13 French Street

by Gil Brewer

  “In Nebraska, you mean?” I said.

  He nodded. “But I don’t think so. It’s too far, and when you get down to it, one piece of ground is as good as another.” He poured himself a small drink and drank it, then said, “Or maybe not.”

  There was a long silence. Petra drummed her fingers on her knee. Then she said, “Well, then you’re going to bury her in town? In the cemetery in town?”

  “No. I don’t know yet,” he said. “The funeral procession will start here, though.”

  “There won’t be any procession,” Petra said.

  I glanced at her sharply.

  Verne saw me. He said, “That’s all right. She’s right, Alex. There’ll only be us. Nobody else knew her.”

  “But Verne,” Petra said. “Where will you bury her?”

  “I think I’ll bury her out on that knoll, the other side of the orchard. You know, up by that sycamore. It’s a nice spot.”

  “Aren’t you being a little—well, I mean—” Petra stared at me.

  “I know,” Verne said. “No, I’m all right.”

  “But no hearse—” Petra said.

  “That’s right. We’ll have to carry her. Damn it,” he said. “I’m all right. I don’t know why I think this way, but I do.”

  “But who will you get for pallbearers?”

  She was watching him as she spoke, a little apprehensive, maybe. She had a right to be. My insides were knotted up like a tangle of barbed wire, and I kept wanting to tell him. But how could I tell him?

  “There should be six,” Petra said.

  “Four will do,” Verne said.

  “Won’t people talk?”

  “What do you care how they talk?” He turned in his chair and looked at her without any expression. Then he turned back and stared at the floor some more. I decided the best thing to do was to let him get rid of whatever was inside him. Then maybe he’d be all right.

  “I ordered a light casket,” Verne said. “She’d almost fit in a child’s casket. So four will do.”

  “Verne, if you don’t stop it!” Petra said.

  “Stop what?” He seemed slightly startled. “Nothing.”

  I couldn’t seem to get comfortable in my chair. It was hard, bumpy all over. I knew it wasn’t, actually, but it seemed that way.

  “Yes,” Verne said. “Up on that knoll.” He rose and walked into the hall. I heard him at the telephone. Petra rose quickly and came over by me.

  “He acts funny,” she said.

  “He’s been working too hard. Any kind of shock might make him act this way. He’ll be all right in a little while.”

  She stood very close to me. She leaned over, and without volition I put my arms around her, felt the firm swelling of her hips. Her lips descended. I shoved her away. “Look out,” I said.

  “Yes.” She went back to her chair. “You’re excited, aren’t you?” she said. “I am, too. I wish it were over.”

  My hands were gripping the arms of the chair so hard the tendons and muscles in my wrists ached. It seemed as if little voices were shrieking and screaming in the back of my head. When I looked at Petra, her eyes were like black holes. They were pointed at me, but I don’t believe they really saw me. It was all going on in her head, behind the eyes. I began to perspire.

  Verne returned. He stood in the center of the room and ran both clawed hands through his hair three or four times, briskly. “I talked with them,” he said. “Two men will be out to dig the grave up on the knoll.”

  I sat rigid with my hands gripped around the ends of the chair arms.

  “You can hire professional pallbearers,” Petra said. Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Listen,” Verne said. “Don’t think anything’s the matter with me, for God’s sake!” He turned to me. “I’m sorry, Alex. It’s just the way I want to do it, is all. No. I’ll get old Herb Corey and his hired hand to help. You and I will make up the other two. She knew them; they’re the only ones she knew around here. The only ones ever spoke to her. They’ll be glad. You’ll help, won’t you, Alex?”

  “Sure, Verne.” My voice was a raven’s croak.

  Corey’s hired hand….

  I wanted a drink, but I couldn’t trust myself to pour one because my hands would have trembled too much. Corey’s hired hand. God. Up there on that brambled hill in the quiet nights of passing seasons, squatting, with those damned field glasses sweating against his eyeballs.

