David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

I investigate burglaries and refer them to the state police, he thought. I stop suspicious-looking characters who are cruising Clamden neighborhoods. On the holidays I direct traffic so we can hold parades. I don’t even do most of that anymore. I’m the chief now. I have the officers do it. Ten years ago Ralph Smolness swung a chair at me when I answered his wife’s call about domestic violence. That’s it. That’s what I do. I don’t play Indian in the cornfield with a maniac who’s going to make soup out of me if I don’t quit bumping into stalks.

The engine of the Valiant was running, the car was vibrating slightly. Dyce was not in the car, at least not in sight. Tee wiped away a drop of sweat that was threatening his eye. The rapper was saying something that sounded like “fug it, fug it.” Probably not. Tee thought. There were still laws, at least in Connecticut, and why in hell was he thinking about that? The music sounded over and over in his head; he couldn’t get the noise out of his mind even when the record ended.

He lifted himself to his knees and heard the corn behind him rustle again. Be quiet, he warned himself then realized he hadn’t made the sound just as something hit him hard in the right buttock. Oh, fuck it, he thought. He tried to reach for his gun, but a foot in his back pushed his face in the dirt and another foot stood on his right arm. The lyrics “fug it, fug it” were still reverberating in his mind and the beating of his pulse in his ear matched the beat of the drums.

Someone was in grandfather’s house. He couldn’t believe it. Someone was living there. He heard the jungle music, the unrelenting drums, the raucous squeal of guitars, the lyrics that went beyond suggestive to demanding, all of it profaning grandfather’s values and his memory. No, not his memory. Nothing could touch his memory, for that lived within Dyce’s soul. There was a tractor parked by the front porch, someone in overalls sitting on the stone steps, eating, leaning his back against the stone pillar that had once held the porch roof. Behind the man was the porch itself, or what remained, charred by fire. No one was living there. It had been repaired-could not have been without Dyce’s knowledge and permission-so the man blasting the music into the rural air was only there temporarily. Dyce could deal with him, if he had to, when he replenished his supply of PMBL. The last of it had just gone into the cop in the cornfield.

Dyce dragged Tee’s body two rows farther into the corn so that it could not be seen by anyone passing on the road. He walked to Tee’s car and drove it deeply into the field, curving his route so that no one glancing down the entrance furrow could see anything at the end but more corn.

Dyce prepared grandfather’s body as he remembered grandfather having done for his father ten years earlier. The coffin, however, was beyond his talents. Unskilled with saw or hammer, he simply laid the old man’s body on a plank set up on the sawhorses covered by the black tarpaulin. For three days Dyce sat vigil in grandfather’s chair in the darkened living room, and with every hour his faith in grandfather’s religion drained a fraction more until finally, the vigil over, there was none left. His faith in the resurrection was nothing more than a distant hope, his credence in the hellfire and the righteous, whimsical god who fueled it with his wrath dwindled to nothing. But he never lost faith in grandfather himself. If grandfather’s God was wrong, that did not mean grandfather himself was wrong.

On the morning of the fourth day Dyce carried grandfather’s withered body to his bedroom, dressed him in pajamas and laid him to rest under the blankets, The old man had become so frail in his final years it was like carrying a child. It was winter and Dyce had kept the heat off so the decomposition was slight, but the odor, as he cradled the body against his chest, was very strong. Dyce choked back his revulsion and forced himself to breathe deeply. If grandfather stank, then the stench was good and pure.

When all signs indicated that the old man had died peacefully in bed-as indeed he had-Dyce called the authorities and told them he had just returned from a weekend in upstate New York looking at the campus of the college he was to attend in thirteen days and had discovered his grandfather dead. Dyce waited a week after the official funeral before he set fire to the house. He knew he would not return and he could not bear the idea of anyone else living in the home where he and grandfather had loved one another.

The fire department responded more quickly than he had anticipated, saving most of the roof and the attic rafters and a portion of the porch where grandfather had sat and waited and watched for the arrival of his grandson.

It was good enough, Dyce decided. No one could live in the house and there was something comforting about the indestructibility of the stone walls that continued to stand, blackened by smoke but as solid as the earth from which they came. From a distance the house still looked whole and someday, when he had wrested his fortune from the world, Dyce could return to live again in his only inheritance.

The cemetery was empty except for the men digging a fresh grave in Section Three, and they were too far away and preoccupied to pay any attention to him. With one more look around to assure his privacy, Dyce knelt on the grass beside grandfather’s grave. A spider had spun a web from the plastic flowers that sat atop the funerary urn to the ground and the encased carcasses of two victims hung from the threads like roosting bats with their wings enfolded round them. Dyce removed the plastic flowers from the top of the urn, snapping the web, revealing the glass gallon container beneath. He would need all of it this time, he would have to take it with him, so Dyce pulled out the bottle. Dirt and some kind of moss encrusted the bottom of the container so it came up with resistance, and algae was slowly colonizing the unperceptible valleys of the glass surface, but inside the bottle and its plastic lid, which was still untouched by nature’s slow incursions after fifteen years, the liquid PMBL was still as clear as spring water with the faintest touch of blue. Like water from a glacier, Dyce thought. Like drinking water of an earlier age before pollution. Like the water in Canada, maybe. He would find out soon enough.

Holding the bottle to his chest with both arms wrapped around it, Dyce spent a moment alone with grandfather. At first it was hard to concentrate; there were so many things on his mind. They were chasing him and they were so close. He didn’t understand how they could be so close, two of them within an hour- but they were stupid, they were gullible. He had no doubt that he could outwit them. There was only one of them he feared, the companion at the hospital of the cop he had just dealt with-but he wasn’t here and maybe he wasn’t coming. If he did come, Dyce knew what he had to do. He could ignore the others or deal with them as they came along, but that one he would have to kill.

He struggled to put such things out of his mind and to get in touch with grandfather. Eventually the peace settled over him and he could see the old man again, and smell the scent of the plain soap he used to wash his body and his hair. He could feel the gentle prickle of grandfather’s beard touching his cheek, and then the back of his neck as grandfather got behind him. He could hear the rapid panting of grandfather’s breath into his ear, he could feel grandfather pressing against him from behind, pressing and pressing until the panting stopped with a shuddering sigh.

Dyce felt a moment’s anger with grandfather for dying-no, not for dying, but for failing to come back. For leaving Dyce alone and without hope. But the moment passed and he left grandfather as he always did, with love and longing.