The Elementals Read Free Page B

her father’s hand. “What has she got?” she whispered to him.
    Luker looked over at the nun, shook his head in ignorance, and whispered back: “I don’t know.”
    For many seconds then there was no movement in the sanctuary. The air conditioner started up suddenly, drowning the traffic outside. No one prayed. Dauphin and Mary-Scot, embarrassed and evidently most uncomfortable, stood staring at each other across the central aisle. Leigh had shifted a couple of feet down and turned sideways. With her elbow resting on the back of the pew, she held her veil raised so that she might exchange perplexed glances with her mother. Luker and his daughter grasped one another’s hands to communicate their wonder. Odessa stared fixedly ahead of her, as if she could not be expected to evince surprise at anything that was done at the funeral of a woman mean as Marian Savage.
    Dauphin sighed loudly and nodded to his sister. Slowly they moved toward the altar, and took stations behind the coffin. They did not look down at their dead mother, but stared grimly ahead of them. Dauphin took the slender black box from the nun, unlatched it and lifted the top. All the McCrays craned but could see nothing of its contents. In the faces of the brother and sister was something at once so terrified and so solemn that even Big Barbara refrained from speech.
    From the box, Sister Mary-Scot withdrew a shining knife with a narrow pointed blade about eight inches long. Together, Dauphin and Sister Mary-Scot held the dagger by its polished handle. Twice they passed it over the open space of the coffin, and then turned the point of it down over their mother’s unbeating heart.
    Big Barbara’s astonishment was so great that she must stand; Leigh clutched her mother’s arm and rose as well. Luker and India followed suit, as did Odessa across the aisle. Standing, the mourners were able to see into the coffin. They half expected Marian Savage to sit up in protest at this extraordinary proceeding.
    Sister Mary-Scot let go the handle of the knife. Her hands trembled in the space above the coffin, her lips moved in prayer. Her eyes opened wide as she reached down into the coffin and pulled apart the linen grave-clothes. Marian Savage’s unpainted flesh was distinctly yellow; Sister Mary-Scot pushed aside a prosthesis and uncovered the mastectomy scars. Drawing in his breath sharply, Dauphin raised the knife high.
    “Lord, Dauphin!” cried Sister Mary-Scot, “get on with it!”
    Dauphin pressed the blade an inch deep into the corpse’s sunken breast. He held it there the length of his shuddering.
    He withdrew the knife slowly, as if fearful of causing Marian Savage pain. The blade emerged coated with the mixed coagulated liquids of the unembalmed body. Shuddering anew at the sensation of actually touching the corpse, he placed the knife in his mother’s cold stiff hands.
    Sister Mary-Scot flung away the empty black box and it clattered on the polished wooden floor. Quickly she pulled together the graveclothes and without ceremony dropped the top of the coffin over the mutilated body of their mother. She rapped loudly three times on the lid. The sound was distressingly hollow.
    The priest and the organist reappeared through the small side door. Dauphin and Mary-Scot dashed to the back of the church together and dragged open the great wooden doors to admit the pallbearers. The six men hurried down the aisle, lifted the coffin on their shoulders and, to the accompaniment of a thunderous postlude, carried it out into the fiery sunlight and blasting heat of that Wednesday afternoon in May.
    Part I

    Savage Mothers

    Chapter 1

    The house in which Dauphin and Leigh Savage lived had been built in 1906 ; it was a large, comfortable place with generous rooms and careful and pleasing detail in such things as hearths, moldings, frames, and glazing. From the windows on the second floor you could see the back of the great Savage mansion on Government Boulevard.