Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  How could anybody grow vegetables without growing tomatoes? Great juicy beefsteak tomatoes, delicious mouthfuls of cherry tomatoes, tomatoes for spaghetti; sauce, tomatoes for sandwiches, tomatoes for— Ah, there they were, on the other side of the garden. But what had happened to them? Arlene Pott’s tomato plants were wizened and drooping. They were dying. Most of them were dead. They looked as though their young lives had been interrupted, as though they had all perished suddenly in the midst of a hearty prime.

  Homer glanced up at the house. From here he could see the open casement windows of the kitchen and hear the blare of the stereo. But the garden was to the north of the house and the kitchen windows looked out on the woods to the east. Unless Wally and his girlfriend moved their festivities into the living room, they would not catch a glimpse of the interloper bumbling around in the garden. Boldly, Homer stepped over the fence and trampled across the weed-engulfed squash vines to the rows of pole beans. Jerking a tall pole out of the ground, he carried it to the tomato bed, poked it gently into the dry earth, then shoved it straight down.

  The pole stopped. Something was obstructing its thrust. Then, sickeningly, the obstruction gave way. Up through the pole a shuddering certainty transmitted itself to Homer’s fingers. Slowly he withdrew the pole and looked at it. Fifteen inches of it were grimy with dirt, but the end was sticky with some other substance. Homer sniffed the end, then turned his head away and closed his eyes in sorrow, his stomach heaving.

  Arlene Pott had not gone to Reno or Phoenix or Honolulu. She was not being transformed into a new woman at a beauty spa. She was right here at home, decomposing beneath her own vegetable garden. Her husband had murdered her, and then he had dug up the tomatoes and laid her down in the dirt and covered her over and replanted the tomatoes right on top of her, only he didn’t know how to plant tomatoes, so they had all died. Poor Arlene. How had he killed her? With a gun, with a knife, with a hatchet?

  Merriment was still issuing from the kitchen window, horselaughs from Wally Pott, soprano convulsions from the nurse with the mop of platinum curls. Filled with pity for the woman with the flowery dresses and the sad eyes, the woman who had felt the need of prayer, who had sought the blessings of Taurus, who had not lived to bring her tender seedlings to fruitful maturity, Homer carried the bean pole through the woods to his car. Opening the trunk, he laid the pole carefully across the spare tire. Then he drove slowly in the direction of the Nashoba police station, in the Town Hall.

  The man was stupid, that was his problem. Careless and stupid. Too stupid to get rid of his wife’s pocketbook, too dumb to throw out her suitcases, too feebleminded to know how to transplant a tomato. Homer didn’t know which was more horrifying, Wally’s brutal murder of his wife or his slipshod failure to cover up the crime.

  An hour later, they were all together in the kitchen, Wally Pott and Josie Coil, Homer Kelly and Peter Terry, along with a couple of young guys from the department who doubled as firemen when the need arose. The young guys had already dug Arlene’s strangled body out of the vegetable garden and wrapped it in one of her lavender sheets and laid it in the back of the police van.

  “Don’t look at me,” cried Josie, backed up against the sink, her voice shrill in the accusing silence. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  Wally Pott was beside himself. Addled by the sudden fall of the thunderbolt, he stared at Josie and whimpered, “But you said I had to do something. Soon, you said. This guy Victor, you said—” Wally could still see Victor in his mind’s eye, looming up as threateningly as ever, Victor at the modeling agency, Victor with his cleft chin, Victor with his eyebrows that met in the middle.

  “Victor?” cried Josie harshly. “Who’s Victor? I don’t know any Victor. It’s all in your own mind, Wally Pott.” She screamed at him, “You’re crazy. You’re just incredibly insane. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  Wally did not come peaceably. He was still shouting and struggling when they dragged him out of the van and pulled him into the police station. In the firehouse across the street, one of the volunteers was hosing down the hook-and-ladder truck. He dropped the hose and lent a hand.

  28

  Truly, sir, it is to me a wonder that the earth swallows not up such wretches, or that fire comes not down from heaven to consume them!

