T. Boyle - Riven Rock

And it got louder. Telegrams arrived nonstop, newspapers ran headlines and front-page eulogies. The employees of the McCormick Reaper Works sent over a replica of the reaper composed of five thousand flawless gardenias, with the main wheel symbolically broken, and four hundred workers shuffled in a solemn double line past the catafalque. Presidents, premiers, sultans, grand viziers, emperors and beglerbegs sent their condolences. Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the reaper, multimillionaire, recipient of the Cross of the French Legion of Honor, cranky, old, bullheaded, unloving, rheumatic, wheezy and tyrannical, was dead at seventy-five. Dead, and lying there in the drawing room in his coffin, as pale as a toad preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

When it came time to pay his last respects, Stanley was led into the drawing room by his big brother, Cyrus Jr. Cyrus Jr. was then a bearded young man of twenty-five who suddenly found himself in control of a business that grossed seventy-five million dollars a year and whom everybody said looked just like Papa. Stanley couldn’t see the resemblance. His father was an old man, the oldest person of either sex he’d ever seen, sixty-five when Stanley was born, seventy by the time Stanley began to understand who he was, and finally, in the end, a fleshless, soulless artifact as ancient and unfathomable as a fossilized dinosaur egg. Stanley liked dinosaurs — he liked to dream about the rending teeth of the big carnivorous ones and the armor they all wore to protect themselves, even the slowest and smallest — but he didn’t like his father. Or hadn’t liked him.

And as he approached the coffin, Cyrus’s hand huge and soft in the feeble grip of his own and burning like a furnace, like a steam engine, like molten rock, he felt nothing but guilt. Not sorrow, not loss, but guilt. People looked at him and saw a grieving son, but what they didn’t know was that when his mother had convened the family nightly to pray for his father’s recovery, Stanley had bowed his head and pleaded with God to take the old Reaper King away forever. And God had listened, because Stanley didn’t love his progenitor and provider the way a son should — he feared him, feared and loathed him and shrank away from his booming wheeze and his twisted shellacked hands and the smell of something gone dead and rotten that seeped like poison from his flaring old hair-choked nostrils. It was a terrible thing not to love your father, a sin that reverberated through all the chasms of hell and howled in the very ears of the Devil himself. Stanley was a patricide, an ingrate, a worm. And he was only nine years old.

But there it was, the casket, huge, big as a boat and polished till you could see your face in it, and not just in the brass or gold or whatever it was, but in the wood too. It was elevated on a dais in the center of that familiar room with its old French furniture and wainscoted walls and the vaulted ceiling painted to mimic a summer sky replete with cottony clouds and birds on the wing, and that made it seem even bigger. This was the ship that would take the Reaper King on his final voyage, down to a place where it was always dark and wet and where the insects would burrow into his flesh and lay their eggs to hatch… and then to heaven, because Stanley’s father was a good man who’d served humanity and God too and fed the multitudes, just as Christ had — Stanley knew that and would never deny it. He knew it because his mother had told him so. Told him again and again till he’d grown up with a whole litany of his father’s goodness to hold up against the living picture of the crabbed bitter old immitigable figure sunk into the wheelchair in the upper hallway.

Stanley’s legs were leaden, his feet stuck to the floor. There must have been two hundred people there, friends, relatives, strangers, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, and he couldn’t look into their faces, couldn’t even lift his head. He watched his feet, studying the sheen of his high-button shoes as they stuck and pulled free of the carpet, stuck and pulled free, step by step, closer and closer. The drinks and sandwiches were gone now, but the whole house smelled of them still, and this room especially. It smelled like a kitchen, reeking of canapes, smoked sausage, fish eggs and something else, something indefinable — perfume, he guessed it was. But not the sort of perfume ladies wore — something deeper, harsher, more intense and astringent. He was thinking about that, about what kind of perfume that might be and how the undertaker and his silent gliding palm-rubbing assistants just might happen to know, when all at once Cyrus Jr. squeezed his hand, a sudden violent pressure, and Stanley looked up to see the bright stony rail of the casket right there in front of him and his dead father’s nose projecting above it like some etiolated mushroom springing up out of the ground after a storm. He felt dizzy, as if he’d been etherized, and his legs almost failed him — they didn’t seem to have any bone left in them, weren’t even attached to his hips anymore — and then his mother was there, rising up from beside the coffin to wrap him in her arms.

She’d been kneeling in the shadows like some sort of supplicant, like the maharajah’s widow who throws herself on the funeral pyre, and he saw that his sister Anita was there too, eighteen and bereft, her wide baleful face like a picked-over field, and Missy Hammond, the governess, with the swollen hump of her disfigurement and the little red-flecked clots of her eyes staring up at him in misery. And Harold — Harold was kneeling beside them, his shoulders bunched and his hands clasped before him, Harold, his confidant and playmate, only two years older than Stanley and a virtuoso of sinuosity who only wanted to throw a ball and tackle and be tackled till he was indistinguishable from the sod itself, and here he was transformed into a professional mourner, as hollow and cringing as one of the undertaker’s assistants. It was a shock: Harold had loved their father, really loved him, and Stanley hadn’t. The shame burned into him, and he buried his face in his mother’s dress.

And then, somehow, he found himself up on the dais with his mother, staring down at the unhinged face of his dreams. There he was, his father, monstrous in death, as big as any giant or ogre, stretched out on his back as if he were sleeping, his eyes closed, his beard thrust up in a gray spume that shrouded his throat and chin and the new tie they were going to bury him in… but he wasn’t sleeping, he was dead, and there was a rigidity to his fresh-shaven cheeks and a depth to the pits and trenches beneath his eyes that all the mortician’s powder in the world couldn’t conceal. Stanley tried his best to look sad, aggrieved, troubled and heartsore, his mother right there beside him, clergymen fluttering on the periphery like a flock of crows, aunts, uncles and perfect strangers mewling and weeping and dabbing at their eyes, but he only managed to look the way he felt: scared. He wanted to bolt, break away from his mother and all her insuperable power to hold him there, and run before they saw the truth in his eyes, before the rotting stiff perfumed corpse of his father lurched upright in the casket and roared out his perfidy. And he might have, he might have broken for the door and shamed them all, if it wasn’t for Mary Virginia.

All this time she’d been waiting in the wings, weeping and gnashing her teeth, a prisoner of grief, but now, finally, her moment had come. Stanley wasn’t aware of it. He was only aware of himself, slouching on the dais with all those people looking at him and wanting only to run, hide, burrow, hating his mother for holding him there and the mourners for invading his house and his father for dying and for having been alive in the first place. He was vaguely aware that someone was missing, someone vital, but he wasn’t thinking and he didn’t care and he only wanted to die himself, die on the spot and get it over with — until he heard his sister’s first shattering cry. Everything changed in that moment. Suddenly he was outside of himself, floating high over the room with the painted birds and watching his big sister annihilate the whole sorry long-faced crowd with the violence of her grief.