A Covenant with Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

all right, sustaining rather than creating, with time to wonder and to read and to enjoy life. Still, Rosemary’s voice was a bit high for my taste. Nonsense. It was an awful voice, tiny and piping and breathless. (“A small but unpleasant voice,” they said of one soprano; yes.)
    Well. Foolishness. I knew I would need, soon, to think deeply about this. Responsibility, it was, and this time I did not have a jury or a precedent to assume it for me. I was tired of tiptoeing, of leaving my love by the dawn’s early light. I liked to lie with my lips in her hair and my eyes shut against the dazzle of sunlight on her ivory haunch, the one French novelists invariably called the “hanche galbée,” the loveliest of curves in a curved universe. But, but. Well, nobody was rushing me.
    And while I rose on a Sabbath morning, stretched, groaned, touched my toes, blinked, felt the blood course and the bladder press and the lungs fill and the brain prickle, a mile away dust descended to dust and ashes to ashes as Louise Talbot was buried. The Colonel attended the funeral; he attended everything; and he described it later. Martin DeKalb’s horse-drawn hearse, and the two hired Pierce-Arrows behind it, three or four private cars behind them. The clip-clop along a shadeless road and the cars stalling one by one in a senseless and random rotation so that the line of them died and lurched and died again and stretched and shrank like a drunken snake. Then the cemetery, the cortege passing through the gates at about nine-thirty and crawling up the one dusty road and halting. Bryan Talbot got out of the first Pierce-Arrow and stood by the casket. Mr. and Mrs. Hoyers, parents of the deceased (and here the Colonel shocked himself and us by a monumental slip of the tongue: “the bride’s parents,” he said), emerged from the other hired car and stood across from Bryan, not looking at him or speaking to him. And after the brief service in the pitiless morning sun, the pastor’s meaningless comforts, Hoyers sweating under the arms, his wife sobbing softly, Bryan blank and glassy—after the few mourners had comforted parents and husband and the gravediggers had returned to fill the hole—then the small group dispersed slowly, and the Colonel smelled sweet grass and heard birdsong until the cars started up and the smell became the smell of exhaust and the birds were frightened into silence. But the old soldier noticed again that the Hoyerses and Talbot did not speak, or look; just disappeared into their cars. So he snooped about, and discovered that the Hoyerses were staying at the Territorial and planned to be in our city until at least Tuesday; not at the house, not with Bryan, and Emil Dietrich had paid them a call. Which the Colonel duly reported, with flashings of the eye and archings of the brow and whinnies of delectation.
    On Monday, May seventh, the newspaper informed us that an Army monoplane had flown across the country, without stopping, from Hempstead on Long Island to San Diego, in twenty-seven hours; and that there had been earthquakes in Turkey and Chile. On Tuesday it informed us that the grand jury was considering the murder of Louise Talbot. “I think they were wrong about her,” my mother said that night. We were sipping coffee on the veranda. It was a warm night and the new street lamps were sparking and sputtering; lizards crawled and locusts chirred and far off a voice whooped; relentlessly, suicidally, a moth assaulted the screen. When I was a young boy we had heard distant coyotes barking into the still night air; but no longer. “She may have been a cold woman, and trying too hard. Marriage is supposed to be fun. If it isn’t—and it may not have been her fault—a woman is liable to do any crazy thing. That husband of hers never looked like much.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make him a murderer.” Bryan Talbot, who is, in a twisted sense, the hero