  Reverend Peter Bulkeley

  Concord, 1650

  The discovery of Arlene Pott’s dead body and the simultaneous arrest of her husband on suspicion of murder produced a sensation in the town of Nashoba. There was shock and disbelief, pity for Arlene and revulsion for Wally. Not until Wally’s arraignment and imprisonment without bail, not until the first scandalized excitement had died down, was the day chosen for Arlene’s memorial service.

  It turned out to be a brilliant afternoon in early October, when up and down Estabrook Road the undergrowth was decked with berries and seed heads in bright reds and pinks, and the foliage was spotted and flecked in hues for which there were no names. Blood Street was lined with wild sumac as red as its name, with towering cherry-colored cones rising above the blood-soaked leaves. In the belfry of Old West, the barn owl drowsed on a crossbeam, its offspring long since flown. Below the belfry in the sunny open spaces of the church, Joe Bold sat waiting behind the pulpit, ready to do his best to give the poor woman a dignified farewell. The place was packed.

  Peter Terry came in with Flo and sat down beside the Kellys, and instantly Flo Terry transfixed Homer with her gelid eye. Doom, that eye implied, had come at last upon the parish of Old West Church, just as she, Flo Terry, had foretold.

  Homer shifted uneasily on the bench, wedged between Mary’s solid thigh and Flo’s massive prophetic haunch. It was a good thing Flo didn’t know about Betsy Bucky, another Old West parishioner every bit as homicidal as Wally Pott. Homer sought out Betsy in the congregation. There she was in the front row. The sun in its erratic favoritism had chosen her today for glory. Her eager little wiry frame was bathed in light. She was staring around the room, atwitter with excitement, obviously intoxicated by the lurid circumstances of Arlene’s death. Was she comparing herself to Wally Pott as a fellow killer, a more capable assassin? Surely not, decided Homer. Betsy was one of those innocents who never caught themselves in the act. She was a ruthless natural killer, but as far as she was concerned Carl’s death had happened by itself. Although she had slain her husband with a malicious violence equal to that with which Wally Pott had strangled his wife, she would never be brought to trial. Even Betsy’s closest friends probably still thought of her as Carl Bucky’s spunky little wife, although they had seen her kill him with her brutal coffeepot, her deadly deep-fat fryer, her lethal bread pans, her murdering eggbeater, her fatal cake tins. Look at the woman preen herself in the front row!

  Then Homer dropped his gaze to his own slightly swollen midriff, remembering the French toast Mary had offered him at breakfast. Trustingly, like a lamb to the slaughter, he had eaten two slices and accepted two more. What if Mary Kelly were another Betsy Bucky? Homer glared suspiciously at his wife, but Mary was flipping the pages of her hymnbook, nudging him to stand up, holding the open pages under his nose.

  Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

  Bears all its sons away,

  growled Homer, staring in horror at the words by Isaac Watts.

  They fly forgotten, as a dream

  Dies at the opening day.

  It was true. How grim. Death was just around the corner, waiting for them all the time. They were here today and gone tomorrow. Like a fibrillating pulse, they vibrated for a moment on the earthly scene, then disappeared forever. The entire population of the globe was moribund. All those billions of people—black, white, brown, yellow, red—they were merely advancing toward the giant scythe that swept in its vast arc, ready to cut them down. Row. after advancing row, they bowed their heads like the grass and fell before the inevitable blade.

  O God, our help in ages past,

  Our hope for years to come,

&nb
sp; groaned Homer, sorrowing for Arlene Pott and Carl Bucky and all the other nameless doomed fellow human beings in the world, but especially for himself,

  Be thou our guard while troubles last,

  And our eternal home.

  In the succeeding weeks, Homer’s gloom about human mortality was fatefully underscored, at least in the parish of Nashoba’s Old West Church, because, as it turned out, the deaths of Carl Bucky and Arlene Pott were only the beginning. From that moment on, the funerals in the church came thick and fast.

  Philip. Shooky’s was the first. Ed Bell was with Phil when he died. Together they sat on the ground at the summit of a little knoll, leaning against a big white pine tree, looking out over a blaze of swamp maples. It was a place where Phil had always loved to take his dogs.

  “Where’s Deborah?” said Ed softly.

  “Visiting the kids. She’ll be back this evening.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Go ahead,” said Phil, stiffening his back against the pine tree.

