The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  I was surprised to hear my father’s voice on the line. He never phoned me. He never phoned anybody. He always had Mom do it, then stood beside her and told her what to say.

  “Jacqueline, you need to come home.”

  “Dad?”

  “Tonight. Right now.”

  I didn’t ask why. I already knew why. I could hear it in his voice. He never called me Jacqueline. “I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday. There’s money waiting for you at Western Union. Use it to fill your gas tank.”

  I didn’t bother saying goodbye to anyone. I just jumped the deck rail, circled around to the driveway and hopped in my car. As I pulled away from the house, I looked back and saw Jenny standing at her front door, as still as a pillar of salt.

  9

  She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

  —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, THE SCARLET LETTER

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I had to do was buy a decent dress. My father wore the same black suit that he only wore to funerals. He’d bought it several years ago, when it seemed like every other week someone he knew was dying. “I’ve had a lot of good use out of this suit,” Dad said as we rode in the limo behind the hearse. “As you get older, it’s a good idea to invest in a decent suit of clothes appropriate for the occasion. And when it’s my time, you can bury me in it.”

  They buried my mother next to my brother in Pastor Corner, a small, cedar-fringed garden in the oldest part of the Masonic Cemetery in Pocahontas, Arkansas. Somebody at the funeral said, “Lucy will be happy now,” and I thought, yes, she would be. I didn’t believe there was a heaven where she and Sean could finally be together again, but no doubt as the arterial bubble in her brain ruptured and the fearful darkness closed over her head, she probably consoled herself with that thought—Soon I’ll see him. My little brother had died too young, and not once since the day of his murder had I seen my mother truly, completely happy. Sean had been her baby.

  There were only two empty plots remaining in the corner where they buried some of the first pilgrims to settle in Pocahontas. Dad and I were all that was left of the old family name of Pastor, which was really Pasteur. Lyons was my married name, though I was no longer married. I don’t know why I kept my ex-husband’s name. Maybe I didn’t want to go back to being a Pastor. That name didn’t belong to me anymore. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just give myself a new name without having to marry into it. But it wasn’t worth dealing with the courts and the Social Security Administration. Even if I changed my name, I’d still be Jackie Lyons. Jackie Pastor had passed away a long time ago.

  The funeral was held at the church where Mom and Dad were married. I hadn’t sat in those pews in over twenty years. Some of the faces were new, but the church hadn’t changed at all, except that everyone was a stranger to me, even those I should have remembered.

  None stranger than my father. He took it all in perfect stride, a picture of Southern gentility, dressed like a don in his black suit with the black armband and the white carnation in his buttonhole. The only sign of grief he showed was when we were waiting for the service to start. He leaned over and whispered, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your mother going first.” As the first song began, he added, “We had it all planned out,” and winked at me with a tear in his eye. Just one. That’s all he had for her.

  When I was ten years old, I had sat in this same church pew looking at my grandfather’s shark fin of a nose sticking up from his open casket. I was too short to see anything else of him. A few years later, my brother’s casket sat in the same spot, but it was closed. Both funeral services were pretty much the same as this one. The same songs, the same litany, the same praises and exhortations to celebrate a life lived well in the service of God Almighty whose wisdom is never-ending and whose ways are as mysterious as the stars and the sea. Only the names changed, meaningless names, one funeral blending into another as the years between shrank into nothingness.

  Yet there was some subtle difference to my mother’s funeral that I couldn’t nail down. It started to bother me even before the final amen. At first I thought they had shortened the service. I remembered it being much longer, but back then I was just a kid, when ten minutes seemed a lifetime. Still, something was missing.

  I couldn’t let it go.

