“Oh, that was a terrible time,” she said. “A terrible thing that happened to his wife and little boy.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

My dying mother looked at me with stoned contempt. “You don’t know. You don’t understand. It was terrible because it was no one’s fault. Certainly not George Barton’s. He simply had a seizure.”

She then told me what I have already told you. She heard it from the mouth of Adele Parker, who said she would never get the image of the dying woman out of her head. “What I’ll never get out of mine,” Mom said, “was the way he screamed at Peabody’s. I didn’t know a man could make a sound like that.”

 • • •

Doreen DeWitt, Fernald’s wife, called my mother and gave her the news. She had a good reason for calling Laura Morton first. “You’ll have to tell him,” she said.

My mother was horrified at the prospect. “Oh, no! I couldn’t!”

“You have to,” Doreen said patiently. “This isn’t news you give over the phone, and except for that old gore-crow Myra Harrington, you’re his closest neighbor.”

My mother, all her reticence washed away by the morphine, told me, “I gathered up my courage to do it, but I was caught short as I was going out the door. I had to turn around and run to the toidy and shit.”

She walked down our hill, across Route 9, and to the parsonage. She didn’t say, but I imagine it was the longest walk of her life. She knocked on the door, but at first he didn’t come, although she could hear the radio inside.

“Why would he have heard me?” she inquired of the ceiling as I sat there beside her. “The first time, my knuckles barely grazed the wood.”

She knocked harder the second time. He opened the door and looked at her through the screen. He was holding a large book in one hand, and all those years later she remembered the title: Protons and Neutrons: The Secret World of Electricity.

“Hello, Laura,” he said. “Are you all right? You’re very pale. Come in, come in.”

She came in. He asked her what was wrong.

“There’s been a terrible accident,” she said.

His look of concern deepened. “Dick or one of the kids? Do you need me to come? Sit down, Laura, you look ready to faint.”

“All of mine are all right,” she said. “It’s . . . Charles, it’s Patsy. And Morrie.”

He set the big book carefully on a table in the hall. That was probably when she saw the title, and I’m not surprised that she remembered it; at such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.

“How badly are they hurt?” And before she could answer: “Are they at St. Stevie’s? They must be, it’s the closest. Can we take your station wagon?”

St. Stephen’s Hospital was in Castle Rock, but of course that wasn’t where they had been taken. “Charles, you must prepare yourself for a terrible shock.”

He took her by the shoulders—gently, she said, not hard, but when he bent to look into her face, his eyes were blazing. “How bad? Laura, how badly are they hurt?”

My mother began to cry. “They’re dead, Charles. I am so sorry.”

He let go of her and his arms dropped to his sides. “No they’re not,” he said. It was the voice of a man stating a simple fact.

“I should have driven down,” my mother said. “I should have brought the station wagon, yes. I wasn’t thinking. I just came.”

“They’re not,” he said again. He turned from her and put his forehead against the wall. “No.” He banged his head hard enough to rattle a nearby picture of Jesus carrying a lamb. “No.” He banged it again and the picture fell off its hook.

She took his arm. It was floppy and loose. “Charles, don’t do that.” And, as if he had been one of her children instead of a grown man: “Don’t, honey.”

“No.” He banged his forehead again. “No!” Yet again. “No!”

This time she took hold of him with both hands and pulled him away from the wall. “Stop that! You stop it right now!”

He looked at her, dazed. A bright red mark dashed across his brow.

“Such a look,” she told me years later, as she lay dying. “I couldn’t bear it, but I had to. Once a thing like that is started, you have to finish it.”

“Walk back to the house with me,” she told him. “I’ll give you a drink of Dick’s whiskey, because you need something, and I know there’s nothing like that here—”

He laughed. It was a shocking sound.

“—and then I’ll drive you to Gates Falls. They’re at Peabody’s.”

“Peabody’s?”

She waited for it to sink in. He knew what Peabody’s was as well as she did. By that time Reverend Jacobs had officiated at dozens of funerals.

“Patsy can’t be dead,” he said in a patient, instructional tone of voice. “It’s Wednesday. Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, that’s what Morrie says.”

“Come with me, Charles.” She took him by the hand and tugged him first to the door and then into the gorgeous autumn sunshine. That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

When they reached Route 9—sunwashed and silent, empty of traffic as it almost always was—he cocked his head, doglike, toward the sound of sirens in the direction of Sirois Hill. On the horizon was a smudge of smoke. He looked at my mother.

“Morrie, too? You’re sure?”

“Come on, Charlie.” (“It was the only time I ever called him that,” she told me.) “Come on, we’re in the middle of the road.”

 • • •

They went to Gates Falls in our old Ford wagon, and they went by way of Castle Rock. It was at least twenty miles longer, but my mother was past the worst of her shock by then, and able to think clearly. She had no intention of driving past the scene of the crash, even if it meant going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn.

Peabody’s Funeral Home was on Grand Street. The gray Cadillac hearse was already in the driveway, and several vehicles were parked at the curb. One of them was Reggie Kelton’s boat of a Buick. Another, she was enormously relieved to see, was a panel truck with MORTON FUEL OIL on the side.

Dad and Mr. Kelton came out the front door while Mom was leading Reverend Jacobs up the walk, by then as docile as a child. He was looking up, Mom said, as if to gauge how far the foliage had to go before it would reach peak color.

Dad hugged Jacobs, but Jacobs didn’t hug back. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, looking up at the leaves.

“Charlie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Kelton rumbled. “We all are.”

They escorted him into the oversweet smell of flowers. Organ music, low as a whisper and somehow awful, came from overhead speakers. Myra Harrington—Me-Maw to everyone in West Harlow—was already there, probably because she had been listening in on the party line when Doreen called my mother. Listening in was her hobby. She heaved her bulk from a sofa in the foyer and pulled Reverend Jacobs to her enormous bosom.

“Your dear sweet wife and your dear little boy!” she cried in her high, mewling voice. Mom looked at Dad, and they both winced. “Well, they’re in heaven now! That’s the consolation! Saved by the blood of the Lamb and rocked in the everlasting arms!” Tears poured down Me-Maw’s cheeks, cutting through a thick layer of pink powder.

Reverend Jacobs allowed himself to be hugged and made of. After a minute or two (“Around the time I began to think she wouldn’t stop until she suffocated him with those great tits of hers,” my mother told me), he pushed her away. Not hard, but with firmness. He turned to my father and Mr. Kelton and said, “I’ll see them now.”

“Now, Charlie, not yet,” Mr. Kelton said. “You need to hold on for a bit. Just until Mr. Peabody makes them presenta—”

Jacobs walked through the viewing parlor, where some old lady in a mahogany coffin was waiting for her final public appearance. He continued on down the hall toward the back. He knew where he was going; few better.