  “No, wait, let’s talk a little more.” Ed put his arm around Phil’s shoulders.

  “No, we’ve talked enough.” Phil rolled up his sleeve. “Do it now. I’m ready.”

  Ed removed his arm from Phil’s shoulders and picked up the Bible and leafed through it, looking for the twenty-third Psalm. Phil recited it with him, muttering in a low voice, looking not at the book but at the dogs gamboling in the amber-colored grass in the field that lay between the swamp maples and the summit of the hill.…

  It wasn’t until four hours later that Deborah Shooky found her husband stretched out under his favorite tree as if he were asleep. Even’ in the midst of her grief, she assumed he had died of the stroke they had both been dreading.

  But the post-mortem examination revealed that Phil’s heart had simply stopped beating. He had not died of a brain hemorrhage or an embolism or a stroke. And there were some puzzling needle marks on his arm.

  “Did he have a blood test recently?” Dr. Spinney asked Deborah. “Did he go to any other doctor besides me?”

  “No,” said Deborah. “Just the podiatrist.”

  “Oh, I doubt the podiatrist would have taken a blood sample.”

  “You know, Arthur,” said Deborah, giving voice to her suspicions, “Phil was terribly afraid of losing his mental capacity like Howie Sawyer. He was just terrified of ending up like Howie.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur Spinney, shaking his head dolefully. “He often expressed those fears to me.”

  “I just can’t help but wonder if he didn’t take his own life in some way. Those needle marks on his arm—”

  “But there was no syringe beside his body. How did he get rid of the hypodermic?”

  “I don’t know,” said Deborah, bewildered.

  Together they examined the laboratory where Phil had taken care of an occasional dog or cat, even in his retirement. They found no used needles, only new ones still wrapped in sealed paper packages.

  But Dr. Spinney shared Deborah’s suspicions. As a veterinarian, Phil Shooky had been acquainted with all the latest systems for the painless dispatch of sick and unwanted animals. Sodium pentothal and scopolamine were handy on his shelves. And surely he had known about that simple chemical, potassium, un-detectable by any pathologist because it came flooding out of the cells at the moment of death. Dr. Spinney looked for potassium chloride among Phil’s collection of phannaceuticals, but did not find it. Perhaps it was not Phil but someone else who had administered the fatal dose.

  “I wonder if some other veterinarian, some friend of his, might have done it for him?” suggested Dr. Spinney.

  “Well, I don’t know who it would be,” said Deborah, gazing sadly into space.

  “Well, never mind.” Shrugging his shoulders helplessly, Dr. Spinney signed the requisite piece of paper with a good conscience, Cause of death: cardiac arrest, grateful that Phil had asked no more of him.

  Lorraine Bell was even more suspicious than Deborah Shooky. She confronted her husband in angry protest. “It was your group, wasn’t it? Phil wanted to die, and you helped him. Oh, Ed, dear, be careful. I’m so afraid. You could get yourself into terrible trouble.”

  In church they said Phil’s death was a blessing. “He knew his mind was going,” said Charlie Fenster to Homer and Mary Kelly at Phil’s funeral. “This way he won’t have to suffer years of. affliction like Howie Sawyer.”

  Homer assented, and Mary nodded sadly, and then all three of them glanced across the church at the bench under the window where Joan Sawyer was sitting by herself, gazing dreamily at the door through which the minister was about to enter, along with Deborah Shooky and all the younger Shookys.

  “A blessing,” said Charlie again. “Really a mercy.”

  It was a mercy too when Thad Boland died in bed. Thad’s daughter found him when she came to pick up her widowed father’s laundry.

  “His heart simply stopped,” said Dr. Spinney, calling Thad’s daughter from the hospital after the autopsy.

  “Oh, poor Daddy,” wept Thad’s daughter.

  “And they found something strange. There was a hard mass in his abdomen, something pretty unpleasant. Your father wasn’t my patient. Do you know who his doctor was?”

  But Thad’s daughter didn’t know.

  “Well, I just wonder if he knew he was in real trouble. Maybe his death was a blessing.”

