The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  She was really late now, the parking lot was full, and she thought that even from outside she could hear organ music. Her mother was going to kill her.

  A side door led into the vestibule and she slipped in, hoping she’d be unnoticed. No such luck. One of the ushers, some dressed-up farmer, frowned at her and handed her a program. With his pointing finger, he indicated that there was room in the choir loft.

  Torrie found a seat on the end, next to a row of little kids being minded by a couple of mothers. Looking down, she saw her family sitting in two rows in the middle of the sanctuary. Even Jeff was there. He was on one side of Matthew and Anita on the other, Torrie guessed to make sure he behaved, although it was also possible they just didn’t like sitting next to each other. Her parents and Ryan were in front of them, with Blake and the skanky girlfriend on the end of the row. She didn’t think they were going to look up, unless she launched a paper airplane at them.

  The coffin was as big as a boat. Peerson coffins usually were. At least they’d closed the lid, and at least she’d missed the part where everybody took their last looks before the service. One more chance for people to stare at you. When you were dead, you had absolutely no privacy.

  The organ reached the wheezy end of whatever dirge it had been playing and struck a new note. The pastor entered and signaled them to rise. Torrie grabbed a hymnal. She was glad for the little kids so she wouldn’t have to share. “How Great Thou Art,” the program said, and she pretended to look it up and sing along. Instead she let her gaze travel around the sanctuary, hoping to find anything that would let her eyes disengage from her brain. The stained-glass windows were the old-fashioned kind, everything done in bright colors and heavy leading. Here was an angel blowing a heavenly horn, Jesus the Good Shepherd, a dove descending, an open book representing The Word.

  The hymn ended. They all sat down and composed themselves for the boring parts. “Let us pray,” the pastor instructed them.

  “Dear Lord, we gather here today to celebrate a new voice in thy heavenly choir, your faithful servant Martha Ann, who comes to you freed from her earthly labors and sorrows, glorified in thy presence. Even as we mourn her loss, let us not forget that in thy eternal kingdom there is no loss, only the peace that passeth all understanding. So that our tears will be dried and we shall be comforted by the promise of thy eternal mercy and goodness and love, we ask it in Jesus Christ’s name, amen.”

  “Amen,” the congregation responded. One of Martha’s grandsons, a nervous-looking boy of twelve, got up to read the Scripture, from Matthew, the part about not knowing the day or the hour when the Son of Man would return, which was meant to remind you that you could keel over at any time and stand before the Throne. Kind of an odd choice for Aunt Martha, who everybody knew was headed that way sooner rather than later.

  They stood again to sing “Just as I Am,” and Torrie took this occasion to examine the program she’d been given. There was a picture of Martha and Norm on the front. They probably hadn’t been able to find any picture of Martha all by herself. On the inside of the cover was an inspirational verse:

  God hath not promised skies always blue,

  Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.

  God hath not promised sun without rain,

  Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

  But God hath promised strength for the day,

  Rest for the labor, light for the way,

  Grace for the trials, help from above,

  Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

  Now that really sucked. As far as Torrie was concerned, it was telling you to grin and bear it, put up with whatever miserable circumstances life threw at you, and you’d get your reward in heaven. No way.

  It was time for the homily. The pastor waited for everybody to get settled. Torrie was pretty sure she heard Matthew pipe up in the middle of the silence. Looking down, she saw Anita drawing him onto her lap. Good luck with that. Once he got squirmy, he stayed that way.

  “Dear friends,” said the pastor, using his ordinary, sermon voice, not the exalted one he reserved for prayers. “I don’t have to tell any of you what a good Christian Martha was. There’s probably no one here today who wasn’t touched by her faith, whether that shone forth in the love and care she gave to her family, her tireless work on behalf of the Ladies’ Aid, or her fortitude during her last illness.”

  A sudden rattle against the windows and everybody looked up. A squall of rain hit hard, along with a high, dreary wind. It made you think of ghosts. The wind howls like a hammer, the night blows cold and rainy / My love she’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing.

  The pastor had to raise his voice to be heard. “She loved her family, she loved her dear husband, Norm. Can we even begin to imagine the joy of their heavenly reunion? Their two souls, no longer parted by death, reunited in glory. Oh, we do not mourn, we rejoice for them! She loved her church, and she loved her community. But today I’d like to talk about another community, that of our fellowship in Christ. A community of faith, a fellowship of believers.”

  Torrie hoped that Martha was in heaven. You didn’t want to believe that people just died, and that was the stupid end of everything. Her stomach hurt. She was afraid she was going to have to get up and go to the bathroom, right in the middle of everything. Her mother was trying to look behind her, look around the sanctuary. For Torrie, most likely.

  “How do we recognize our fellow citizens? Well, of course we come together in church. We know of each other’s good works, the evidence of a godly life, like Martha’s. Kindness, willingness to help, sacrifices on behalf of others. But good works by themselves do not lead us to salvation. It is faith and faith alone that makes us truly one with Christ.”

  If she was little, like Matthew, she could just start hollering, Hey! I’m up here! It was a little creepy, her whole family down below her wondering where she was, and her right there all along.

