By afternoon, the flow of traffic had mostly dried up. Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendant, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move. It was just as well, because by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth there had been less than three dozen men capable of standing watch. Gus, who felt perfectly fine until yesterday, had come down with a runny nose himself. In fact, the only person in town besides herself who seemed all right was Amy Lauder's sixteen-year-old brother Harold. Amy herself had died just before that first town meeting, her wedding dress still hung in the closet, unworn.
Fran hadn't been out today, hadn't seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the close-together double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality.
And now there were these questions to consider. Flies … eyes … pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic ice-maker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube.
She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind-two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator's icemaking gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that.
The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer's day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don't come to swim because the water's never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.
The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?
She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.
It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.
That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.
At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.
You can't keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer.
The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again-
She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.
She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It … it …
"No!" she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would … would …
"Stop backing away from it!" she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. "Who's going to bury him?"
And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole-she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuces-and turned around, a little afraid.
The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn't like Harold and didn't know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn't like.
Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars -that was Harold's style.
"He whacks off in his pants," Amy had once confided to Fran. "How's that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they'll just about stand up by themselves."
Harold's hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn't care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him-she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn't think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.
He hadn't seen her. He was looking up at the house. "Anybody home?" he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac's window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie's nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away.
Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He's another living human being, anyway.
"Over here, Harold," she called.
Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold's eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her.
"Say, Fran," he said happily.
"Hi, Harold."
"I'd heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I'm canvassing the township." He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush.
"I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father-?"
"I'm afraid so," Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. "But life goes on, does it not?"
"I guess it does," Fran said wanly. His eyes were on her beasts again, dancing across them, and she wished for a sweater.
"How do you like my car?"
"It's Mr. Brannigan's, isn't it?" Roy Brannigan was a local realtor.
"It was," Harold said indifferently. "I used to believe that, in these days of shortages, anyone who drove such a thyroidal monster ought to be hung from the nearest Sunoco sign, but all of that has changed. Less people means more petrol." Petrol, Fran thought dazedly, he actually said petrol. "More everything," Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy.
"Harold, if you'll excuse me-"
"But whatever can you be doing, my child?"
The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike-I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it-I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord. I just don't know.
"Harold," she said patiently. "I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physically impossible for me to be your child."
"Just a figure of speech," he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. "Anyway, what is it? That hole?"
"A grave. For my father."
"Oh," Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice.