(“Thank Christ Richie Fournier dint have that trick,” Bill Pulsifer said later, and they had all nodded shakily—many of them were still wiping their mouths, because almost all of them had puked at some point or other during that hellacious half hour . . . these were not things Dave Eamons could tell Maddie, but Maddie guessed more than Dave ever guessed she guessed.)
Gunfire tore Michael Fournier to shreds before he could do more than sit up; other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was a goddam wonder someone on one side hadn’t shot someone on one of the others, but they got off lucky. Bud Meechum found a hole torn in the sleeve of his shirt the next day, but liked to think that might have been nothing more than a thorn—there had been raspberry bushes on his side of the boneyard. Maybe that was really all it was, although the black smudges on the hole made him think that maybe it had been a thorn with a pretty large caliber.
The Fournier kid fell back, most of him lying still, other parts of him still twitching.
But by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake was going on there—but only there, no place else.
Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.
Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch. Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.
Goddam good thing, too, because a few of the deaders almost got away. Old Frank Daggett, still two hours away from the heart attack that would carry him off after it was all over and the moon had risen, organized the men into a pair of angled flanks so they wouldn’t shoot each other, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bull Run. By the end of the festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. No one puked on it, because no one had anything left to puke up. The sour smell of vomit was almost heavier than the smell of gunsmoke . . . it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.
And still some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs . . . the fresher ones, for the most part.
“Burt,” Frank Daggett said. “You got them chain saws?”
“I got ’em,” Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come. “In the truck.”
“Gassed up?” Blue veins stood out on Frank’s ancient, hairless skull.
“Yeah.” Burt’s hand was over his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Work y’fuckin gut all you want,” Frank said briskly. “But get them saws while you do. And you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . .”
The last “you” was his grandnephew Bob.
“I can’t, Uncle Frank,” Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw at least twenty men lying in the tall grass. They had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the cross fire that had cut his late wife to ribbons before he fainted when her decayed brains exploded from the back of her head in a grisly gray fan. “I can’t. I c—”
Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.
“You can and you will, chummy,” he said grimly.
Bob went with the rest of the men.
Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest.
“I was nearby when Frank spoke to Bob,” Dave told Maddie. He wasn’t sure if he should be telling her this—or any of it, for that matter, with her almost halfway to foaling time—but he was still too impressed with the old man’s grim and quiet courage to forbear. “This was after . . . you know . . . we cleaned the mess up.”
Maddie only nodded.
“I’ll stop,” Dave said, “if you can’t bear it, Maddie.”
“I can bear it,” she said quietly, and Dave looked at her quickly, curiously, but she had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.
Davey didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping. And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.
She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year—a time that now seemed impossibly distant—and doing something so trite it was laughable: She was Knitting Little Things (the second bootee of a pair this evening). But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across to the mall on the mainland for a long time.
Something had thumped the window.
A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something was moving out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling on the sash. Jack was going to reglaze all the windows this fall, she thought stupidly, and then: Maybe that’s what he came back for. Because it was Jack. She knew that. Before Jack, no one from Jenny had drowned for nearly three years. Whatever was making them return apparently couldn’t reanimate whatever was left of their bodies. But Jack . . .
Jack was still fresh.
She sat, poised, head cocked to one side, knitting in her hands. A little pink bootee. She had already made a blue set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much. The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket’s Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway.
It was Jack. She knew it.
“Jack?” she said, and the window burst inward and what came in was not really Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.
His compass was still around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.
The wind blew the curtains out in a cloud as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.
He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry . . . but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.
Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnaclecrusted holes, and she realized she was looking at whatever remained of Jack’s brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth champed mechanically up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains of the black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L.L. Bean’s last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how well it had lasted, even under water all this time, even—
The cold cobwebs of bone which were all that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach—for the first time—and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing’s eye.
Making horrid, thick, draggling noises that sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootee swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootee, leaving a trail of slime behind it.
Jack fell over the end table she’d gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married—she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack finally said either she was going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was asking for the goddam thing and then
bust it up into firewood with—
—with the—
He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye socket and tossed it aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.
She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she thought: You buy it, Maddie, for Christ’s sake! I’m tired! Want to go home and get m’dinner! You want it, buy it! If you don’t, I’ll give that old bat twice what she wants to bust it up for firewood with my—
Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; polluted teeth poised to bite. To kill her and kill the baby.
She tore loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he tried to chew and then spat out.
When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen—at least the top half of him was—with the compass dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to be some idiot question in those black eye sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his skull as he had threatened to cleave the end table.
His head fell in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smelled like a woodchuck exploded with gassy decay in a high-summer meadow.
Still his hands clashed and clittered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.
She chopped . . . she chopped . . . she chopped.
At last there was no more movement.
A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic: Is it a miscarriage ? Am I going to have a miscarriage? But the pain left . . . and the baby kicked again, more strongly than before.
She went back into the living room, carrying an ax that now smelled like tripe.
His legs had somehow managed to stand.
“Jack, I loved you so much,” she said, and brought the ax down in a whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor beneath.
The legs separated, trembled wildly . . . and then lay still.
She carried him down to the cellar piece by piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away—he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn’t freeze.
Once a severed hand tried to close over her wrist . . . then loosened.
That was all.
There was an unused cistern, polluted, which Jack had been meaning to fill in. Maddie Pace slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes, then worked the heavy cover back into place.
“Rest in peace,” she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in pieces, and then she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pulled at her hair and tore at her breasts until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it’s like to be in—
But before the thought could be completed, she had fallen down in a faint that became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt all right.
She would never tell, though.
Never.
