Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

There was no reply. I decided he was probably in the bathroom. I sure hoped he hadn’t fallen in there, because it was Mrs. Grogan’s day off. When I went into the living room and saw him sitting in his chair—oxygen bottle on the floor, iPhone and McTeague on the table beside him—I relaxed. Only his chin was on his chest, and he had slumped a little to one side. He looked like he was asleep. If so, that was a first this late in the afternoon. He napped for an hour after lunch, and by the time I arrived, he was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

I took a step closer and saw his eyes weren’t entirely closed. I could see the lower arc of his irises, but the blue no longer looked sharp. It looked foggy, faded. I began to feel scared.

“Mr. Harrigan?”

Nothing. Gnarled hands folded loosely in his lap. One of his canes was still leaning against the wall, but the other was on the floor, as if he had reached for it and knocked it over. I realized I could hear the steady hiss from the oxygen mask, but not the faint rasp of his breathing, a sound I’d grown so used to that I rarely heard it at all.

“Mr. Harrigan, you okay?”

I took another couple of steps and reached out to shake him awake, then withdrew my hand. I had never seen a dead person, but thought I might be looking at one now. I reached for him again, and this time I didn’t chicken out. I grasped his shoulder (it was horribly bony beneath his shirt) and gave him a shake.

“Mr. Harrigan, wake up!”

One of his hands fell out of his lap and dangled between his legs. He slumped a little farther to one side. I could see the yellowed pegs of his teeth between his lips. Still, I felt I had to be absolutely sure he wasn’t just unconscious or in a faint before I called anyone. I had a memory, very brief but very bright, of my mother reading me the story of the little boy who cried wolf.

I went into the hall bathroom, the one Mrs. Grogan called the powder room, on legs that felt numb, and came back with the hand mirror Mr. Harrigan kept on the shelf. I held it in front of his mouth and nose. No warm breath misted it. Then I knew (although, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I actually knew when that hand fell out of his lap and hung between his legs). I was in the living room with a dead man, and what if he reached out and grabbed me? Of course he wouldn’t do that, he liked me, but I remembered the look he got in his eyes when he said—only yesterday! when he’d been alive!—that if he was a younger man, he’d take this new income stream by the balls, and squeeze. And how he’d closed his hand into a fist to demonstrate.

You’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless , he’d said.

Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that, dead people weren’t ruthless, dead people weren’t anything , but I still stepped away from him as I took my cell phone out of my hip pocket, and I didn’t take my eyes off him when I called my father.

Dad said I was probably right, but he’d send an ambulance, just in case. Who was Mr. Harrigan’s doctor, did I know? I said he didn’t have one (and you only had to look at his teeth to know he didn’t have a dentist). I said I would wait, and I did. But I did it outside. Before I went, I thought about picking up his dangling hand and putting it back in his lap. I almost did, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It would be cold.

I took his iPhone instead. It wasn’t stealing. I think it was grief, because the loss of him was starting to sink in. I wanted something that was his. Something that mattered.

I guess that was the biggest funeral our church ever had. Also the longest cortege to the graveyard, mostly made up of rental cars. There were local people there, of course, including Pete Bostwick, the gardener, and Ronnie Smits, who had done most of the work on his house (and gotten wealthy out of it, I’m sure), and Mrs. Grogan, the housekeeper. Other townies as well, because he was well liked in Harlow, but most of the mourners (if they were mourning, and not there just to make sure Mr. Harrigan was really dead) were business people from New York. There was no family. I mean zero, zilch, nada. Not even a niece or a second cousin. He’d never married, never had kids—probably one of the reasons Dad was leery about me going up there at first—and he’d outlived all the rest. That’s why it was the kid from down the road, the one he paid to come and read to him, who found him.

Mr. Harrigan must have known he was on borrowed time, because he left a handwritten sheet of paper on his study desk specifying exactly how he wanted his final rites carried out. It was pretty simple. Hay & Peabody’s Funeral Home had had a cash deposit on their books since 2004, enough to take care of everything with some left over. There was to be no wake or viewing hours, but he wanted to be “fixed up decently, if possible” so the coffin could be open at the funeral.

Reverend Mooney was to conduct the service, and I was to read from the fourth chapter of Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” I saw some of the business types exchange looks at that, as though Mr. Harrigan hadn’t shown them a great deal of kindness, or much in the way of forgiveness, either.

He wanted three hymns: “Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “In the Garden.” He wanted Reverend Mooney’s homily to last no more than ten minutes, and the Rev finished in just eight, ahead of schedule and, I believe, a personal best. Mostly the Rev just listed all the stuff Mr. Harrigan had done for Harlow, like paying to refurbish the Eureka Grange and fix up the Royal River covered bridge. He also put the fund drive for the community swimming pool over the top, the Rev said, but refused the naming privilege that went with it.

The Rev didn’t say why, but I knew. Mr. Harrigan said that allowing people to name things after you was not only absurd but undignified and ephemeral. In fifty years, he said, or even twenty, you were just a name on a plaque that everyone ignored.

Once I had done my scriptural duty, I sat in the front row with Dad, looking at the coffin with the vases of lilies at its head and foot. Mr. Harrigan’s nose stuck up like the prow of a ship. I told myself not to look at it, not to think it was funny or horrible (or both), but to remember him as he’d been. Good advice, but my eyes kept wandering back.

When the Rev finished his short talk, he raised his palm-down hand to the assembled mourners and gave the benediction. Once that was done, he said, “Those of you who would like to say a final word of goodbye may now approach the coffin.”

There was a rustle of clothes and a murmur of voices as people stood. Virginia Hatlen began to play the organ very softly, and I realized—with a strange feeling I couldn’t name then but would years later come to identify as surrealism—that it was a medley of country songs, including Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of a Dove,” Dwight Yoakam’s “I Sang Dixie,” and of course “Stand By Your Man.” So Mr. Harrigan had even left instructions for the exit music, and I thought, good for him . A line was forming, the locals in their sport coats and khakis interspersed with the New York types in suits and fancy shoes.

“What about you, Craig?” Dad murmured. “Want a last look, or are you good?”

I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers.