"I have something to read to you," he announced. "It won't take long. It's a list of names. Thirty names." He cleared his throat, then tilted his head to peer at his list through the lower portion of his bifocal lenses.

"Douglas Atwood," he said. "Raymond Andrew White. Lyman Baldridge. John Peter Garrity. Paul Goldenberg. John Mercer…"

I've made up the names. There's no record of the list, nor did Lewis Hildebrand recall any of the names the old man intoned. It was his impression that most of them were English or Scotch-Irish, with a couple of Jews, a few Irish, a handful that would have been Dutch or German. The names were not in alphabetical order, nor was there any evident scheme to them; he was to learn later that the old man had read their names in the order of their death. The first name read- not Douglas Atwood, although I've called him that- was the first man to die.

Listening to the old man, hearing the names echo against the room's wood-paneled walls like clods of earth falling on a coffin lid, Lewis Hildebrand had found himself moved almost to tears. He felt as though the earth had opened at his feet and he was gazing into an infinite void. There was a pause of some length after the reading of the final name, and it seemed to him that time itself had stopped, that the stillness would stretch on forever.

The old man broke it. He took a Zippo lighter from his breast pocket, flipped its cap, spun its wheel. He lit a corner of the sheet of paper and held it by its opposite end while it burned. When the flame had largely consumed the paper, he laid what remained in an ashtray and waited until it was ashes.

"You will not hear those names again," he told them. "They are gone now, gone to wherever the dead go. Their chapter has closed. Ours has just begun."

He was still holding the Zippo, and he held it up, lit it, and snapped it shut.