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Show 417 Through the closing hymn, Lorin watched his father led from chair to chair to meet palsied ancestors who stared at their laps or grinned at remote memories. When he had met them all the old couple led him to a balcony and propped him carefully in a webbed lawn chair. Don't touch the rail now, the old man said. It's loose and you'll fall. They left him and went inside, leaving the door ajar in case he fell anyway. Lorin and Stephen and Katy's husband joined the other pallbearers-a cousin and his two sons-in carrying the casket down the steps to the hearse. It felt as heavy as a piano, and Lorin watched his brother's back. The kid had done very well. During the short drive to the cemetery and along the winding roads between spruce trees and sycamores inside the gates, Lorin kept an eye on his father sitting in the lawn chair. His arms hung down and his head was tipped back. Through the thick glasses the yellow eyes stared out over a landscape of broken spires and roofs that had fallen in and winding roads that had buckled away from the sides of mountains, and huge mansions whose walls had slid into heaps of rubble exposing empty corridors down which tiny dark figures flitted, keeping to the shadows, There was the barest movement of the eyes in their pink bath as they watched pale things that flew in the murk that deepened out of the canyons. At the gravesite the pallbearers hefted the casket onto the suspended bands over the hole and stepped back. Lorin took his brother aside while the others were gathering around the grave. "Thanks, little brother," he said, and put a hand on Stephen's arm. Stephen flung the hand off. "Don't ever try that shit with me again," he said. His face was white. Lorin went and found his mother and the girls. The four of them stood together while Katy's husband dedicated the grave. The women's heads were |
