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Chapter 1:
Who Mourns for Alasdair?
I scanned the parking lot before the service, looking for Brad's red Pontiac. I did not see it. Nor did I see his intense face when I repeatedly looked back over the pews during the service. Given the small-town craving for a bit of drama, I'm sure that other necks were likewise craning for a backward glance, other eyes were likewise stealing furtive glances over the congregation, looking for a countenance sure to add tension--and interest--to the occasion. But I had not really expected to find my nephew among the hundred or so mourners in Dilthon's Presbyterian chapel that day.
Still, I had hoped. Hoped that somehow Brad could spare an hour to grieve the death of one who had tried so hard to live up to his high expectations. Someone who would have given anything to please him. But having fallen short of the mark Brad had set for him in life, Alasdair Pittman would merit none of Brad's concern in death. In any case, Brad did not do funerals. The dead held little interest for him. And in this case, no interest whatever.
Brad had better things to do than lament the suicide of a loser. His time would be better spent recruiting and coaching a new and better place kicker for next year's team, a kicker who wouldn't fold under the pressure of the biggest game of the year. A winner.
Mourning for a loser like Alasdair was left to other losers--like me and the nine or ten other teachers and the thirty-odd students that Paul Hales, the principal, had been able to conscript. A stretch, really, to say that we were all there to mourn Alasdair. Some, as I have suggested, had come hoping for some scandal, or at least some excitement, torelieve their boredom. But most were there out of obligation. Half of the teachers and most of the students had barely even known him. Most of the faculty came not out of any sincere sense of loss, but out of a sense of professional duty. It was like grading tests or chaperoning dances--teachers did this kind of thing.
Academic duty had also summoned the school's a cappella choir, on hand to sing in memory of a boy most of the choir members had avoided during his years at Dilthon High. Duty had also brought the student council--at least the female members of the council. Popular girls who had never felt it their duty to so much as exchange greetings with Alasdair alive felt obligated to pay their respects to him dead. The boys on the council did not come at all.
Two exceptions: the student-body president, Stephen Camp, was there, as was the junior class president, Matt Olson. The only male members of the council in attendance, they acted out their duty with evident discomfort, awkwardly sidling their way into the pews at the back of the chapel, clearly embarrassed to be there. Stephen and Matt were also the only football players there. And the football team had learned only too well from their coach to put losing--and losers--behind them.
But the awkwardness of the two football players merely reflected in an exaggerated form the stilted woodenness of the entire service. Everyone followed the accepted but uninspired script for the occasion, mechanically reading lines, moving stiffly on cue to assigned places on stage. More polished than the two football players, but no less perfunctory, the minister presided without emotion, without spontaneity, conducting with cold correctness services he clearly wanted to be over. Two or three times, the service was interrupted by uncontrollable sobs from Alasdair's mother, Janice Pittman. But she seemed to realize that she was embarrassing others and prolonging their unpleasant duty: passionate grief had no place in this script. At the end of each outburst, she cast haggard eyes about the chapel in a quick, desperate search for some sign of unfeigned sympathy or compassion; finding none, she drew herself together and returned to the script. A remarkably young woman to have a seventeen-year-old son, Mrs. Pittman looked like a frightened child that day, a child clinging to her other son, fourteen-year-old Anson, whose bewilderment surpassed his grief.
As to the whereabouts of Alasdair's father--Janice Pittman's former husband--I have no idea. I had never met the man. Rumor had it that he was an aimless alcoholic who had abandoned his wife shortly after the birth of their second son, Anson. What became of him after that, I cannot say. I can say that--whether because of inebriation or simple disconnection--he did not make it for his son's funeral that November day. Maybe it was just as well. The script for the dreary services did not seem to include the part of a derelict drunk father anyway.
A tiny spark of genuine feeling did glow feebly and briefly during the remarks of Kevin Larsen--a classmate actually willing to speak. Kevin, apparently, had occasionally judged the need to ostracize Alasdair in order to preserve his own social reputation to have been less urgent than his need to save his math grade by getting Alasdair's help with his homework. He at least broke from the script enough to stammer a bit. Alasdair, he said, with neither the grace nor the artifice of sophistication, had been "real nice" (repeated three or four times) to help him with his math, especially the hard problems. He said he was real sorry about the way Alasdair had died, but then, seeming to sense that he'd brushed against a topic that his audience did not want to hear about, relapsed into his "real nice" motif. Then, looking at the minister and the principal for nods of approval, he sat down.