  The rain drove against the windows and the old church creaked. People shifted in their seats. There would be a tent erected over the gravesite, but still . . .

  She thought she’d missed part of the homily, some thread of argument. She shifted around in her seat, trying to ease the pressure on her stomach. The preacher never ran out of things to say, because there was always something people were doing wrong. “How can we ever see into the heart of another, or those others into our own hearts? Even those nearest and dearest to us. We struggle with the pressures of everyday life, and too often we are frustrated, hurried, angry, confused. We are not the people we set out to be. We are not true to our best selves. Jesus is the only one who sees that best self and loves us as we are meant to be loved. Every day he stands at the entrance of our hearts, waiting patiently for us to invite him in.”

  Her abdomen was cramping. She felt flushed and sweaty from the pain of it. She wondered how bad Martha’s cancer had hurt. The wind howled like a hammer. That sounded great until you really thought about it, like a lot of Bob’s lyrics. Jesus wanted shelter from the storm. He was a raven with a broken wing, a dove spiraling down. The dove was the Holy Spirit descending to men on earth. Jesus was mad at her for being a total brat and making her mother unhappy and eating all that pizza.

  “It is our choice and ours alone. Open our hearts to the Savior and be a part of his church, his loving and faithful community. Or hold ourselves apart, excluded, alone, unhappy, lost.”

  Torrie had to get to the bathroom and the bathroom was all the way in the basement. She got up and made her way down the spiral staircase, to the empty vestibule, then the flight of cement steps to the basement, half-running, then finally reaching the little washroom beneath the stairs, latching the wood door and rippng her pants down just in time. She flushed, waited for the tank to fill, then flushed again. She felt weak and hollowed out and ashamed of the filth that came out of her.

  Above her head, the floorboards thrummed with the deep sound of the organ. Smaller sounds reached her too, a stack of plates chink
ing together, footsteps. The supper was being made ready, and in a minute or two everybody would be down here, hungry.

  Right there on the toilet she asked Jesus to forgive her for her snotty behavior and her smart mouth and everything wrong and stupid and unkind she’d ever done.

  She ran water and washed her hands and unlatched the door. Some of the women had put on aprons and were busy taking the tops off casseroles and putting serving spoons in them. Coffee was brewing in an urn. They smiled at her and she wondered if she should offer to help. Probably not. They were the kind of women who had to do everything themselves.

  Now there were voices and feet overhead, and just as Torrie was trying to decide if she should go upstairs and find her family, her mother came down the steps. When she saw Torrie, her mouth popped open. “Where have you been all this time?”

  “I got here late and I had to sit upstairs.”

  “I don’t know where to start. I truly don’t.”

  “Mom, I’m really, really sorry about Aunt Martha. I mean I’m . . .”

  Then she was crying and her mother hugged her and her mother’s hair was tickling her nose and that was weird but she guessed it was all right. Her mother released her and produced Kleenex. “Here, blow your nose.”

  Torrie blew. “Are you all right?” her mother asked. “You look so pale. Did you get a chill? Does your head hurt?”

  As usual, her mother would have to go through a whole catalog of ailments to see which of them applied to you. “I’m OK. Just kind of tired.”

  “You come sit over here. I am going to fix you a plate and you are going to eat something and I don’t want to hear any arguments.”

  Torrie sat. People were making their way into the basement and lining up at the supper table. This church was smaller than the one in Grenada. It was going to be wall-to-wall eating. Her seat was in a corner and she was glad she was out of the way. Her mother came back with a plate and a plastic cup. “This is 7UP, you’ll drink that, won’t you? None of this has meat so it should be perfectly all right.”

  Her mother hadn’t done badly. The plate held green-bean casserole, carrot slaw, a roll with butter, macaroni and cheese, and a brownie. Torrie actually felt a little hungry, hollowed out, and anyway it was kind of nice to have her mother wait on her.

  “It looks good, Mom. Thanks. Oh. What did they do . . .”

  Her mother lowered her head to whisper. “It’s still raining, so they left her coffin in the sanctuary and they’ll inter her tomorrow with just the kids there.”

  Not that it made any real difference, but it seemed less awful that way, as if Martha wasn’t quite gone yet. Torrie ate a little macaroni and cheese, then some green beans. Her father came over and stood looking down at her. “How’s that mac and cheese?”

  “It’s good, Dad. You should get some.”

  “Your mother made turkey and gravy. Oh, I forgot, meat.”

  “That’s OK, Dad.” She thought of the sausage pizza. She was never going to eat pizza again. Her father patted the top of her head and moved off toward the supper line.

  Her brother Blake was next. He was wearing a corduroy sports coat he’d outgrown. He had monster arms and shoulders from working construction. She said, “That jacket just screams, ‘I haven’t dressed up since high school.’”

  “Hey Tor. Where were you?”

  “Up in the choir with the rest of the peanut gallery.”

  “Mom thought you’d been kidnapped.”

