by Stephen King
He took his glass of milk and made a toasting gesture, as he always did, and I made one right back, as I always did. “Where would you live, Craig? If you could, as you say, live anywhere?”
“Maybe Los Angeles, where they make the movies. I could catch on hauling equipment, then work my way up.” Then I told him a great secret. “Maybe I could write for the movies.”
I thought he might laugh, but he didn’t. “Well, I suppose someone has to, why not you? And would you never long for home? To see your father’s face, or put flowers on your mother’s grave?”
“Oh, I’d come back,” I said, but the question—and the mention of my mother—gave me pause.
“I wanted a clean break,” Mr. Harrigan said. “As someone who lived his whole life in the city—I grew up in Brooklyn before it became a . . . I don’t know, a kind of potted plant—I wanted to get away from New York in my final years. I wanted to live somewhere in the country, but not the tourist country, places like Camden and Castine and Bar Harbor. I wanted a place where the roads were still unpaved.”
“Well,” I said, “you sure came to the right place.”
He laughed and took another cookie. “I considered the Dakotas, you know . . . and Nebraska . . . but ultimately decided that was taking things too far. I had my assistant bring me pictures of a good many towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and this was the place I settled on. Because of the hill. There are views in every direction, but not spectacular views. Spectacular views might bring tourists, which was exactly what I didn’t want. I like it here. I like the peace, I like the neighbors, and I like you, Craig.”
That made me happy.
“There’s something else. I don’t know how much you’ve read about my working life, but if you have—or do in the future—you’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless as I climbed what envious and intellectually clueless people call ‘the ladder of success.’ That opinion isn’t entirely wrong. I made enemies, I freely admit it. Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place. But when the game is over—and mine is, although I keep my hand in—you take off the uniform and go home. This is now home for me. This unremarkable corner of America, with its single store and its school which will, I believe, soon be closing. People no longer ‘just drop by for a drink.’ I don’t have to attend business lunches with people who always, always want something. I am not invited to take a seat at board meetings. I don’t have to go to charity functions that bore me to tears, and I don’t have to wake up at five in the morning to the sound of garbage trucks loading on Eighty-first Street. I’ll be buried here, in Elm Cemetery among the Civil War veterans, and I won’t have to pull rank or bribe some Superintendent of Graves for a nice plot. Does any of that explain?”
It did and didn’t. He was a mystery to me, to the very end and even beyond. But maybe that’s always true. I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made. “Sort of,” I said. “At least you didn’t move to North Dakota. I’m glad of that.”
He smiled. “So am I. Take another cookie to eat on your way home, and say hello to your father.”
* * *
With a diminishing tax base that could no longer support it, our little six-room Harlow school did close in June of 2009, and I found myself facing the prospect of attending eighth grade across the Androscoggin River at Gates Falls Middle, with over seventy classmates instead of just twelve. That was the summer I kissed a girl for the first time, not Margie but her best friend Regina. It was also the summer that Mr. Harrigan died. I was the one who found him.
I knew he was having a harder and harder job getting around, and I knew he was losing his breath more often, sometimes sucking from the oxygen bottle he now kept beside his favorite chair, but other than those things, which I just accepted, there was no warning. The day before was like any other. I read a couple of chapters from McTeague (I had asked if we could read another Frank Norris book, and Mr. Harrigan was agreeable), and watered his houseplants while Mr. Harrigan scrolled through his emails.
He looked up at me and said, “People are catching on.”
“To what?”
He held up his phone. “To this. What it really means. To what it can do. Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.’ This is that lever.”
“Cool,” I said.
“I have just deleted three ads for products and almost a dozen political solicitations. I have no doubt my email address is being bandied about, just as magazines sell the addresses of their subscribers.”
“Good thing they don’t know who you are,” I said. Mr. Harrigan’s email handle (he loved having a handle) was pirateking1.
“If someone is keeping track of my searches, they don’t have to. They’ll be able to suss out my interests and solicit me accordingly. My name means nothing to them. My interests do.”
“Yeah, spam is annoying,” I said, and went into the kitchen to dump the watering can and put it in the mudroom.
When I came back, Mr. Harrigan had the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and was taking deep breaths.
“Did you get that from your doctor?” I asked. “Did he, like, prescribe it?”
He lowered it and said, “I don’t have a doctor. Men in their mid-eighties can eat all the corned beef hash they want, and they no longer need doctors, unless they have cancer. Then a doctor is handy to prescribe pain medication.” His mind was somewhere else. “Have you considered Amazon, Craig? The company, not the river.”
Dad bought stuff from Amazon sometimes, but no, I’d never really considered it. I told Mr. Harrigan that, and asked what he meant.
