“Could we stop talking about this now?”
“They say babies born in the year two thousand will have an average life span of one hundred years,” he said contemptuously, ignoring me. “Ice Age man probably lived to be around thirty. We’re not supposed to get older than that. We’re supposed to die and turn into dirt. So flowers can grow in us, and all that shit. Jesus. People complain about pollution, but the real problem is people. We’re cluttering up the earth.”
I said nothing. It was strange to hear someone speak this way. Grandpa could, if he chose, prolong his life by many years, perhaps with a liver transplant. But the very idea made him snort in derision.
“Everybody ought to get one liver and that’s it,” he said. “Livers are like cars. If you can’t take care of the first one, what the hell makes people think they deserve another?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just figured people have an obligation to stick around as long as they can.”
“Ridiculous. Nonsense. Why? What am I going to accomplish now? What good is an old man like me anyway?”
“You could tell me some more stories,” I suggested. I was searching desperately in my mind for some argument to counteract his, but the horrible truth was I realized he was right. It was time for him to die. Nevertheless, every atom of my being sought for a way to rebel against the inevitable. I’d spent my entire childhood in the shadow of death. Everyone I was supposed to have known, everyone who could have given my life fullness and more meaning, was already gone. In fact, they’d left before I arrived, with barely a hint of who they’d been, and instead of meeting them I was left with the task of piecing together the clues of my identity with only Grandpa to help me. I’d paid my dues to death in full, I thought, and I didn’t care to surrender any more of my people to the unknown, where I couldn’t reach them. Perhaps this was why our house was full of ghosts when I was a child—my mournful ancestors felt guilty at leaving me behind, parentless, broke, and playing with imaginary friends.
But Grandpa said, “I’ve told you all the stories I know.”
“All of them?”
“Literally all. You know everything I know. And they’re all written down, right?”
For a moment I considered lying to him to get him to prolong his stay, but when Grandpa questioned me about anything it was nearly always a formality; he already knew the answer because he always knew what I was thinking. In the last three years, I had filled several notebooks with Grandpa’s knowledge of family history as he repeated it to me. Recently I’d shown the whole collection to him, and even he was amazed at the scope and variety of the stories. “I can’t believe my poor pickled head holds all that,” he marveled, and then he began to laugh, wheezily, at some private joke.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“It’s just ironic,” he gasped.
“What is?”
“My head being pickled. Just like all those poor Rory heads in the barrel.”
It was then spring of 1988. I was going to be graduating soon. About a year and a half had gone by since I’d visited Henry Hutchins in Buffalo; during that time I’d occupied myself by searching the farmhouse for anything the Air Force might have sent home after my father’s death, and for other clues—anything.
I also wrote long, rambling letters to Annie. They were enthusiastic, not really about anything. Infatuated with my own way of expressing myself, I made copies of them; in rereading them now, I see them for what they were: a desperate bid to get her to change her mind, to love me the way I loved her. She answered them at first, then she only answered every other one, then she wrote rarely. Time passed, as it always did. Then I heard nothing.
Forget about her, said an inner voice. It was a voice that had been speaking to me often lately, as I was getting older. Just let her alone.
As much as I hated to admit it, I knew the voice was right. I would never be able to forget about her, but maybe leaving her alone was the best thing. So I focused my energy anew on finding my mother.
But Grandpa had told me nothing had been delivered to him anyway, so there was no point in looking—there was nothing to be found. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, and besides, he had a whole roomful of relics to keep him company and remind him of my father. But now that I brought it up, he too wondered what had happened to Eddie’s personal effects.
I knew the Air Force must at least have had a record of what he’d left behind, even if it was nothing important: his toothbrush, perhaps, and other things like that. I spent several months making phone calls to various government departments before I was even able to determine which one would be able to tell me anything useful. Then I had to submit a request in writing, stating my reasons for wanting to know what Eddie’s personal effects, if any, had been, and where they had been sent. It took them nearly three months to respond.
“It’s a wonder we’ve ever won any wars at all, with this kind of military bureaucracy,” I told Grandpa, who agreed; occasionally he still ranted at the clerical idiocy that had set him adrift in the South Pacific forty-seven years ago. But finally, that spring, there came a letter in the mail. It was a photocopied list, typed in 1970 by a Sergeant Jackson. Apparently it had been Sergeant Jackson’s job to catalog the effects of dead men and mail them off to whatever address the deceased had put down for next of kin. The list contained mostly mundane items, as I’d suspected it would, but among them was the following entry:
Twenty-seven (27) letters, personal correspondence.
“Did you write Eddie twenty-seven letters?” I asked Grandpa.
He frowned. “Does the Air Force say I did?”
“No. They just say they found twenty-seven of them when he died.”
“I wrote him one a month,” said Grandpa. He closed his eyes and did some mental figuring. “He was gone for eighteen months before he was killed. So I wrote him eighteen letters. If that many.”
“Who else would have written him letters?”
“Anybody with his address, of course,” Grandpa said.
“But how many people had his address?”
“I don’t know, boy. Probably half the girls in Mannville.”
