Read Online Revival by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

It was Fernald DeWitt, who had promised to help George with the digging that day. He jumped from the cab, ran to Mrs. Parker, and looked at the woman kneeling in the road. Then he ran on toward the site of the collision.
    â€œWhere are you going?” Mrs. Parker screamed. “Help her! Help this woman ! ”
    Fernald, who had fought with the Marines in the Pacific and seen terrible sights there, did not pause, but he did call back over his shoulder, “She and the kid are gone. George might not be.”
    Nor was he wrong. Patsy was dead long before the ambulance arrived from Castle Rock, but Lonesome George Barton lived into his eighties. And never got behind the wheel of a motor vehicle again.
    You say, “How could you know all that, Jamie Morton? You were only nine years old.”
    But I do know it.
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    In 1976, when my mother was still a relatively young woman, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was attending the University of Maine at the time, but took the second semester of my sophomore year off, so I could be with her at the end. Although the Morton children were children no more (Con was all the way over the horizon in Hawaii, doing pulsar research at the Mauna Kea Observatories), we all came home to be with Mom, and to support Dad, who was too heartbroken to be useful; he simply wandered around the house or took long walks in the woods.
    Mom wanted to spend her final days at home, she was very clear about that, and we took turns feeding her, giving her her medicine, or just sitting with her. She was little more than a skeleton by then, and on morphine for the pain. Morphine’s funny stuff. It has a way of eroding barriers—that famous Yankee reticence—which would otherwise be impregnable. It was my turn to sit with her on a February afternoon a week or so before she died. It was a day of snow flurries and bitter cold, with a north wind that shook the house and screamed beneath the eaves, but the house was warm. Hot, really. My father was in the heating oil business, remember, and after that one scary year in the mid-sixties when he looked bankruptcy in the face, he became not just successful but moderately wealthy.
    â€œPush down my blankets, Terence,” my mother said. “Why are there so many? I’m burning up.”
    â€œIt’s Jamie, Mom. Terry’s out in the garage with Dad.” I turned down the single blanket, exposing a hideously gay pink nightgown that seemed to have nothing inside it. Her hair (all white by the time the cancer struck) had thinned to almost nothing; her lips had fallen away from her teeth, making them look too big, and somehow equine; only her eyes were the same. They were still young, and full of hurt curiosity: What’s happening to me?
    â€œJamie, Jamie, that’s what I said. Can I have a pill? The pain is awful today. I’ve never been in such a hole as this one.”
    â€œIn fifteen minutes, Mom.” It was supposed to be two hours, but I couldn’t see what difference it made at that point. Claire had suggested giving her all of them, which shocked Andy; he was the only one of us who had remained true to our fairly strict religious upbringing.
    â€œDo you want to send her to hell?” he had asked.
    â€œShe wouldn’t go to hell if we gave them to her,” Claire said—quite reasonably, I thought. “It isn’t as if she’d know.” And then, nearly breaking my heart because it was one of our mother’s favorite sayings: “She doesn’t know if she’s afoot or on horseback. Not anymore.”
    â€œYou’ll do no such thing,” Andy said.
    â€œNo,” Claire sighed. She was closing in on thirty by then, and was more beautiful than ever. Because she was finally in love? If so, what a bitter irony. “I don’t have that kind of courage. I only have the courage to let her suffer.”
    â€œWhen she’s in heaven, her