by Jeffrey Ford
I saw much more of my brother and sisters during those months than I had in a long time. Jim was a year older than me, married, and had three boys. He lived only two towns away from my parents and was very close to my father, having followed in his footsteps and become a machinist. Our lives had gone in different directions, and we hadn’t talked much in the intervening years since I had left home. While we conducted our deathwatch, he spoke a great deal, in a very self-assured manner. These utterances were more proclamations than any attempt to really communicate.
One evening, when we were all at the house during one of our weekend visits, I reached a point where the sight of my mother wasting away in that hospital bed, in that cramped room, became too much for me. I stepped away and went outside, around the corner of the house, to stand by the chimney where the irises always grew in spring. It was dark enough, so I took out a joint and lit up as surreptitiously as possible. Just as I was taking a big hit, Jim came around the corner. He saw me and stopped.
He shook his head and quietly laughed. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Catching a buzz.”
Then he stepped up close to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and hugged me. It lasted only seconds, and I was startled.
“I’m going out for some beer,” he said. “Let’s sit at the picnic table tonight and have a few.”
“Okay,” I said, and we did. In the shadow of the cherry tree, moonlight slipping through, he interweaved tales of personal success at work with smatterings of his fundamentalist, Lutheran dogma. His church had him interpreting the Book of Nehemiah. I nodded and drank one beer after another.
My sister Mary was six years younger than me. She was also married and had two boys. They lived in Brooklyn. Mary could easily cry or laugh at any situation, and often did both within a matter of seconds of one another. Both she and her husband, Jerry, were artists. He was into realism, creating very fine line drawings, whereas Mary made huge abstract paintings, amalgamations of colors that had never before met each other on canvas. Later, Mary’s creativity changed direction; the last time I visited their place, set all about the house were writhing amorphous lumps formed from chicken wire and papier-mâché.
My father was so dedicated to the care of our mother that he wouldn’t eat properly. When we would take him out to the local diner to make him eat, Jerry’d stay at the house with the children—seven boys in all. They all usually played a game of Wiffle ball in the backyard. If the boys got too raucous, Jerry would threaten, “If you don’t calm down, I’m going to have to have another beer.” By the time we’d arrive home from dinner, Jerry would be crocked, passed out on the living room lounger, and the boys would be sitting quietly watching a video.
In the last days before my father was forced to return my mother to the hospital, a mouse was spotted in the house, and I had a dream that it was a projection of my mother’s will, allowing her buried consciousness to dart around and overhear our conversations. One night I felt the little creature run the entire length of my body while I was sleeping on the couch. When I told Mary about my theory, she neither laughed nor cried, but merely nodded her head, and in earnest said, “Maybe.”
Dolores, the youngest of us siblings, was only a few years out of college, but she faced this family challenge head-on, and, more than any of us save my father, actually took on the grim practical tasks. She dealt with the nurses who came to the house in the morning and at night, making sure they turned our mother often to prevent bedsores. When the nurses failed to show, Dolores took over their tasks. Perhaps it was Dolores’s degree in philosophy that gave her the strength, though I doubt it. Her husband, Whitey, was an engineer, who I once watched sink 113 putts in a row on a roll-out green in his living room. He’d never before touched a golf club.
One night, after the boys were bedded down in their sleeping bags and most of the grown-ups had also retired, Dolores stood in the kitchen, hip propped against the drain board (my mother’s drinking spot from the old days), and, leaning toward me across the narrow room, whispered: “This nurse down the hall with the white nail polish and frizzed hair”—pointing with her finger close to her body—“she’s a trip. Real trailer trash, but a good nurse. She knows what she’s doing.” Dolores spoke so low then I had to turn my head to catch her words. “She told me she saw the coffee.”
“She saw ‘the coffee’?” I said.
“She told me that when people are very close to dying, they vomit up this brown grainy stuff that’s known as the coffee. She said she saw the coffee.”
“Man,” I said and grimaced.
Dolores just shook her head, which then gave way to silent laughter. Her attempts to suppress her giddiness made me laugh too. When we regained control, she wiped her eyes and said, in a normal voice, “Could you possibly…?”—one of my mother’s stock phrases from the days of wine and no roses.
