“The amazing thing is, after that ceremony and before any injection is necessary, the person who’s reached the age of one hundred often goes very quickly They realize that their time has come, it’s been a good life, and they depart. Did you ever hear of boning? It’s something that happens in Australia among the aborigines. A witch doctor points a bone at a man—usually someone very old or with a supposedly incurable disease. The man who’s been boned falls to the ground and crawls off to his hut. His spirit sinks. Within days, sometimes within hours, he dies.
“Boning is another word we use here for what happens. It started as a kind of joke. Then it became part of the lore. We often talk of the departure ceremony as the boning. But here our spirits don’t sink, even though we know there’s little time left. Do you remember when Jack Pendergast died?”
“Yes, I certainly do.” Dennis was remembering what he had seen from the shadows by the creek on that June night: Jack Pendergast making his final bow to the world, embedded in Rose Loomis.
“He’d turned one hundred a few days before his departure. There was a little boning party for him given by my parents. Only close friends came. And three days later he lay down to take a nap and never woke up. It wasn’t a heart attack at all, and he didn’t need any Versed or potassium chloride. That’s how it will happen for most of us. We’ll go without remorse, with hardly anything undone, and without anger. With a full acceptance of death as a voluntary rounding off of a completed life. Because we know we’ve had more luck than any other group of people in the world. Where else on this planet is that true?
“Larissa, my great-grandmother, was the first. The rest of us—well, almost all of the rest of us—have followed in her footsteps gratefully.”
“Almost all, yes.” Dennis nodded slowly. “But not all.”
“That’s right. There have been occasions when someone said, ‘No, I’ve got things to do, places to see—I don’t want to die yet. I don’t care what I swore to when I was a kid. I want to keep on living!’ “
“And then what happens, Sophie?”
“Usually we talk them out of it. We make a concerted communal effort, because we believe it’s vital. And they come round. They realize how their death fits into the scheme of things—most particularly, how it benefits their children and grandchildren. How it makes it possible for all of the rest of us to go on living. They’re boned, so to speak, and they depart quietly.
“But not all, as you said. I know of two such instances. About twenty years ago there was a man named Julian Rice. He had no children and so he didn’t feel a great sense of continuity. Two of his brothers had died in a mine disaster that he believed could have been prevented—he blamed the community. Also, he was in love. Imagine, he was coming up on a hundred years of age, and he fell in love with Betsy Prescott, a woman of eighty-two who’d been widowed in that same mining accident. Julian and Betsy were having an affair. If you’re full of good cholesterol and you don’t smoke and you drink the water from the spring, it can happen.
“The bottom line was that they didn’t want to die. He and the widow left town one night. They took a supply of the spring water with them, although that was unnecessary. One thing we’ve learned is that after a certain age the water becomes redundant. If you drink regular quantities from your twenties up to about sixty, you’ve ingested as much into your system as you’ll ever need. It sets in motion a biological cycle that appears to be irreversible. You can quit imbibing—you still age slowly and gently, and you still keep your vitality. Do you remember Lost Horizon, the James Hilton novel?—it was a movie later, with Ronald Colman. His plane crashes deep in the Himalayas, near this monk-ruled paradise of Shangri-la, where the people live forever. Ronald Colman eventually leaves with a beautiful young Tibetan girl, but by the time they go through a snowstorm and reach the outside valley she’s shriveled into a hundred-year-old hag. “It’s not like that here. Not so romantic, not so drastic. But Julian Rice didn’t believe it and he took water with him. We had to stop them—him and Betsy Prescott. They might have lived far too long and the secret would have come out that way, or Rice might have talked about it, because he was a boastful, hot-tempered man. We couldn’t risk it. We did some detective work and found out they’d gone to the Pacific coast of Mexico. We sent people after them. What happened was horrible, and violent. Julian Rice was killed. So was one of our young men, Sam Hubbard. Rice shot him. Betsy was unharmed, although she was in shock. They brought her back here. She recovered, bit by bit, and died at the age of ninety, well before her time. It was sad, and I’ve often wondered if we did the right thing. But I think on balance we had to.”
Sophie fell silent, waiting for his response.
“And of course,” Dennis said, “the second time that anyone tried to break the pact was last summer. The Lovells tried. Susan and Henry Lovell.”
“Yes. And I’m going to tell you about that. I’ll tell you everything. But come with me now.” She stood quickly. “Come outside. Dress warmly. Come.”
“Where are we going?”
Sophie took his arm. “Don’t you know?”
Chapter 25
The Murderer
SOMETIMES HER GLOVED hand touched his. Sometimes she was a step ahead. They reached the gate in the forest. A few stars gleamed between tufts of snow hung from the trees.
“It’s hard to believe, Sophie.”
“I understand that.”
She twirled the combination lock on the gate, and it clicked open. They stepped through. She led him along the path, the same path he and the children had trod nearly a year ago when she had shown them the old mining cabin and the odd way the tennis ball rolled and the seemingly impossible tilt of her body.
They reached the spring and the little oval pool. In the darkness a light mist of steam rose off the water. Dappled moonlight gleamed off the snow. Sophie took off her clothes. Her skin seemed the color of ivory. Her nipples stiffened in the cold. She was smiling at him.
