In the Country of Last Things (21 page)

Before the ceremony, Willie went into the garage, unscrewed the horn from the car, and spent the better part of an hour polishing it up. It was one of those old-fashioned horns you used to see on children’s bicycles—but larger and more impressive, with a brass trumpet and a black rubber knob almost the size of a grapefruit. Then he and Sam dug a hole next to the hawthorn bushes out back. Six of the residents carried Frick’s body from the house to the grave, and as they lowered him into the ground, Willie put the horn on his grandfather’s chest, making sure that it was buried along with him. Boris Stepanovich then read a short poem he had written for the occasion, and afterward Sam and Willie shoveled the dirt back into the hole. It was a primitive ceremony at best—no prayers, no songs—but just to be doing it was significant enough. Everyone
was out there together—all the residents, all the members of the staff—and by the time it was over, most of us had tears in our eyes. A small stone was placed on the gravesite to mark the spot, and then we went back into the house.

Afterward, we all tried to pick up the slack as far as Willie was concerned. Victoria delegated new responsibilities to him, even allowing him to stand guard with the rifle while I was conducting interviews in the hall, and Sam made an effort to take him under his wing—teaching the boy how to shave properly, how to write his name in longhand, how to add and subtract. Willie responded well to this attention. If not for a dismal stroke of luck, I believe he would have come around quite nicely. About two weeks after Frick’s funeral, however, a policeman from the Central Constabulary paid us a visit. He was a ridiculous-looking character, all pudgy and red-faced, sporting one of the new uniforms that had recently been given to officers from that branch of the service—a bright red tunic, white jodhpurs, and black, patent leather boots with kepi to match. He fairly creaked in this absurd costume, and because he insisted on thrusting out his chest, I actually thought he might pop his buttons. He clicked his heels and saluted when I answered the door, and if it hadn’t been for the machine gun slung over his shoulder, I probably would have told him to leave. “Is this the residence of Victoria Woburn?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Among others.” “Then step aside, Miss,” he answered, pushing me out of the way and entering the hall. “The investigation is about to begin.”

I will spare you the details. The upshot was that someone had reported the funeral to the police, and they had come to verify the complaint. It had to have been one of the residents, but this was an act of such astonishing betrayal
that none of us had the heart to try to figure out who it was. Someone who had been present at the funeral no doubt, who had been forced to leave Woburn House after his allotted stay and bore a grudge for being driven back into the streets. That was a logical guess, but it didn’t much matter anymore. Perhaps the police had paid this person money, perhaps he had merely done it out of spite. Whatever the case, the information was deadly accurate. The constable strode out into the back garden with two assistants trailing behind him, scanned the enclosure for several moments, and then pointed right to the spot where the grave had been dug. Shovels were ordered, and the two assistants promptly fell to work, searching for the corpse they already knew was there. “This is most irregular,” the constable said. “The selfishness of burial in this day and age—imagine the gall of it. Without bodies to burn, we’d go under fast, that’s for sure, the whole lot of us would be sunk. Where would our fuel come from, how would we keep ourselves alive? In this time of national emergency, we must all be vigilant. Not one body can be spared, and those who take it upon themselves to subvert this law must not be allowed to go free. They are evildoers of the worst sort, perfidious malefactors, renegade scum. They must be rooted out and punished.”