He pointed to the Modern Library copy of McTeague. “This came from Amazon. I ordered it with my phone and my credit card. That company used to be just books. Little more than a mom-and-pop operation, really, but soon it may be one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. Their smile logo will be as ubiquitous as the Chevrolet emblem on cars or this on our phones.” He lifted his, showing me the apple with the bite out of it. “Is spam annoying? Yes. Is it becoming the cockroach of American commerce, breeding and scurrying everywhere? Yes. Because spam works, Craig. It pulls the plow. In the not-too-distant future, spam may decide elections. If I were a younger man, I’d take this new income stream by the balls . . .” He closed one of his hands. He could only make a loose fist because of his arthritis, but I got the idea. “. . . and I would squeeze.” The look came into his eyes that I sometimes saw, the one that made me glad I wasn’t in his bad books.
“You’ll be around for years yet,” I said, blissfully unaware that we were having our last conversation.
“Maybe or maybe not, but I want to tell you again how glad I am you convinced me to keep this. It’s given me something to think about. And when I can’t sleep at night, it’s been a good companion.”
“I’m glad,” I said, and I was. “Gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Harrigan.”
So I did, but he didn’t see me.
* * *
I let myself in through the mudroom door like always, calling out, “Hi, Mr. Harrigan, I’m here.”
There was no reply. I decided he was probably in the bathroom. I sure hoped he hadn’t fallen in there, because it was Mrs. Grogan’s day off. When I went into the living room and saw him sitting in his chair—oxygen bottle on the floor, iPhone and McTeague on the table beside him—I relaxed. Only his chin was on his chest, and he had slumped a little to one side. He looked like he was asleep. If so, that was a first this late in the afternoon. He napped for an hour after lunch, and by the time I arrived, he was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I took a step closer and saw his eyes weren’t entirely closed. I could see the lower arc of his irises, but the blue no longer looked sharp. It looked foggy, faded. I began to feel scared.
�
��Mr. Harrigan?”
Nothing. Gnarled hands folded loosely in his lap. One of his canes was still leaning against the wall, but the other was on the floor, as if he had reached for it and knocked it over. I realized I could hear the steady hiss from the oxygen mask, but not the faint rasp of his breathing, a sound I’d grown so used to that I rarely heard it at all.
“Mr. Harrigan, you okay?”
I took another couple of steps and reached out to shake him awake, then withdrew my hand. I had never seen a dead person, but thought I might be looking at one now. I reached for him again, and this time I didn’t chicken out. I grasped his shoulder (it was horribly bony beneath his shirt) and gave him a shake.
“Mr. Harrigan, wake up!”
One of his hands fell out of his lap and dangled between his legs. He slumped a little farther to one side. I could see the yellowed pegs of his teeth between his lips. Still, I felt I had to be absolutely sure he wasn’t just unconscious or in a faint before I called anyone. I had a memory, very brief but very bright, of my mother reading me the story of the little boy who cried wolf.
I went into the hall bathroom, the one Mrs. Grogan called the powder room, on legs that felt numb, and came back with the hand mirror Mr. Harrigan kept on the shelf. I held it in front of his mouth and nose. No warm breath misted it. Then I knew (although, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I actually knew when that hand fell out of his lap and hung between his legs). I was in the living room with a dead man, and what if he reached out and grabbed me? Of course he wouldn’t do that, he liked me, but I remembered the look he got in his eyes when he said—only yesterday! when he’d been alive!—that if he was a younger man, he’d take this new income stream by the balls, and squeeze. And how he’d closed his hand into a fist to demonstrate.
You’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless, he’d said.
Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that, dead people weren’t ruthless, dead people weren’t anything, but I still stepped away from him as I took my cell phone out of my hip pocket, and I didn’t take my eyes off him when I called my father.
Dad said I was probably right, but he’d send an ambulance, just in case. Who was Mr. Harrigan’s doctor, did I know? I said he didn’t have one (and you only had to look at his teeth to know he didn’t have a dentist). I said I would wait, and I did. But I did it outside. Before I went, I thought about picking up his dangling hand and putting it back in his lap. I almost did, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It would be cold.
I took his iPhone instead. It wasn’t stealing. I think it was grief, because the loss of him was starting to sink in. I wanted something that was his. Something that mattered.
* * *
I guess that was the biggest funeral our church ever had. Also the longest cortege to the graveyard, mostly made up of rental cars. There were local people there, of course, including Pete Bostwick, the gardener, and Ronnie Smits, who had done most of the work on his house (and gotten wealthy out of it, I’m sure), and Mrs. Grogan, the housekeeper. Other townies as well, because he was well liked in Harlow, but most of the mourners (if they were mourning, and not there just to make sure Mr. Harrigan was really dead) were business people from New York. There was no family. I mean zero, zilch, nada. Not even a niece or a second cousin. He’d never married, never had kids—probably one of the reasons Dad was leery about me going up there at first—and he’d outlived all the rest. That’s why it was the kid from down the road, the one he paid to come and read to him, who found him.
