He dreamed that they were in a small country church that they sometimes attended in the summer. The church was cruciform and had a threadbare green carpet. There was a sharp and depressing smell of ecclesiastical varnish. The occasion was a funeral and the coffin stood before the chancel but he could not remember whose soul it was they had come to pray for and he looked around the congregation to discover who was missing. Charlie Estabrooke? But he was on the left with his wife. Bailey Barnes? Bailey was on the right with his whole family. Alex Kneeland? Eddie Clapp? Jim Randolph? Sam Farrar? Dave Poor? Rick Rhodes? Jim Stesse? And Roger Cromwell? When he saw that the congregation was intact he realized that the funeral must be his own.
V
When Tony had been in bed for seventeen days there was a spell of fine weather and Nailles woke one morning feeling wonderful. It was about six. The sun had not yet risen but the sky was brilliant. He shaved and bathed and bounded into Nellie's side of the bed and taking her in his arms he thought she seemed a much younger woman than he knew her to be. They seemed in their loving and being loved to have put down the accumulations of time, as if their baser qualities, like some stern presence, had gone off for an hour or so, leaving them free to sport and revel. When he went to the window the land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew. Septic drain fields lay under the grass and that flock of cardinals in the fir trees might have lice, but while the brilliance of their plumage and the clarity of their singing had nothing to do with peace on earth, love or bank deposits, it gave him such a feeling of exaltation he threw his arms apart as if he were going to embrace the landscape and the birds. "Oh I feel so wonderful," he said. "Something seems to have happened while I slept. I feel as though I'd been given something, some kind of a present. I feel that everything's going to be the way it was when it was so wonderful. Tony will get up today or perhaps tomorrow and go back to school. I just know that everything's going to be wonderful."
Nailles ate a big breakfast and then went up to Tony's room. That neither he nor his wife nor his son had ever been ill made the reek of a sickroom, as it flew up to his nose, cutting and strange. The shades were drawn. Tony slept. He slept in his underpants and his shoulders were bare. His skin was a liverish color. His hair was mussed and had not been cut for a month. He embraced his pillow with desperation. "Wake up, Tony," Nailles said. "Wake up. It's a marvelous, marvelous morning. Wake up and take a look." He raised the shades and a brilliant light poured into the sickroom. "Look, Tony, see how bright everything is. Nobody can stay in bed on a day like this. It's like a challenge, Tony. Everything's ahead of you. Everything. You'll go to college and get an interesting job and get married and have children. Everything's in front of you, Tony. Come to the window."
He took his son by the hand and drew him out of bed to the window and stood there with an arm around his shoulder. "See, Tony, how bright it all is. Doesn't it make you feel better?" Tony dropped to his knees on the floor. "Tomorrow, Daddy," he sobbed. "Maybe tomorrow."
Nailles felt, like some child on a hill, that purpose and order underlay the roofs, trees, river and streets that composed the landscape. There was some obvious purpose in his loving Nellie and the light of morning but what was the purpose, the message, the lesson to be learned from his stricken son? Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made. Tony was sobbing violently and then he spoke-he howled:
"Give me back the mountains."
"What, Sonny, what did you say?"
"Give me back the mountains."
"What mountains, Sonny," Nailles asked. "Do you mean the mountains that we used to climb? The White Mountains. They're not really white, are they? Remember how we used to climb from Franconia to Crawford? That was fun, wasn't it? Are those the mountains you mean?"
"I don't know," Tony said. He got back into bed.
"Well I have to go or I'll miss the train," Nailles said. "I'll see you tonight"
Nailles, waiting that morning for the 7:56, fended off any questions about his son's health by saying that he had mononucleosis. He stood on the platform between Harry Shinglehouse and Hammer. Nailles and Hammer read the Times. Shinglehouse read the Wall Street Journal. Since the dinner party Nailles and Hammer had said good morning but not much more. They sometimes took the same train in the morning but Nailles had only once seen his neighbor on the 6:32 home, when Hammer was asleep, either drunk or weary or both. He had a black dispatch case in his lap and was humped unconscious over this in a position that seemed desperate and abject. What is the pathos of men and women who fall asleep on trains and planes; why do they seem forsaken, poleaxed and lost? They snore, they twist, they mutter names, they seem the victims of some terrible upheaval although they are merely going home to supper and to cut the grass. Nailles watched his neighbor and when he did not wake up at Bullet Park he shook his shoulder and said: "Time to get up." "Oh thank you," said Hammer. It had been their only conversation.
This morning they nodded to one another and read their folded papers as down the tracks came the Chicago express, two hours behind schedule and going about ninety miles an hour. Nailles grabbed for his hat, folded his paper and shut his eyes because the noise and commotion of the express was like being in the vortex of some dirty wind tunnel. When the express had passed he opened his eyes and saw the train helling off into the distance, gaily waving a plume of steam like a pig's tail. He had started to read the Times again when he noticed that Harry Shinglehouse had vanished. He swung around to see if Harry had changed his position but he was not on the platform. Looking back to the tracks he saw a highly polished brown loafer lying on the cinders. "My God," he finally said. "That fellow. What's his name. He was sucked under the train."
"Hmmmmm," said Hammer, lowering his paper.
"Shinglehouse. He's gone."
"By Jesus, so he has," said Hammer.
"Shinglehouse," Nailles shouted. "He's dead. I mean he was killed."
"What'll we do," said Hammer.
"I'll call the police," Nailles said. "I'd better call the police."
There was a telephone booth at the end of the platform and he ran to this and got the police.
"Patrolman Shea speaking," said a voice.
"Look," Nailles said. "This is Eliot Nailles. I'm at the station.