September Song by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online

son-in-law’s basement.
    â€œIs it to go in the Protestant cemetery or the Catholic?”
    â€œNeither.”
    The family graveyard lay out of sight of the house at a distance from it of a hundred yards. In it were buried three generations of Bennetts—with space remaining for several more, descendants to come of that son-in-law, the orchardman, whom he was bent on having. All his life long he had laid flowers on those graves, had mowed and weeded and raked among them, had straightened their headstones after the heavings of the frost. He had lived to an age that made even those of his dead whom he remembered remote in time from him. Of the others he had forgotten just what the kinship to him of many of them was.
    But the knowledge was comforting that all were his, Bennetts by birth or grafted onto the stock, tenants of his domain. Comforting, too, was the old-fashioned quaintness of their headstones: weather-worn, mossy tablets of white marble, some with inscriptions so effaced by time and the elements as to be nearly indecipherable, others with their stilted epitaphs and archaic spelling, they made death seem like something that used to happen to people.
    The transaction was concluded with, “Mr. Bennett, sir, we appreciate your patronage, and” pointing with his pencil first to the blank space following the year of Seth’s birth, and the dash following that, then to Molly’s, “may it be a long time before I’m called on to fill in those.”
    He could not resist saying, “Hold on, young fellow. When that time comes you may not be here yourself.”
    â€œHow well I know! But if I’m not somebody will be.”
    The mason and his crew with their crane and backhoe arrived on the worksite after Janet went off to her job in the morning and were finished and gone by the time she got home in the evening. Thus she never knew the stone was there until he showed it to her.
    He was pleased with his production. The setting: soil sacred to her family, its shrine, its collective crypt. The cast: all her ancestors, born here, buried here, an unbroken line of succession, inheritance. She could not but feel their eloquent silence, their call, their claim on her. Each marble marker was the tablet of the law, proclaiming her identity, her duty. And now this latest one, her parents’, with its impending dates, its Biblical injunction, passed on the torch to her. From out of the corner of his eye he slyly studied its effect.
    It was quick in coming.
    â€œOh, Father!” she cried, and burst into tears.
    She had never called him “Father” before, always “Papa,” and the unaccustomed name distanced him from himself, made him feel as though he was being spoken of in the third person, posthumously.
    She flung herself, sobbing, into his arms.
    Shaken, shamed, he said, patting her back, “Now, now. I’m not under there yet,” although he could almost feel the weight upon him of that granite block, which stared at him over her heaving shoulder. It now seemed to him the worst of bad jokes at his own expense, and there it would sit to mock him with that blank space waiting to be filled in. “It’s just the sensible thing to do. Not leave it to you and your sisters. The three of you might not agree on what we would have wanted.”
    She was supposed to have said that she would carry on her parents’ lives, marry Pete and keep the farm in the family. If not on the spot then soon afterwards. She did neither, despite her father’s urging Pete to “strike while the iron is hot.” If she noticed them at all, she found Pete’s timid attentions out of place at a time when she was saddened by the prospect of her parents’ deaths.
    With the elasticity of youth, Janet recovered from the scare he had given her, and she cheered him by pointing out to him how long-lived their family was. So, while encouraging Pete in his slow suit, he plotted to