Eventide - Kent Haruf [43]
Where you going? Guthrie said. If you need something, let me go get it for you.
I want to see what they done to him.
Guthrie stepped out of the way and Raymond grabbed the back of the pew ahead of him, pulling himself upright, and fit the crutches in place and hobbled out into the aisle up to the casket. He stood at the long smooth side of it. He set his hands on the dark satiny wood and then tried to raise the top half of the lid but couldn’t manage to move it without dropping his crutches. He turned his head to one side. Tom, he said. Come help me with this damn thing, would you?
Guthrie came forward and raised the upper half of the polished lid and propped it back. There before Raymond was his brother’s dead body, stretched out lying on his back, his eyes sunken in the waxy-looking face, his eyes closed forever under the thin-veined eyelids, his stiff iron-gray hair combed flat across his pale skull. At the funeral home they had called Victoria to ask her to bring them something appropriate for them to put on him, and she had located the old gray wool suit in the back of his closet, the only one he had ever owned, and when she had brought it to them they had had to cut the coat down the back seam to get him into it.
Raymond stood and looked at his brother’s face. His thick eyebrows had been trimmed and they had dabbed powder and makeup on his cheeks over the scratches and bruises, and they had wound a tie around his neck under the shirt collar. He didn’t know where they had gotten the tie, it wasn’t anything he remembered. And they had folded his brother’s hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.
You can shut it again, he said to Guthrie. That ain’t him in there. My brother wouldn’t let himself look like that even for a minute if he was still alive. Not if he still had breath to prevent them from doing him like that. I know what my brother looks like.
He turned and hobbled back to the pew and sat down and laid his crutches out of the way. Then he shut his eyes and never looked at the dead face of his brother again.
PEOPLE BEGAN FILING INTO THE CHURCH. THE ORGANIST in the loft at the back of the sanctuary began to play, and Victoria and Maggie came in, with Katie in her mother’s arms. Together they slid in beside Raymond. The mortician and an assistant in a matching black suit seated people in pews on both sides of the aisle, moving everybody up to the front, but there were not a great many mourners at the funeral, and only the first five rows were filled. Before the service began, the mortician came forward very somberly and opened the casket so that during the service people might view his handiwork, and then the minister came in from a side door and crossed to the pulpit and greeted them one and all in the name of Jesus in a voice that was laden with solemnity and import. Then there were prayers to be said and hymns to be sung. The organist played Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine and Abide with Me: Fast Falls the Eventide, and people sang along, but not very loud. When the music was finished the preacher began to talk in earnest and he spoke about a man about whom he knew next to nothing at all, saying to those in attendance that he believed Harold McPheron must have been a good man, a Christian light among his fellows, else why would they be there marking his passing even if they were only a few in number, though they must all remember a man might be loved deeply even if he was never to be loved widely, and no one present should ever forget that. Sitting beside Raymond, Victoria cried a little despite the inadequacy and ignorance of what the man was saying, and Katie at one point grew so fussy that Raymond had to reach over and lift her onto his lap, patting her and whispering