Below the surface of this forced, seemingly amiable family reunion, there were secret tensions swirling. Mary’s husband got fed up with my brother’s decrees. When Jerry refused to carry out an order, Jim quietly offered to break his arm. Dolores was mad at Lynn, my wife, because, as a nurse, Lynn felt the care that my mother was receiving in the hometown hospital wasn’t the best. But no one wanted to hear it, especially Dolores, who had been working hard with what she had been handed. There were recriminations, judgments, clashes of style that lived only until they were voiced to my father, who crushed them one by one, like ants in the kitchen, with a single word—“Bullshit.” I, of course, laid low, my specialty perfected in childhood.
After she returned to the hospital for the last time, my mother soon fell into a coma that lasted for weeks. When I would think of her there, I always envisioned her room filled with bright sunlight and a view of the trees along the bay road. I never thought of her in the dark. To preserve this image, I never went to visit her during those final days. Dolores would call and complain to me that the nurses ignored our mother. “I’m afraid she’ll die of thirst,” she said. But I continued to make up excuses why I couldn’t drive up to Long Island. No matter what I told him, my father always said, “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you if anything changes.”
Then, in the middle of a particularly beautiful spring day, I took the boys out in the double stroller and we walked through the park and around the lakes. On our journey, passing through a small tract of woods, we came across a woman in a long raincoat and a man with a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. He looked a little like the actor Charles Bronson. A target with a bull’s-eye was set up against a tree no more than four feet from where the guy stood. While the woman smoked a cigarette and watched, he shot arrows into the target. I said hello to them as we passed, and the man turned and made an angry face at us. The weirdness of the people and the presence of the bow frightened me, and I picked up the pace.
“What the hell was that all about?” I said, once we were out of the woods.
“Robin Hood,” said Jack, the older of the two boys.
After we arrived back home and I was letting us into the house, the phone started ringing. It was Jim. “Mom’s gone,” he said, and in that instant, I pictured inside her mind, like a chamber in a deep cave, a candle going out.
On the afternoon of the wake, the immediate family was allowed a private viewing time before the other mourners arrived. My brother and sisters and I went with my father. We stepped into the parlor, made claustrophobic with floral wallpaper and dim light. I could look at my mother for only a second or two at a time. To me she was a frowning void in a turquoise dress. My father turned away and stepped to the back of the parlor. Facing the wall, he let out a sound I have never heard another person make. It was like the cry of an animal. Then his shoulders moved slightly and I could tell he was weeping. I wanted to approach him, but I could almost see an impenetrable aura around him that I knew I would never be able to pass through. A few minutes later, he dried his eyes and turned around to face the casket.
Through the entirety of
my mother’s illness, I had never seen my father show any emotion. Whatever needed to be done, he did. He always kept it light with my mother and never complained. Trying to continue at his job, taking care of her at home, the sleepless hours the nights the nurses failed to come, all had physically depleted him. He forgot to eat regularly and grew so thin we started referring to him as Gandhi. There were times when he was absolutely zombielike, stooped over, haggard, but somehow he continued to function.
When my brother and I were very young, our father took us out in the bay in an aluminum rowboat. He rowed way out by Captree Bridge. The water started to get choppy and the wavelets were slapping the prow, spraying water on us. Only minutes passed before the wind started to howl and the weather really got nasty. My father manned the oars—I can see the sleeves of his shirt rolled up over his biceps—and started rowing like a machine. There was never a look of concern on his face, even though we were heading against the wind. He held a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and rowed steadily with great determination until we reached the shore three quarters of an hour later. When we landed, he said, “That was a little hairy.” No matter how many short jabs to the head he had sustained through my mother’s illness, no matter how many body shots or pummelings in the corner, I knew that relentless oarsman was at work inside him, pulling for shore.
One night back at the beginning of my mother’s final decline, before any of us could know just how bad it was going to get, I found my father, at two in the morning, down in the basement—his new smoking lounge. Sitting in his bathrobe on a folding chair, beneath a bare bulb, surrounded by the chaos of Christmas decorations, Mary’s abstract paintings, mildewed books, and broken furniture, he pointed upstairs with the two fingers holding the burning cigarette and said to me, “I have to do this right.”
Throughout the days of the wake, strange occurrences were reported in my parents’ house. The television would turn itself on and off at will. This I personally witnessed, sitting in the living room at midnight drinking a beer. I was nowhere near the remote, and the television came on with a loud buzz to show a field of static snow. There were also strange knocking sounds in the walls, phone calls with only silence at the other end of the line, sudden cold breezes that blew down the hall, and photographs brushed off the wall.
