Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai Read Free Book Online Page A

elephant-sized grave. These were the men who weren’t away at war, the lame or too-old, the too-young or asthmatic.
    The elephant was six days dead. Reverend Hewlett called a meeting in the sanctuary after Sunday services, which a few of the circus folk had attended—the bearded lady, the illustrated man, the trainer himself—and now more filed in, joining the congregation. A group of dwarfs who might have been a family, some lithe women who looked like acrobats. Reverend Hewlett removed his robe and stood at the pulpit to address the crowd. He was only thirty years old, still in love with the girl he’d left in Chicago, still anxious to toss a ball on Saturdays with whoever was willing.
    He looked at them, his flock. Mayor Blunt sat in the second row—the farthest forward anyone sat, except, once a year, those taking first Communion—with his wife on one side, his daughter, Stella, on the other. The mayor had decided that the burial of the dead was more a religious matter than a governmental one, and had asked Reverend Hewlett to work things out.
    The Reverend said, “I’ve been charged with funeral arrangements for the elephant. For—I understand her name was Belle. We ask today for ideas and able hands. And we extend our warmest welcome to the members of the Roundabout.” In the days since the disaster, his parishioners had already opened their homes, providing food and beds. (The circus trailers were too hot, too waterless, too close to the dead elephant. And the people of Little Fork had big hearts.) The performers, in turn, had started helping in the gas station and the library and the dried-out gardens, even doing tricks for the children on the brown grass of the park. They were drinking a fair amount of alcohol, was the rumor by way of the ladies at the general store, more in this past week than the whole town of Little Fork consumed in a month.
    Adolph Pitt, of Pitt’s Funeral Home, stood. “I called on my fellow at the crematorium, and he says it’s nothing doing. Not even piecemeal, even if the beast were—forgive me—even if it were dismembered.”
    “
She
,” the elephant trainer said from the back. “Not
it
.” The trainer still carried with him, at all times, the thin stick he’d used to guide the elephant, nudging it under her trunk, gently turning her head in the right direction. No one had yet seen him without it. Reverend Hewlett imagined he slept with it under his arm. The man slept alone in his scorching trailer, having refused all offers for a couch and plumbing. Hewlett was an expert now in grief—they hadn’t told him, at seminary, the ways his life would be soaked in grief—and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a man cling to an object. Usually he could talk to the bereaved about heaven, about the warm breast of God, about the promise of reunion. But what could he say about an elephant? The Lord loveth the beasts of the field? His eye is on the sparrow? Surely the burial would help.
    Reverend Hewlett saw it as his duty to raise an unpopular option the men had been mulling over the past few days. The mayor couldn’t bring it up, because he had an election to win in the fall. But Revered Hewlett was not elected. And so he said it: “The swimming pool was never filled this summer. It’s sitting empty.”
    Some of the men and women nodded, and a few of the children, catching his meaning, made sharp little noises and looked at their parents. The circus folks didn’t much respond.
    “It’s an old pool,” the Reverend said, “and we can’t dig a hole this summer. We can dig a hole
next
summer, and that can be the new pool. This one’s too small, I’ve heard everyone say since the day I got here.”
    “There’s no dirt to bury him with!” Mrs. Pipsky called.
    “Maybe a tarp,” someone said.
    “Or cement. Pour cement in there.”
    “Cement’s half water.”
    The mayor stood. “This town needs that pool,” he said. The youngest Garrett boy clapped. “We’ll find