The Secret History - Donna Tartt [205]
Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I’m sorry.
The minister ran through the service fast, his bland face tinted green beneath the canopy. Julian was there—I saw him now, looking towards the four of us. First Francis, and then Charles and Camilla, moved to go stand with him but I didn’t care, I was in a daze. The Corcorans sat very quietly, hands in laps: how can they just sit there? I thought, by that awful pit, do nothing? It was Wednesday. On Wednesdays at ten we had Greek Prose Composition and that was where we all ought to have been now. The coffin lay dumbly by the grave. I knew they wouldn’t open it, but I wished they would. It was just starting to dawn on me that I would never see him again.
The pallbearers stood in a dark row behind the coffin, like a chorus of elders in a tragedy. Henry was the youngest one. He stood there quietly, his hands folded before him—big, white, scholarly hands, capable and well-kept, the same hands that had dug in Bunny’s neck for a pulse and rolled his head back and forth on its poor broken stem while the rest of us leaned over the edge, breathless, watching. Even from that distance we could see the terrible angle of his neck, the shoe turned the wrong way, the trickle of blood from nose and mouth. He pulled back the eyelids with his thumb, leaning close, careful not to touch the eyeglasses which were skewed on top of Bunny’s head. One leg jerked in a solitary spasm which quieted gradually to a twitch and then stopped. Camilla’s wristwatch had a second hand. We saw them silently conferring. Climbing up the hill after her, bracing his knee with his palm, he’d wiped his hands on his trousers and answered our clamorous whispers—dead? is he—?—with the brief impersonal nod of a doctor.…
—? Lord we beseech you, that while we lament the departure of our brother Edmund Grayden Corcoran your servant out of this life, we bear in mind that we are most certainly ready to follow him. Give us grace to make ready for that last hour, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death.…
He hadn’t seen it coming at all. He hadn’t even understood, there wasn’t time. Teetering back as if on the edge of the swimming pool: comic yodel, windmilling arms. Then the surprised nightmare of falling. Someone who didn’t know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn’t believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.
Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.
… I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.…
The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave with long, creaking straps. Henry’s muscles quivered with the effort; his jaw was clenched tight. Sweat had soaked through to the back of his jacket.
I felt in the pocket of my jacket to make sure the painkillers were still there. It was going to be a long ride home.
The straps were pulled up. The minister blessed the grave and then sprinkled it with holy water. Dirt and dark. Mr. Corcoran, his face buried in his hands, sobbed monotonously. The awning rattled in the wind.
The first spadeful of earth. The thud of it on the hollow lid gave me a sick, black, empty feeling. Mrs. Corcoran—Patrick on one side, sober Ted on the other—stepped forward. With a gloved hand she tossed the little bouquet of roses into the grave.
Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged