Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  Still, they weren’t sure. They got out of the car, walked across the caterpillar softness of moss furred up through parchment leaves, around to the back of the cabin. He was sitting on the porch, reading, a can of soda on the weathered table beside him.

  “Philip!” Trace shouted.

  He looked up. “Mom! Dad! What’re you doing here?”

  Giddy with relief, they looked at each other, then back to Philip. “We were just looking for you,” Trace said.

  Philip shook his head, shaking loose from his disbelief. “Well, come on in!” He moved toward the rail. “You’ll have to come in this way, the front door’s padlocked. I’m an…unregistered guest.”

  “Philip! You mean you broke in?” Laura said.

  “I didn’t break in, Mom. I just…let myself in. We kids learned the secrets of this place long ago.” He reached over the rail and gave her his hand and she put her foot on the edge of the porch and swung herself up and over the rail. Trace followed and they stood there. Philip began, “I just came out here. I thought I could study here where it’s quiet. I thought…” But his shoulders heaved and the three of them came together, their arms around one another, the sounds of the river and the woods mingling with his sobs. “Thanks,” he said, snuffling into his sleeve.

  They stepped apart. “Well, come in,” Philip said.

  At first, they couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Then their eyes picked out the shapes of fireplace and table, a white porcelain sink, the shine of stove burners, stacks of white dishes piled against a dark wall. Philip groped for the light switch. “I don’t turn it on much,” he said. “Saves on the utilities.”

  His sleeping bag covered the cot in the main room. On the table by the cot were more books, and a white envelope. Even in the dim light, they could see the envelope bore Philip’s name and his school address. It was in Annie’s writing.

  “It’s the letter she wrote me last year, about coming here,” he said.

  Laura nodded, her eyes fixed on the white paper. How could it be—Annie’s letter here and she gone?

  She drew her eyes away to look around the cabin again. Through the doorway, she saw the two bedrooms, the partition between them going halfway to the ceiling. They used to throw pillows back and forth over the partition—she and Annie in one room, Trace and the boys in the other—laughing and scrambling over the beds.

  Trace and Philip were talking. “How long you planning to stay?” Trace asked.

  Philip looked at his watch. “I could get back before dark if I start soon.”

  They helped him pack up, load his bicycle baskets. Together, they drove to a diner and had ham sandwiches and coffee, steaming and dark in heavy glass mugs. Philip talked about school and they talked about Woodbridge and Laura told about being in Hadley with Rachel. “There’s a question I want to ask you.” She said it gently. “When Grandma dies…”

  Yes, it was all right with him.

  They drove him back to the cabin. The sun had shifted, thrown its light on the grooved log wall, the winter-dingy window, the steps where often they had stood, lined up together, while some kind passerby took their picture.

  Philip unchained his bicycle, hugged them good-bye. “I did get some stuff done. It’s not like I wasted time.” He straddled the bike, one foot braced against the earth to keep from falling, the other on the pedal, ready to push off. “I don’t know what I hoped to find here, anyway.” There was a touch of laughter in his voice. “Maybe you guys—I don’t know.”

  He pedaled off. Laura and Trace got in the car and drove out of Argonne Woods and home. It was after dark when they got there. As they drove in, the headlights picked up tiny crescents of deep rose against the bark of the tree. The redbud was starting to come out!

  Sooner than anyone other than perhaps Rachel herself had expected—four days after the trip to Argonne Woods—a call came from Carlena. “Laura, your mother died an hour ago. The doctor was just here. But I knew.” She was crying. “Forgive me, dear. I never get used to it.”

  Laura’s hand tightened on the phone. “Tell me.” She listened and in her mind was an image of the ocean floor being pulled away like a rug beneath the waves.

  “I gave her tea. She drank it. I was in the next room. All I heard was a sigh. I came back and she was gone.”

  Tears flooded Laura’s eyes. She sat down in the rocking chair in the kitchen and rocked back and forth, listening to Carlena, holding the phone against her cheek.

  *

  O, Thou that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace, and to her a safe passage and a glad reunion. “Rebecca…Lilly! And aren’t they beautiful.” Will…Annie… “Give them my love.” And at our life’s end a sweet repose. God be thanked for her. Receive her unto her own. Mother! She is coming now through trees, and she is coming into the room at night, to take away all cares with the touch of her hand, and she is standing luminous and still in the yellow silk dress and the amber beads, and she is fading away into the night—she who slipped from earth an hour ago. And who will succor us from the long darkness? Who will hold our head in her lap and keep us safe from hunger, cold, desertion, and the fear of death?

  You in whose stead the passion of lovers yearns in the lust of the body for another home to fuse into home everlasting, but no more home than you… You the home expelled from in the breaking of the waters… The dream of return grows dim and wise and is, in time, forgotten in the brain, or, if not forgotten, protected from, for there is pain, still, in the frayed edges of our leaving, in the jagged torn flesh of our separation and the imperfect closing over of that wound whereby we who were one became two—at birth first, and then again and again. And she torn from me, too, and then again before I was ready. What shall save us (now daughter, now mother), we who in the middle of our life are told that our mother dies and, having neither mother nor daughter, turn to ourself in pain and sorrow and know as a desperate surprise that we shall prevail. Once more, we shall prevail. And who may abide?

