Undead. John Russo

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СКАЧАТЬ to be done with dying and not have to live any more. To be under the ground, oblivious…oblivious of hurting, oblivious of the fear of dying.

      They do not have to live any more. Or die any more. Or feel pain. Or accomplish anything. Or wonder what to do next. Or wonder what it is going to be like to have to go through dying.

      Why does life seem so ugly and beautiful and sad and important while you are living it, and so trivial when it is over?

      Life smolders a while and then dies and the graves wait patiently to be filled, and the end of all life is death, and the new life sings happily in the breeze and neither knows nor cares anything about the old life, and then it in turn dies also.

      Life is a constant turning over into graves. Things live and then die, and sometimes they live well and sometimes poorly, but they always die, and death is the one thing that reduces all things to the least common denominator.

      What is it that makes people afraid of dying?

      Not the pain.

      Not always.

      Death can be instantaneous and almost painless.

      Death itself is an end to pain.

      Then why are people afraid to die?

      What things might we learn from those who are dead, if they find the means to return to us?

      If they come back from the dead?

      Will they be our friends? Or our enemies?

      Will we be able to deal with them? We…who have never conquered our fear of confronting death.

      At dusk, they finally spotted the tiny church. It was way back off the road, nearly hidden in a clump of maple trees, and if they had not found it before dark they probably would not have found it at all.

      It was the cemetery behind the church that was the objective of their journey. And they had hunted for it for nearly two hours, down one long, winding, rural back road after another—with ruts so deep that the bottom of the car scraped and they had to crawl along at less than fifteen miles per hour, listening to a nerve-wracking staccato spray of gravel against the fenders and sweltering in a swirl of hot, yellow dust.

      They had to come to place a wreath on their father’s grave.

      Johnny parked the car just off the road at the foot of a grassy terrace while his sister, Barbara, looked over at him and breathed a sigh intended to convey a mixture of both tiredness and relief.

      Johnny said nothing. He merely tugged angrily at the knot of his already loosened tie and stared straight ahead at the windshield, which was nearly opaque with dust.

      He had not turned off the engine yet, and Barbara immediately guessed why. He wanted her to suffer a while longer in the heat of the car, to impress upon her the fact that he had not wanted to make this trip in the first place and he held her responsible for all their discomfort. He was tired and disgusted and in a mood of frozen silence now, though during the two hours that they were lost he had taken his anger and resentment out on her by snapping at her continuously and refusing to be at all cheerful, while the car bounced over the ruts and he worked hard to restrain himself from ramming the gas pedal to the floor.

      He was twenty-six years old and Barbara only nineteen, but she was in many ways more mature than he was—and through their growing-up years she had pretty much learned how to deal with his moods.

      She merely got out of the car without a word, and left him staring at the windshield.

      Suddenly the radio, which had been turned on but was not working, blurted a few words that Johnny could not understand and then was silent again. Johnny stared at the radio, then pounded on it and frantically worked the tuning knob back and forth, but he could not get another word out of it. It was strange, he thought, and just as puzzling and frustrating and tormenting as everything else that had happened to him in this totally disgusting day. It made his blood boil. If the radio was dead, then why did it blurt a few words every once in a while? It ought to be either dead or not dead, instead of being erratic or half-crazy.

      He pounded the radio a few more times, and worked with the tuning knob. He thought he had heard the word “emergency” in the jumble of half-words that had come across in a squawk of static. But his pounding had no effect. The radio remained silent.

      “Damn it!” Johnny said, out loud, as he yanked the keys out of the ignition and put them in his pocket and got out of the car and slammed the door.

      He looked around for Barbara. Then he remembered the wreath they had brought with them to place on their father’s grave, and he opened the car trunk and got it out. It was in a brown paper bag, and he tucked it under his arm as he let the trunk bang shut—and he looked for Barbara once more and experienced a burst of fresh anger at the realization that she had not bothered to wait for him.

      She had scrambled up the terrace to take in a view of the church, which was tucked back into a hollow among the trees where a place had been carved for it out of the surrounding forest.

      Taking his time so he wouldn’t get mud on his shoes, he climbed the grassy terrace and caught up with her.

      “It’s a nice church,” she said. “With the trees and all. It’s a beautiful place.”

      It was a typical rural church; a wooden structure, painted white, with a red steeple and tall, narrow, old-fashioned stained-glass windows.

      “Let’s do what we have to do and be on our way,” Johnny said, in a disgruntled tone. “It’s almost dark, and we still have a three-hour drive to get home.”

      She shrugged at him, to show her annoyance, and he followed her around the side of the church.

      There was no lawn, no gate—just tombstones, sticking up in the tall grass, under the trees, where a few scattered dead leaves crackled under their feet as they walked. The tombstones began in the grass just a few yards from the church and spread out, among trees and foliage, toward the edge of the surrounding woods.

      The stones ranged in size from small identifying slates to large monuments of carefully executed design—an occasional Franciscan crucifix or a carved image of a defending angel. The oldest tombstones, grayed and browned and worn with age, almost seemed not to be tombstones at all; instead, they were like stones in the forest, blurred by the darkening silence engulfing the small rural church.

      The gray sky contained a soft glow from the recent sun, so that trees and long blades of grass seemed to shimmer in the gathering night. And over it all reigned a peaceful silence, enhanced rather than disturbed by the constant rasp of crickets and the rustle of dead leaves swirling in an occasional whispering breeze.

      Johnny stopped, and watched Barbara moving among the graves. She was taking her time, being careful not to step on anybody’s grave, as she hunted for the one belonging to her father. Johnny had a hunch that the idea of being in the cemetery after dark had her frightened, and the thought amused him because he was still angry with her and he wanted her to suffer just a little for making him drive two hundred miles to place a wreath on a grave—an act he considered stupid and meaningless.

      “Do you remember which row it’s in?” his sister called out hopefully.

      But he neglected to answer her. Instead, he smiled СКАЧАТЬ