“Now you, Dennis.”
He undressed, dropping his clothes in a pile on the earth. There was no wind and he was not cold at all. She took his hand and led him into the water, carefully, because there were rocks and not all were eroded smooth. He lowered himself into the pool next to her. It was deep enough for him to sit and allow the warm current to flow around his hips and splash as high as his shoulders. He smelled no sulphur, no chemicals. The water soothed and calmed him.
“This is where they came,” Sophie said. “My great-grandparents—Larissa and Otis. Do you feel their spirit in the air?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I do. Do you want to make love?”
He remembered she had asked him that in her house on the first night they had been alone, when he had flown back from New York to be with her because he had known already that he didn’t want to live without her. Then he had said, “Of course I do.” This time he had no need for words. Already aroused, he took her in his arms and drew her toward him in the water of the spring. Even as she settled on his lap and he entered her greater warmth and began to rock gently back and forth, he felt water surge up and touch his lips. It was the water of the spring on his face. The sweet, warm water of the spring. He touched his lips with his tongue and took his first sip.
An hour later they were back at the house. Sophie brought feta cheese, crackers, and red wine from the kitchen. He stirred the log fire again, added more oak. He felt wonderfully tired, cleansed. The red-orange blaze sprang up in the fireplace.
“Are you worn out?” Sophie asked. “Do you want to go to bed?”
“No. I want to know the rest.” In as calm a voice as he could recruit, considering all he had been told and all that had happened, he asked, “What was the Lovells’ reason for refusing to honor the pact?”
Sophie said, “Henry and Susie told us they’d been thinking about it for years. Thinking, debating, and planning. They saw no necessity to die. Modern medicine, nutrition, and biological science had made enormous stride
s. Except for pneumonia and AIDS, we’d virtually conquered infectious diseases. One hundred years of life was no longer so remarkable. The age of departure should be changed to a hundred and ten, the Lovells believed. Or at least a hundred and five.
“They came to me and my parents with that suggestion, and the Water Board met, with other elders invited as well, to get some more input and a quorum. We discussed it, and we decided in the negative. It could have brought discovery and further requests for more and more extensions of life.
“My father, because he was an old friend of the Lovells, brought the decision to them. They were disappointed, to put it mildly. But they had a second line of persuasion. With the town’s blessing they wanted to leave Springhill. Never come back. They said they understood the risks but they had a well-thought-out plan to obviate them. They were going to travel to a city in another state and start life there as a couple in their late sixties. After about twenty years they’d move to another city in another part of the country and there they’d tell people they were in their seventies. And then, later, move again. And so on. Each time they moved they’d lie about their starting age, so no one would ever realize how old they really were. They’d go on a long time that way.
“Their idea was plausible but not acceptable. Too much could happen along the way. They could become attached to the first community they moved to, not want to leave. How would they deal with Medicare, driver’s licenses? Out of the protective aura of Springhill, they’d be vulnerable. And they might have the urge to confess the secret to someone. Maybe it would feel wonderful, one evening around the barbecue pit, to say to friends, ‘Do you realize Susie and I are one hundred and twenty and one hundred eighteen years old? You don’t believe us? We can prove it.’
“Aside from all those frightening and likely eventualities, there was the precedent they’d be setting for the whole community of Springhill. One exception could open the floodgate. All the years of discipline would go down the drain.
“They’d sworn to the pact. We all saw it as a nonbreakable agreement. ‘No,’ my father said—he spoke to them as a friend, not as an official of any sort—’it just wouldn’t work.’ The Lovells came to me as mayor and chairperson of the Water Board. I said, ‘Please understand, we can’t allow it.’ I didn’t say, ‘Please forgive me,’ because that would have been hypocrisy. I didn’t believe I was making any sort of decision that required forgiveness.
“Henry had passed his hundredth birthday by then. A date had been set for the boning party and the departure ceremony. Susan was two years younger, but quite a while ago she’d told the Board she wanted to depart at the same time as Henry. This is common with couples who’ve been married sixty or seventy years or more, and where the younger one is close to the age of one hundred. The request has always been honored.
“Then one night Henry and Susan went for a walk with their son, Hank, and their daughter, Carol, and confessed what they planned to do. In effect, they said goodbye to their children. At first Hank and Carol didn’t know what to do. In the end they came to us and told us. They feared their parents were endangering the lives of the community—and that meant their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children.
“But by then Henry and Susan were gone. Gone up toward Pearl Pass, where they’d intended to camp until the first snowfall while we went haring off on a bunch of wild-goose chases—because in the earlier discussions with my parents and with the Water Board, they’d hinted that they were thinking of starting out in the San Diego area, and then maybe heading for Hawaii.
