“Careful!” Mark shouted at his brothers in the dark just before dawn. “Careful! You might break father if you pull the chain too hard!”
The oldest Pence brothers removed their father’s stone corpse from their home via the attic’s small window. Chains threaded through pulleys nailed to the walls nudged Russell Pence’s body out of the attic window with the same methodology that might be used to remove a grand piano. The process moved slowly. There was much anxiety that a twist might break a chain with too much pressure, that a knock might crack away an arm or leg.
“Just a little more and his head will be clear of the window,” Travis shouted to one of his brothers grasping and tugging at the chain.
“Keep taking your time!” Mark shouted, his heart skipping a beat at each breeze.
Though the removal had not created any cracks in his father’s body, Mark feared the remaining family did not avoid such damage. The younger of his siblings continued to cry behind their bedroom's locked doors. Kate had left in the night, and Mark doubted she would even send a letter to inform her family where they might send her cards come the holidays. Russell Pence had sired so many children before the passing of a mother and a wife, and so the house remained crowded despite the departure of a single sister. But Kate’s absence made the house feel empty to Mark nonetheless, and the eldest of the Pence sons refused to consider how much lonelier the home would feel after his father’s stone body was successfully removed from the attic.
“It won’t be easy to bury him,” a brother spoke to Mark as the chains lightly settled Russell Pence’s remains onto the front lawn. “The stone makes the body so heavy that the funeral services are expensive. Lots of families are standing the corpses up above the ground as monuments.”
Mark shook his head. “We’ll not deny father a decent burial. We’ll find some way to cover the cost.”
Mark failed to feel confident that means would be found for an honorable burial no matter how many times he promised his siblings a decent ceremony throughout the day’s remainder. Living mouths would still gather at the Pence table. Bills would continue to arrive through the mail. Respect for fathers and ancestors felt very ephemeral when the living’s needs continued to pound at the door.
Mark left the home late in the afternoon hoping to find a little assurance that he had chosen well in following his father’s wishes and faith. Outside his door, Mark saw no indication that the fool lingered at the end of the street. The crowd had apparently left his neighborhood to knock on other, waiting doors. His home felt fragile. The world seemed new in a terrifying way. A change gathered in the air.
Mark drifted across the street to Mr. Hussey’s home that had seemed to him the reward of toiling, sacrificing and believing in his father’s way. As with the Pence lawn, the turf showed the divots and trampling of a crowd to show the fool had knocked on the Hussey door as well. Mark bristled at the damage that extended to the flowers Mrs. Hussey once worked to cultivate along the cobble pathway connecting the drive to the doorway.
He needed to hear Mr. Hussey bolster his faith; for his father was now stone, deceased and silent, unable to lift Mark’s confidence when the eldest of the Pence sons stumbled. So Marked knocked upon Mr. Hussey’s door and hoped his neighbor did not think him a fool.
When no one answered his pounding, his need for assurance overcame his better judgment, and Mark peeked through exterior windows. He hoped to see for the first time the lush furnishings to Mr. Hussey’s estate he had imagined so many times when his father’s wisdom proved a bitter medicine. Yet he saw only an empty room behind the first curtained window. Mark turned a corner and saw the room behind another window as empty as the first, devoid of any carpets to soften the hardwood floor, absent of framed photos or prints to splash color upon the wide, white walls. Peering through the blinds of the backyard’s double doors presented a long room as empty as the rest on the first floor. There was no television on the wall, no stereo in the corner, no couch against the wall, no recliners or loveseats for comfortable naps or warm books.
Mark’s mind clouded. The stoning affliction had just taken his father. Responsibilities stacked upon his table. A panic blended with his sorrow, and the mixture quickened his heart so that Mark shook. He scaled the garage to reach a second story window, and yet another empty room hid behind the curtains – a bedroom without dresser or bed, without a mirror before which to comb one’s hair, with a closet open to expose the lack of hanging clothes. He went to his knees to better navigate the steep tiles of Mr. Hussey’s roof. There remained a high gabled window through which he had not looked, and Mark refused to accept that the home across the street could be empty until he stared through the curtains behind every glass pane.
Mark wished the final window had remained empty.
Mr. Hussey lay sprawled upon the extended mattresses of a pullout sofa, the only piece of furniture Mark had seen as he peeked through the home’s windows. Though Mark noticed none of the stoning sickness’s blemishes on the arm that fell to the floor, Mr. Hussey remained still as a rock. His neighbor’s lips had turned blue, bright and awful in a room otherwise absent of color. An overturned prescription bottle spilled pills onto a pile beneath Mr. Hussey’s hand. Mark held his breath to concentrate and squinted through the window. Still, he saw no movement in Mr. Hussey – no rising and falling of the chest to indicate breathing, no sudden jerk of the eyes towards the interloper at the window, no signs of life in the neighbor Mark located in the last room of an empty house.
Mark swept his gaze through the room, still praying to see something to dispell his anxiety and doubt. Instead, his eyes better focused to the room’s shadows. His sight moved beyond Mr. Hussey’s pale body sprawled upon the pullout sofa. There, against the far wall, stood the shapes of three figures. They were propped upward in that last room of Mr. Hussey’s home, pushed back into the shadow against that wall furthest from the window’s light. Mark wept to recognize the monument that remained of Mrs. Hussey, who would no longer tend to the walkway's flowers. He sobbed to recognize the grown sons, once so full of promise and exuberance, leaning rigidly against the wall. Mr. Hussey had concealed them behind that last window to his empty home.
Mark cried as he returned home. His soul pined for a glimmer of gold, but all he found was gray stone.