Free Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow Page A

came here on my own, but I went to the wrong funeral,” she replied, nodding. “Somebody named Corinne.”
    â€œI’m Corinne, actually. Martin, I mean. Her husband. Candle. Do you know where my funeral is, Mrs. Appleyard?”
    â€œPlease don’t call me that. It’s his
father’s
name, not mine. A retarded son with spina bifida, five orthopedic operations, and the bastard up and divorces me.”
    â€œWhat
should
I call you?”
    â€œPatricia Zabor.” Her hair was smooth, raven, and amazingly long, flowing down her back like a nun’s veil. “Your funeral’s by the lawnmower shed, straight past the Korean markers.” She extended a black-gloved index finger. “It’s invisible because of all those fir trees.”
    â€œYour funeral’s right behind me, Miss Zabor. Just keep walking. You can’t miss it.”
    They parted company, marching off bravely in opposite directions.
    Â 
    By some miracle, he got through the morning. He survived the stupefying graveside elegy offered by Vaughn Poffley’s minister, a weasel-faced man who spoke as if his mouth were full of peanut butter. He endured the gleaming casket sitting in its earthen groove; the grotesque flowers; the remorseless stone on which someone had inscribed SHE LOVED ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL; the insipid gathering at Vaughn’s house, where the drapes clashed horribly with the slipcovers and the rugs stank of carpet shampoo. Corinne’s parents barely spoke to Martin. Lifelong Socialists and die-hard bohemians, they’d never understood why their daughter had married a Republican. The only gratifying moment of the entire reception occurred when Jenny informed him she’d found the ideal home for Corinne’s pets. An eccentric Main Line dowager named Merribell Folcroft had promised to add them to her private zoo.
    The next two weeks passed in a blur of angry victims, happy perpetrators, and miscarried justice. When an accused shoplifter pleaded innocent in the face of massive counterevidence, Martin dismissed the charges, setting the kleptomaniac free to steal again. In another such case, the judge was offered proof that Dustin Grant, a Deer Haven adolescent, had been mutilating his neighbors’ trees with his father’s chain saw—Dustin had been videotaped in the act—and Martin merely reprimanded the vandal: no fine, no family counseling. Then came the complaint of Alfred Lafferty, a Chestnut Grove resident whose property abutted the golf course. It seemed that, some weeks earlier, Susan Curtis of Glendale had teed off on the sixth hole while intoxicated, and the ball had sliced into the plaintiff’s backyard, killing his beloved cat, Leopold. Normally Martin would have required the defendant not only to replace the slain cat but to pay for its successor’s shots. Instead he threw the case out of court. He wished Susan Curtis’s golf ball had beaned the wayward Irish setter instead, thereby preventing it from running in front of Corinne’s truck. If God could part the Red Sea and set the planets spinning, why couldn’t He send one lousy golf ball on the proper trajectory?
    As Martin awoke on the last morning in August, the alarm clock droning in his ear, he experienced a rare moment of perfect resolve. He would not go to the Abaddon Municipal Building this day. Instead he would take a vacation, pursuing the hobby he termed “urban spelunking,” one of the enthusiasms he shared with Vaughn Poffley—the others being Monday-night NFL broadcasts and Friday-night poker games. Both men took supreme pleasure in driving through the seedier sections of Philadelphia on Sunday afternoons and visiting its moribund factories. Like archaeologists digging up a lost civilization, they would piece together the city’s past, feeling a peculiar joy upon deducing that the empty building on Cadwallader Street had once been a meat-packing plant or