by test
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It took them more than fifteen minutes to drag the corpse back to the hearse. By then it was past noon and his father was anxious to get the embalmment under way. He pushed the gurney to one side in the back and laid the body, wrapped in canvas, on the floor. Then he backed the hearse out and turned at the barn. He drove past the house without stopping. "They can see him after I get done with him," he said, before Dan even wondered if that was the usual practice.
Dan could guess what the embalmment would consist of. He had seen bits and pieces of these, and Hank had told him the rest. They would hose the body off in the second bay of the garage, which doubled as the spare embalming room, then lift it onto the table in the real embalming room and "blood" him. Embalming fluid would be pumped into the carotid artery until it came out the jugular. Then the joints would have to be broken, the limbs pushed into place. The eyelids and mouth sewn shut, cotton balls pushed into the ears. Makeup applied, a suit chosen, a casket.
Dan wondered about the hard-on, though. Hank told him they sometimes had to cut them off. "Depends if it's an open casket or not," Hank said. Dan felt sure that Hank was teasing, although, as with everything about his father's business, he could never be sure.
Now they drove back across the valley and once again they did not speak,
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though Dan, clearheaded now from the work and the long morning, knew there were things to talk about. He wanted Hank now. He had things to tell him. There were questions, real questions, to be answered.
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His mother's diner sat in front of the lot on which their house stood. On the other side of the house was the funeral home and a small parking lot for the services. Beyond all this the valley fell away, pastures sloping into roads and lines of trees and then pastures again. As they pulled in, Dan saw his mother behind the counter, talking across the passthrough with Pete, the day cook. Hank's car was parked along the side of the diner. This made Dan happy, as he wouldn't have to do the embalming. The rest of the day would be his.
Once inside the garage, with the body on the table, Dan's father lit a cigarette and leaned on the edge of his equipment tray. "You must be hungry," he said, breathing out the smoke, which immediately filled the room with its smell.
"A little," Dan said. He was starving, but he didn't want to let on.
"Go get something to eat," his father said. "He can help me from here on out." Switching his cigarette from one hand to the other, he pointed an index finger straight up. His father meant Hank, and Dan could see that he had avoided using his name, but it seemed a good sign to Dan that this father wanted Hank to work at all.
"You did well, Dan," his father said, coughing a little as he exhaled. "You're a real Foley. A Foley can look anything straight in the face." He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. "That's a hard thing to look at and you never flinched. That's good." Nodding to himself, Dan left.
He tried to think about what he had seen, but nothing registered. Jimmy Tamsley in a harness. The wall of mud. The chaos of the tilted bedroom. The other body, there and not there at the same time. He wondered briefly if there were mudslides in the Bible and made a note to check with his mother.
There were other questions too, but he wasn't sure now about what was secret and what wasn't. He couldn't tell his mother what he had seen. He needed Hank there to press him into the act of telling. Now he wanted to be sure of what he shouldn't know. Finding Hank was important.
"Took a long time," Dan's mother said when he came in the back door of the diner. She looked him up and down and Dan realized for the first time that his clothes were caked with mud. "Pretty rough?"
He sat down in a cane chair by the door. "There was a lot of mud," he said, picking at a clod stuck in the folds of his pants. "The whole house was on its side."
"You dug him out?" she asked. "Jimmy, right?"
Dan nodded, closing his eyes. He could smell tomato soup cooking on the stove. "You're hungry," his mother said as if he had held out his hands for food.
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Dan nodded again and she slipped a bowl off the top of the stack and ladled it full of soup.
"Where's Hank?" Dan said as she set the bowl down in front of him.
"He left," she said. "I'm not sure." She crumbled a stack of saltines and dropped them in the soup.
"You don't know where he is?"
"He left about an hour ago. He came in here drunk. He went out the back door of the diner," she said, brushing the crumbs on her apron. "He went I don't know where."
"What do you mean you don't know where?" Dan set down his spoon.
"Just what I said. I don't know where he went."
"What if he really left this time?" Dan said, standing.
His mother turned to the counter and began chopping vegetables. "I don't know," she said, looking out the window above the sink. "His car's still out there." Dan stared at the back of her dress. Finally she turned to him. "I don't know if he'll ever leave."
More puzzles. Dan couldn't figure what his mother meant by that. He left the kitchen without a word and hurried up to his bedroom to change. He wanted to go find Hank, whohe felt surewas stumbling away from them out the flooded pastures that lay below the house. He might be leaving them for good, as he sometimes threatened to do. This might be his escape. But Dan would stop him. He could lead Hank back.
