The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor

Author:Edwin O'Connor [O'Connor, Edwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9781568490618
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; Little, Brown and Company
Published: 1961-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

HERE LIES

A MAN BELOVED

BY ALL

CORNELIUS J. HEFFERNAN

And underneath:

AND HIS LOVING WIFE

MARGARET B.

A strange final equation, surely: short shrift for poor Margaret B.!

He talked with special zeal of the care of his grave. It should be perpetual; he had read only recently of a new grass admirably adapted to this purpose: green the year round, it required little mowing. He had already written to inquire if this grass were suitable for these latitudes.

There was more, but at last he finished. He breathed out hard, then sat back in his chair, clearly waiting for his due. I could at least be truthful; I said, “You’ve thought of everything, Mr. Heffernan.”

“I left out nothing,” he said with satisfaction. “Did you notice that, Father?”

“Yes. Yes indeed.”

“All tied up in a bundle,” he said. “No loose ends. Neatness counts! That’s what they used to tell us in school and that’s what I’ve always believed. I’ve lived neat and I’ll die neat. No man can argue with that. But what’s the good of it all, Father, unless you can trust people? To carry out the plans. Just as I made them. Right to the dot. That’s the question the whole wide world asks, Father: Who can you trust? The big books all ask that one. And I ask it too. Who can I trust, Father? Some priest who’s so busy trying to get out of the room the moment he sees you coming in he can’t hear a word you say? Some smart-aleck priest who always knows just what you’re going to say ten minutes before you say it? No no, Father. I’ll trust no priest like that. No matter how well I know his pa. I say it now for one and all to hear: If a priest has got no time for Bucky Heffernan, Bucky Heffernan has got no time for that priest! Alive or dead. Not after all the trouble I took to make everything come out nice. And that’s why I’m here tonight, Father. Right here. In Old Saint Paul’s rectory. I’m here to get a priest I can trust!” And then he actually said the words; he said, “Will you bury me, Father?”

It was both a compliment and a request—of a somewhat special kind, to be sure. And how to respond? What in the world could you say to this? Because the whole thing was so close to farce, so divorced from the meaning of death, so wildly, comically out of proportion that for a moment I was almost tempted to answer in kind, to suggest little graveside ingenuities of my own. But then I looked at Bucky and saw his eyes staring at me with passionate earnestness, and I suddenly realized that, despite all the ludicrous trappings, here was an old man who really was going to die soon simply because he was that old, who wanted terribly to have everything “come out nice,” and to whom it was a matter of the most enormous importance that Bucky Heffernan, once he had ceased to be Bucky Heffernan, be borne in glory to the ground and treated grandly every day.

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