  We sat at the dining room table because all the furniture in the living room was crowded with people, most of them women dressed in funereal black, perched on the arms of couches and chairs like crows. The church organist, old Mrs. Passwater, sat at the table next to me and sketched with her finger on its undusted surface the recent history of deaths and divorces in Pocahontas. The Passwaters were another of those indigenous town families like the Pastors, older than the oldest houses, older even than the trees that dropped dead limbs on their roofs when it stormed. Mrs. Passwater had played the organ at my parents’ wedding, and she’d played it at my mother’s funeral. Old Mr. Passwater was killed in Sicily during the war, fighting for General Patton. He had never been old, but that’s what we called him. Mrs. Passwater still had the general’s letter where he said her husband was a hero and a patriot, writing:

  The meek and pious have a place,

  And necessary are,

  But valor pales their puny rays,

  As does the sun a star.

  Every Sunday service before Memorial Day, she read these lines to live by. She had never remarried, keeping the memory of her hero husband Corporal John Passwater foremost in her heart.

  It turned out that most of the women fussing over my father were either widowed or divorced. They took it in relays to bring food from the kitchen or freshen his drink any time his ice looked like melting. Sometimes they even brought me a nibble. I watched my father wolf down a bowl of peach cobbler as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks. As soon as it was empty, the bowl was replaced by a slice of apple pie. I said, “This is less a funeral than a holiday.”

  “It’s a celebration of your mother’s life.” He sucked a bourbon toddy down to the ice and set the empty glass on the table. It was immediately whisked away, hey presto, like magic. “She would have wanted it this way. Besides, there’s no sense in wasting good pie. Or good bourbon, thank you, Melanie.” This was to the redhead who brought him a new drink.

  “That’s pretty near her real color, too,” Mrs. Passwater whispered.

  I couldn’t help noticing the difference between this house and Jenny’s. Two small towns, two untimely deaths, yet this one really was a celebration, as contrived as that always sounded, while Jenny’s was … what? Here, there were people constantly in and out of the house, kids playing in the yard, men on the porch smoking and drinking, widows in the kitchen conducting cold-war evolutions against each other as they plotted angles on my father. At Jenny’s, her neighbors had dropped off green-bean casserole and buckets of fried chicken, but none had stayed to comfort her. Her kids had no friends their own age to play with (Nathan didn’t count) and help them forget their grief, even for a little while.

  My mother seemed too young to have died of a stroke, but when I mentioned this, Mrs. Passwater said, “Your grandfather, Dr. Pastor, was your mother’s age when he died, and his was a stroke, too.” I had always thought of my grandfather as ancient, only slightly younger than the hill upon which he perished. In my mind he was this frightful old dentist, with smelly breath and clean fingers, who still haunted the upper precincts of the house and used to wake me in the night with his ghostly pocket watch ticking in my ear. My mother was still the young woman who used to dress me up in pretty things and send me out to play, only to discover me naked and swinging like Jane in the neighbor’s trees.

  Neither of them had aged in my memory; one remained dreadfully old, the other strangely youthful, and I supposed they would always be that way now.

  * * *

  Eventually the house poured our visitors out in drips and drabbles and left my father and me alone, truly
alone. We sat at the dining room table. There was a bottle between us now, and a bucket of ice, and a world of silence. He wouldn’t look at me, but his lip got stiffer with every drink.

  Finally, he pulled off his black armband and tossed it on the table. He stood up and walked to the den with the graceful stagger of a gentlemanly drunk, one hand ready to catch himself against the nearest wall and prevent his drink from spilling.

  “This is where I found her,” he said, pointing to a place on the rug by the television. “She got up sometime during the night. I thought she had gone to use the bathroom. When she didn’t return, I looked for her.”

  He stood over the spot, absently caressing it with his socked foot. “I don’t know why she came downstairs. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to bother me. When I found her, she was still breathing, but the light had gone from her eyes. She didn’t see me, didn’t hear me. It was already too late.”

  He brushed against the door and caught himself on the doorknob. “But that’s not what’s bothering you,” he said.

  “It doesn’t feel like she’s gone,” I said.

  He staggered back to the table and slid into his chair. “I know what you mean.”