But when Dan walked into his bedroom, he immediately smelled Hank, who was lying in the bed, and felt his panic drop away. It was a stale smell, like dirty clothes, which he knew to be the alcohol on Hank's breath. On the chair next to Dan's desk was one of his father's legal pads on which Hank had started a letter. "Dear Dan, I got sick," it read, the sentence unfinished. Dan thought about shaking him awake, telling him to get downstairs, that he was needed.
He found himself speaking. "You should see what I saw," he said, barely aware of his own hope that Hank might roll over and open his eyes. "Hank," he said softly and then once again, louder this time, "Hank." But Hank was too drunk to wake up and give anything to Dan and Dan knew that. He wanted something simplean explanation, a nudge, a joke. Anything that made things clearer and smaller.
He kneeled down on Hank's scattered clothes and leaned against the bed. Bending close to Hank, he listened to his breathing and became aware of the way Hank had fallen onto the bedhis head perfectly centered on the pillow, his hands joined, the stiff posture of his legs, the parting of his lips. Hank was unshaven. If Hank were a corpse, they would shave him, adjust him, fold him and unfold him until he looked just right, until he looked ready. That much Dan knew.
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This man was his brother. This brother was a drunk, unable to take the burden of the morning from him, unable to laugh off the big things with Dan so that the small things might fall into place. Dan reached out and ran a hand along his brother's whiskers. Hank didn't stir. Soon, over Hank's soft, even breathing, he heard the rain begin again.
Then Dan could see himself, kneeling against the edge of the bed in his own dim room. He could hear his own words from a distance, telling the story of a morning. This is something ancient, he thought, something learned long ago.
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Mississinewa
by Cathy Day
Two miles outside Peru, the Mississinewa Reservoir sits, a big, brown puddle of river water, backed up and stagnant. I've seen it in spring, all that Mississinewa lapping against docks and half-submerged trees. The trapped water still smells of river, and I cannot help but think of the Flood of 1913. It's the same water probably. Surely in all this time, the water has run its course and found its way back here to our dam, the way old elephants return to their own boneyard to die.
The Mississinewa River almost broke its banks every year, which was maybe why we weren't expecting it in 1913, the year the rains came so fast there wasn't time to sandbag. We were living out by the winter quarters then, me and my husband Charles, and Margaret, who was just a w
eek or two old. Charles was doing work for old Wallace Porter, building his circus wagons and animal cages, sometimes cutting curlicue designs on the staircases of Porter's mansion.
Old Porter was friends with my folks, so I knew about his wife, his great love, dying on him, and that he'd said he'd never marry again. He was small and bone thin, the kind of thin people turn into when they stay up all night worrying and forget to eat for days at a time. He had tiger eyes, tan and gold and green, but they were rimmed by dark circles, so the eyes sunk in and you caught yourself sometimes leaning forward to look into the hollows. His eyes were the only sad thing about him, though, because he carried himself like a gentleman, all poise and polish, right down to his voice, which was the same for respectable folks like my parents as for the gypsies and strange rabble who ran his circus, which he bought with the money after he sold the biggest livery stable business in northern Indiana.
Understand, I lived through the Flood of 1913, but also I was living near the winter quarters where I could hear the animals screaming, where, after the waters went away, all the carcasses rotted in the fields where they'd settled, like the grey, open-eyed fish you'd find in a dry creek bed.
In 1913, Porter practically owned the town. He bought about a hundred acres along the Mississinewa River, built a bunch of barns for all those animals, and built himself a mansion on the top of a hill with white columns and stained glass windows. Since his wife was gone, Porter lived up there all by himself,
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except for the maids and butlers, of course. Some folks say that at night, he'd go down the hill to the winter quarters and play poker and drink with the roustabouts, or sometimes they'd find him in the barns, watching the animals mate. He said to Charles once that he was just making sure that the mating was getting done, that things would keep on going. Charles even heard that sometimes Porter would get all hot and bothered watching those animals and he'd pay calls on the star acrobat Jennie Dixianna, who had a bunkhouse all to herself. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. It was never any of my business, but I believe what Porter told me once:
Ruth, what I always wanted was to have many children, to scatter my name like those proverbial seeds in the wind, but God didn't make that possible for me, so I'm just going to make something on this earth really big and put my name all over it.
Most people simply buy a company or make a doo-dad and go about making a name for themselves that way, but Porter was different. Around here, people use that word, different, like a slur, but he was the better side of different.
