was patched with black ice. The coldest part of the Maine winter was now upon them.
"Well, I don't really know, honey," Louis said, taking Ellie on his lap. On the TV, a running gunfight was in progress. A man spun and dropped, unremarked upon by either of them. Louis was aware-uncomfortably so-that Ellie probably knew a hell of a lot more about Ronald McDonald and Spiderman and the Burger King than she did about Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul. She was the daughter of a woman who was a nonpracticing Jew and a man who was a lapsed Methodist, and he supposed her ideas about the whole spiritus mundi were of the vaguest sort-not myths, not dreams, but dreams of dreams. It's late for that, he thought randomly. She's only five, but it's late for that. Jesus Christ, it gets late so fast.
But Ellie was looking at him, and he ought to say something. "People believe all sorts of things about what happens to us when we die," he said. "Some people think we go to heaven or hell. Some people believe we're born again as little children-"
"Sure, carnation. Like what happened to Audrey Rose in that movie on TV."
"You never saw that!" Rachel, he thought, would have her own cerebral accident if she thought Ellie had seen Audrey Rose.
"Marie told me at school," Ellie said. Marie was Ellie's self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm, or perhaps even scurvy. Both Louis and Rachel encouraged the friendship as well as they could, but Rachel had once confessed to Louis that after Marie left, she always felt an urge to check Ellie's head for flits and head lice. Louis had laughed and nodded.
"Marie's mommy lets her watch all the shows." There was an implied criticism in this that Louis chose to ignore.
"Well, it's reincarnation, but I guess you've got the idea. The Catholics believe in heaven and hell, but they also believe there's a place called limbo and one called purgatory. And the Hindus and Buddhists believe in Nirvana-"
There was a shadow on the dining room wall. Rachel. Listening.
Louis went on more slowly.
"There are probably lots more too. But what it comes down to, Ellie, is this: no one knows. People say they know, but when they say that, what they mean is that they believe because of faith. Do you know what faith is?"
"Well...
"Here we are, sitting in my chair," Louis said. "Do you think my chair will still be here tomorrow?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be, or is. Get it?"
"Yes." Ellie nodded positively.
"But we don't know it'll be here. After all, some crazed chair burglar might break in and take it, right?"
Ellie giggled. Louis smiled.
"We just have faith that won't happen. Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of.
If we don't, it's just blotto. The end."
"Like going to sleep?"
He considered this and then said, "More like having ether, I think."
"Which do you have faith in, Daddy?"
The shadow on the wall moved and came to rest again.
For most of his adult life-since college days, he supposed-he had believed that death was the end. He had been present at many deathbeds and had never felt a soul bullet past him on its way to... wherever; hadn't this very thought occurred to him upon the death of Victor Pascow? He had agreed with his Psychology I teacher that the life-after-life experiences reported in scholarly journals and then vulgarized in the popular press probably indicated a last-ditch mental stand against the onrush of death-the endlessly inventive human mind, staving off insanity to the very end by constructing a hallucination of immortality.
He had likewise agreed with an acquaintance in the dorm who had said, during an all-night bull session during Louis's sophomore year at Chicago, that the Bible was suspiciously full of miracles which had ceased almost completely during the age of rationality ("totally ceased," he had said at first but had been forced backward at least one step by others who claimed with some authority that there were still plenty of weird things going on, little pockets of perplexity in a world that had become by and large a clean, well-lighted place-there was, for instance, the Shroud of Turin, which had survived every effort to debunk it).