Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

Author:John Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

5

It was Doc Cathey who brought up the question of funeral arrangements. When he’d finished looking Simon over he sat with his hands on his knees, opposite his patient, looking at the floor between their two chairs as if crossly, his glasses far down his gray beak of a nose (Callie over by the window, with her hands folded; Henry standing against the refrigerator; little Jimmy playing, oblivious to it all, on the floor). Doc said: “You thought at all about the funeral, Simon?”

Simon went pale, and his hands, busy buttoning his shirt, stopped moving. He had a wart on the knuckle of his middle finger, and Callie couldn’t help but wonder if it came from his never getting clean. He smiled, just a flicker, as if in fright, and said, “The Lord will provide.”

“The hell he will,” Doc Cathey said.

“Now, Doc,” Henry said.

“Well she can’t stay there in the hospital morgue,” Doc said. “One way or another she’ll have to be buried. What kind of fun’ral do you people normally put on?”

Simon looked as if his mind had stopped. “The Lord—” he said. Then he said, suddenly awake for an instant, “Every nickel we had—” He looked at Callie, as if in panic, then over at Henry.

“You mean to say you let it burn?” Doc said. His face squeezed shut with fury and he shook his head. He fumbled with the hearing-aid button on his vest.

“Simon, don’t you have any friends you can turn to?” Callie said.

He looked smaller than ever, as it seemed to Henry. Like a woodchuck beset by dogs. He folded his hands and sat thinking, or daydreaming, perhaps, the frightened smile playing on his face, on and off. At last he said, and this time he knew what he was saying—there was no question of it now—“The Lord will provide.”

“Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He reached for the bag by his foot.

But Simon looked up sharply, his mouth open, raising his clasped hands a little, like a man with handcuffs on, the muscles of his face tense, and the brightness that had come into Simon’s eyes made even Doc Cathey stop and wince and listen.

“Or ever the silver cord be loosed,” Simon said, “or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Doc Cathey leered as if with some sort of vicious triumph. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” he said. “Who pays the mortician?”

“It’s of no importance,” Simon said. “Dust to dust.”

“What?” Doc said. He leaned closer, turning his hearing aid toward Simon.

“Of no importance,” Simon said again.

They were like a couple of old witches, the two little men sitting knee to knee, bright-eyed as a couple of hawks. Doc Cathey said, “I believe you’d just roll her in a ditch and leave her lay!”

“Stop it,” Callie said, startled.

But Doc Cathey had understood.

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