the way some people get, and not much interested in me, and I didn’t see any call to bother her.
That nasty smell was still there, so I knew it was the house. I wondered what it was, but I didn’t ask; I figured it wouldn’t be polite to mention it.
I could hear Doc Everett’s voice from the parlor, too low to make out the words, and sometimes I could hear Allie answering him, or making sounds. I waited for the sound of the baby crying.
It didn’t come. Instead, finally, I heard Allie scream.
I jumped up off that wall, and took a look at Miss Everett, but she wan’t doing a thing, she was just standing there.
I knocked on the door. “What’s going on in there?” I called.
I could hear Allie crying, and I opened the door without waiting for any by your leave.
Allie was sitting on the couch with her dress all rucked up, and there were bloody towels piled on the floor, and…and other things. Before I got a good look Allie wailed, “The baby’s dead! Bill, our baby’s dead!”
“I’m afraid so,” Doc Everett said. “Listen, I really think we had better get your wife to the hospital; would you tell my sister to call an ambulance?”
I sort of froze for a moment, trying to take it in, but then I turned and went back out to the foyer, and there was Miss Everett dialing the phone.
“I heard what he said,” she told me.
And then it was just waiting, and trying to comfort Allie and not to look at the poor little dead thing there on the towels, until the ambulance came. I rode in the back with Allie, and Doc Everett followed in his car.
They kept Allie for observation, they called it, and sent her home with me the next morning.
Somewhere in there, I don’t remember when, I asked Doc Everett what had happened, and he told me that the baby had got tangled in the cord and strangled while it was being born, that it happens sometimes and there wasn’t anything he could do, it was too late by the time he saw what was happening.
It wasn’t until after I brought Allie home that she asked what had happened to the baby’s body, and I realized I didn’t know.
Wasn’t an easy question to ask anyone, neither.
Finally, though, I called Doc Everett, and he told me he’d sent the body to Tuchman’s Funeral Home, seeing as that’s the only one in town and he didn’t figure we’d be wanting to go to Lexington for it.
Allie wanted to see it, before she made any plans for the burying, so I called up Tuchman’s and asked if that’d be possible, and Henry Tuchman, on the other end of the line, sorta cleared his throat and said how it would be possible, all right, but he sure wouldn’t advise it, as the baby didn’t look too good, what with being strangled.
I’d gotten a look at it back at Doc Everett’s place, and I hadn’t thought it looked so bad as all that, but I told Allie what he’d said, and she broke out crying again, and I don’t know what I told Henry but I got off the phone and tried to comfort her, which didn’t do either of us a damn bit of good.
That afternoon Henry called back, and asked if we’d want to make the funeral arrangements or whether he should just take care of it, as he figured we were pretty broke up. Allie overheard, and she said we’d be right there to look at the baby and make the plans.
That didn’t sound good to me, but she wan’t taking any argument on it, so off we went.
At the funeral home, there was Henry Tuchman with his mournin’ face on, which made him look more like a pompous asshole of a salesman than like anything decent, and he showed us to a room where this little coffin was set up on a table that Henry called a bier, and there were a few flowers around it.
I asked Henry, “Who picked it?” ’Cause I’d always heard that funeral homes are practically like auto showrooms, with a dozen different models of coffins and all that shit.
“Doc Everett chose it; he’s volunteered to cover some of the costs for you, seein’ as he knows the two of you han’t got all that much set aside.”
Now, I knew I ought to be grateful at that, but I wan’t, as it seemed damn pushy to have put up that money and picked out that box without asking us first. I was trying to think of something to say about it that wouldn’t sound too bad when Allie said, “Open it.”
Henry blinked at us and said, like some goddamn Englishman on TV, “I beg your pardon?”
“Open the box, Henry,” I said. “We want to see our baby.”
Henry got all upset at that. “You really don’t want to, Bill,” he said.
“The hell we don’t.”
“The coffin has been sealed,” he said.
“That’s bullshit. Unseal it.”
“I can’t.”
I was beginning to lose my temper. I’d been standing around feeling helpless while other people did everything, at the doc’s house and the hospital and all, and it wan’t goin’ down well.
“Henry,” I said, “you told me on the phone this mornin’ that we could see our baby, and now we want to see our damn baby.”
“If you insist,” Henry said, “I can have the coffin unsealed for a private viewing. If you could come back in an hour?”
I’d had enough. “Open the damn thing now, Henry,” I said.
“I can’t, Bill,” he said. “Honest.”
I might’ve cooled down at that, ’cause he looked as if he meant it, but Allie wasn’t having it.
‘Bout two years back, after that idiot Jim Bryce raped the Miller girl down on Greenman’s Creek, Allie got worried about crazies, so she got herself a .38 revolver and I showed her how to use it, and after that she’d carry it in her purse as a regular thing. I hadn’t given it a thought in months—until she pulled it out and stuck the barrel under Henry Tuchman’s nose.
“I am not leaving this room,” she said, “until I see my baby. If you don’t open that coffin right now, Bill’s gonna get a wrecking bar from the truck and bust it to flinders.”
Henry just sort of stared, and wan’t saying anything sensible, and I figured maybe I could save us all some trouble. I didn’t know just what all this talk of “sealing” was, so I went and took a look and it looked to me like that coffin just would open right up if you pushed the latch.
So I did, and it did.
Son of a bitch was empty.
I sort of stared at it for a moment, trying to figure it out, and I was still doing that when Allie came up beside me and saw it was empty and pointed the gun at Henry again and shrieked, “Where is she?”
Henry threw his hands in the air like Allie was trying to rob him. “I don’t know,” he said, “I swear I don’t! Doc Everett never brought her, told me to fake it, same as he