We were all out in the garden by then, crowding around the grave as this fool prattled on with his vicious, empty-headed remarks. Victoria’s face had gone white, and if I hadn’t been there to prop her up, I think she might have collapsed. On the other side of the expanding hole, Sam was keeping a careful watch over Willie. The boy was in tears, and as the constable’s assistants continued to shovel up the earth and fling it carelessly into the bushes, he began
to cry out in a panic-stricken voice, “That’s grandpa’s dirt. You shouldn’t be throwing it away. That dirt belongs to grandpa.” It got so loud that the constable had to stop in the middle of his harangue. He eyed Willie with contempt, and then, just as he began to move his arm in the direction of his machine gun, Sam clapped his hand over Willie’s mouth and began to drag him off toward the house—struggling to keep him in check as the boy squirmed and kicked his way across the lawn. In the meantime, a number of the residents had fallen to the ground and were begging the constable to believe in their innocence. They knew nothing of this heinous crime; they had not been there when it happened; if anyone had told them of such foul doings, they never would have agreed to stay there; they were all being held prisoner against their will. One cringing statement after another, an outbreak of mass cowardice. I felt so disgusted I wanted to spit. One old woman—Beulah Stansky was her name—actually grabbed hold of the constable’s boot and began to kiss it. He tried to shrug her off, but when she wouldn’t let go, he drove the tip of his boot into her belly and sent her sprawling—moaning and whimpering like a beaten dog. Fortunately for all of us, Boris Stepanovich chose to make his entrance at precisely this moment. He opened the French windows at the back of the house, gingerly stepped out onto the lawn, and strolled over to the hubbub with a calm, almost bemused look on his face. It was as though he had witnessed this scene a hundred times before, and nothing was going to ruffle him—not the police, not the guns, not one bit of it. They were pulling the body out of the hole when he joined us, and there was poor Frick stretched out on the grass, the eyes now gone from his head, face all smeared with dirt, and a
horde of white worms writhing in his mouth. Boris did not even bother to glance at him. He walked straight up to the constable in the red coat, addressed him as general, and then proceeded to draw him off to the side. I did not hear what they said, but I could see that Boris hardly stopped grinning and twitching his eyebrows as they talked. Eventually, a wad of cash emerged from his pocket, he peeled off one bill after another from the roll, and then placed the money in the constable’s hand. I didn’t know what this meant—whether Boris had paid the fine or whether they had struck some sort of private agreement—but that was the extent of the transaction: a short, swift exchange of cash, and then the business was done. The assistants carried Frick’s body across the lawn, through the house, and then out to the front, where they tossed it into the back of a truck that was parked in the street. The constable harangued us once more on the steps—very sternly, using the same words he had used in the garden—and then gave a final salute, clicked his heels, and walked down to the truck, shooing aside the bedraggled onlookers with short flicks of his hand. As soon as he had driven off with his men, I ran back out into the garden to look for the car horn. I thought I would polish it up again and give it to Willie, but I couldn’t find it. I even climbed down into the open grave to see if it was there, but it wasn’t. Like so many other things before it, the horn had vanished without a trace.

Our necks were saved for a little while. No one would be going to prison, in any event, but the money that Boris forked over to the constable had pretty much exhausted
our reserves. Within three days of Frick’s exhumation, the last items from the fifth floor were sold off: a gold-plated letter opener, a mahogany end table, and the blue velvet curtains that had hung on the windows. After that, we scraped up some additional cash by selling books from the downstairs library—two shelves of Dickens, five sets of Shakespeare (one of them in thirty-eight miniature volumes no bigger than the palm of your hand), a Jane Austen, a Schopenhauer, an illustrated
Don Quixote
—but the bottom had fallen out of the book market by then, and these things fetched no more than a trifle. From that point on, it was Boris who carried us. His store of objects was far from infinite, however, and we did not delude ourselves into thinking it would last for very long. We gave ourselves three or four months at best. With winter coming on again, we knew it would probably be less than that.

The sensible thing would have been to shut down Woburn House right then. We tried to talk Victoria into it, but it was hard for her to take that step, and several weeks of uncertainty followed. Then, just as Boris seemed on the point of convincing her, the decision was taken out of her hands, was taken out of all our hands. I am referring to Willie. With hindsight, it seems perfectly inevitable that it should have worked out that way, but I would be lying to you if I said that any of us could see it coming. We were all too involved in the tasks at hand, and when the thing finally happened, it was like a bolt from the blue, like an explosion from the depths of the earth.

