Unknown by Unknown Page B

of Dean, lying on the bed, lying on the sofa, propped up on pillows, sunk into the back of a chair: silent and unmoving.
    The pictures came without her willing them, and stayed though she wished them away. She tried to concentrate on the three screws, but they wavered, and disappeared, and the hateful album fell open before her. Sarah felt that she was as much debilitated by the imaginaiy photographs as by the actual trouble of maintaining her husband. Becca Blair watched her friend closely through these days and for her sake repeated a little prayer every hour on the hour, and even said two of them, to make up, if she missed her time by so much as a minute.
    The afternoon after the Coppage fire, as they were driving home, Becca said without preamble, 'What you gone do, hon? What you gone do?'
    Sarah knew what Becca was talking about. 'I don't know, Becca. Just get used to it, I guess.'
    'Ghhh!' repeated Becca, with a sigh. 'What you gone do?'
    In all of this, there was but one thing for which Sarah Howell felt that she could be truly thankful - and that was that she was never there when the doctor changed the bandages around her husband's neck and head.
    The sun was still shining brightly when Sarah returned from work that afternoon. The air was hot, even this late in the day. She found her husband and her mother-in-law in the backyard.
    Dean wore white cotton socks, khaki pants, and a Hawaiian shirt over his bandages. The effect was ludicrous, but horribly so, because his neck and head were completely covered with the tape. He lay in the hammock like a desecrated mummy.
    The motionless body of her husband made Sarah uneasy. She had slept on the couch in the living room ever since his return, and she had never gotten over the feeling that she was sharing the house with a corpse, that Dean was somewhere else, still at Fort Rucca perhaps, or already in Vietnam, and that the body of bandages in her bedroom - and here in the hammock - was a practical joke played on her by someone unknown and malevolent.
    Jo Howell was spread across the tiny straight-backed chair in a way that only emphasized her obesity. She shooed the flies off her son with a paper fan, and kept the hammock in gentle motion.
    'What'd you hear?' said Jo, as soon as Sarah approached.
    'About what?' said Sarah.
    'About the fire', replied Jo. 'Dean wants to hear everything', said his mother, with quiet maliciousness, 'Larry Coppage was. his good friend for just years on years, and now Larry's done gone and burned up like quail in a brushfire, and Dean wants to hear everything.'
    Sarah nodded, inwardly wondering how it was possible for Jo to tell whether Dean were listening, or even that he could hear anything at all that they said. She dropped cross-legged on to the grass, and then in a very quiet voice, Sarah told her mother-in-law all that she had heard that day at the plant. She related the gossip, old and new, dredged up from the past, or newly created for the occasion, about Larry Coppage, his wife, and the five children, who had perished the night before in the burning house.
    Of course there had been major consternation at the factory over the unfortunate destruction of the Coppage family. Larry was high up in the administration, was kin to the people who owned and controlled the place, and was liked by virtually everyone. Very few who came to the plant on Thursday morning had not already heard about the fire and its melancholy consequences. People felt bad because of it. They pitied the poor family, and were disturbed that not a single member was left on whom they could heap condolences and platters of food. Larry, so far as the administration was concerned, was the only member of the Coppage family that was easy to get along with, and they had depended on him - beyond his capacity in the personnel department - to be an occasional middleman between them and the principal stockholders. He was a severed link now.
    Many women on the line knew Rachel through the