Of more concern than whom these letters were from, however, was where they’d been sent after Eddie’s fighter jet disintegrated in a fiery cloud over the Indian Ocean. I was certain that was the next clue to the riddle of who my mother was. I imagined there must have been some kind of private agreement between Eddie and Eliza, some sort of arrangement about what would happen if Eddie was killed. I felt sure they weren’t just randomly copulating. Henry Hutchins knew my father well, and if he thought they were in love, then they probably were. Perhaps they even suspected that Eliza was pregnant already, in which case she would want some memento of my father, some connection to ensure his return. Or perhaps Eddie, like Grandpa, knew in advance the day and manner of his death, and informed her of this as they lay together in bed in that party house in Buffalo, with poor Henry Hutchins tripping his head off in the next room, so that she could plan her life accordingly.
But the address to which the letters and other items had been sent was not included. I seemed to have run into a blank brick wall, built with infinite care by the Air Force. I fired off one last letter to the same department that had sent me the list of Eddie’s personal effects, in the desperate hope that some blue-suited, soulless automaton would read it and take pity on me.
“I am attempting to find the answer to a question that has haunted me since my birth,” I wrote. “You are the only ones who can help me. My father gave his life while in the service of the Air Force. I think the least you bastards could do in return is tell me where these letters were sent, and stop giving me the runaround.”
“That’s tellin’ ’em,” said Grandpa admiringly. Since his time with Enzo on their South Pacific island, he’d borne a strong distrust of the Air Force, which during his war had been run by the Army. My father’s death had only served to exacerbate his feelings.
“I don’t think you should call them bastards,” said Mildred. “You might get better results if you were nicer.”
“It takes one to know one,” I said, but I knew she was right, so I changed bastards to gentlemen and mailed off the letter.
I included a photocopy of the photocopied list that Sergeant Jackson had typed out eighteen years ago and mailed it back to the same department from which it had come. Perhaps it would be months before I heard a reply, I thought; perhaps it would be never. I marked the date on a calendar. It was then early Saturday morning, the fifteenth of March. With a start I remembered that today was the day of Frederic Simpson’s funeral; he was going to be buried in the churchyard in two hours. I hadn’t planned on going, but I knew suddenly that I had to be there.
I showered and put on my one good suit, which barely fit me any longer. It had belonged to Eddie, but I was taller than he by a good inch and a half, and my wrists and ankles were revealed by the retreating cuffs of the jacket and pants. In fact, according to Grandpa, I was the tallest Mann ever to exist, and the effect was that I could not continue for much longer the great Mann tradition of wearing antique hand-me-downs.
“We need to take that boy shopping,” said Mildred, in disapproval.
Grandpa raised his eyebrows. He and I had never gone clothes shopping together in our lives. The very idea of it was simultaneously horrifying and intriguing. Somehow the notion had escaped me that one could simply buy clothes whenever they were needed. It seemed like a waste of money, when there were so many generations worth of perfectly good suits and hats and shirts lying around, packed in cedar chips and mothballs. So what if they were decades out of date? Clothes were clothes. Nothing in my wardrobe had been made after 1969. But Grandpa was not the same man he’d once been, and he found himself caught up in the idea of making sure I was well dressed.
“Mildred, you are correct, as usual,” said Grandpa. “We’ll get him suited up before he graduates.”
“You’re not coming to Frederic’s funeral?” I asked.
“I don’t feel well,” Grandpa said. I said nothing to that; he didn’t look well either, but I didn’t want to mention it.
I parked my motorcycle in the gravel car lot of the church. There were only four or five other cars there, and I wondered for a moment if I had misread the date. But there was a small sign in front of the door, which read SIMPSON FUNERAL SERVICES, 11:00 A.M. I entered the church and sat in the back row of pews, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness of the church’s interior.
“Come on up to the front, why don’t you,” said a disembodied voice. I squinted into the gloom. Standing up behind the altar was Father Kinney, the parish priest, and I could now make out the forms of several uniformed men sitting in the front row. They were soldiers. I tiptoed up and sat behind them. The soldiers sat stiffly at attention, ignoring me completely.
“I’m glad someone showed up,” said Father Kinney. “Were you related to the deceased?”
“No,” I said, and then as an afterthought I added, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that’s you, Billy,” said Father Kinney. “I didn’t recognize you. No need to apologize. Glad you could make it.” He seemed more than glad. He seemed relieved that he wouldn’t be performing the funeral ceremony to an empty house.
Frederic’s coffin had already been placed at the front of the center aisle, draped with the American flag. Two more soldiers stood at the head of it, staring sternly at the rear of the church. Father Kinney said, “We might as well begin.”
Besides the soldiers, I was the only member of the congregation. Although the Manns had always been Catholics, I’d never been baptized, and Frederic’s funeral was the first Catholic service of any kind I had attended in my life. I was fascinated, as though I’d stumbled upon the rituals of some ancient and forgotten cult. I followed the lead of the soldiers, who knew when to kneel and when to stand, and who sang the hymns in loud, clear voices, completely bereft of tonality and rhythm but full of military enthusiasm.
Father Kinney said, “At this time, anyone who wishes to may say a few words and share their memories of Frederic.”