  It was murder, that’s what it was. And I was in on it. It was hard to believe, to comprehend. It always is, I guess, when things get close to you, like this.

  • • •

  Just after a lunch of sandwiches and coffee prepared by Petra, and during which no one spoke, I met Verne in the hallway by the stairs. Petra was in the kitchen.

  “Alex, what about Jenny?” He tried to hold himself straight, to act all right, when he looked like death itself.

  “She said she couldn’t come, Verne. She has a new job. She was very sorry to let you down. Sorry, too, about your mother.”

  “Oh.” His mouth twisted down at the corners.

  “She has a phone now. You could talk with her if you like.”

  “No,” he said. “I understand, Alex. I don’t blame Jenny, either. Hell with it all. Let Petra take care of things.”

  I said nothing. Just stood there looking at the man who had been my comrade through a lot of hell-roaring days. A man I’d been able to depend on, as he’d been able to depend on me. We’d drunk together, and fought together, and raised hell together. Once we’d been brothers. And now I had seen his own mother murdered—yes, been a party to that murder. But I didn’t have the guts to tell him. I didn’t have the guts because his wife had her hot hands snarled up in my brain. Too late. It’s always too late.

  “Going up and take a nap,” Verne said. “Sorry about all this, Alex.” His smile was ghastly.

  “Sure. Take it easy.”

  I watched him climb the stairs. He looked very, very old.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE PICTURE. Petra in the hammock. She had returned it to Verne’s study, laid it face down on his desk, the way I had first seen it.

  “Only while he’s around, darling,” she said. “He might notice it was missing. No use taking chances. Not that it means much.”

  She was standing close to me when she said it and the faint odor of her perfume seemed to choke me. I agreed with her, without speaking. And that afternoon the gravediggers came.

  I walked out into the orchard and watched them up there on the knoll. Two men. Their shovels scraped and flashed in the gray, cooling light of autumn. The sky was a tent of gray and their voices joked upon the air between the rasps of earth against steel.

  The sun was dead.

  “Boy, will I be glad when this is done!”

  “Ain’t it a fact?”

  “They buryin’ a dog? Hell of a big dog.”

  “Naw. Old woman kicked off.”

  “Wish my old woman’d kick off.”

  “Damn that root. Hand me the ax. What in hell anybody’d wanta dig a grave up here … What they make graveyards for?”

  “Nutty. Went to Buffalo last week.”

  “Hot dog!”

  “Did somethin’ I’d always wanted to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Had two of ‘em in bed with me the same time.”

  “Hell, man. Ain’t you ever done that before?”

  I left the orchard and walked around the front of the house. Somebody rapped on a window. It was Petra. She motioned for me to come in. I went on inside the house.

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Good,” I said. “Petra …” I had to tell her about Corey’s hired hand and what he knew, but I didn’t know how to begin. It seemed I wasn’t able to tell anybody much of anything these days.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just hold me.”

  “No.” We were in the hall. “Stay away from me, Petra. We were seen.”

  She s
till wore the thin black dress and the white scarf knotted about her throat. Her eyes were very black. “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody saw you push her out of the window, Petra. Not only that, but he saw us—what we were doing when she came into the room.”

  She was very quiet. She stared at me for a long moment. “You’re serious, aren’t you? But you can’t be. How could—”

  “He did, I tell you. Corey’s hired man. He’s been sitting on top of that hill across the road with a pair of field glasses watching you for God knows how long. He stopped me on the way back from town and told me. He wants money, or—”

  Her lips had parted, but otherwise her face hadn’t altered expression. “Go on,” she said. “Or—what?”

  “Oh, God. Or you—once in a while, twice a week—nights. Or—or both,” I said.

  She was wearing a thin silver bracelet. She took it off one arm and put it on the other.

  She said, “And the funeral’s tomorrow and he’s going to help. He’s going to be here.”

  “Yes. So the funeral’s tomorrow.”

  “Well, how much does he want?”

  “I don’t know. I have to see him tomorrow night.”

