Excerpt from Many Are Called: Forty-Two Short Stories Half the people in Edgerton will be at my brother's funeral tomor row. Some of them have seen me around town these past couple of days, and they are bound to be asking each other why I'm not there. They'll probably have more sense than to ask my mother, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of my father's friends happened to say, Where's Bob? My father will come up with a story and he'll expect me to back him. I guess I' will. All I want now is to spend a few hours with my mother after the funeral and then catch the late train out. Riley will be buried with military honors. A squad from the Riley Greer Post of the American Legion will fire a round or two, and there'll be Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts and Brownies and firemen and ladies' auxiliaries and garden clubs and church groups, and I don't want any part of them, not tomorrow. It's decent of them to do what they're going to do. But I don't want to be there when they do it. Last Monday, my father phoned me long distance where I work, at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Albany. He'd just had word that Riley's remains would be brought to Edgerton on Friday, and could I come down then and stay until the funeral on Sunday? He said there'd been a meeting about it at the Legion. The casket would be set up in the Legion Hall, and two men would stand guard by it day and night, with relief every two hours. He was pretty near out of breath. He went on and on about the arrangements - the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the ladies' auxiliaries. Everybody knew what Riley's first fu neral must have been like, at Salerno, with the fighting still going on and all, and they wanted this one to be right. I said I'd come down. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.