She understood, of course, that David knew of this, and Dave would say nothing at all if she pressed. She kept her ears open, and she knew what he meant, and what they had apparently done. The dead folks and the . . . the parts of dead folks that wouldn’t . . . wouldn’t be still . . . had been chain-sawed like her father had chain-sawed the hardwood on Pop Cook’s two acres after he had gotten the deed registered, and then those parts—some still squirming, hands with no arms attached to them clutching mindlessly, feet divorced from their legs digging at the bullet-chewed earth of the graveyard as if trying to run away—had been doused with diesel fuel and set afire. She had seen the pyre from the house.
Later, Jenny’s one fire truck had turned its hose on the dying blaze, although there wasn’t much chance of the fire spreading, with a brisk easterly blowing the sparks off Jenny’s seaward edge.
When there was nothing left but a stinking, tallowy lump (and still there were occasional bulges in this mass, like twitches in a tired muscle), Matt Arsenault fired up his old D-9 Caterpillar—above the nicked steel blade and under his faded pillowtick engineer’s cap, Matt’s face had been as white as cottage cheese—and plowed the whole hellacious mess under.
The moon was coming up when Frank took Bob Daggett, Dave Eamons, and Cal Partridge aside.
“I’m havin a goddam heart attack.” he said.
“Now, Uncle Frank—”
“Never mind Uncle Frank this ’n’ that,” the old man said. “I ain’t got time, and I ain’t wrong. Seen half my friends go the same way. Beats hell out of getting whacked with the cancer-stick. Quicker. But when I go down, I intend to stay down. Cal, stick that rifle of yours in my left ear. Muzzle’s gonna get some wax on it, but it won’t be there after you pull the trigger. Dave, when I raise my left arm, you sock your thirty-thirty into my armpit, and see that you do it a right smart. And Bobby, you put yours right over my heart. I’m gonna say the Lawd’s Prayer, and when I hit amen, you three fellows are gonna pull your triggers.”
“Uncle Frank—” Bob managed. He was reeling on his heels.
“I told you not to start in on that,” Frank said. “And don’t you dare faint on me, you friggin pantywaist. If I’m goin’ down, I mean to stay down. Now get over here.”
Bob did.
Frank looked around at the three men, their faces as white as Matt Arsenault’s had been when he drove the dozer over men and women he had known since he was a kid in short pants and Buster Browns.
“I ain’t got long,” Frank said, “and I only got enough jizzum left to get m’ arm up once, so don’t fuck up on me. And remember, I’d ’a’ done the same for any of you. If that don’t help, ask y’selves if you’d want to end up like those we just took care of.”
“Go on,” Bob said hoarsely. “I love you, Uncle Frank.”
“You ain’t the man your father was, Bobby Daggett, but I love you, too,” Frank said calmly, and then, with a cry of pain, he threw his left hand up over his head like a guy in New York who has to have a cab in a rip of a hurry, and started in: “Our Father who art in heaven—Christ, that hurts!—hallow’d be Thy name—oh, son of a gun, I—Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it . . . as it . . .”
Frank’s upraised left arm was wavering wildly now. Dave Eamons, with his rifle socked into the old geezer’s armpit, watched it as carefully as a logger would watch a big tree that looked like it meant to fall the wrong way. Every man on the island was watching now. Big beads of sweat had formed on the old man’s pallid face. His lips had pulled back from the even, yellowish white of his Roebuckers, and Dave had been able to smell the Polident on his breath.
“. . . as it is in heaven!” the old man jerked out. “Lead us not into temptation butdeliverusfromevilohshitonitforeverandever AMEN!”
All three of them fired, and both Cal Partridge and Bob Daggett fainted, but Frank never did try to get up and walk.
Frank Daggett intended to stay dead, and that was just what he did.
Once Dave started that story he had to go on with it, and so he cursed himself for ever starting. He’d been right the first time; it was no story for a pregnant woman.
But Maddie had kissed him and told him she thought he had done wonderfully, and Dave went out, feeling a little dazed, as if he had just been kissed on the cheek by a woman he had never met before.
As, in a way, he had.
She watched him go down the path to the dirt track that was one of Jenny’s two roads and turn left. He was weaving a little in the moonlight, weaving with tiredness, she thought, but reeling with shock, as well. Her heart went out to him . . . to all of
them. She had wanted to tell Dave she loved him and kiss him squarely on the mouth instead of just skimming his cheek with her lips, but he might have taken the wrong meaning from something like that, even though he was bone-weary and she was almost five months pregnant.
But she did love him, loved all of them, because they had gone through a hell she could only imagine dimly, and by going through that hell they had made the island safe for her.
Safe for her baby.
“It will be a home delivery,” she said softly as Dave went out of sight behind the dark hulk of the Pulsifers’ satellite dish. Her eyes rose to the moon. “It will be a home delivery...and it will be fine.”
RUDYARD KIPLING
(1865–1936)
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) during the period of British rule of India. When he was five, he and his three-year-old sister were sent to England to be educated. Although he attended the United Services College at Westward Ho! (a Devon school that served to prepare boys for military careers), his poor sight prevented his having a career in the Indian Army. In 1882, he returned to India, where he began work as a journalist at a Lahore newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette. Upon his marriage in 1892 to Caroline Balestier, an American, Kipling moved to the Brattleboro,Vermont, area, where the couple lived for the next four years before settling in England. Among his story collections are Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Life’s Handicap (1891), The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902), Actions and Reactions (1909), and Debits and Credits (1926). His novels include The Light That Failed (1891), Captains Courageous (1896), and Kim (1901). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.
The Mark of the Beast
(1890)
Your Gods and my Gods —do you or I know which are the stronger?
—Native Proverb.
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
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