  She became bold again, the way she always was. With both hands she bunched her hair behind her head, then let it sprawl out over her shoulders again. “Well, we’ll pay him something. I can just about figure his price. He’ll be dirt cheap.”

  “My God,” I said. “Don’t you see?”

  “Of course I see. I’ll think of something. Meanwhile, we’ll pay him. You say he was watching from across the hill?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He couldn’t prove a thing.”

  “Sure. All right,” I said “Maybe he couldn’t. But if he said anything, it might start the ball rolling. What if he spoke to Verne?”

  She socked me with it. “What if Verne were dead, Alex?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She moved in close and it all came in on me like a kind of white heat, dry and stifling. She moved in my arms and brushed her lips across mine. “Alex, Alex,” she said, “I love you so much.”

  “What did you mean—what you said, there?”

  “What?”

  “About Verne.”

  She leaned away from me, from the waist up. “Nothing, darling, honest. Nothing at all.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “All right, I’m lying. Kiss me, damn you! Come on, darling, kiss me!”

  “Don’t call me that. You’ll slip.”

  “You’re getting to think right, aren’t you? You’re admitting it to yourself at last.”

  I grabbed her close and pushed my mouth down on hers. My hand was fumbling at her dress when I heard footsteps in the upstairs hall. It was Verne. I let go and pushed her away from me.

  She headed for the kitchen. I went into Verne’s study and drank from the whisky decanter. I choked the stuff down. But it didn’t help. It didn’t stop my heart from whacking in there and it didn’t stop that sense of being stifled, of being wound tighter and tighter and tighter.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE FUNERAL was at ten o’clock the next morning.

  Sometime during the night it had started raining and it didn’t let up with morning. A slow, cold drizzle that seeped into you, into your bones. The sky was a gray pall, splotched with black, as if it had some kind of disease that was spreading. And the rain kept slowly coming down, whispering in a steady hush over the cold country.

  The Reverend Mr. Waugh was the first to appear at the house. He was a small, tight man in a tight-fitting suit, with tight eyes and a close-lipped mouth. He walked as if he were strapped together with leather, and when he turned, he turned his whole body. Maybe there was something the matter with his neck.

  He had been talking with Verne in the living room after we’d been introduced. I had gone into the study. Petra was with Verne.

  The Reverend Mr. Waugh’s voice went on and on, droning monotonously from the living room. I kept sampling the whisky. It was the only thing that would help pull me through. I tried not to think. But all I could think of was Petra and that our time was a little closer.

  The Reverend cleared his throat in the doorway and walked tightly up to me.

  “This is highly irregular,” he said. “Highly, you know. I don’t mean to—of course, Mr. Bland—friends and all. But the officials won’t like it. Burying out here when there’s a cemetery in Allayne. There’s an ordinance, you know.”

  “We’re outside its jurisdiction,” I said.

  “Yes, but it’s highly irregular.”

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  He looked startled, blinked tightly at me, with his small eyes. “No.”

  I heard a rustle at the door. Petra glanced in, blew a kiss at me, and vanished. Inside I began to tremble. You don’t fool around with death like this. I kept telling myself that. Only it didn’t do any good.

  The Reverend Mr. Waugh went to the study window. “Here comes the hearse.” He turned, looking at me. He seemed happy.

  I heard Petra call to Verne, “Here comes the hearse, dear.”

  I didn’t move. The Reverend Mr. Waugh scurried tightly from the room.

  A funeral service was held in the house and after that we started with the casket for the knoll.

  Verne had the left side and I was behind him. Herb Corey—a red-faced, embarrassed, stout farmer—was opposite Verne. Behind him, across from me, was Corey’s hired hand. I’d been more or less forced to shake his hand when we were introduced, watching the loose smile play across his lips. His name was Cecil Emmetts.

  Petra followed behind us, walking with the Reverend Mr. Waugh through the dripping orchard. All of us wore raincoats. Petra carried an umbrella, beneath which the Reverend Mr. Waugh leaned tightly.