There was dead silence. Father Kinney looked at me. I pretended not to notice.
“Billy? You’re the only one here,” he said.
I swallowed.
“Go ahead,” urged Father Kinney. “Just a few words.”
I stood up.
“Frederic Simpson was a good friend of my father,” I said.
Father Kinney nodded from the pulpit. “I see,” he said.
Encouraged by this, I went on, addressing myself partly to Father Kinney and partly to the soldiers, who continued to ignore me. “He served his country in Vietnam, and he was badly wounded. He’s been in a coma or something ever since then. He doesn’t have any family left, so I’m glad I could be here. He and my dad were pals. My father died in Vietnam.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I sat down, my face aflame.
“Thank you,” said Father Kinney. “We will now proceed to the grave site.”
In utter silence, the soldiers stood up and formed a line on either side of the coffin. With Father Kinney and an altar boy in front and myself behind, they walked slowly down the aisle, taking one short step at a time, the lead soldier counting a barely audible cadence. I watched their feet; they moved in perfect precision. With a shock of understanding, I realized that they hadn’t known Frederic at all. This was merely their job. They were professional funeral soldiers. They probably never knew any of the dead they carried. They simply carried them, quietly and with great ceremony, to their graves.
We formed a small group around the open tomb. Father Kinney read another passage of the funeral service and the soldiers formed a single line. The soldier who had counted the cadence as they marched now produced rifles from somewhere, and each soldier received one. I stood with my hands folded in front of my crotch on the opposite side of the grave. At a quiet command, they raised their rifles and pointed them at the sky.
“Fire!” said the one who commanded them, and I jumped as their rifles cracked in unison. They did this twice more. Then the rifles were collected. They picked up the flag from the coffin, folded it with much ceremony into a thick triangle, and gave it to the commanding soldier, who turned with it and, after a moment of indecision, approached me.
“Sir, on behalf of the United States Army, you are presented with this American flag as a small token of appreciation and gratitude for the service rendered by”—here he paused, then remembered—“Frederic Simpson.”
I couldn’t quite believe he was offering the flag to me. I looked uncertainly at Father Kinney, but he was staring off into the distance at something that wasn’t there. I cleared my throat.
“Thank you very much,” I said, and I took it.
And the funeral was over. The soldiers marched carefully out of the graveyard, leaving me alone with Father Kinney.
“Saddest funeral I’ve ever performed,” he said. “Smallest congregation, too. How exactly did you know him?”
“I knew his sister Annie,” I said.
“Ah yes. The one who disappeared. Did they ever find her?”
“No.”
“Well,” Father Kinney sighed. “That’s the end of the Simpsons, I guess. And here’s the rest of them.” With a sweep of his arm he indicated the surrounding tombstones.
My gaze followed the sweep of his arm. What I saw then took my breath away: dozens upon dozens of tombstones, perhaps one hundred of them, all bearing the name of Simpson. There were even more of them than there were Mann tombstones. I’d never explored this part of the burial ground, since my family occupied the opposite corner of the graveyard, and somehow it had never occurred to me that there might have been other Simpsons in other times.
“Jesus,” I breathed, forgetting I was in the company of a priest. But Father Kinney appeared not to be offended. “There are so many of them!”
“Oh yes,” said Father Kin
ney. “That’s what makes this particular funeral so sad. Simpson was once the most common name in Mannville, before it was called Mannville, of course. In fact, we came darn close to being called Simpsonville. And now they’re all gone, every last one of them.”
I pondered the implications of this. Somewhere inside me, a small candle of understanding began to glimmer with a tiny spark.
“Do you mind if I look around here for a bit?” I asked. The spark of understanding burst suddenly into flame, tiny, but bright and strong. I had some exploring to do.
“Certainly not,” replied the priest. “There’ve been Manns in this graveyard since this church was built. You have a right to.” He picked his way neatly around the stones and made his way back into the church. “Thanks for coming, Billy,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m sure it meant a lot to Frederic, if he’s watching.”
Then I was alone among the dead.
I read with interest the names on the Simpson stones. There were many with birth dates from the last part of the eighteenth century, as there were in the Mann section. They were carved out of the same white granite, probably once gleaming and bright but now dull and pitted with age and decay. Judging by the dates, there’d been many more Simpsons before the Civil War than after it. What had they been like? I wondered. Had they always been a bunch of fat drunks? Had they always lived in the big white house on top of the hill? And what had happened to them? What had caused them to die off?
Grandpa would know. I was sure of it. When I got home, Grandpa would have some questions to answer.
I turned to leave and was headed purposefully for my motorcycle when a familiar name caught my eye. Next to the rear fence I found the grave of Frederic Simpson, but not the same Frederic Simpson we’d just committed to the earth. This Frederic was born in 1848 and had died in 1864. The engraving on his stone depicted a pair of crossed rifles surrounded by a wreath, the sign of an infantryman. This Frederic had been a veteran of the Civil War, just like Willie Mann. He must have died in battle, or perhaps of fever, or infection, or any one of the endless afflictions that claimed the lives of soldiers in those dark days. He’d been only sixteen years old. I wondered if he’d known my great-great-grandfather.
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