“Is he in there now?” she wants to know.
I nodded again. I hadn't meant to give out any untrue stories. But a kid
will always lie, not meaning particular to lie, if you sort of invite
him with questions like that, and get him scared by the way you're
acting. Besides, I says to myself, so long as Hank has turned into a
corpse, and being a corpse makes him dead, what's the difference whether
he's in the blacksmith shop or in the cistern? I hadn't had any plain
idea before that being a corpse meant the same thing as being dead. And
I wasn't any too sure what being dead was like, either. Except I
knew they had funerals over you then. I knew being a corpse must be a
disadvantage from the way that Elmira has always said to keep away from
that cistern, or I'd be one. And I began to see the whole thing was more
important even than I had figured it was at first. I wondered if there'd
be a funeral at our house. If there was one, that would be fine. They
didn't have them every day in our town, and we hadn't ever had one of
our own.
Mis' Alexander, she led Elmira into the house, both a-crying, and Mis'
Alexander trying to comfort her, and me a-tagging along behind holding
on to Elmira's skirts and sniffling into them. And in a few minutes all
those women that Mis' Rogers had told came filing into the house, one
at a time, looking sad and mournful. Only old Mis' Primrose, she was a
little late getting there, because she stopped to put on the dress she
always wore to funerals, with the black Paris lace on to it that her
cousin Arminty White had sent her from Chicago.
When they found out that Hank had come home with liquor in him and done
it himself they were all excited and they all crowded around and asked
me questions, except two that were holding Elmira's hands where she sat
moaning in a chair. And those questions scared me and egged me on to
lies I hadn't had any idea of telling.
Says one woman: “Danny, you saw him do it in the blacksmith shop?”