"No! Like the…"
What you hear next makes you retch. Black-market adoptions, you told Chief Kitrick. But I don't think that's the whole story. I've got the terrible feeling that there's something more, something worse, although I'm not sure what it is.
Now you're sure what that something worse is, and the revelation makes you weep in outrage. "Show me, June," you manage to say. "Take me. I promise it'll be your salvation." You try to remember what you know about Catholicism. "You need to confess, and after that, your conscience will be at peace."
"I'll never be at peace."
"You're wrong, June. You will. You've kept your secret too long. It festers inside you. You have to let out the poison. After all these years, your prayers here in the synagogue have been sufficient. You've suffered enough. What you need now is absolution."
"You think if I go there…" June shudders.
"And pray one last time. Yes. I beg you. Show me. Your torment will finally end."
"So long! I haven't been there since…"
"Nineteen forty-one? That's what I mean, June. It's time. It's finally time."
***
Through biting wind and chilling rain, you escort June from the ghost of the synagogue into the sheltering warmth of your car. You're so angry that you don't bother taking an indirect route. You don't care if Chief Kitrick sees you driving past the tavern. In fact, you almost want him to. You steer left up the bumpy road out of town, its jolts diminished by the storm-soaked earth. When you reach the coastal highway, you assure June yet again and prompt her for further directions.
"It's been so long. I don't… Yes. Turn to the right," she says. A half mile later, she trembles, adding, "Now left here. Up that muddy road. Do you think you can?"
"Force this car through the mud to the top? If I have to, I'll get out and push. And if that doesn't work, we'll walk. God help me, I'll carry you. I'll sink to my knees and crawl."
But the car's front-wheel drive defeats the mud. At once you gain traction, thrust over a hill, swivel to a stop, and frown through the rain toward an unexpected meadow. Even in early October, the grass is lush. Amazingly, horribly so. Knowing its secret, you suddenly recall — from your innocent youth — lines from a poem you studied in college. Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands.
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is anymore
than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition.
You force your way out of the car. You struggle around its hood, ignore the mud, confront the stinging wind and rain, and help June waver from the passenger seat. The bullet-dark clouds roil above the meadow.
"Was it here?" you demand. "Tell me! Is this the place?"
"Yes! Can't you hear them wail? Can't you hear them suffer?"
… the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord.
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
"June! In the name of God" — rain stings your face — "tell me!"
… a uniform hieroglyphic…
Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white.
"Tell me, June!"
"Can't you sense? Can't you feel the horror?"
"Yes, June." You sink to your knees. You caress the grass. "I can."
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
"How many, June?" You lean forward, your face almost touching the grass.
"Two hundred. Maybe more. All those years. So many babies." June weeps behind you. "I finally couldn't count anymore."
"But why?" You raise your head toward the angry rain. "Why did they have to die?"
"Some were sickly. Some were deformed. If the Gunthers decided they couldn't sell them…"
"They murdered them? Smothered them? Strangled them?"
"Let them starve to death. The wails." June cringes. "Those poor, hungry, suffering babies. Some took as long as three days to die. In my nightmares, I heard them wailing. I still hear them wailing." June hobbles toward you. "At first, the Gunthers took the bodies in a boat and dumped them at sea. But one of the corpses washed up on the beach, and if it hadn't been for the chief of police they bribed…" June's voice breaks. "So the Gunthers decided they needed a safer way to dispose of the bodies. They brought them here and buried them in paper bags or potato sacks or butter boxes."
"Butter boxes?"
"Some of the babies were born prematurely." June sinks beside you, weeping. "They were small, so terribly small."
"Two hundred?" The frenzied wind thrusts your words down your throat. With a shudder, you realize that if your mother was Mary Duncan, Scot, the Gunthers might have decided that you looked too obviously gentile. They might have buried you here with…
Your brother or your sister? Your twin? Is your counterpart under the grass you clutch?
You shriek, "Two hundred!"
Despite the howl of the storm, you hear a car, its engine roaring, its tires spinning, fighting for traction in the mud. You see a police car crest the rain-shrouded hill and skid to a stop.
Chief Kitrick shoves his door open, stalking toward you through the raging gloom. "God damn it, I told you to leave the past alone."
You rise from the grass, draw back a fist, and strike his mouth so hard he drops to the mushy ground. "You knew! You son of a bitch, you knew all along!"
The chief wipes blood from his mangled lips. In a fury, he fumbles to draw his gun.
"That's right! Go ahead, kill me!" You spread out your arms, lashed by the rain. "But June'll be a witness, and you'll have to kill her as well! So what, though, huh? Two murders won't matter, will they? Not compared to a couple of hundred children!"
"I had nothing to do with — "
"Killing these babies? No, but your father did!"
"He wasn't involved!"
"He let it happen! He took the Gunther's money and turned his back! That makes him involved! He's as much to blame as the Gunthers! The whole fucking town was involved!" You pivot toward the ridge, buffeted by the full strength of the storm. In the blinding gale, you can't see the town, but you scream at it nonetheless. "You sons of bitches! You knew! You all let it happen! You did nothing to stop it! That's why your town fell apart! God cursed you! Bastards!"
