Boy in the Water by Stephen Dobyns

Author:Stephen Dobyns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

The chapel was full and the three golden chandeliers were blazing with light. Most of the faculty and staff were sitting in the two front rows, but Roger Bennett and Bill Dolittle stayed in the back in order to watch the doors and keep an eye on the students who occupied the pews behind their teachers. Also standing in back was Chief Moulton, the Brewster policeman. As headmaster, Hawthorne sat to the right of the altar, facing the school. On the other side of the altar was Harriet Bennett in her ecclesiastical robes. It was eight-thirty Thursday morning. Through the stained-glass windows, the November sun sent multicolored rays across the faces of faculty and students alike. Rosalind Langdon had just finished playing a Bach fugue on the organ and Tank Donoso, who lived in Shepherd, was climbing into the pulpit and looking somewhat truculently out at the chapel. As president of the student body he had been chosen to speak for the other students in Shepherd about their feelings for Evings, feelings that had probably ranged from the critical to the indifferent until death had increased Evings’s importance. Tank wore a dark blue suit that seemed too tight and he must have run his electric clippers across his scalp that morning, because he was nearly bald. Hawthorne glanced away and saw the door in back open. Frank LeBrun entered. He hesitated, then remained by the exit.

The service had begun shortly after eight with the Reverend Bennett talking about “Clifford Evings the man,” as she had called him. Her eulogy had been a mixture of homily and reminiscence but so generalized that she could have been talking about anybody. Hawthorne wondered what she truly thought, since she had urged him to dismiss Evings or at least force him into early retirement just the previous week. Instead she had spoken about the luminescence of his soul and the weight of his mortal burden. She said the light of his presence had been dimmed in this world only. Hawthorne imagined accusing her of hypocrisy, which he would never do. But possibly, now that Evings was dead, she could feel charity and even remorse. Possibly the prayers with which she concluded her remarks had been heartfelt.

Others had spoken. Skander told how he and Evings had both come to Bishop’s Hill exactly twenty years earlier. He had little to say beyond that numerical fact except that Evings had become a “fixture” and “one of those quiet people upon whom I had come to depend.” Tom Hastings, stuttering only a little, had spoken of a weekly chess game that he and Clifford played for years. Bill Dolittle had spoken of Evings’s love of books. But in none of these descriptions did Hawthorne see the frightened and desperate man he had come to know in the past two months. There was no mention of someone’s trashing his office only a week earlier or of Evings’s having taken his own life. And Hawthorne asked himself what the students thought of such a veneer of praise or if these pieties were just something they had come to expect.

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