“Hank remembered, when his father was younger, he’d always talked about spending some time in British Columbia, north of Lake Louise. Henry came from mountain stock—he loved the high country. He’d said, ‘Up there in British Columbia is the last livable frontier.’ And Susie couldn’t stand extreme heat. What kind of a life would they lead in a coastal area like San Diego? Hank and Carol and I played detective. We looked through the Lovell house, through every stitch of their belongings, and between us we figured out what clothes they’d taken. They’d left a good part of their summer stuff behind. Some camping gear and a military knife were also gone, and in a garbage can we found a receipt for a new nylon tent. We also dug out of the attic an old set of Department of the Interior geological surveys of the White River National Forest. One of them was missing—the one that covered the area near Pearl Pass in Pitkin County. Dad and Henry and a couple of other elders had hunted for elk up there about ten years ago. Henry was familiar with the terrain and he was an excellent woodsman. So we made an intelligent guess and sent up three teams of people to find them.”
“In this case,” Dennis asked, “who exactly is ‘we’?”
“The Water Board, whose emergency committee I chair. We were in charge, although we conferred with as many people in town as we could.
“One team went straight up to Pearl Pass and camped in the eastern bottleneck. That was the only way out of the area in the direction of Independence Pass and Leadville and Denver, unless you intend to head back down to Aspen by way of Difficult Campground. Peter Frazee was leader of that group. I went with a second team—with my cousin Amos McKee and Dan Crenshaw, who runs the gym, and Louise Hubbard, Grace’s daughter by her first marriage. Nominally I was the leader, although Amos is a real mountain man and Dan was the oldest among us. But I’m the mayor—as you’ve begun to realize, that’s quite a bit more than just a pencil-pushing sinecure.
“My parents, with Oliver Cone and Shirlene Hubbard, made up the third team. Dad’s a great tracker, Oliver is a bowman, Shirlene’s a geologist, and they were the ones who found the Lovells’ camp. They found it in the evening but didn’t go in until dawn. They had to kill the dog. That was unfortunate, but when it was discussed at the meeting before we left for Pearl Pass we all agreed that if the dog alerted the Lovells, Henry might do something foolish. Everyone remembered the debacle in Mexico with Julian Rice and poor Sam Hubbard. Henry Lovell had a rifle—that Remington which they foolishly left up there and was found with my father’s fingerprints on it. We didn’t think Henry would use it in anger, but we didn’t dare take the risk.”
Dennis bent to stir the fire again. He placed a thick oak log atop the others.
“My parents and the Lovells sat down and talked. Harped, as we say in Springling. It’s a way of reasoning through a problem that tries to put the good of the community above all else—in a humanist and communal way, if you’ll accept the use of those two words linked together. Because for us, community isn’t a glorious abstraction, like the state in Marxism, or all freedom-loving peoples in that government claptrap we’ve heard for decades. This community is a specific group of people who have names and faces. Three hundred and seventy linked human beings, and their unborn descendants.
“They harped for a couple of hours. Henry began to come round, to see it, to be willing. And to be gracious, not angry. But not Susan. The funny thing is, what really got her back up was not so much my father’s gentle insistence that she and Henry had to depart now, that day, for the general good, but that Oliver had put an arrow through the heart of their old dog, Geronimo. Susan kept saying, ‘How can you be so all-fired high-and-mighty about the good of the community when you’ve just killed an innocent dog that wouldn’t even harm a cat? You did that on behalf of the community? What kind of community that’s of any lasting value does such a brutal thing?’ It was remarkable—she carried on about that dog for the better part of an hour, and it was one of the last few hours of her life.”
“How do you know those details?” Dennis asked.
“I was there by then, with my team. At the harping I didn’t talk much. I listened. And my parents had no decent answer for that question of Susan’s. It was just one of those many things that ‘had to be.’ After a while the discussion petered out, because it was clear from the beginning that there could be only one outcome. If the Lovells said no, some sort of force, however mild, would have to be used. That
was a hateful idea. That’s what we were trying to avoid at almost any cost.”
“You were trying,” Dennis said, “to get them to ratify their own murder.”
“Their murder?” Sophie looked pale for a moment, but then recovered. “No, Dennis, not their murder. Their death, yes. Their departure. That universal act to which all of us without exception are doomed. It’s ordained as part of life. It can’t be escaped. It’s just a question of when. So, no, my darling, my dear lawyer husband, not their murder. Their voluntary acceptance of the end of their life at the age of one hundred. Don’t you see the difference? It’s vast. Forget that they’d sworn to it seventy-nine years ago—forget even that, because I’m sure the law would not regard that oath as a binding contract. Just remember everything I’ve told you. Balance their deaths against the life of the community they and we both loved and wanted to perpetuate.”
“I’m trying,” Dennis said, “but I’m not quite succeeding. You’re right that the law wouldn’t see this assisted suicide pact as a binding contract. And the law wouldn’t see their deaths under these circumstances as anything but murder. It’s not even euthanasia. For God’s sake, they weren’t suffering—they were healthy. So it’s the willful and deliberate taking of two fit lives. How can you call that anything but murder?”
“Because this act, which you call assisted suicide,” Sophie said, a little heatedly, “goes beyond the narrow world of law. It goes beyond any prudent or useful definition of justice, which is what you lawyers are always trying to define and make happen—with results that all sane people agree are ridiculous bordering on disgusting. Yes! It goes to the heart of human life. It goes to what we all dream of when we dare to dream.”
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