  “For real?” She was interested in this thought, wondering who, in Grenada, you could get to kidnap you. “No such luck.”

  “Yeah, she keeps thinking Patty Hearst.”

  Torrie made a sound of pained disgust. Blake just laughed. He didn’t get worked up about things, at least not about complicated things. Now that he was getting laid on a regular basis, he probably didn’t have a worry in the world. His eyes strayed over the crowd, no doubt looking for the skank, who for the first time in recent memory was more than three feet away from him. “OK, I gotta go. Catch you later.”

  “Later.” She ate a little of the slaw, since carrots were a healthy food, at least until you soaked them in mayonnaise. She moved her chair farther toward the wall so she could lean back. It was warm in the room and she felt sleepy, and glad she could sit and watch everybody moving, eating, talking, and nothing about them ever changed, and that was fine.

  “You awake?”

  She’d closed her eyes, and here was her brother Ryan standing over her. She had to remember all over again that he’d cut his hair. “Is everybody in the family going to come over and pay their respects?”

  “Not Anita. They went home already.” He sat down next to her.

  “Look,” Torrie said, indicating her plate. “Me. Food.”

  “It’s a start.”

  She poked him in the shoulder and ate a piece of buttered roll. She said, “Aren’t there wakes, funerals, where they have bars?”

  “I think you have to be Irish. Maybe Italian. This is OK, though. It’s so, I don’t know, normal.”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking sort of the same thing.”

  They watched a while longer from their corner. Their parents were sitting at a table with some of the Peersons, except that their mother got up about every three minutes the way she always did to make sure that her husband or somebody else had what they needed. And if you looked at all the other tables you could see the exact same thing, people doing what they always did, eating baked beans and ham and apple crisp, talking about the weather, the prices of corn and fuel, loans come due, people with bad luck or no luck, which often came down to simple laziness and lack of effort, the incomprehensible entity that was the government, and hadn’t the pastor given a beautiful and affecting homily.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, as if they’d been talking all along. “It’s like watching a big flock of cranes or something, all of them walking around and honking and flapping their wings and doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.”

  “OK,” Torrie said. “That’s a little strange, but I think I get it.”

  He stood up. “I was going to go back with Libby and Glen, hang out with them for a while. Unless you want me to drive back with you?”

  She shook her head. “Go. Try not to get arrested.”

  Of course her mother didn’t like the idea of her driving home by herself either, as if there really was some mad kidnapper out there, and Torrie pointed out that it had practically stopped raining, and her father said the only way this was going to happen was if Torrie waited until they were ready to leave and then if she drove ahead of them so they could keep track of her. Torrie rolled her eyes and said, “All right, gee,” stopping herself just in time to keep from saying jeez.

  She started her mother’s car and got the heater going and ran the wipers to clear off the windshield and then waited for her parents to get it together, saying good-bye, good-bye to everybody and her mother making sure she had her casserole dishes and serving spoons and nobody else’s. Her father started the car and Torrie flashed her lights at them and steered her way out of the church parking lot and to the crossroads and from there onto the highway.

  It wasn’t raining hard enough to keep the wipers running; they scraped and squeegeed over the glass. But every so often she had to flip them on and then off, otherwise the raindrops thickened and obscured her vision and it really was pretty dark out here, even if the road was straight as tape. Her father’s headlights reflected off the rearview mirror. She would have liked to explain to him that following too closely was a safety hazard. It was probably her mother fussing at him to keep up, keep up, and after a couple miles of this Torrie waved (they could probably see her hand) and sped up, gunning it on a flat stretch and leaving them behind, at least for a minute or two.

  She saw their headlights behind her, gaining ground, and gunned it again, knowing that her mother wouldn’t allow her father to exceed a certain speed, and finally the road was all hers, lonely and beautiful and noth
ing but the white line feeding beneath her wheels. She tried singing, since there was no such thing as a radio station out here, Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, but her voice was all wrong for that one. Singing along, flipping the windshield-wiper switch to on, one instant everything right and the next this shocking noise, impact, the smell of something burnt, the car skidding 180 degrees, the force of it slamming her to one side.

  The white lines tore away and she fought the skid, pumping the brakes, but the steering wheel jerked out of her hands and then there was nothing beneath her tires. The car was airborne but already seeking gravity, and in that long, floating, disbelieving second before it began to pitch and fall, Torrie thought that at least she wasn’t going to die a virgin.

  Chicago

  MARCH 1981

  The class was supposed to be reviewing the material on research methods, but they could hardly be blamed for wanting to talk about the president, the president getting shot. A momentous thing, even if by now it seemed certain that no permanent harm had been done. By now he was recovering, sitting up in his hospital bed and signing paperwork. By now everyone had heard of his joking with the doctors before the surgery: “I sure hope you’re all Republicans!” Say whatever else you wanted about the man, you had to admire his style.

  By now the grubby, pathetic shooter had been thoroughly jailed. By now there were public prayers, and people sending cards and teddy bears and flowers. Although a dead president would have been more solemn and dramatic, still they were all conscious that this was history, the taste and texture of it, and they should pay attention.