  It was what everyone else said too, once again. Thad’s death was a blessing in disguise. And they all thought of Claire Bold, who was not being granted the same blessing, who was lingering on hopelessly, dying slowly of the same disease that would have tormented Thad if he had not been mercifully released ahead of time.

  Rosemary Hill’s decease was a tidy suicide. Rosemary had finished sorting the stuff in the attic, and then she had turned her attention to the rest of the house. She cleaned it from top to bottom. She waxed the floors and washed the windows. She emptied the refrigerator and scrubbed it inside and out. She pickled the last of her green tomatoes. She straightened her cupboards, sent most of her clothes to the Morgan Memorial, threw away her old underwear, polished the silver, paid all the bills, mounded compost around her rosebushes, and raked the leaves. It was as though she were expecting an honored visitor for whom everything had to be spic-and-span. Then Rosemary wrote letters to each of her children and left them on her desk with her last will and testament and the keys to her safe-deposit box at the bank.

  On the last day of her life, Rosemary washed her hair and took a bubble bath, then went out to lunch with her old friends Jill and Marigold. On the way home she mailed a letter to Dr. Spinney, then parked her car in her garage, left the key on the desk, climbed the stairs to her bedroom, put on her best nightgown, got into bed with her bottles of sleeping pills and a big glass of water, lay back on the pillow, gazed for a moment at the south windows of her bedroom through which the light of afternoon was flooding, took a deep breath, and began swallowing the pills.

  Dr. Spinney didn’t get his letter till next day. As soon as he read it, he rushed over, but of course he was too late. He called her son, Jeffry, in Cambridge, and Jeffry notified Amanda in Schenectady, and soon Rosemary’s children and grandchildren were gathered in her house to arrange everything and plan the funeral.

  As funerals go, it was a grand occasion, a celebration of Rosemary’s generous life. Two of the grandchildren played th flute and the French horn in the balcony, accompanied on the organ by Augusta Gill. Joe Bold conducted the service. Ed Bell read a, eulogy that was an affectionate summation of all that Rosemary’s life had meant to her friends and her church and the town in which she had lived so long.

  Arthur Spinney was grumpy about it. “For an honest woman, she was pretty crafty,” he complained to Homer Kelly. “She lied to me about those sleeping tablets, claimed they were all gone, persuaded me to give her some more.” But even Dr. Spinney admitted that for Rosemary it had been a civilized goodbye. “She might have had another six months of pain. I suppose it wa
s a mercy.”

  29

  Their souls … are not … hurried away by insulting Devils down to the infernal regions, but are convoyed by kind and guardian angels into climes of bliss.…

  Reverend Paul Litchfield

  first minister of Carlisle, 1781-1827

  It was as though Phil Shooky had set a fashion. While Claire Bold hung on to her fragile life by a nearly invisible thread, her husband’s parishioners began falling out of sight like an eager crowd shouldering its way through a dark door.

  Agatha Palmer and Percy Donlevy and Bill Molyneux followed hard on the heels of Rosemary Hill. Their deaths were skewed and off center, like Phil’s and Thad’s and Rosemary’s. None of them died in a way that might have been expected. Agatha had been suffering from leukemia, but she hadn’t been desperately ill. One morning her cleaning lady, bumping the vacuum cleaner through the door of the living room first thing in the morning, was stunned to find Agatha lying peacefully on the sofa with an open Bible on her lap. She seemed to have died in her sleep.

  Percy Donlevy’s death was anything but peaceful. Percy had suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he died when his car plunged down Arlington hill on Route 2 and struck a bridge abutment head on.

  As for Bill Molyneux, it was true that his multiple sclerosis had flared up again, but the disorder was still a long way from finishing him off. Bill died on a camping trip to Baxter State Park. The ranger found him in his little dome tent still curled up in his sleeping bag in the heat of a late-October noonday.

  Bill’s death was the last straw for Lorraine Bell. She raged at her husband and beat her fists against his chest. “That’s where you were last Tuesday when you wouldn’t tell me where you were going. You went up to Baxter State Park to meet Bill Molyneux.”

  Ed took her hands and held them gently. “But somebody had to help him. He couldn’t do it alone.”

  “Well, why did it have to be you? Oh, Ed, you know what they’ll call it if they find out. Murder, first-degree murder.” Lorraine burst into tears.