Abruptly you realize the terrible irony of your words. Bastards? All of these murdered children were bastards. You spin toward the grass, the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Falling, you hug the rain-soaked earth, the drenched lush leaves of grass. "Poor babies!"
"You can't prove a thing," Chief Kitrick growls. "All you've got are suppositions. After fifty years, there won't be anything left of those babies. They've long since rotted and turned into — "
"Grass," you moan, tears scalding your face. "The beautiful grass."
"The doctor who delivered the babies is dead. The Gunthers — my father kept track of them — died as well. In agony, if that satisfies your need for justice. Orval got stomach cancer. Eve died from alcoholism."
"And now they burn in hell," June murmurs.
"I was raised to be… I'm a Jew," you moan and suddenly understand the significance of your pronouncement. No matter the circumstances of your birth, you are a Jew, totally, completely. "I don't believe in hell. But I wish… Oh, God, how I wish…"
"The only proof you have," Chief Kitrick says, "is this old woman, a Catholic who goes every afternoon to pray in a ruined synagogue. She's nuts. You're a lawyer. You know her testimony wouldn't be accepted in court. It's over, Weinberg. It ended fifty years ago."
"No! It never ended! The grass keeps growing!" You feel the chill wet earth. You try to embrace your brother or your sister and quiver with the understanding that all of these children are your brothers and sisters. "God have mercy on them!"
What do you think has beco
me of the children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
"Luckier?" You embrace the grass. "Luckier?"
Through the rain-soaked earth, you think you hear babies crying and raise your face toward the furious storm. Swallowing rain, tasting the salt of your tears, you recite the kaddish prayers. You mourn Mary Duncan, Simon and Esther Weinberg, your brother or your sister, all these children.
And yourself.
"Deliver us from evil," June Engle murmurs. "Pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death."
Back in 1970, just after I finished graduate school at Penn State, I took a weekend off and drove with a close friend to his home near Pittsburgh. On an August afternoon, we went to a compound that some friends of his father had built in the mountains. It had a swimming hole, a barbecue pit, a bunk house, and… I still see it vividly: a shrine. Its contents haunted me until finally, twenty-two years later, I had to write about it. Again the theme is grief, a subject I returned to often after Mart's death. "The Shrine" was nominated by the Horror Writers Association as the best novella of 1992.
The Shrine
« ^ »
Grady was in the mausoleum when the beep from his pager disrupted his sobbing.
The mausoleum was spacious and bright, with shiny marble slabs that concealed the niches into which coffins had been placed. In an alcove near the tall, wide windows that flanked the main entrance, glinting squares of glass permitted mourners to stare within much smaller niches and view the bronze urns that contained the ashes of their loved ones. Plastic, bronze-colored letters and numbers that formed the names of the deceased as well as their birth and death dates were glued upon the squares of glass, and it was toward two of those panes, toward the urns behind them, that Grady directed his attention, although his vision was blurred by tears.
He'd chosen cremation for his wife and ten-year-old son, partly because they'd already been burned — in a fiery car crash with a drunken driver — but more because he couldn't bear the thought of his cherished wife and child decomposing in a coffin in a niche in the mausoleum or, worse, outside in the cemetery, beneath the ground, where rain or the deep cold of winter would make him cringe because of their discomfort, even though the remaining rational part of Grady's mind acknowledged that it didn't matter to his fiercely missed family, who now felt nothing because they were dead.
But it mattered to him, just as it mattered that each Monday afternoon he made a ritual of driving out here to the mausoleum, of sitting on a padded bench across from the wall of glassed-in urns, and of talking to Helen and John about what had happened to him since the previous Monday, about how he prayed that they were happy, and most of all, about how much he missed them.
They'd been dead for a year now, and a year was supposed to be a long time, but he couldn't believe the speed with which it had gone. His pain remained as great as the day he'd been told they were dead, his emptiness as extreme. Friends at first had been understanding, but after three months, and especially after six, most of those friends had begun to show polite impatience, making well-intentioned speeches about the need for Grady to put the past behind him, to adjust to his loss, to rebuild his life. So Grady had hidden his emotions and pretended to take their advice, his burden made greater by social necessity. The fact was, he came to realize, that no one who hadn't suffered what he had could possibly understand that three months or six months or a year meant nothing.
Grady's weekly visits to the mausoleum became a secret, their half-hour concealed within his Monday routine. Sometimes he brought his wife and son flowers and sometimes an emblem of the season: a pumpkin at Halloween, a Styrofoam snowball in winter, or a fresh maple leaf in the spring. But on this occasion, just after the Fourth of July weekend, he'd brought a miniature flag, and unable to control the strangled sound of his voice, he explained to Helen and John about the splendor of the fireworks that he'd witnessed and that they'd used to enjoy while eating hot dogs at the city's annual picnic in the sloped, wooded park near the river on Independence Day.
