The Lesson by Jesse Ball Read Free Book Online

at people much.
    —I believe there was an accident, said Gerard. The balloon extravaganza caught fire. Everyone perished. I was asked my opinion by a correspondent from a national newspaper. He was here half an hour ago and left. He was looking for the crash site.
    —What did you say?
    —I said I didn’t think there would be a crash site. Such an accident, at such a height, wouldn’t the debris just spread out across the county?
    —I would think so, said Loring. But I’m not a correspondent. I believe that correspondents are supposed to be at the scene when they get their story. Maybe he was worried that it might not count for much if he was elsewhere, even if there was nowhere to be.
    —It was odd that he was here in the first place, said Mona. To arrive so soon after it happened? When must he have set out? The correspondents don’t cover the Jubilee. He must have proposed to himself that there would be an accident, and come when there had still not been one.
    These are the sort of dark thoughts that Mona had. She had, if anything, been bleaker as a child than now. She had been one of those known as
stationary children
or
stationaries
because she refused to move much. This caused endless difficulties for her mother, who eventually perished, for other reasons. Her father kept her on afterwards, in one or another capacity. She was older than he, of course, and so he relied on her advice in order to run the cemetery.
    —Did you pass the new plots on your way up the hill?
    —I don’t know.
    —The ground is still broken a bit around them, hasn’t settled in yet. You didn’t see?
    —I suppose I did, said Loring, looking back.
    —It’s no use to look from here, said Mona, not unless you can see through that hill and out the other side.
    She laughed.
    —People are so stupid sometimes. Anyway, what I was saying is this: The new plots are doubled up. That Grish family died, all of ’em from blood poisoning. There were six of them and just three plots, so there was a big conversation here with the constabulary about if there should be a lottery between them to see which three would get the graves, because, of course, someone has to pay for them, or whether donations would be sought out, which likely wouldn’t come, as they weren’t well-respected. Leastways, it was decided to put them all in, and so the pairings had to be made. Now, this was a particular problem, as Gerard didn’t know them at all and didn’t have anything useful to say in the matter, but luckily Jan, our digger, he knew them in some small way. I don’t think he gets around very much, but he had some experience calling on them, and so he was brought in to say which of them might not mind being in the grave with which other, and so forth.
    Gerard had sat down on one of the stones. It did not look very comfortable. Loring sat too, but on the stair.
    —There were six of them, as I said, and so it would seem like putting the husband and wife together would make sense, except that it was ruled out immediately on the basis of their hating one another furiously (which perhaps was the cause of death). So, the mother, Celeste, was put with Jimmy, the third oldest, and the father with the youngest, Peter, who he had been seen with once at the fair (someone said) and had appeared to have been having a good time. That left the other two, Gladys and Rollins, who supposedly couldn’t stand to be in a room together. However, there wasn’t anything for it. Three coffins, three graves, six bodies, in they went. Not even money for stones. They all got one stone. It said, Grish Family, blood poisoned. I don’t really know what that means, do you?
    But by then night had fallen, and so the couple went off down the hill to their house, which was within the cemetery walls. (A cemetery watcher’s house within the cemetery walls: a fine thing!)
    —I will find my own way out, said Loring.

The Weakness of Age
    was such that Loring was entirely exhausted by the time