  *

  “Yes, Carlena, yes. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  Bart and Paula were in the next room. The four of them had eaten dinner together, but Trace had gone to a department meeting. Bart came into the room—he had overheard. There were tears in his eyes. She stood and he put his arms around her. She leaned into him, crying. “It’s quite a thing, to lose your mother.”

  He nodded, his breath a sob. He was already feeling it in the arms in which he now enfolded her.

  Paula came to the doorway. She and Laura hugged one another. “Want to come and sit on the couch with us?” Paula asked.

  They went and sat together, one on either side of her, and they talked about Rachel.

  They heard Trace’s car as it pulled in the driveway. He walked into the room. Laura stood. “Trace—”

  He stopped.

  “Carlena called awhile ago. Mother died this evening.”

  “Oh, Laura!” They held each other; his arms around her pressed tight. “Oh,” he said again. His chest rose, trembled, once.

  They called Philip. He would meet them at the airport in Massachusetts. Bart and Paula went home to pack. Laura went into the white-walled room, her daughter’s room, and got the box of ashes and put it in her suitcase.

  *

  At the house in Hadley, they all gathered—Lillian and Richard, Howard and Irene. Lillian and Richard’s children had come with them from Michigan. Over the phone, talking about funeral arrangements, Laura had told her brother and sister, “We want to bury Annie’s ashes next to Mother’s.” It had been a grief for them, too. They were satisfied to share it now.

  The service would be the day after tomorrow. They went and looked at the body of their mother, their grandmother. They talked with the neighbors, talked with the lawyer, talked with the minister. He told them, “She did not understand why she should live and Annie should die.” They nodded. Who could understand? “But later, she was able to put those questions aside.”

  They roamed around
the house. They talked with one another. Laura and Howard and Lillian would return later, for the disposition of the household.

  They had given the newspaper a list of Rachel’s associations. The obituary appeared on an inside page, at the top of the column of death notices. “When our father died,”—Howard noted—“his picture was on the front page.” He had been a city luminary. Not so for her. “You are my life work,” she had said.

  Laura called Ginny’s number. No answer. Fred would be in Cancun. It was just as well. She would get in touch with him later.

  The funeral director called with a question: “Do you want her wedding band to stay with her?”

  Laura had taken the call. The idea was abhorrent to her. Destroy their mother’s gold ring in a fire? “No, we’d like to have it.”

  She reported the conversation to Lillian and Howard, who agreed. In the disposition of their mother’s jewelry, it was the wedding band she chose. She slipped it on her finger, above her own. It fit her finger perfectly.

  *

  The hour for the funeral came. They were seated in a side room reserved for the family. The service was brief and uninspiring. It didn’t matter. The occasion spoke for itself. Laura remembered the service for Annie—how carefully they had planned it. There had been outrage and tragedy to moderate. Here there was only grief, and thanksgiving.

  At the cemetery, they gathered again, huddled, waiting, as the cars pulled slowly along the road. A slight wind blew.

  Trace and Laura stood together.

  “Are you sure you want to?” Laura whispered.

  “Yes. I can do it alone if you’d rather.”

  “No. If you do it, I want to be part of it.” It would not have been her choice, to do it themselves, lower the box of their daughter’s ashes into the ground. He had suggested it. “Is it a common custom?” she’d asked, uncertain. “It’s sometimes done,” he said. She didn’t want to press him—if it was important to him, if it would help him, she would not demur. But she didn’t want him doing it without her.

  “I’ll tell you when it’s time,” he said.

  The service proceeded. The minister was reading from a service book. “We are here to commit to the earth the ashes of Rachel Taylor and of Anne Randall.” He was facing Rachel’s grave. Laura watched, the scene blurred to greens and browns, a slur of red and pink and yellow where the flowers were, near the two mounds of earth—the piles narrow and high. The breaks in the surface of earth looked small, no wider than the spread of a man’s hand. The boxes were there, a small carrying loop affixed to the top of each. Her heart raced, hurt; her fingers were chilled in the wind, though the sun shone. Philip and Bart stood close; Howard and Lillian and the others, too. She heard sobbing.

  The minister’s voice halted; he looked up. Trace touched her elbow. “Now.”

  They stepped forward, away from the others, across the unmarred grass, past the headstone for Will, past Rachel’s ashes, the mound of earth, and to the second grave, the second pile of dirt, the second small box, the outer wrapping now removed and an inner wrapping, white, covering the stiff square container.

  Trace started to kneel. She followed him. “All right,” he whispered. He moved a hand slowly forward, waiting for her to move with him, and together they picked up the box and carried it the several inches to the deep place in the earth and together they began to lower it, their arms pressed against each other’s—hand to hand, wrist to wrist, forearm to forearm.

  The hole was deeper than she’d thought. She was almost to her shoulder and she felt no solid earth stopping the descent of the box. Panic invaded her heart. She might have to drop it, let go too quickly. It was the trapdoor again, falling away. She could not bear the thought of it—the box dropping, thudding into the hole.

  She whispered to him—she was shivering, sick at her stomach—“I can’t reach down any farther.”

  Immediately, his voice was there, the pressure of his elbow steady against her arm, his shoulder inching forward. “It’s all right. I’ve got it. You can let go.”

  And so she did.