Life Goes On Read Online Free PDF Page A

Oscar asked.
    â€œI bet it was Thelma Darnell,” Livinia said. “Remember? Myron mentioned in his phone call last week that her family had taken her to the hospital.”
    â€œOh, that’s right. I wished we’d known. We could’ve sent flowers.”
    â€œI’ll cook something tonight and take it over to them,” Livinia said.
    Back at the funeral home, we weren’t as happy as we should have been. “Would you look at that,” Fern Hampton grumped. “He didn’t even bother coming to his own funeral. How disrespectful can you get.”
    â€œLooks like I bought a new suit for nothing,” Asa Peacock commented to Jessie.
    Bob Miles was ecstatic. What a headline this’ll make, he thought. Local Man Comes Back from the Dead!!
    When people fail to do anything newsworthy, the successful journalist must create news, which is how Bob has lasted. What an exhilarating week he’d had! Two magnificent headlines, a half-pageobituary, and a copy of my eulogy in his suit pocket, just in time for this week’s Herald.
    All in all, people took it well. If schools had fire drills and the armies had battle drills, it was probably prudent for a town to have an occasional funeral drill. We talked about it during the funeral meal in the meetinghouse basement.
    â€œThat was a fine job you did,” Ellis Hodge told me, patting me on the back. “You had me reaching for my hankie a time or two. I’m just sorry Oscar and Livinia weren’t there to hear it.”
    â€œNever hurts to practice,” I said.
    â€œI suppose you’re right,” Ellis agreed.
    The meat loaf was superb—moist and flavorful. The Friendly Women looked on from the kitchen, beaming.
    There were several who commented that it has been the finest funeral the town had seen since Juanita Harmon’s death by stove explosion in 1967. Fine enough to make several persons wish they could expire while the town’s bereavement abilities were at their peak.

Four
Home
    W hen my wife and I had agreed to purchase Dr. Neely’s ancestral home, we had been so taken with the oak trees, brick sidewalks, and porches, we’d failed to notice the flaking paint and the rotten eaves. I don’t do well with heights, but I had, with a little prodding from my wife, been scraping and painting the lower half of the house for the past year whenever I’ve had a spare moment.
    Around the middle of May, I turned my attention to the eaves. I borrowed a ladder from my father and inched my way upward, clinging to the rungs with a white-knuckled grip. I hoped if I could build up enough layers of paint on the wood, I might not have to replace it.
    When I reached the second-story window, my knees began to tremble and I felt dizzy. Barbara was standing at the base of the ladder, holding a sofa cushion in the event I fell, which was looking more probable every moment.
    â€œWhy don’t we hire someone to do this?” she yelled up from the ground.
    â€œI can do it myself,” I shouted back.
    It would stagger the mind to know how many men in Harmony have perished while saying, “I can do it myself”—that brief, seemingly harmless declaration, followed by an explosion or anguished scream or severed limb.
    I peered at the wood sill beneath the window. It looked spongy. I pulled a screwdriver from my back pocket and began probing. The screwdriver sank in up to its hilt.
    â€œRemind me to replace this piece,” I called down to Barbara.
    â€œDo you know how to do that?”
    â€œNo, but I can read a book about it.”
    My books on home repairs are a source of merriment to the other men in town, who consider directions an affront to their masculinity. These men also believe it’s immoral to hire someone to work on their houses so long as they can stand erect. Consequently, most of the houses in town are monuments to the half-finished project.
    Two winters before, Bill