  Did he? I had been seeing her ever since we got home from the cemetery. She’d be in the kitchen or the den or somewhere, but when I looked, it was another woman or the edge of the china cabinet or the shadow of a drape. I wasn’t seeing her ghost so much as my own memories of her. It was like we’d gone to somebody else’s funeral. She should have been there beside us, playing the gracious hostess, a role she had mastered ages ago. Her absence was an aching hollow.

  “Everything just feels unfinished, somehow,” I said.

  “What if we finish this bottle?” He held it up to the light. It was about half full. “Would it be finished then?”

  “Maybe.”

  He made us fresh toddies and we clinked glasses. My old man could mix a damn good cocktail, but I had a difficult time enjoying it. I heard her walking around upstairs. Or maybe it was my grandfather. Dad didn’t seem to notice. We had never talked about my special friends. Considering all that had happened over the last few days, and how their sudden reappearance always seemed to presage my life falling apart, I figured it was about time I told him.

  “What time did you say Mom passed?”

  “I didn’t say. I’m not sure what time it was. After midnight, I think. I left the hospital around five in the morning.”

  “I was in jail.” He looked a little surprised as he sipped his drink. “There were two other women in my cell. Sometime during the night, an elderly woman came to the door and asked for me. My cellmates said she told them not to wake me.”

  He glanced at me over the rim of the glass, his eyebrows wrinkling his forehead. “You think it was your mother?”

  “The jail doesn’t allow visitors at night.”

  I couldn’t read his eyes. He blinked once, then drained his glass. He set it down with a shrug. “Maybe it was her.”

  It was my turn to look a little surprised.

  He smiled. “Jacqueline, it’s just like you to think you’re the only person in the world who ever saw a ghost.”

  “Have you seen Mom?”

  I think I hoped he had, but he shook his head no. “Now, your grandfather is a different matter. He’s still hanging around.”

  “You know about him?”

  He chuckled at my surprise, then waved his hand vaguely at the ceiling. “You can still smell him sometimes. He had a distinctive smell, something you never forget.”

  “Like coffee and cigarettes,” I said.

  “And hair tonic and wool and body odor. Your grandfather only bathed on Saturdays.”

  “Sean and I tried to tell you.” A light shone suddenly in the window. A car had pulled into the driveway. Dad leaned back in his chair and parted the curtain to see who it was. “But you didn’t believe us.”

  “You were just kids, scared to death. What was I supposed to say? Yes, your grandfather’s ghost lives in the attic, now go back to bed?”

  He walked to the door, opened it, stepped outside and closed it behind him. I finished my drink and left the glass on the table while I fetched a slice of chess pie from the fridge. When I returned, Dad was still outside. I peeped through the curtains and saw him talking to the redhead from the funeral. I sat down and ate the slice of pie, then made another drink. While I was pouring, the car backed out of the driveway. Dad waited until it was gone before he returned.

  He didn’t tell me about his visitor and I didn’t ask. He just said, “Did you make your old man one of those?” So I made him a toddy and got another slice of pie from the fridge and watched him eat it.

  “So who picked out Mom’s dress?” They had buried her in a hideous black fringed thing with tiny white flowers, sequins, and pearl snap buttons, something she’d have never worn while she was alive.

  “Deedee Mills took care of everything for me.”

  “I wish they had done a better job with her face.” I don’t know why I was bringing this up. I knew I sounded like some grumpy old maiden aunt complaining about the fecklessness of the mortician. I don’t know why I wanted my mother to look like the woman I knew instead of some wax effigy poured by someone working from a bad photograph.

