One Second After [79]
"Pop-pop," was all she could get out.
Jen put a hand on her granddaughter's shoulder.
"Pop-pop is in heaven now, dear. But it's OK to cry."
Elizabeth leaned against John's shoulder, forcing back a sob, but then looked up at him.
"Dad, you're burning up."
"I'm OK," he said.
He looked at Jen.
"Let's go in," she said.
He followed her into the house, which was all so silent, and into what had been Jennifer's room.
Tyler's features were already going to a grayish yellow.
John remembered the first time they had met, Tyler coldly looking at this Yankee, worse yet from New Jersey, who obviously had but one intent only, and that was to seduce his only daughter and take her away.
John smiled. Oh, I understand that now, Pop, he thought.
And then so many other memories, of the gradual thaw. The first time they'd gone out shooting together while the "girls" went to the mall to go shopping, Tyler fascinated by the old Colt Dragoon pistol John had brought along, roaring with laughter over the encounter with the local rednecks that had happened but weeks before. That had been an icebreaker, father and potential son-in-law shooting, talking guns, then sitting on the patio and having a cold beer.
And then the grudging acceptance that had turned to friendship and at last had turned to the love a father would have for a son, a son who then gave him two beautiful granddaughters, granddaughters who allowed him once again to relive the joy of raising a child.
He was gone now. War or not, he would have died, but he had indeed died far sooner as a result of the war. In the cold figures of triage, he was an old man, someone whom villages, town, and cities all across America, this day, but ten days after an attack, were being forced to "write off."
For an old man in the advanced stages of cancer, there would be no
medicine That had to be rationed now to someone who "stood a chance"
or who, in a colder sense, could be of use. If the old man were not dying at home his would be a body whose departure would free a bed in a hospital flooded with the sick and injured. In a starving community his would be one less mouth to feed, even though his last meals were from a can poured into a feeding tube .. . but even that can of Ensure was now a meal, perhaps for an entire day, for someone else.
Tyler was dead, and there was a war, though it did not in any sense seem like a war that any had even conceptualized this way ... and he was dead as surely as millions of others were now dead or dying after but ten days ... as dead as someone lying in the surf of Omaha Beach, the death camp of Auschwitz, as dead as any casualty of war.
Frightened for a moment, John looked back at Jennifer, who stood in the doorway, clutching her grandmother's side. The last of the ice had given out two days ago, the bottles of insulin now immersed in the tank of the basement toilet to keep them cool. And there was a flood of panic in John. He knew, almost to the day, how much insulin was left.
He caught Jen's gaze; the way he was staring at her granddaughter, she pulled Jennifer in tighter to her side.
He turned back to look at Tyler.
"I think we should pray," John said.
He went down on his knees and made the sign of the cross. "Hail Mary, full of grace ..."
It was close to sunset. To the north the hills, so affectionately known to all locals as "the Seven Sisters," were bathed in the slating golden light of evening. Beyond them was the massive bulk of Mount Mitchell, its slopes green as spring moved steadily upwards towards the summit. "I think that's deep enough, Ben," John said.
Ben looked up from the grave he had been digging for the last three hours, helped by John's students Phil and Jeremiah.
Charlie had been right. The golf course was the ideal spot for the new cemetery, the earth easy to dig. Over twenty other graves had been dug this day or were being dug now. The seven who had died in the elementary school during the night, five others who had died during the day... and three suicides, though one minister had tried to protest that decision that they