Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  Verna and Arman had arrived at the church with several bottles of vodka in the trunk of their car. After Harry’s coffin was escorted to the crematorium—that part was for family only—the two of them and Gordo accompanied me back to the church hall. They toted the vodka inside while I began to greet the gathered mourners. Gordo sat down, looking done-in and weary. Arman wore a two-inch wooden cross around his neck, suspended from a thin strip of leather. He had carved the cross from a maple in his own backyard. He had brought two bottles of Russian champagne along with the vodka, but the corks had popped while he and Verna were driving on bumpy roads and some of the champagne had overflowed. The bottles had been placed upright in a box, but were little more than half full. The vodka was intact, and was consumed in the church hall. The town had not seen a funeral quite like it.

  The remaining champagne was left in the car and, when we returned home, Arman carried it in, popped corks and all. Verna and I sat together later, numbed by the funeral and by the leftover champagne, which the two of us had finished off. We faced each other across the kitchen table.

  “George,” she said, her voice deeper and more Russian after the champagne. “The reason I married three times is because I need to love. Sometimes I’d be sitting at my kitchen table, maybe gluing sequins, or weaving strips of crêpe, and I’d raise my head and say into the air, ‘I love you.’ But who was there to love? If nobody was sitting across from me, I went out and found a husband.”

  She looked at my face as if wondering whether to go on. “My second husband died making love to me, George. I swear it’s true, though I’ve never told a soul. He never had a problem with his heart before, not a bit of chest pain. He was an outdoor man, a master pruner. But he was passionate. You don’t need to pass this any further but, well, he died the moment of—you know, orgasm. I didn’t even realize what happened at first. I had to push him off. ‘My God!’ I was shouting. ‘What happened! What’s the matter!’ I didn’t know what to do, who to call. I would have to say what we were doing when he died. It would be everybody’s business and the whole countryside would know. So I kept it to myself. I called the ambulance and said into the phone, ‘My husband died in bed. Please come.’”

  She started to laugh, and I laughed too, and we laughed for ten minutes. I thought of Grand Dan and her barked laugh at my grandfather’s funeral service; I thought of the women of our family, hysterical in the front pew the day we buried Mr. Holmes.

  Verna reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Anyway,” she said, between gulps and sobs—we were both crying now—“the forests were safe. The trees trembled when he came near, George. I wouldn’t have believed it, except I saw it for myself.”

  The master pruner had been felled—not by a tree, but by love. It was a death Harry might have envied.

  Verna went upstairs to join Arman in bed. Before she went up, she wrapped her big arms around me and said—her voice sounded strangely husky, like Harry’s—“You learn to move on, George. You learn how to do this.”

  As I watched her haul herself slowly up the stairs, I understood that she had become a second sister to me. I thought of her sitting alone in her kitchen, raising her head and saying into the air, “I love you,” and moving on. I thought of Phil, her mouth full of pins, taking up a hem—and rewriting her history. Phil had moved on, and now she had Tall Ronnie to love. I’d become used to Ronnie in her life; he, too, was part of the family.

  It was late, but I knew I would not sleep. I stood at the kitchen window and stared into darkness, guessing at the outline of trees. I thought about Harry’s last days at home. How before going to hospital to die, he woke to find himself clinging to the edge of the mattress. His body and the bedclothes were so drenched in perspiration, we both had to get up so that I could change the sheets.

  I heard Verna’s bedroom door close, and I went into the living room and kicked off my slippers. I stretched out on the chesterfield, still wearing my dressing gown. The champagne was wearing off. I did not want to go up to an empty bed, so I left a lamp burning low and pulled Grand Dan’s shawl over me. I stared at the ceiling.

  I was suspended over rough water. Harry had sunk and I had to row alone back to shore. We’d been headed towards death for weeks and months but, irrational as it sounds, when his death came, it came as a surprise.

  Harry is dead, I said to myself.

  “Harry is dead,” I said aloud.

  I thought of the third-floor nurses who’d been on duty the night he died. After being alone with Harry’s body for a few minutes, I had been ushered into a small room off the nurses’ station where I was left alone to make phone calls. Case had been at the hospital all afternoon and had gone straight to her theatre from the ward. I knew she would be home after midnight, so I called her first, and told her not to come back. She said she would phone Verna and Gordo, who had asked to be notified, day or night. We decided to let Phil know in the morning. The doctor on call came to the ward and did her paperwork. I was permitted to wander in and out of Harry’s room. He was lying on his back. His body would not be sent to the morgue until after I left.

  But then I began to sense that the nurses wanted to call housekeeping to have the room cleaned and the bed disinfected and readied for the next admission. I sensed urgency. Maybe they’d received word that a new patient was on his way. Conversation stopped when I walked past the desk. I went to Harry’s room, lifted his cold hand and then tucked it back under the sheet. I looked at his face and, for a quick second, saw a crease above his right cheekbone. I imagined a loupe in his eye socket, held tightly to his orbit as if he were giving careful attention to some detail I couldn’t see. When I looked again, the crease was gone. I gathered his belongings and took the elevator down for the last time. I stepped into the March air and felt as if I had been shot out into the night.