  I liked the way they did things back in my grandfather’s day. People used to keep their dead at home until it was time to bury them, instead of sending them off to be powdered and puffed up with facial prosthetics by medical school dropouts. Because when you lived with the dead taking up the dining room table or the parlor or the bed, with the smell of them getting a little riper every hour, you got used to the idea they were dead and after a few days of having them around, you were finally ready to put them in the ground. Glad to put them in the ground, glad to be rid of them so you could move on. Because they were only meat, and rotting meat at that, and the funeral was a release from grief, a thing to be welcomed, realized, and got through and put behind you, rather than dreaded and avoided. Because the funeral is just the beginning of grief, and because we tidied it up and perfumed and preserved it, people could go on pretending their loved ones weren’t dead for a couple more days, until the day we laid her in the ground and pushed the dirt in the hole, and stood a rock up over her and carved into it her name, a couple of ultimately meaningless dates, and maybe a lie or two, until even the names and dates and lies were erased, until even the meaning of the rock itself was forgotten and it was pulled up and used as a doorstop and the field was plowed over and planted, until some day someone decided to put a highway through and they unearthed her bones with a backhoe and called in some college professor to bend over her with his patient brush and his dentist tools and pronounce, Here lies a woman.

  So the grief started out stunted and deformed and pretended and only realized at the end, when they filled in the hole. That’s why you see those little crosses and wreaths all up and down the highway—people can’t let go of the dead because we create the illusion of burying them alive, or if not alive, then not entirely dead either. You end up suffering your grief alone with nothing but the memory of that lifelike body lying in the cold airless dark all alone, listening to the descending convocation of politic worms.

  Maybe that’s why I hated my father so much at that moment. He was moving on, eating his pie and drinking his bourbon and already thinking about tomorrow’s redhead. Maybe he could do that because he had a chance to say goodbye to her, while I had avoided her telephone calls and slept through her last attempt to reach out to me. Who was I to judge the dryness of his wrinkled face? Where were my own tears?

  “Didn’t she know I was staying the night?” I asked Dad.

  “Who?”

  “That redhead from the funeral.”

  The bastard didn’t answer. He got up and put his plate on the kitchen counter and poured his ice out in the sink. I followed him, my insides buzzing like a horsefly, itching to shoot my heart out of a cannon against the white hump
of his infidelity.

  “I guess there’ll be no end to the pussy now,” I said, spat.

  He set his glass in the sink. I think I grieved him more than the passing of his wife of fifty years. I always was his favorite. At least I got to be somebody’s favorite. “Do you think your mother was stupid, Jackie?” He stared out the kitchen window into the dark.

  “No.”

  “Do you think she could be married to me all these years and not know?”

  “Do you think she enjoyed living a lie, Daddy?”

  “Your mother enjoyed being married to me. She accepted what came with that, the good and the bad. I can’t help the way I am. I loved your mother, but I loved other women, too. Some of them very dearly. It wasn’t just the sex, but that’s all you could ever see. Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve never been able to love more than one thing or one person or one idea at a time. You’re either mad in love, or you’re crazy with hate. You’re old enough to know by now that people are nothing if not a rat’s nest of contradictions. Even the people we love.”

  “Yeah, I keep forgetting how complicated you are,” I stabbed from hell’s own heart. “How many sacrifices you made to keep your marriage together. But that’s all over now. You’re free to chase all the tail you want.”

  He passed without looking at me, shuffled wearily down the hall and climbed to the top of the stairs. He stopped with his hand gripping the wooden rail. He looked old. He had aged a hundred years before my eyes, this frail, tottering old drunk. “I’m going to bed.”

  I stayed downstairs, because I had to finish something, even if it was only a bottle of whiskey.

  10

  I WOKE ON THE PORCH SWING ABOUT eleven in the morning, my throat as dry as an old eraser, the singing of the birds in the trees like fingernails clawing the blackboard of my skull. Dad sat in a glider rocker reading the morning paper, a tray at his elbow with two glasses and a sweaty pitcher of orange juice. I grabbed an empty glass and poured it to the brim, downed about half of it before I started tasting the vodka. I surfaced long enough for a breath of air, then finished it off and wiped the crust from my lips with the back of my hand.