The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [206]
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “We can do this.”
Schwartz nodded. He wondered how Emerson had done it—whether Emerson really had done it, after all. It was one thing to hear President Affenlight tell the story, one thing to imagine Emerson kneeling in the dirt in his suit, tears in his beard, lifting the simple wooden lid off a simple wooden casket. Your mind stayed trained on the emotional, the intellectual, the symbolic. Emerson became a character in a play, and his act became a myth, a source of meaning. You didn’t think about what Ellen Emerson’s decaying body looked like, or how it smelled: you couldn’t think about that if you tried.
Schwartz felt himself faltering. His face was still averted, and he wanted to keep it that way.
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s not so bad.”
Schwartz, both heartened and abashed by the Skrimmer’s calm, turned his head. A shock ran through him, another current of obscure fear, but the shock passed, and Henry was right that it was not so bad—or at least it wasn’t so much worse than the viewing at the funeral. Affenlight’s body had slid toward the foot of the casket and was oddly, pathetically, contorted, but the embalming seemed to have held up through the hot summer, and the body seemed still to be his own.
They lifted him by the lapels of his suit, the pockets of his pants. They lowered him into the huge vinyl bag Schwartz had pilfered from the VAC, and into which he had inserted steel bars to ensure that the body would sink. He zipped the bag shut. They pulled off their gloves and masks, tossed them into the casket, clapped it shut. Nose plugs still in, they slathered their arms in diluted bleach, hoisted the bag, and carried it down to the beach. Owen and Pella rejoined them at the water’s edge, where a long rowboat awaited them. Luckily the water was calm. They tied Contango to the little pier and rowed out into the lake, tacking this way and that because they were drunk and none of them knew how to row.
81
They were far, far out, dangerously far if you wanted to think of it that way, and even the few lights of Westish that pricked the distance seemed on the point of vanishing. Mike, who’d been doing the heavy rowing, grimacing in pain all the while, stopped and raised his oars from the water. Henry, behind him in the bow seat, did the same. The creak of the rowlocks ceased, as did the steady slosh of the blades, and all that remained was the slap of waves at the rowboat’s hull, the black sky all around.
Pella sat in the stern, Westish at her back, the lake ahead, though most of what she could see was Mike’s sweat-drenched chest, the shrug and drop of his big shoulders as he tried to catch his breath. What a face, she thought. Let it never be bearded again.
Alone at the prow sat Owen, his back to the rest of them. He looked out at the dark water, a hand laid softly on the material of the bag in which Pella’s father lay.
They were drifting now, the rowboat’s nose tacking softly to port, to the north. It was time, and Mike was looking at her, waiting for her to say that it was time, but even though it was her dad and her idea, she realized that she was waiting for Owen. Owen would know what to do. She found a warm can of beer beneath her seat—they’d brought the beers but not the cooler—and cracked it and handed it to Mike. Mike handed that one to Henry, and she found another.
Finally Owen turned around. He was wearing his Westish cap with the harpoon-skewered W, and behind the weak beam that streamed from his reading light his face was wet. He smiled, looked at Pella. “Would it be all right if I said something?”
They rearranged themselves, Owen and Henry on one bench, Pella and Mike on the opposite one, her dad in between. Owen passed the bottle of scotch.
“Perhaps we should bow our heads,” Owen said. “Don’t worry. I won’t invoke any bread-based religions.”
They bowed their heads. The beam of Owen’s reading light passed over each of them, settled on the navy