"If only you could have seen the skyrockets," Grady murmured. "I don't know how to describe… Their colors were so…"
The beep from the pager on his gunbelt interrupted his halting monologue. He frowned.
The pager was one of many innovations that he'd introduced to the police force he commanded. After all, his officers frequently had to leave their squad cars, responding to an assignment or merely sitting in a restaurant on a coffee break, but while away from their radios, they needed to know whether headquarters was desperate to contact them.
Its persistent beep made Grady stiffen. He wiped his tears, braced his shoulders, said goodbye to his wife and son, and stood with effort, reluctantly leaving the mausoleum, locking its door behind him. That was important. Helen and John, their remains, needed to be protected, and the cemetery's caretaker had been as inventive as Grady had been about the pager, arranging for every mourner to have a key, so that only those who had a right could enter.
Outside, the July afternoon was bright, hot, humid, and horribly reminiscent of the sultry afternoon a year ago when Grady had come here, accompanied by friends and a priest, to inter the precious urns.
He shook his head to clear his mind and stifle his tortured emotions, then approached the black-and-white cruiser, where he leaned inside to grab the two-way radio microphone.
"Grady here, Dinah. What's the problem?" He released the transmit button on the microphone.
Dinah's staccato response surprised him. "Public-service dispatch."
Grady frowned. "On my way. Five minutes."
Uneasy, he drove from the cemetery. "Public-service dispatch" meant that whatever Dinah needed to tell him was so sensitive that she didn't want a civilian with a police-band radio to overhear the conversation. Grady would have to use a telephone to get in touch with her. After parking at a gas station across from the cemetery, he entered a booth beside an ice machine, thrust coins in the telephone's slot, and jabbed numbers.
"Bosworth police," Dinah said.
"Dinah, it's me. What's so important that — "
"You're not going to like this," the deep-voiced female dispatcher said.
"It's never good news when you page me. Public-service dispatch? Why?"
"We've got a combination one-eighty-seven and ten-fifty-six."
Grady winced. Those numbers meant a murder-suicide. "You're right." His voice dropped. "I don't like it."
"It gets worse. It's not in our jurisdiction. The state police are handling it, but they want you on the scene."
"I don't understand. Why would that be worse if it isn't in our jurisdiction?"
"Chief, I…"
"Say it."
"I don't want to."
"Say it, Dinah."
"… You know the victims."
For a moment, Grady had trouble breathing. He clutched the phone harder. "Who?"
"Brian and Betsy Roth."
Shit, Grady thought. Shit. Shit. Shit. Brian and Betsy had been the friends he'd depended upon after all his other friends had distanced themselves when his grief persisted.
Now one of them had killed the other?
And after that, the executioner had committed suicide?
Grady's pulse sped, making his mind swirl. "Who did what to…"
The husky-throated female dispatcher said, "Brian did. A forty-five semiautomatic."
Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ, Grady thought.
***
The puzzling directions Grady received took him not to Brian and Betsy's home, where he'd assumed the killings would have occurred, but instead through and past the outskirts of Bosworth into the mountains west of town. Pennsylvania mountains: low, thi
ckly wooded, rounded at their peaks. Between them, primitive roads led into hidden hollows. In a turmoil, confused, Grady wouldn't have known which lane to take if it hadn't been for the state-police car blocking one entrance. A square-jawed trooper dropped his cigarette, crushed it into the gravel with his shoe, and narrowed his eyes when Grady stopped his cruiser.
"I'm looking for Lieutenant Clauson," Grady said.
When the trooper heard Grady's name, he straightened. "And the lieutenant's waiting for you." With remarkable efficiency for so large a man, the trooper backed his car from the entrance to the lane, allowing Grady to drive his own car up the narrow draw.
Leaves brushed against Grady's side window. Just before the first sharp curve, Grady glanced toward his rearview mirror and saw the state-police car again block the entrance. At once, he jerked the steering wheel, veering left. Then, behind as well as ahead, he saw only forest.
The lane tilted ever more upward. It kept forcing Grady to zigzag and increased his anxiety as branches scraped the top of his car in addition to his windows. The dense shadows of the forest made him feel trapped.
Brian shot Betsy?
And then shot himself?
No!
Why?
I needed them.
I depended on…
I loved them!
What on earth had made them come out here? Why had they been in the woods?
The lane became level, straightened, and suddenly brought Grady from the forest to a sun-bathed plateau between two mountains, where an open gate in a chainlink fence revealed a spacious compound: several cinderblock buildings of various sizes on the left, a barbecue pit adjacent to them, and a swimming pool on the right.
Grady parked behind three state-police cars, an ambulance, a blue station wagon marked MEDICAL EXAMINER, and a red Jeep Cherokee that Grady recognized as belonging to Brian and Betsy. Several state troopers, along with two ambulance attendants and an overweight man in a gray suit, formed a cluster at the near rim of the swimming pool, their backs to Grady. But as Grady opened his door, one of the troopers turned, studied him, glanced back toward the rim of the pool, again studied Grady, and with a somber expression, approached him.
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