‘We’ll move him,’ said the voice, casually.
‘You idiots, you’ll kill me, don’t!’
But he could not say any of this out loud. He could only think it.
Hands took hold of him. They started to lift him. He cried out and nausea choked him up. They straightened him out into a ramrod of agony. Two men did it. One of them was thin, bright, pale, alert, a young man. The other man was very old and had a wrinkled upper lip.
He had seen their faces before.
A familiar voice said, ‘Is — is he dead?’
Another voice, a memorable voice, responded, ‘No. Not yet. But he will be dead before the ambulance arrives.’
It was all a very silly, mad plot. Like every accident. He squealed hysterically at the solid wall of faces. They were all around him, these judges and jurors with the faces he had seen before. Through his pain he counted their faces.
The freckled boy. The old man with the wrinkled upper lip.
The red-haired, red-cheeked woman. An old woman with a mole on her chin.
‘I know what you’re here for,’ he thought. ‘You’re here just as you’re at all accidents. To make certain the right ones live and the right ones die. That’s why you lifted me. You knew it would kill. You knew I’d live if you left me alone.
‘And that’s the way it’s been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn’t know it was dangerous to move a hurt man. You didn’t mean to hurt him.’
He looked at them, above him, and he was curious as a man under deep water looking up at people on a bridge. ‘Who are you? Where do you come from and how do you get here so soon? You’re the crowd that’s always in the way, using up good air that a dying man’s lungs are in need of, using up space he should be using to lie in, alone. Tramping on people to make sure they die, that’s you. I know all of you.’
It was like a polite monologue. They said nothing. Faces. The old man. The red-haired woman.
Someone picked up his brief-case. ‘Whose is this?’ they asked.
‘It’s mine! It’s evidence against all of you!’
Eyes, inverted over him. Shiny eyes under tousled hair or under hats.
Faces.
Somewhere — a siren. The ambulance was coming.
But, looking at the faces, the construction, the cast, the form of the faces, Spallner knew it was too late. He read it in their faces. They knew.
He tried to speak. A little bit got out:
‘It — looks like I’ll — be joining up with you. I — guess I’ll be a member of your — group — now.’
He closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.
The Handler
Mr. Benedict came out of his little house. He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people. A little dog trotted by with clever eyes; so clever that Mr. Benedict could not meet its gaze. A small child peered through the wrought-iron gate around the graveyard, near the church, and Mr. Benedict winced at the pale penetrant curiosity of the child.
‘You’re the funeral man,’ said the child.
Cringing within himself, Mr. Benedict did not speak.
‘You own the church?’ asked the child, finally.
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Benedict.
‘And the funeral place?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Benedict bewilderedly.
‘And the yards and the stones and the graves?’ wondered the child.
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Benedict, with some show of pride. And it was true. An amazing thing it was. A stroke of business luck really, that had kept him busy and humming nights over long years. First he had landed the church and the churchyard, with a few green-mossed tombs, when the Baptist people moved up-town.
Then he had built himself a fine little mortuary, in Gothic style, of course, and covered it with ivy, and then added a small house for himself, way in back. It was very convenient to die for Mr. Benedict. He handled you in and out of buildings with a minimum of confusion and a maximum of synthetic benediction. No need of a funeral procession! declared his large advertisements in the morning paper. Out of the church and into the earth, slick as a whistle. Nothing but the finest preservatives used!
The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so very inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy. He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no.
Whoever you might be, if Mr. Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eyes and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift as he said to you:
‘You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.’
But, always, when you talked to him, you felt he never heard a word you said.
Now, he stood on his porch and said, ‘You are a sweet little child,’ to the little staring child, in fear that the child might not like him.
Mr. Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn’t pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day-after-day routine. He would let the conflict begin.
He knew just where to go to get himself enraged. Half of the day he spent travelling from place to place in the little town, letting the superiority of the living neighbours overwhelm him, letting his own inferiority dissolve him, bathe him in perspiration, tie his heart and brain into trembling knots.
He spoke with Mr. Rodgers, the druggist, idle, senseless morning talk. And he saved and put away all the little slurs and intonations and insults that Mr. Rodgers sent his way. Mr. Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession. ‘Ha, ha,’ laughed Mr. Benedict at the latest joke upon himself, and he wanted to cry with miserable violence. ‘There you are, you cold one,’ said Mr. Rodgers on this particular morning. ‘Cold one,’ said Mr. Benedict. ‘Ha, ha!’
Outside the drug-store, Mr. Benedict met up with Mr. Stuyvesant, the contractor. Mr. Stuyvesant looked at his watch to estimate just how much time he dared waste on Benedict before trumping up some appointment. ‘Oh, hello, Benedict,’ shouted Stuyvesant. ‘How’s business?
I bet you’re going at it tooth and nail. Did you get it? I said, I bet you’re going at it tooth and — ‘ ‘Yes, yes,’ chuckled Mr. Benedict vaguely. ‘And how is your business, Mr. Stuyvesant?’ ‘Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benny old man? That’s a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalming a frigid woman? Hey, that’s not bad. You heard what I said?’ roared Mr. Stuyvesant, pounding him on the back. ‘Good, good!’ cried Mr. Benedict, with a fleshless smile. ‘Good day.’
On it went, person after person. Mr. Benedict, pummelled on from one to the next, was the lake into which all refuse was thrown. People began with little pebbles and then when Mr. Benedict did not ripple or protest, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder. There was no bottom to Mr. Benedict, no splash and no settling. The lake did not answer.
As the day passed he became more helpless and enraged with them, and he walked from building to building and had more little meetings and conversations and hated himself with a very real, masochistic pleasure. But the thing that kept him going most of all was the thought of the night pleasures to come. So he inflicted himself again and again with these stupid, pompous bullies and bowed to them and held his hands like little biscuits before his stomach, and asked no more than to be sneered at.
‘There you are, meat-chopper,’ said Mr. Flinger, the delicatessen man. ‘How are all your corned beeves and pickled brains?’
Things worked to a crescendo of inferiority. With a final kettle-drumming of insult and terrible self-effacement, Mr. Benedict, seeking wildly the correct time from his wrist watch, turned and ran back through the town. He was at his peak, he was all ready now, ready to work, ready to do what must be done, and enjoy himself. The awful part of the day was over, the good part was now to begin! He ran eagerly up the steps to his mortuary.
The room waited like a fall of snow. There were white hummocks and pale delineations of things recumbent under sheets in the dimness.
The door burst open.
Mr. Benedict, framed in a flow of light, stood in the door, head back, one hand upraised in dramatic salute, the other hand upon the door-knob in unnatural rigidity.
He was the puppet-master come home.
He stood a long minute in the very centre of his theatre. In his head applause, perhaps, thundered. He did not move, but lowered his head in abject appreciation of this kind, kind applauding audience.
He carefully removed his coat, hung it up, got himself into a fresh white smock, buttoned the cuffs with professional crispness, then washed his hands together as he looked around at his very good friends.
It had been a fine week; there were any number of family relics lying under the sheets, and as Mr. Benedict stood before them he
