Book of the Dead by John Skipp, Craig Spector (Ed.) Page B

piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away—he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn’t freeze.
    Once a severed hand tried to close over her wrist… then loosened.
    That was all.
    There was an unused cistern, polluted, which Jack had been meaning to fill in. Maddie Pace slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes, then worked the heavy cover back in place.
    “Rest in peace,” she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in pieces , and then she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pulled at her hair and tore at her breasts until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it’s like to be in—
    But before the thought could be completed, she had fallen down in a faint that became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt all right.
    She would never tell, though.
    Never.
     
    She understood, of course, that Dave knew nothing of this, and Dave would say nothing at all if she pressed. She kept her ears open, and she knew what he meant, and what they had apparently done. The dead folks and the… the parts of dead folks that wouldn’t… wouldn’t be still… had been chain-sawed like her father had chain-sawed the hardwood on Pop Cook’s two acres after he had gotten the deed registered, and then those parts—some still squirming, hands with no arms attached to them clutching mindlessly, feet divorced from their legs digging at the bullet-chewed earth of the graveyard as if trying to run away—had been doused with diesel fuel and set afire. She had seen the pyre from the house.
    Later, Jenny’s one fire truck had turned its hose on the dying blaze, although there wasn’t much chance of the fire spreading, with a brisk easterly blowing the sparks off Jenny’s seaward edge.
    When there was nothing left but a stinking, tallowy lump (and still there were occasional bulges in this mass, like twitches in a tired muscle), Matt Arsenault fired up his old D-9 Caterpillar—above the nicked steel blade and under his faded pillowtick engineer’s cap, Matt’s face had been as white as cottage cheese—and plowed the whole hellacious mess under.
    The moon was coming up when Frank took Bob Daggett, Dave Eamons, and Cal Partridge aside.
    “I’m havin a goddam heart attack,” he said.
    “Now, Uncle Frank—”
    “Never mind Uncle Frank this ‘n’ that,” the old man said. “I ain’t got time, and I ain’t wrong. Seen half my friends go the same way. Beats hell out of getting whacked with the cancer-stick. Quicker. But when I go down, I intend to stay down. Cal, stick that rifle of yours in my left ear. Muzzle’s gonna get some wax on it, but it won’t be there after you pull the trigger. Dave, when I raise my left arm, you sock your thirty-thirty into my armpit, and see that you do it a right smart. And Bobby, you put yours right over my heart. I’m gonna say the Lawd’s Prayer, and when I hit amen, you three fellows are gonna pull your triggers.”
    “Uncle Frank—” Bob managed. He was reeling on his heels.
    “I told you not to start in on that,” Frank said. “And don’t you dare faint on me, you friggin’ pantywaist. If I’m goin’ down, I mean to stay down. Now get over here.”
    Bob did.
    Frank looked around at the three men, their faces as white as Matt Arsenault’s had been when he drove the dozer over men and women he had known since he was a kid in short pants and Buster Browns.
    “I ain’t got long,” Frank said, “and I only got enough jizzum left to get m’arm up once, so don’t you fuck up on me. And remember, I’d ‘a’ done the same for any of you. If that don’t help, ask y’selves if you’d want to end up like those we just took care of.”
    “Go on,” Bob said hoarsely. “I love