  While I was stretched out on the chesterfield, I thought of all of these things—the nurses who wanted to get on with the next admission, Harry’s cold fingers, his thin white body, the sheet tucked under his chin with the hospital logo showing above his sternum. I thought of Verna and Arman in bed upstairs, of Gordo in the room next to theirs, all of them now asleep. I thought of Grand Dan reading from Ecclesiastes and thinking back to a time when my grandfather had been alive: “If two lie together, they have heat; but how can one be warm alone?”

  I tried to alter images that flung themselves into my head. Harry not moving. How could he not be moving? The wedding ring that matched mine being slipped from his finger and dropped into my palm. Harry beneath the lid of a closed coffin, the trip to the crematorium after the service, the reception at the hall with the mourners drinking vodka. Harry as cremains.

  Would I be given his ashes in a box? Would there be small pieces of bone inside? Case and Rice and I were to go to the cemetery the following week, for the interment, just the three of us. The Danforth plot had been expanded to include the Witley name, and Harry’s ashes would be laid next to our baby, Matt. All of these things were going through my mind. I knew I would be exhausted in the morning, but my fatigue did not seem to be connected to the other events in motion.

  I heard a noise outside the house, and sat up. There was nothing to see inside the room except the living-room furniture. The wind is coming up, I thought. It’s begun to blow through the trees. What I heard next happened all at once, a loud but slightly muffled sound. Logic was not part of this sequence. What I heard was the sound of wings beating, many large wings marking time. I thought of the pair of doves that flew to the backyard feeder every day and I said to myself, But this is the sound of hundreds. How can there be so many? Why would wings be beating at night?

  I thought of Matt and I knew that the sound was not from doves, nor from birds of any kind. Was Harry with our son?

  Call me crazy, go ahead. I’m the one who was sitting upright on the chesterfield when the house was held, momentarily, in embrace. My senses reacted swiftly. I was immensely comforted and did not want the noise to stop. But i
t did cease, abruptly, and I was sad and let down and relieved all at the same time, even knowing that the sound was lost to me forever.

  The next morning at breakfast, I sat with Verna and Gordo—Harry’s look-alikes—and sympathetic Arman, who slid into Harry’s seat at the end of the table. Far from being offended, I was comforted by the gesture. I asked if anyone had heard the wind come up in the night, and no one had. I said nothing about what had happened. I did not have the words to tell.

  I would like to hear that sound again. The wondrous, all-encompassing sound of many wings beating.

  The sound of angels.

  THREE SKELETON

  FORTY-TWO

  Femur, tibia, fibula. Radius, ulna.

  I’m desperate for water. I must have water. I’m closer to the lump near the car. Why do I so badly want to cry? I could cry all I want and there wouldn’t be a tear to squeeze out. There isn’t enough moisture left in me.

  There have been times in my life when I’ve cried myself out. Cried until there were no tears left. For months, the carrot man was the only person I talked to after Harry died. Case and Rice came up the hill as often as they could. I attended plays at the theatre; I even volunteered at receptions for opening nights. I appeared to be a normal human being. But it was the carrot man I talked to. Going to the Saturday morning market was my feeble attempt to get my willpower working again. It was early summer and I told myself to get out and breathe fresh air, look at the world around me, start making meals again. I admonished myself for standing at the kitchen counter with a can of tuna and a fork. I stared out at the chokecherry, and tasted nothing. Sometimes a whole meal was a cracker slathered with marmalade.

  What was I supposed to do? I’d slept beside the same man for more than fifty years. I was alone for the first time. Truly alone. I had been familiar with every daytime cough from another room, every adjustment of mood, every sideways step away from his usual behaviour. The months of his illness had been difficult, but I’d shared every one of those painful days. My life had been tied to his, long before his surgery.

  I drove down the hill into town and walked past market stalls, keeping my head down so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone I knew. I did know people, but I nodded when they greeted me and they left me alone. I began to loiter at the carrot stall because, even when there was a lineup, the vendor, a wispy sort of older man with muscular shoulders, singled me out and began to take time to explain his produce. Dozens of carrot bundles were arranged along the top of his fold-up table. He explained how much moisture they required, how he sorted and priced and sized; how they cost a dollar less if I bought two bundles instead of one; how he dug a hole in the earth in the fall and buried them in a burlap sack so they’d last the winter months and into spring. He spoke with tenderness. He was never in a hurry. I loitered because he was a stranger and knew nothing about me.

  How many new facts are there to learn about carrots? On subsequent Saturdays, he began to throw in extra information: what time he’d risen that morning to get an early start; how many years he’d had a market garden; how many times he washed the carrots before spinning and bagging—three. I began to believe that my skin would turn orange. Were carrots good for rods or cones, or both? Neither of us could remember. He was a widower, he told me. Did he pity me? Did I clutch my cloth shopping bag in a way that exposed my despair? If I had asked, he’d probably have told me that sorrow emanated from me like a scent. On the other hand, his future lay in carrots; he had dirt under his fingernails. He was speaking of loneliness. His, mine. I never learned his name. I drove back up the hill and thought of running away. But running away from what? Who was holding me back? And where would I run? I could not think how to plan the details, and suddenly remembered Phil running away from the Haven. I wondered how she had organized her escape—not that anyone had held her back, either. She had escaped without notice on a warm fall day, two years after she’d moved in. She lifted her coat from her locker, slipped her arms into it and pushed the walker out the side door. The rest of the inmates, including Tall Ronnie, were having afternoon naps. She began to walk.

