A sly, disdainful grin worked its way slowly over Andrew's bird-like face as he prepared to offend the people around him. “Into the Valley of Death proceeds the shabby line of sniveling mourners”, he chirruped in his shrill, Scottish accent that thirty years in Africa had done little to soften. He waved his glass in the direction of the valley that sank down from the end of the lawn, dousing his granddaughter's pony tail in whiskey as he sagged over. This was the excuse Marjorie, his daughter-in-law, was waiting for. Now she could justifiably remove her children from the company of the sad, drunk, old man with a renewed determination never to visit the house again.
Richard stayed on, angry with his wife, angry with his father, presuming that he understood them both and not wanting to take sides: he didn't know how to take sides and never had a side of his own. He glanced reluctantly in the direction in which Andrew had been leering for the past while, certain of what his eyes would pick out through the thick afternoon air. After all the years that had passed, he was still drawn to the spectacle and intrigue of another funeral. He had watched funeral processions across the narrow valley from the lawn for as long as he could remember and they had always been a source of nervous childhood delight. “Funeral!” one of his sisters would shout at the top of her voice and Richard would come tripping over his clumsy feet to watch the spectacle from the safe distance across the little valley which sat between the graves and their home.
The innocence of those days was spoiled when the children became part of a funeral procession themselves and were made to follow their mother's coffin round the rim of the valley from where they could see back towards the house. Now from the house, if they looked carefully, they could make out the headstone, and funerals had become a different matter. Andrew's preoccupation with funerals in the valley began on the day of Sylvia's funeral, the day on which the children developed their aversion for them. He watched them at his leisure from the lawn, drink in hand, observing where every new grave was dug in relation to where he had buried his wife. Obsessively he compared the number of mourners to the size of the crowd at Sylvia's send-off as he called it, wondering when he would be making his own trip into the Valley.
The cemetery covered the floor of the short, narrow valley, reaching up the far side until it met the fresh green line of young maize plants. That line moved higher each year as the valley sides filled with fresh death like a dam fed with a constant trickle of water. This new collection of mourners was easy to locate as they moved through the field of maize. The coffin rode jauntily on their shoulders above the fresh green plants which, at that time of the year, still reached only as far as a man's waist. Only when the people emerged from the maize into the higher reaches of the cemetery could Andrew properly gauge the size of the crowd, and today's gathering was modest, a fact that gave Andrew some perverse pleasure. The pastor of the Church was near the head of the small group, easily identified in his dazzling white coat. He lead the mourners deeper into the valley, well away from Sylvia, and gathered the family together, assuming an importance Andrew knew all about and had come to detest.
In the valley, beside the fluid mound of fresh, moist earth piled up beside the gaping grave, the heat and humidity were overpowering. The men were relieved of the burden of the coffin which was rested on top of another grave while the pastor delivered himself of his thoughts. The women sat on the ground weeping and fussing over the coffin, laying their hands on it, rearranging sad-looking bunches of wilting flowers, attempting anything that might at least help to make the situation softer and prettier if they could not reverse it. The men collected themselves in a group just behind the pastor, and in the stillness and stifling heat of the day, the sad lilt of Christian rejoicing floated around the stagnant air, unable to climb up out of the valley to soothe or irritate the distant, drunken spectator.
Andrew waved for Richard to go after his wife. “No point you hanging round here just to go home to a blazing row later,” he slobbered, bringing his hand back to push aside a stray wedge of colourless hair while keeping his eye carefully trained on the funeral below. Richard sat on, as indecisive as ever, his loyalty torn as it always was. “He must be at the dust to dust bit now,” Andrew commented as he observed the women now standing to one side and the men huddled around the grave, obviously lowering the coffin into the ground a quarter of a mile away through the thick, hot air.
