The Watchman Read Online Free PDF Page B

was a businessman. He was no greedy misanthrope; no clammy-spaded, morbid grave digger, dogging the steps of his fellow man, fevering shamelessly for him to drop down cold as soon as possible so that Peace might clap him into a scrolled box and turf him away snugly to snooze till the horn-shout of Doomsday. Peace was an artist. He hungered for his canvas, his pigments. Still and all, he was frequently seized by these unnerving moods of professional pessimism. Fortunately, man's manifest mortality was always there to reassure him.
    Peace the Undertaker was well thought of in Mound County and when, as once occurred, he was heard to remark in a voice of hushed alarm: "Have you noticed how the death rate has been falUng off lately?" it seemed, to those who overheard him, an imiocently fiscal comment:

    something a grocer might say in a bad year for turnips. Moreover, it would be a mean mind indeed which could think cynically of a man so warmhearted as to have embalmed his wife Elma's adored Irish setter Herbert in a posture so movingly lifelike that its lifted, lacquered nose seemed at times fixed upon poor, grieving Elma's eyes and at others that nose might well have been snuffling for the spoor of Heaven itself, as if the Almighty were the illusive Bird of Salvation after which all hunters searched vainly in the shrubbery of this life. The dog was cunningly mobile, as well: Peace having provided Herbert with steel foot-rollers like a child's Christmas bear by Steiff, so that Elma could move it about the house in her wake of chores. And it was only those few townsmen of hasty and quarrelsome vision who fancied they saw in the setter's cocked, agate eyes a light of despairing wildness and imagined upon its trumped-up face a wounded expression of outraged disbelief in the incessant, hounding chatter of its little iron wheels. It was perhaps small children—natural skeptics—who were the least appreciative of the art of Peace the Undertaker. Almost all of these, not yet hooked by their elders' festive addiction to funerals, saw Peace the Undertaker as a kind of creeping landslide, a human glacier moving with inexorable approach across the green playground of their world: grinding uncles under grass, immuring aunts like butterflies in amber, absorbing grandpas, parents, and pleasant candy storekeepers, and leaving in its wake nothing but the trackless memory of vanished school chums.
    None remembered it now but, had there been any to remember, one of them surely would have made something of the clue that, as a child, Thomas Peace was forbidden to play with dolls but that he did so anyway, secretly, in the shadows of his father's carriage-house. They were never new dolls, they were old dolls—dead dolls, so to speak: broken dolls, sawdust-trickling dolls, dolls with an arm gone, dolls with melted wax faces or splintered china faces, decidedly dead dolls. To this clue they might add the spectacle of young Tom Peace plaguing old Jake Booher for every empty shoe box he could spare. But no one remembers. In an age, two thousand years from this, when bewildered archaeologists unearth myriad dolls from the sand loam and humus of a vanished river village—but let them do their guessing. No one remembers—and that's just as well. There is trouble enough now for now. Thomas Peace

    hears, at last, the whine of tires and the rumble of a truck in the driveway at the rear of Peace's Parlors. He hurries to the back door, flings it open, peers anxiously into the headlights as he searches for the familiar face of the penitentiary's Captain of Guards. Yes, he had been right—something clearly amiss. In the half-light Peace could see that it was not the prison van that had backed up to his rear door. Before he snapped on the back porch lights he saw the slowly revolving Grimes' light of the Mound County Sheriffs truck. Luther Alt's deputy Tzchak and two other men were struggling with a sheet-covered figure on a stretcher at the truck's rear