  It was Phil herself who helped put the pieces of the story together later. Old as she was, she had the necessary strength to escape. She still has. After I stopped worrying, I understood why she had left. I admired what it must have taken to make the decision. I marvelled at how she’d managed to get so far.

  The reason she left was because of the Wilna Creek Times, which had run an item in the morning paper about a home for the elderly in Germany. A performing bear had been brought in to entertain and amuse the residents of the home. The bear was supposed to sit on a bench and eat fruit. Instead, it sat on the lap of a ninety-year-old woman and crushed her to death.

  Phil was in the common room when she read this, and scrunched the paper into her lap. She began to laugh and couldn’t stop. She laughed until she cried, which is what the women in our family have always done when we are upset. And then, she made her plan to escape.

  She travelled back to her beginnings. She was not confused. She pushed her walker with the air of someone out for a daily walk. A woman who lived on a crescent three blocks from the Haven glanced out her kitchen window and saw Phil pass by, twice. She had gone around and around the circle by mistake. Hours later, when word got out that a resident was missing, the woman called police.

  On her third pass around the crescent, Phil found an egress that hooked up to the highway out of town, a road she recognized as the old Wilna Creek Road. By this time, she was tired and discouraged, and she plunked herself down on the seat of her walker. Two men from the town Works Department drove by in a flatbed truck, rakes and garden equipment sticking up out of the back. The driver stopped, reversed, and asked Phil if she was lost. She brightened and told him she’d started out for a walk and had come too far. She needed to get home, and gave the men directions. They were happy to take a break, and hoisted her up into the back of the truck. They set the walker on its side and fastened it, told Phil to hang on to a chain at the side, and drove slowly so she wouldn’t fall out of the truck as it bumped along.

  “You can’t imagine what fun it was to dangle my legs over the back,” she told me later. She turned her head from side to side to show how she had taken in the scenery. “But everything on the old road has changed. Even so, the fall colours were glorious. And I saw geese overhead, line after line of them. I tilted my head to watch those wonderful wavering Vs.”

  After two miles, the men dropped her off at the place she identified as home. “I wasn’t being untruthful,” she said. “The Danforth house ‘was my home for a century.”

  “You sure came a long ‘way, lady,” the driver said when he lifted her down. “Good thing we found you when we did. Maybe you shouldn’t go quite so far next time.”

  Phil thanked the men and sat down on the seat of her walker to let them know that she would stay in the sun for a while, in front of her house.

  When the search began and the Works Department men heard a radio bulletin about a missing senior, they too called police. After she’d been picked up by ambulance and returned to the Haven and collapsed in bed, only then did she recount her adventure. I had been phoned and told that she was safe. I arrived at the Haven and sat beside her bed until she woke after a long, untroubled sleep. When she began to tell her story, I understood that she had been plotting for some time. She had planned every detail except how she was actually going to get to the house and back. The bear sitting on the lap of the old woman was the straw that decided when she should leave.

  She had also not reckoned on the house being empty when she arrived, though she was glad it was. She took her time trying to reconcile the differences between what she saw and what she remembered. She pushed the walker into the backyard, caught the wheels in dead grass and stumbled over squares of cement that formed a narrow walkway from the door to a new opening in the stone wall. She found a crumble of stone that might have been part of our summer kitchen. Renovations ha
d taken place and the house appeared to be smaller. Grand Dan’s wagon-wheel garden was still there, but no rose bushes. How could everything change in such a short time? Phil was irritated by tangles of weed and undisciplined growth. She pushed her walker in circles, trying to remember where the chicken coop had been. She thought of her father driving the Model T that had given him so much pleasure into the tilting shed before he left for the war and never came back. She thought of Mott leaving cans of milk and cream at the back door when Ally and I were children. Then, she thought about the skim milk Mott had fed to his pigs and the skim milk that was served at the Haven, and she gave up. The past had gone and she hadn’t caught hold of it.

  She lowered herself to dry grass, took off her shoes, lay on the ground and slept. When the owners returned, they found her curled up next to the old stone wall. So peacefully was she tucked into the landscape, they were reluctant to wake her. The police were called for the third time, more than three hours after Phil had disappeared. By then they were already on their way.

  FORTY-THREE

  Well I’m not about to run anywhere. My bones ‘won’t move ‘when my brain orders movement. The muscles of my arms and legs keep cramping as if they’ve been bound and tied in knots. I want these fractures treated! I want my bones set right! My face must be battered and swollen. There’s nothing like real pain to clear the head. Though, admittedly, my head has begun to feel a bit foggy; I keep going in and out of sleep. Did I leave my bankbook on the table? Did I destroy the photo of Anonymous-she? Damn the cheese, going rotten in the fridge.