Shortest Day (28 page)

They bound Christ's body to a tree
,

And wounded him full sore;

From every wound the blood ran down
,

Till Christ could bleed no more.…

Carol, “The Lamb of God”

T
here were scraping sounds below the window. Someone was shoveling the walk. Sarah looked down and saw Chickie Pickett dump a shovelful of snow to one side.

“Oh, Morgan, Chickie's down there shoveling. Don't you want to help?”

Morgan was at his desk. He didn't look up. “Oh, I think she can handle it.”

Sarah looked at the intent curve of his back. This morning all her doubts had returned to torment her. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her boots. “Are you coming, Morgan? We'll be late if we don't hurry.”

Still he did not look up. “You go ahead. I'll be along shortly. There's something I've got to do first.”

“Well, all right.” Feeling a terrible certainty, Sarah clumped down the stairs alone, and stopped on the front walk to thank Chickie.

“No problem,” said Chickie, her face rosy in the cold.

Left to himself, Morgan jumped up and went to the window. Sarah was heading for Inman Square to take the bus. Good. He would dodge over to Kirkland Street and run the whole way and get to Mem Hall first. Morgan snatched up his coat, pulled open his desk drawer, and put something in his pocket.

His mood was triumphant, frenzied. He felt excited, a little crazy. But that was Sarah's doing. It was Sarah who was driving him insane. She was incorrigible. Getting rid of one fucker, what good did that do? There was always another. Arlo Field! He should have seen all along that it was Arlo Field!

The sharpness of the cold struck Morgan's face, and he thrust his chin down into his parka. Chickie had finished clearing the walk. It was a bright day, with the sun smashing down on the heaps of snow thrown up by the plow. Morgan strode to the end of Maple Avenue, then zigzagged over to Kirkland and ran all the way to Memorial Hall, slipping on the icy cracked concrete, nearly falling, regaining his balance, and running on again.

He entered by the north door to find the place already jumping. The memorial corridor was full of cheerful people, waiting to get into Sanders Theatre. Most of them had children clinging to them or hopping up and down beside them, because it was a Saturday-afternoon performance. Now the thick crowd began tunneling into Sanders, handing their tickets to Dotty and Linda, Spencer and Robbie, who stood by the two sets of stairs. “Up one flight to the mezzanine,” said Linda. “Through the door to Row B,” said Spencer.

The building manager looked out from the door to his office and said hello to Morgan. “How did it go last night?”

“Oh, fine,” said Morgan, but he could remember nothing about last night, nothing about his leaping and stamping with the Morris dancers, only his relief at the absence of Jeffery Peck, and then the revival of his agony as he stood watching at the bottom of the stairs while Sarah fell into the arms of Arlo Field.

Slipping into the great hall, he hurried up to the table allotted to the Morris men. The hall was full of people in every state of undress. At one end the chorus had gathered in a ring to practice the “Sussex Mummers' Carol”—

God bless the mistress of this house
,

With gold chain round her breast;

Where-e'er her body sleeps or wakes
,

Lord send her soul to rest
.

Morgan looked around for the other Morris dancers. A couple of them were talking to the puppeteer, helping him uncover his tall mannikins and lift them high. But no one stood at the table where the swords and sticks and bells had been laid down in perfect order. Morgan chose one of the swords and slipped it under his coat.

He took it to the hallway beside the men's room. No one was going in or out. No one saw him slip into the broom closet, pull the light string, and close the door.

The closet was crowded with cleaning equipment, a set tub, a mop bucket, and a waxing machine. Morgan took the whetstone out of his pocket, held it under the faucet, and began sharpening the sword. It was slow work. Skillfully he drew the blade across the stone, sharpening the entire edge at each stroke. Now and then he turned the sword over and worked on the other side. He did not tire. He kept on and on, testing the edge now and then with his finger until at last the blade drew blood.

O
nce again Sanders Theatre was jammed with jiggling people. By two-thirty there was a high excited noise in the big chamber, with everybody talking at once, leaning over the backs of benches, hailing friends across the hall, standing up, sitting down, rearranging coats, and telling one another it was too hot or too cold. Every ticket had been sold, but a bunch of the homeless people from Harvard Towers had filtered past the ticket-takers. They were sitting here and there, wherever there were empty seats.

Polite Cambridge type in Eddie Bauer padded vest (mail-order credit-card classic): “Oh, sorry, but I think that's my seat. Look, my ticket says D4
.”

Bob Chumley in Morgan Memorial mackinaw, la Mode Hobo: “Well, Jesus, you're late, like I thought it would be okay
.”

For some of the smaller children it was their first theatrical experience. They were squealing and crawling over their parents, unaware that the dark hollow stage was about to be transformed into a place of magic.