Our two-story rented house was awful plain, so Porter loaned us some old furniture from the bunkhouses, a ratty davenport and a stained mattress. Charles stayed up late into the nights, making us chairs and a headboard by the light of the kerosene lamp. A few weeks later when I found out Margaret was coming, he carved a cradle, and, after she was born, he painted it sunflower yellow. The rains started while I was still weak and shaky, inching my way through the house in my nightdress.
The rain never let up, not for a whole week. At first, the water covered the back yard, creeping up the back steps, one by one, and then spilled its way through the door and into the kitchen, where I was standing at the sink. The water rushed in like the tide, but instead of soothing me, the cold Mississinewa grabbed my ankles with frozen hands, sending icicles shooting up my legs. Charles found me there, shrieking, holding my nightdress up out of the water. He carried me upstairs, sloshing in his big boots through the living room while I cried for him to save the only nice things we had, my mother's books and my photographs, which were floating around the feet of the kitchen table. Charles piled sandbags around the doors, but it didn't do any good, so he brought up all the food and blankets and the soaked things. I placed the books and photographs on the bed and watched them swell and curl while Charles rocked Margaret in her yellow crib.
After the second day, when the water was a quarter way up the wall on the first floor, Charles and I saw a dinghy across the widening river set out from Ballard's farm. Charles waved a shirt out the window, and the two men inside the boat waved their hats. But the river was churning brown rapids and an uprooted tree tossing in the water capsized their boat. They grabbed the tree and went floating on by us. Charles and I watched them from the bedroom window and neither of us said anything.
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That night, the animals screamed. Lions and tigers were roaring to be let out of their cages in a horrible refrain. The elephants blew their high-pitched cry through their trunks. Over the pounding of the rain, I heard water lapping against the house, as if we were on a boat going down the Congo River, and in the jungle on either side of us were animals clawing each other's backs in the darkness. We heard men yelling, and although we could not make out the words, the tone of their fear and their frantic trying to get the animals free echoed in the night. I got out of bed and opened the window to pitch black and saw jewels in the trees, the yellows and greens of squirrel eyes and possum eyes and snakes, too, blinking into the river that wouldn't stop coming.
I slept in fits and starts, and when I opened my eyes at sunup, I saw what looked like a snake climbing over the window sill. I screamed and woke Charles, who walked to the window with a shoe, but then he laughed and told me to come see. A big bull elephant from the winter quarters had stuck his trunk in the window, and when he leaned against the house, his shivers sent vibrations running through our feet. The water covered his legs and was starting to come up his body and his eyes, brown like a horse's and fringed with long lashes, kept looking at us, like we were at fault. Until then, I realized, his life had been one of show and strain in return for human kindness and some hay. I couldn't stand to see him look at me, pleading. I sat back down on the bed and took Margaret up in my arms.
Charles, I said, give him some food. Bread. Do something.
What do you want me to do, Ruth? We need all our food.
Make him go away then.
So Charles threw my hairbrush hard against his back, but the brush just glanced off and floated away.
I can't make him leave. Maybe he'll go by himself.
But he didn't. The baby wailed in my ear, and the elephant bellowed all day long and shivered the house and I couldn't look out the window at his eyes all afraid of the cold and death. The elephant's trunk poked around the window sill, like a tongue licking the corners of a mouth. Toward noon, Charles remembered a straw tick mattress in another room, slit it open and fed the straw to the elephant out the window, but there wasn't much and the elephant just wailed louder when the straw was gone. By five, bitter cold water almost covered his back. Both the elephant and the baby stopped crying, and then there was only the silence of waiting and the steady thumping of current against the house.
Charles stood at the window. He's just standing there with his head down. He knows it won't be long.
And about the time the sun went down, the trunk slipped out of the window sill and I got up, too, and watched the elephant sink down into the brown water. There wasn't a splash, just a swallowing up and a big spray of his last breath of air.
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I kept Margaret away from the window all that time. There are some things children shouldn't see, even as babies. Folks think they can carry on in front of their babies as if they aren't even there, like they won't remember. But they do, because it's like planting a kernel in their heads that one day explodes and the memory comes rushing back and fills their head with revelations of things long forgotten. See, we don't live just once. We live the first time when things happen and every time we remember that first time, we live it again.
I thought the elephant had floated away in the current, and I imagined his grey bulk bumping off underwater trees, a rollicking tumble head over tail in the brown water. But the darkness outside and the thick, brown water shrouded the elephant completely. He sank below our window and never moved, and when the water finally receded he would still be there, stiff and cold, and so big that even lying on his side, he w
as almost as tall as Charles. With our team of horses, we had to drag the elephant far enough away from the house so that we could burn him.