Dinner Along the Amazon by Timothy Findley Page B

eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly open. There was dried blood at the corner of her lips. She was as pale as that other day, when Harper had come into the bedroom and had seen her asleep. He thought secretly—“She’s not dead now, but she was the other day.”
    Bertha held his hand lightly and looked at Mrs Dewey too.
    “I’m sorry,” said one of the policemen—“but you’ll have to come downstairs now please and answer some questions. Dr Hamilton, are you ready sir?”
    As they went out Harper saw one of the policemen carrying his father’s Colt revolver in a handkerchief.
    Bertha sighed and got up.
    Harper reached out and touched his mother’s lips with his finger. They were hard and cold. He stood rigid and still. Bertha waited. Then he put his hand in Bertha’s and went down the stairs and into the living room.
    Outside, Mrs Jamieson’s windows showed that her lights were finally going out, one by one, like sighs.

    The next day the house was full of people Harper had never seen before, people who drove up to the boulevard in big, handsome cars and who came to see his dead mother dressed in black clothes and carrying fur pieces over their arms or, if they were men, carrying black hats and umbrellas.
    Bertha put on her black uniform and held a Bible in one hand all day long. She met the people in the hallway and spoke quietly to them about Mrs Dewey and then led them upstairs to the spare room where his mother’s body had been laid on the bed dressed in a clean nightgown and one of the pink negligees of which she had been so fond. Bertha had put makeup on Mrs Dewey’s face so that it wouldn’t be so pale and she had tried to smooth the wrinkles from her forehead. She had also put a pretty ribbon around her hair. You couldn’t see where she had shot herself—that was all covered up.
    By afternoon flowers began to arrive, some of them addressed to Harper, some to Bertha and some to ‘Rennie’ or to ‘Darling Rennie’ from ‘So-and-So.’ Harper had some from people he’d never ever heard of.
    Also in the afternoon his two aunts, his mother’s sisters, arrived and his grandmother, who had been told only that her daughter had ‘passed away.’ His aunts had thought it best to keep the details of her death from their mother, because of her great age. She came in a wheelchair, his grandmother, and was carried upstairs by her own chauffeur together with Mrs Dewey’s chauffeur. No one came from his father’s family.
    At three o’clock Harper went into the back garden to feed his guinea pig.
    He reached under the porch and found the cage swamped in a pool of water caused by the storm. The guinea pig was dead. It had drowned. Harper took the cage in his arms and went and sat under the lilac trees with it. He took the dead pig out and laid it on the ground in front of him.
    All around him the birds sang and the insects clamoured for attention. Far away the traffic moved steadily to and fro in the city, humming its monstrous mechanised song.
    He tried to think, but nothing happened.
    Nothing.
    That was all he could grasp. Nothing. Everything was over—everyone went away—and finally you went away yourself.
    He got up and went into the house where he got a spoon and returned after that to the garden. He dug a hole with the spoon and put the guinea pig inside and covered it with earth.
    Then he stamped it down to a level with his feet.
    Bertha came to the sun room door. “Harper, come and say good-bye to your granny, she’s going home now.”
    “No thank you,” said Harper.
    “She’ll be real disappointed,” said Bertha, fanning herself with the Bible. “You come and say good-bye.”
    “No thanks. You tell it to her.”
    “All right, Harper, you please yourself,” said Bertha. “There’s iced tea in the fridge.” She went inside.
    Harper stood in the garden and listened to the birds.
    He looked at the back of the house and counted the rooms by their windows.
    Ten minutes later he was