Kent Haruf - Eventide

They’re burying my brother tomorrow. I won’t be in here for that.

Oh, I’m sorry. Still, I think you’ll need to talk to the doctor anyway.

He better get here early then, Raymond said. I’ll be gone before noon.

She touched his shoulder and crossed to the door and closed the door behind her.

Raymond lay in the bed in the darkened room looking out the window at the bare trees in front of the hospital. Two hours later he was still awake when the wind started up, whining and crying in the higher branches. He thought about what the wind would be doing out south of town and he wondered if Victoria and the little girl had been wakened by it. He expected they hadn’t. But out in the south pasture, the cattle would all be standing awake with their backs to the wind, and there would be dry little dust storms blowing up in the corrals, shifting across the dry clumps of manure and the loose dirt around the barn. And he knew if things were as they should be, he and his brother would step outside in the morning to begin work as usual and they would stop to smell the dirt in the air, and then one or the other of them would say something about it, and he himself might comment on the likelihood of rain, and then Harold would say that a blizzard would be more likely, this time of year, given the way things were going of late.

WHEN THE DOCTOR ENTERED THE ROOM IN THE MORNING he was of a mind not to allow Raymond permission to leave the hospital, but when Raymond said he was going to leave regardless the doctor relented and said he could go for half a day but would have to return after the funeral. Just past noontime at the front desk Raymond signed the papers and they released him into the care of Victoria Roubideaux. She had put Katie with Maggie Jones, and earlier that morning she’d brought him the clean clothes he’d asked for. Now she pushed him in a wheelchair out to where her car was parked at the curb in front of the hospital. One leg of his dark trousers was slit to the knee to accommodate the cast, and he wore a blue shirt with pearl snaps which she had pressed freshly that morning and he had on his plaid wool jacket and the good Bailey hat that he wore only to town. Balanced across his lap were the aluminum crutches the hospital had loaned him.

When he came out of the hospital into the fresh autumn air he looked at the sky and looked all around and breathed in.

Well, goddamn, he said. It feels about as good as church letting out, to get shut of that damn place. Now you’ll have to pardon my language, honey. But by God, it does.

And it’s a good thing to see you come out of there, she said. I believe you look better already.

I feel better already. And I’ll tell you another thing. I ain’t going back in there. Not today, not ever.

I thought you agreed to go back this afternoon. That’s why they let you out.

Oh hell, honey, I’d say anything to get them to release me from that place. Let’s get going. Before they change their minds. Where’s your car at?

Down the street here.

Let’s go find it.

AT THE METHODIST CHURCH ON GUM STREET TOM Guthrie was standing at the curb in the bright sun waiting for Raymond and Victoria. They pulled up and Raymond opened the door and Guthrie helped him climb out. He stood up onto the sidewalk, but when Victoria opened the wheelchair behind him he refused to use it, telling them he would walk. And so with Victoria on one side and Guthrie on the other he fit the rubber cushions of the crutches under his arms and hobbled across the wide walkway into the church.

Inside, the organist hadn’t started playing yet and there was no one in the sanctuary. They moved slowly down the carpeted center aisle between the rows of glossy wooden pews toward the altar and pulpit, Raymond stepping carefully with his head down watching his feet, and they reached the front and he shifted sideways into the second pew. Victoria went out to the nursery to see if she could find Maggie and Katie, and Guthrie sat down beside Raymond. Raymond appeared to be exhausted already. He removed his hat and set it next to him on the pew. His face was sweating, his face was even redder than usual, and for some time he only sat and breathed.

You all right? Guthrie said, looking at him.

Yeah. I will be.

You’re not going to keel over, are you? Tell me if you feel like you’re going to.

I ain’t going to keel over.

He sat breathing with his head down. After a while he looked up and began to survey the objects in the high silent sanctuary — the outsized wooden cross attached to the wall behind the pulpit, the colored windows where the sun streamed in — and now he saw that his brother’s casket was resting on a wheeled trestle at the head of the center aisle. The casket was closed. Raymond looked at it for some time. Then he said: Let me out of here.

Where you going? Guthrie said. If you need something, let me go get it for you.

I want to see what they done to him.

Guthrie stepped out of the way and Raymond grabbed the back of the pew ahead of him, pulling himself upright, and fit the crutches in place and hobbled out into the aisle up to the casket. He stood at the long smooth side of it. He set his hands on the dark satiny wood and then tried to raise the top half of the lid but couldn’t manage to move it without dropping his crutches. He turned his head to one side. Tom, he said. Come help me with this damn thing, would you?

Guthrie came forward and raised the upper half of the polished lid and propped it back. There before Raymond was his brother’s dead body, stretched out lying on his back, his eyes sunken in the waxy-looking face, his eyes closed forever under the thin-veined eyelids, his stiff iron-gray hair combed flat across his pale skull. At the funeral home they had called Victoria to ask her to bring them something appropriate for them to put on him, and she had located the old gray wool suit in the back of his closet, the only one he had ever owned, and when she had brought it to them they had had to cut the coat down the back seam to get him into it.

Raymond stood and looked at his brother’s face. His thick eyebrows had been trimmed and they had dabbed powder and makeup on his cheeks over the scratches and bruises, and they had wound a tie around his neck under the shirt collar. He didn’t know where they had gotten the tie, it wasn’t anything he remembered. And they had folded his brother’s hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.

You can shut it again, he said to Guthrie. That ain’t him in there. My brother wouldn’t let himself look like that even for a minute if he was still alive. Not if he still had breath to prevent them from doing him like that. I know what my brother looks like.

He turned and hobbled back to the pew and sat down and laid his crutches out of the way. Then he shut his eyes and never looked at the dead face of his brother again.

PEOPLE BEGAN FILING INTO THE CHURCH. THE ORGANIST in the loft at the back of the sanctuary began to play, and Victoria and Maggie came in, with Katie in her mother’s arms. Together they slid in beside Raymond. The mortician and an assistant in a matching black suit seated people in pews on both sides of the aisle, moving everybody up to the front, but there were not a great many mourners at the funeral, and only the first five rows were filled. Before the service began, the mortician came forward very somberly and opened the casket so that during the service people might view his handiwork, and then the minister came in from a side door and crossed to the pulpit and greeted them one and all in the name of Jesus in a voice that was laden with solemnity and import. Then there were prayers to be said and hymns to be sung. The organist played Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine and Abide with Me: Fast Falls the Eventide, and people sang along, but not very loud. When the music was finished the preacher began to talk in earnest and he spoke about a man about whom he knew next to nothing at all, saying to those in attendance that he believed Harold McPheron must have been a good man, a Christian light among his fellows, else why would they be there marking his passing even if they were only a few in number, though they must all remember a man might be loved deeply even if he was never to be loved widely, and no one present should ever forget that. Sitting beside Raymond, Victoria cried a little despite the inadequacy and ignorance of what the man was saying, and Katie at one point grew so fussy that Raymond had to reach over and lift her onto his lap, patting her and whispering in her ear until she quieted down.