Joan Didion - Run River

She drove into town alone, a silk robe pulled over her nightgown, to identify the bodies. Because the accident had been discovered so quickly, identification was only a formality. Walter Knight’s face, unmarked, bore only the featureless look of the recently drowned. Rita had been cut, across her left cheek and down that long Blanchard throat; she had been thrown, they said, against the dashboard before the car hit the water. Her long hair was still wet, and Edith Knight wondered, irrelevantly but obsessively, if it would dry before they buried her. She did not see how it could dry in the grave. Although she asked the coroner’s emergency attendant if it could, he did not seem to know. A small man possessed of a large curiosity about people under stress (an interest which relieved the general tedium of his work), the attendant took advantage, however, of this opening: he wondered, probing delicately, if the lady with the beautiful hair had been visiting Mrs. Knight and the late Senator. The late State Senator.

“Miss Rita Blanchard has lived all her life on Thirty-eighth Street,” Edith Knight said sharply. “She is from an old, old family in the Valley. A family,” she added magnanimously, “which crossed the Great Plains a year before my own.”

“A great tragedy, Mrs. Knight,” the coroner’s assistant said, abandoning the opportunity to pursue Sacramento Valley genealogy further and reaching instead for her hand. “A tragic loss.’ ”

“The Lord gives it and takes it, Mr. Paley,” she said, turning away from his outstretched hand.

By the time she left the morgue the sun was completely up, and the heat rising. She drove directly to the McClellan place and found Lily in the kitchen. “Oh Christ,” Lily whispered. “He’ll never have the marmalade.” She had gotten up at dawn to make pear marmalade for her father before the heat came up. The marmalade was a kind he especially liked, from a recipe of his mother’s, and she had planned it as a surprise. She had gone to the ranch the day before to get the pears from Gomez. “The marmalade would have shown him,” she whispered. “Shown him what?” Edith Knight asked, but Lily did not answer because she had put her knuckles against her teeth to keep from screaming and had slipped down beside the sink to the linoleum floor. Shaking but not moving in any other way, she stayed there until Edith Knight pulled her to her feet, untied the apron she was wearing over her nightgown, and led her upstairs to Everett, who was shaving. Later the doctor gave Everett enough pills to keep her quiet for two days and Edith Knight said she had never, never in her entire life, seen anybody react the way that child reacted to a death in the family, she had always been morbidly sensitive and frankly it would have been better if they had gotten the pills before they told her, they might have known it would happen and she of all people should have known Lily was not strong enough to cope with the things other people had to cope with, but when do you think at a time like that.

On the morning of the funeral, Edith Knight and Martha, together, managed to get Lily dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor while Martha went through her closet. She had nothing which approximated mourning except a black silk suit she had bought in Berkeley; now, six months pregnant, she could not fasten the skirt. “Everett said it didn’t matter what I wore,” she said again and again, and finally, after her mother and Martha had conceded that it did not, she put on a maternity skirt, a pink and white flowered blouse that her father had once admired, and, an afterthought, a black lace mantilla. She looked, Martha whispered to Everett, like a stray from The Grapes of Wrath .

It was another bad day, close to 108° at eleven o’clock. Lily sat between her mother and Everett in the car, her composure so precarious that she could look at neither of them.

“I feel stronger every minute,” Edith Knight announced, trying to work her long gloves onto her fingers. “Here,” she added, pulling off one of the gloves and twisting a large ring from her finger. “I meant for you to have this some day anyway.”

Lily slipped the ring over her wedding ring and closed her eyes again. It was a diamond her father had given her mother the day she was born.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I don’t know.” Edith Knight lifted Lily’s left hand and appraised the effect. “You’re really too young.”

“She’s really too skinny,” Everett said. “She’ll lose it.”

“I want it,” Lily said, opening her eyes; it was the first unequivocal statement she had made in two days.

They did not have a Catholic funeral. Because only a handful of the Knights were Catholics in the first place and because even their Catholicism was more an accident of birth or marriage than an act of faith, the family was not troubled by the Episcopal service, the unconsecrated ground: the family graveyard, near the ranch, where no one had been buried since 1892. “I don’t care if he was brought up Catholic or brought up Hindu,” Edith Knight had declared. “I guess I know where he’d want to lie. I guess I know that much.”

From all over the Valley and from the Sierra foothills the family came; everyone from the river came and everyone from town came. Gomez and Crystal came, the Governor came, and the bartender from the Senator Hotel came. As if she were immune to grief, love, all the transient passions, Edith Knight stood throughout the funeral without moving. Lily stood behind her, looking away from the grave toward the distant line of cottonwoods which marked the river. She had thrown the mantilla back from her hair because it seemed to draw the heat; now it lay, fallen from her shoulders, on the ground behind her. She could not stoop to pick it up.

There was a certain comfort in the unkempt graveyard. Dried grass obscured the markers, and the wings had been broken years before from the stone angels guarding the rusted wire gate; there was about the place none of the respect for death implicit in a well-tended plot. Once, a long time before, Walter Knight had brought Lily to see this graveyard. He had made her trace out with her finger the letters on the stones, the names and their dates, until she found the small, rough stone which marked the oldest grave. Matthew Broderick Knight, January 2, 1847, until December 6, 1848 . The baby had been the first of them to die in California. It was a favorite story, passed on from Knight to Knight and documented periodically in the historical supplements to the Sacramento Union . Born in Kentucky, the child had begun to burn with infant fever on the way west. Another child in the party had died of it, and that mother had carried the dead child in her arms for three days, telling no one, afraid they would bury her baby before they came to a station. But Matthew Knight had lived out the crossing; he died instead in a room in Sacramento that first winter, while his father, Lily’s great-great-grandfather, was building the first house on the ranch. His mother, twenty years old that winter, was deranged for months, believing herself at home in Bourbon County even as she hauled buckets of Sacramento River silt to cover the hardpan around her raw house. She wanted to grow a garden of forget-me-nots and love-lies-bleeding and the dogwood she remembered from her mother’s kitchen stoop, but as summer broke and she began to feel herself again she planted those same alien poppies and lupine that grew on the child’s grave. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down , she had ordered cut into the gravestone, but that had been when she was ill. The symbolic nature of Amanda Broderick Knight’s first garden on the ranch was, for the Knights, this story’s raison-d’être . “I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,” Walter Knight had said to Lily, playing a familiar variation on a familiar motif. Even as she recognized that all he was giving her was the official family line, Lily could not help but be disarmed. She answered in the same rich vein: “Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me.” “It does, you hear me?” Walter Knight said sharply. “We made it.” She had never doubted that.