Even for the adults it was pleasant to be embraced by the warm enclosing space, to breathe the golden air and admire the playfulness of the architecture and enjoy the nineteenth-century atmosphere of tawny wood and cast-iron column. Who had thickened it but eminences from the past, like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton and Winston Churchill and Professor John Finley and T. S. Eliot, speaking from the stage, standing between the stone figures of James Otis and Josiah Quincy at either side?

Otis and Quincy were still there, pale as milk in their Carrara marble, looking impassively down, while the squinting animal faces above the stage stared outward at the mezzanine. At the back of the stage the painted Harvard coat of arms declared the virtue of
VERITAS,
and high above, only dimly visible, were a thousand square feet of Latin inscriptions. The sumptuous words had been meant to inspire the young with the generosity of the forefathers in erecting this building for the cultivation of the highest arts and the instruction of succeeding generations.

Well, here they were, the succeeding ages, waiting to be entertained, eager only for the bright revelry to come, unconscious of any call to generosity and sacrifice.

It was Arlo Field who provided the sacrifice. After the jolly horn prelude and the processional entry of the chorus singing its way down the aisles, after Walt's invitation to everyone to join in “The First Nowell,” after the Morris men performed their stick dance—with Kevin Barnes filling in again for Jeffery Peck—after the children's street games and the ceremonial parade with the boar's head, after Saint George's mock battle with the dragon and the second entry of the Morris men—after all these festive rites were over, it was Arlo's turn to enter the mystic center of the sword dance and become the symbolic victim—like Dr. Box's Adonis, whose bones were ground in a mill, and Osiris, who was killed and revived with the growing wheat, and John Barleycorn, who was crushed between two stones.

While the concertina played its merry tune, the Morris dancers raised their swords and executed their intricate figures and tramped around Saint George. Once more they wove their steely web around him, and then—
snick!
—the swords were snatched away, and light flashed along the edge of one blue blade, and Arlo fell with blood streaming from his throat.

CHAPTER 36

Out of children eleven I've got but seven

And they be started up to heaven
,

Out of the seven I've got but five
,

And they be starved to death alive;

Out of the five I've got but three
,

And they be popped behind a tree;

Out of the three I've got but one
,

And he got around behind the sun
.

Traditional British Mummers' Play

H
astily, silently, in a hush of horror, they picked up Arlo and carried him offstage. The audience was silent too, awestruck and bewildered. What had happened? For a moment the stage was empty, and then Walt came forward and explained. His face was white.

“There's been an accident. I'm afraid we'll have to cancel the rest of the performance.”

There was a general groan. Walt held up his hands. “There'll be an extra performance on the thirtieth of December. Substitute tickets will be handed out at the doors as you leave.”

Disappointed men and women rose from their seats, children whimpered, twelve hundred people poured into the memorial corridor.
What happened? Someone was hurt. It was those goddamn swords, my God!

There was chaos at the ticket desk.
The new date's no good, we'll be away, so may we come tomorrow?
At the other end of the corridor there was a blockage, where a pair of medical technicians eased a stretcher out the door.

In the great hall Homer Kelly blew his stack. “Who the hell?” he bellowed. “Who the hell was holding the goddamned bloody sword?” Because there it was, piled up with the rest on the table, its razor edge gleaming, Arlo Field's blood dripping off it like the blood of a chicken from a kitchen knife.

The Morris men didn't know. In their consternation at the sight of Arlo lying on the floor with his throat cut, they had dropped their swords in horror.

In his jolly red Father Christmas robe, Homer thundered at them, “My God, you were all wearing gloves? Why the hell were you wearing gloves?”

They looked at each other sheepishly, and Bill Foose spoke up. “It's Joan. She does the costumes. She said gloves and red sashes. Green baldrics. You know.”

For a moment Homer stared at the six of them, facing him in a row. Then Sarah Bailey joined them. Her face was red and swollen. She had been sobbing her heart out in the ladies' room at the bottom of the steep stairway beside Sanders Theatre.

“Well, tell me,” said Homer, “could it have been an accident?” Avoiding the bloody sword, he picked up one of the others. “All the rest have dull edges. They're not meant to be sharp, are they?” Homer turned to Morgan Bailey. “What would you do if you wanted to sharpen it? Use some kind of knife-sharpener?”

Morgan shrugged uneasily, and Kevin Barnes answered instead. “If it was me, I'd use a whetstone.” He made a scraping gesture to show what he meant. “You just run it along the edge like this. Then you turn the sword over and do the other side.”

Bernard Fox looked doubtful. “It would take you a while.”

“Sure, but it would work.”

Bernard looked at Homer darkly. “I suppose you think it was one of us, rights? I mean, you used to be this big detective, isn't that rights”