  The coffin was not in the least heavy. The rain dripped and we walked slowly through it, through the wet grass and across a makeshift board platform bridging the creek.

  Then we climbed the knoll. There were two other men from town up there to help lower the casket into the ground. As yet there was no headstone, but I’d heard Verne speak of getting one.

  I refused to look toward Emmetts. But I knew he was watching me.

  Herb Corey and Emmetts had come just after the arrival of the hearse, and Emmetts’ eyes stayed on Petra, watching her with a kind of harsh amusement. He was chewing tobacco, and as we trudged along, he occasionally spat.

  I wondered if the old woman moved much inside the casket. We were very careful. Verne’s back was straight and he walked stiffly. Climbing the knoll was bad, though, because the grass was slippery. Once Herb Corey, rather ungainly to begin with, dropped to one knee. He wrenched himself erect with a gasp and an embarrassed word of apology.

  The Reverend Mr. Waugh muttered something to Petra behind us.

  I heard Petra say, “It can’t be helped.”

  We reached the top of the knoll by the sycamore, where the dark grave yawned. It was all I could do to keep from jabbering like an idiot. The whole business was horrible, and it was ripping me apart inside.

  The rain struck the freshly wounded earth at the sides of the grave and, diamond-bright for a brief instant, vanished.

  They whispered and mumbled while the casket was, arranged on the slings over the grave.

  Then Verne stood on one side with Petra and her umbrella. I was on the other side, facing her. Herb Corey and Emmetts and the other two men from town stood off to one side while the minister began praying.

  It rained slowly, the fine mist of rain drifting down straight and almost as if a cloud were descending over the earth. Water dripped from the sycamore and fingered the shiny black surface of the casket. I didn’t hear a word the minister said.

  I looked into her eyes and she looked into mine.

  I couldn’t tear my gaze away. I felt Emmetts’ eyes on us and panic knotted nauseously inside me and the Reverend Mr. Waugh’s voice rambled on and on in
prayer.

  My friend, I thought. My friend’s wife.

  We looked at and into each other. I saw her lips part, and her breasts rose and fell more quickly beneath her coat and the umbrella’s filmy shadow.

  I wanted her. I wanted to leap straight across the grave and take her, bend her body to mine. She wanted me to.

  We were both damned….

  Beneath us in that glistening black casket lay a murdered woman, and I’d been a partner to her death.

  Returning to the house, Emmetts suddenly elbowed my side. His shoulders hitched and hunched beneath his raincoat and he smiled broadly, lips trembling. “Body’s buried, but the truth lingers, hey, Mr. Bland?” he whispered.

  I turned on him, close to flying apart.

  “Easy, now,” he whispered. “See you tonight, hey? You ain’t forgot, have you?”

  “Get the hell away from me before I kill you.”

  He chuckled quietly. “Figure you done enough killin’ for a time.” He spat. “Only thing you’ll be killin’ now is yourself, on her!” He nodded toward Petra’s back, where she was walking beside Verne. Just then she turned and glanced at me. For an instant her gaze locked with Emmetts’. He nodded and grinned at her. She turned away quickly.

  His voice was low. “ ‘Pig,’ she says. We’ll see who’s the pig.”

  • • •

  None of them stayed at the house for long. They all seemed in a hurry to get away. And then we three were alone in the house and the slow rain continued to sift along the eaves.

  Ten minutes later, Verne said, “I’m going into town. Try and pick out a headstone for the grave. I feel better now all this is over with.”

  I glanced at Petra. I couldn’t help it. She was staring at me and her face was pale.

  She said, “I’ll go see if I can’t fix something good for dinner.”

  I knew I had to say something. I knew I had to say what I said. I was shaking all over inside and was afraid my voice would tremble, but it didn’t. I just sounded a bit hoarse. “You want me to go in with you, Verne?”

  He hesitated, put on his hat, shrugged into his coat. “No, I guess not. You stay here.” He smiled, the first smile in quite a while, but I wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t interested. “Keep Petra company.”