Newt’s Mother’s Reticule 112

“I should have know he was dead the minute I came in,” said Angela, leaning on her broom again. “That wicker chair, it wasn’t making a sound. It always talked, creaked away, when Father was in it — even when he was asleep.”

But Angela had assumed that her father was sleeping, and she went on to decorate the Christmas tree.

Newt and Frank came in with the Labrador retriever. They went out into the kitchen to find something for the dog to eat. They found the old man’s puddles.

There was water on the floor, and little Newt took a dishrag and wiped it up. He tossed the sopping dishrag onto the counter.

As it happened, the dishrag fell into the pan containing ice-nine .

Frank thought the pan contained some sort of cake frosting, and he held it down to Newt, to show Newt what his carelessness with the dishrag had done.

Newt peeled the dishrag from the surface and found that the dishrag had a peculiar, metallic, snaky quality, as though it were made of finely-woven gold mesh.

“The reason I say ‘gold mesh,’ ” said little Newt, there in “Papa’s” bedroom, “is that it reminded me right away of Mother’s reticule, of how the reticule felt.”

Angela explained sentimentally that when a child, Newt had treasured his mother’s gold reticule. I gathered that it was a little evening bag.

“It felt so funny to me, like nothing else I’d ever touched,” and Newt, investigating his old fondness for the reticule. “I wonder whatever happened to it.”

“I wonder what happened to a lot of things,” said Angela. The question echoed back through time — woeful, lost.

What happened to the dishrag that felt like a reticule, at any rate, was that Newt held it out to the dog, and the dog licked it. And the dog froze stiff.

Newt went to tell his father about the stiff dog and found out that his father was stiff, too.

History 113

Our work in “Papa’s” bedroom was done at last.

But the bodies still had to be carried to the funeral pyre. We decided that this should be done with pomp, that we should put it off until the ceremonies in honor of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy were over.

The last thing we did was stand Von Koenigswald on his feet in order to decontaminate the place where he had been lying. And then we hid him, standing up, in “Papa’s” clothes closet.

I’m not quite sure why we hid him. I think it must have been to simplify the tableau.

As for Newt’s and Angela’s and Frank’s tale of how they divided up the world’s supply of ice-nine on Christmas Eve — it petered out when they got to details of the crime itself. The Hoenikkers couldn’t remember that anyone said anything to justify their taking ice-nine as personal property. They talked about what ice-nine was, recalling the old man’s brain-stretchers, but there was no talk of morals.

“Who did the dividing?” I inquired.

So thoroughly had the three Hoenikkers obliterated their memories of the incident that it was difficult for them to give me even that fundamental detail.

“It wasn’t Newt,” said Angela at last. “I’m sure of that.”

“It was either you or me,” mused Frank, thinking hard.

“You got the three Mason jars off the kitchen shelf,” said Angela. “It wasn’t until the next day that we got the three little Thermos jugs.”

“That’s right,” Frank agreed. “And then you took an ice pick and chipped up the ice-nine in the saucepan.”

“That’s right,” said Angela. “I did. And then somebody brought tweezers from the bathroom.”

Newt raised his little hand. “I did.”

Angela and Newt were amazed, remembering how enterprising little Newt had been.

“I was the one who picked up the chips and put them in the Mason jars,” Newt recounted. He didn’t bother to hide the swagger he must have felt.

“What did you people do with the dog?” I asked limply.

“We put him in the oven,” Frank told me. “It was the only thing to do.”

“History!” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 411