* * *
Mr. Harrigan must have known he was on borrowed time, because he left a handwritten sheet of paper on his study desk specifying exactly how he wanted his final rites carried out. It was pretty simple. Hay & Peabody’s Funeral Home had had a cash deposit on their books since 2004, enough to take care of everything with some left over. There was to be no wake or viewing hours, but he wanted to be “fixed up decently, if possible” so the coffin could be open at the funeral.
Reverend Mooney was to conduct the service, and I was to read from the fourth chapter of Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” I saw some of the business types exchange looks at that, as though Mr. Harrigan hadn’t shown them a great deal of kindness, or much in the way of forgiveness, either.
He wanted three hymns: “Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “In the Garden.” He wanted Reverend Mooney’s homily to last no more than ten minutes, and the Rev finished in just eight, ahead of schedule and, I believe, a personal best. Mostly the Rev just listed all the stuff Mr. Harrigan had done for Harlow, like paying to refurbish the Eureka Grange and fix up the Royal River covered bridge. He also put the fund drive for the community swimming pool over the top, the Rev said, but refused the naming privilege that went with it.
The Rev didn’t say why, but I knew. Mr. Harrigan said that allowing people to name things after you was not only absurd but undignified and ephemeral. In fifty years, he said, or even twenty, you were just a name on a plaque that everyone ignored.
Once I had done my scriptural duty, I sat in the front row with Dad, looking at the coffin with the vases of lilies at its head and foot. Mr. Harrigan’s nose stuck up like the prow of a ship. I told myself not to look at it, not to think it was funny or horrible (or both), but to remember him as he’d been. Good advice, but my eyes kept wandering back.
When the Rev finished his short talk, he raised his palm-down hand to the assembled mourners and gave the benediction. Once that was done, he said, “Those of you who would like to say a final word of goodbye may now approach the coffin.”
There was a rustle of clothes and a murmur of voices as people stood. Virginia Hatlen began to play the organ very softly, and I realized—with a strange feeling I couldn’t name then but would years later come to identify as surrealism—that it was a medley of country songs, including Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of a Dove,” Dwight Yoakam’s “I Sang Dixie,” and of course “Stand By Your Man.” So Mr. Harrigan had even left instructions for the exit music, and I thought, good for him. A line was forming, the locals in their sport coats and khakis interspersed with the New York types in suits and fancy shoes.
“What about you, Craig?” Dad murmured. “Want a last look, or are you good?”
I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers.
“Yes, but I want to be at the end of the line. I want to be last.”
My dad, God bless him, didn’t ask me why. He just squeezed my shoulder and got into line. I went back to the vestibule, a bit uncomfortable in a sport jacket that was getting tight around the shoulders because I’d finally started to grow. When the end of the line was halfway down the main aisle and I was sure no one else was going to join it, I got behind a couple of suited guys who were talking in low tones about—wouldn’t you know it—Amazon stock.
By the time I got to the coffin, the music had stopped. The pulpit was empty. Virginia Hatlen had probably sneaked out back to have a cigarette, and the Rev would be in the vestry, taking off his robe and combing what remained of his hair. There were a few people in the vestibule, murmuring in low voices, but here in the church it was just me and Mr. Harrigan, as it had been on so many afternoons at his big house on the hill, with its views that were good but not touristy.
He was wearing a charcoal gray suit I’d never seen before. The funeral guy had rouged him a little so he’d look healthy, except healthy people don’t lie in coffins with their eyes shut and the last few min
utes of daylight shining on their dead faces before they go into the earth forever. His hands were folded, making me think of the way they’d been folded when I came into his living room only days before. He looked like a life-sized doll, and I hated seeing him that way. I didn’t want to stay. I wanted fresh air. I wanted to be with my father. I wanted to go home. But I had something to do first, and I had to do it right away, because Reverend Mooney could come back from the vestry at any time.
I reached into the inside pocket of my sport coat and brought out Mr. Harrigan’s phone. The last time I’d been with him—alive, I mean, not slumped in his chair or looking like a doll in an expensive box—he’d said he was glad I’d convinced him to keep the phone. He’d said it was a good companion when he couldn’t sleep at night. The phone was password-protected—as I’ve said, he was a fast learner once something really grabbed his interest—but I knew what the password was: pirate1. I had opened it in my bedroom the night before the funeral, and had gone to the notes function. I wanted to leave him a message.
I thought about saying I love you, but that would have been wrong. I had liked him, certainly, but I’d also been a bit leery of him. I didn’t think he loved me, either. I don’t think Mr. Harrigan ever loved anyone, unless it was the mother who had raised him after his dad left (I had done my research). In the end, the note I typed was this: Working for you was a privilege. Thank you for the cards, and for the scratch-off tickets. I will miss you.
I lifted the lapel of his suit coat, trying not to touch the unbreathing surface of his chest beneath his crisp white shirt . . . but my knuckles brushed it for just a moment, and I can feel that to this day. It was hard, like wood. I tucked the phone into his inside pocket, then stepped away. Just in time, too. Reverend Mooney came out of the side door, adjusting his tie.
“Saying goodbye, Craig?”