After Frick’s body was carried off, Willie was never really the same. He continued to do his work, but only in silence, in a solitude of blank stares and shrugs. As soon as you got close to him, his eyes would blaze with hostility and resentment,
and once he even threw my hand off his shoulder as though he meant to hurt me if I ever did it again. Working together as we did in the kitchen every day, I probably spent more time with him than anyone else. I did my best to help, but I don’t think anything I said ever got through to him. Your grandfather is all right, Willie, I would say. He’s in heaven now, and what happens to his body is unimportant. His soul is alive, and he wouldn’t want you to be worrying about him like this. Nothing can hurt him. He’s happy where he is now, and he wants you to be happy, too. I felt like a parent trying to explain death to a small child, mouthing the same hypocritical nonsense I had heard from my own parents. It didn’t matter what I said, however, for Willie wasn’t buying any of it. He was a prehistoric man, and the only way he could respond to death was to worship his departed ancestor, to think of him as a god. Victoria had instinctively understood this. Frick’s burial site had become holy ground for Willie, and now it had been desecrated. The order of things had been smashed, and no amount of talk from me would ever set it right.

He began going out after dinner, rarely returning before two or three in the morning. It was impossible to know what he did out there in the streets, since he never talked about it, and there was no point in asking him any questions. One morning he failed to show up altogether. I thought that perhaps he was gone for good, but then, just after lunch, he walked into the kitchen without a word and started chopping vegetables, almost daring me to be impressed by his arrogance. It was late November by then, and Willie had spun off into his own orbit, an errant star with no definable trajectory. I gave up depending on him to do his share of the work. When he was there, I accepted
his help; when he was gone, I did the work myself. Once, he stayed away for two days before coming back; another time it was three days. These gradually lengthening absences lulled us into thinking that he was somehow fading away from us. Sooner or later, we thought, a time would come when he wouldn’t be there anymore, more or less in the same way that Maggie Vine wasn’t there anymore. There was so much for us to do just then, the scramble to keep our sinking ship afloat was so exhausting, that one tended not to think about Willie when he wasn’t around. He stayed away for six days the next time, and at that point I think we all felt that we had seen the last of him. Then, very late one night during the first week of December, we were startled awake by a horrendous thumping and crashing from the downstairs rooms. My initial reaction was to think that people from the line outside had broken into the house, but then, just as Sam sprang out of bed and grabbed the shotgun we kept in our room, there was a sound of machine gun fire down below, a huge burst and splatter of bullets, and then more and more of it. I heard people screaming, felt the house shake with footsteps, heard the machine gun go tearing into the walls, the windows, the splintering floors. I lit a candle and followed Sam to the head of the stairs, fully expecting to see the constable or one of his men, girding myself for the moment when I would be shot to pieces. Victoria was already racing down ahead of us, and from what I could gather she was unarmed. It wasn’t the constable, of course, though I don’t doubt that it was his gun. Willie was on the second-floor landing, making his way up to us with the weapon in his hands. My candle was too far off for me to get a look at his face, but I saw him pause when he noticed that Victoria was coming toward him.
“That’s enough, Willie,” she said. “Drop the gun. Drop the gun right now.” I don’t know if he was planning to fire at her, but the fact was that he did not drop it. Sam was standing next to Victoria by then, and an instant after she spoke those words, he pulled the trigger of his shotgun. The blast hit Willie in the chest, and suddenly he was flying backward, tumbling down the stairs until he reached the bottom. He was dead before he got there, I think, dead before he even knew he had been shot.

That was six or seven weeks ago. Of the eighteen residents who were living here at the time, seven were killed, five managed to escape, three were wounded, and three were unhurt. Mr. Hsia, a newcomer who had performed card tricks for us the night before, died from his bullet wounds at eleven o’clock the next morning. Mr. Rosenberg and Mrs. Rudniki both recovered. We took care of them for more than a week, and once they were strong enough to walk again, we sent them away. They were the last residents of Woburn House. The morning after the disaster, Sam made a sign and hammered it onto the front door:
WOBURN HOUSE CLOSED
. The people outside did not go away immediately, but then it got very cold, and as the days went by and the door did not open, the crowds began to disperse. Since then, we have been sitting tight, making plans about what to do next, trying to last through another winter. Sam and Boris spend a part of each day out in the garage, testing the car to make sure it’s in working order. The plan is to drive away from here as soon as the weather turns warm. Even Victoria says she is willing to go, but I’m not sure if she really means it. We’ll find out when the time comes, I
suppose. From the way the sky has been acting for the past seventy-two hours, I don’t think we have much longer to wait.