These uncanny events brought to mind a student, an older Chinese woman, I had taught in a composition course a few years earlier, who had revealed to me her recipe for bird-spit soup. Mrs. Fan had written a paper about her husband’s death, in which she told how it was important, each night for a month following the death of a loved one, to stand at the table when dinner was served and moan loudly for a few minutes. This kept the loved one’s spirit centered, so as it waited for passage to the next world, it would not become confused and wander off on this earth to become a frustrated ghost.
The wake made me realize that it was so named because all one wanted to do was wake from it. Nothing I had ever experienced had been so much like a dream. Minutes became hours in the presence of the dead. In that flower-choked room, like a vault at the bottom of the ocean, people I had not seen or thought of in years approached me from every direction. I shook hands with guys I had lost track of in junior high school, relatives from Oklahoma I had met once when I was three. I could have sworn some of the older folks I chatted with had died years back. Mary and I called the two viewings each day the “matinee” and the “evening show.”
The morning of the burial a small service was held at the funeral home before the casket was taken to the church for “a critical mass,” as my father called it. At the gathering in the wake parlor, people were invited to share remembrances of my mother, read poems, and so on. My father had asked me to read a Tennyson poem he and my mother were fond of, “Crossing the Bar.” I agreed even though it didn’t seem like a very good choice to me. As I took the little red book in my hands and stepped up in front of the mourners, I was thinking instead of lines from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”: “Time a maniac scattering dust, Life a fury slinging flame.” I suddenly became aware that I was two lines into “Crossing the Bar.” Something inside me gave way, like a flywheel snapping, and I put the book down on the table in front of me, excused myself, and left the room.
The next thing I knew I was outside the funeral home, and Lynn was standing in front of me. The day was cool and beautiful.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “That’s okay. Do you feel all right?”
I lit a cigarette and shook my head. “Lame.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “your brother jumped up, grabbed the book, and finished the reading.”
We both laughed, but I had a brief memory flash of being sick as a child, dizzy and weak, calling to my mother from the top of the stairs. I started to pass out, and the last thing I saw was Jim charging up the steps to catch me as I fell forward.
Lynn asked me if I wanted to go back inside.
I flicked the butt away. She took my hand and we returned to the parlor.
The church was a vaulted rib cage of wooden beams, frozen saints subtly winking in the stained-glass light of Christ’s stations, dolorous music, and incense-laden intonations mixed with muffled groans and sniffles. In all, a blur to me, save for the heft of the casket on the way out to the hearse. It was only then, when we slid my mother’s shiny canoe into the back of the car, that my senses returned.
Lynn and I and our two boys rode in a limo along with my parents’ neighbors from across the street, Dan and Rose Curdmeyer. Old Dan was blotto, eyes red, hands quivering, reeking of VO; when the car took a sharp turn, he’d lean way over. Each time, Rose straightened him up nonchalantly, while recounting in her brogue stories of her adventures with Nan and my mother. The cemetery was some distance out on Long Island, the trip was slow, and the car hot as hell. Without warning, my son Jack puked on the black leather seat. Dan’s eyes widened for a moment, he burped, and Rose merely said, “The poor darlin’.”
A high chain-link fence surrounded the cemetery. A few hundred yards down the road from the entrance stood an abandoned strip joint whose sign still clearly read INN OF A THOUSAND EYES. The grounds of the cemetery were vast, green lawns rolling into the distance, here and there sprouting rows of gravestones. The procession of cars wound through the grounds and then stopped a quarter of a mile inside the gate at a spot where tree-lined roads intersected.
Cemetery employees—men and women dressed in black uniforms, like tuxedos—herded us about, and at one point had our entire immediate family, and then the extended family, line up. A woman carrying a huge armful of yellow roses walked down the line and distributed a flower to each of us. When our turn came, we were to walk forward and toss our flower onto the casket, which hovered, as if by magic, over the open grave.
Jack, who was feeling better by then, held my hand as we moved up in line. He pulled at my jacket and I looked down. He was pointing at my flower.
“Pink,” he said.
I nodded to him. He moved his arm slowly so that it scanned the other mourners in our line. Then I realized what he was trying to tell me. The rose I had been given, from the dozens that had been distributed, was the sole pink one.
“We win,” he whispered.
I put my finger to my lips and gave his hand a squeeze.
Following the funeral, there was a party back at the house on Pine Avenue. I spent the afternoon hanging out in the backyard, eating potato salad, drinking beer, and talking to cousins I hadn’t seen in years. Charlie, who was studying Chinese herbal medicine, told me how to make a hallucinogen from crushing and boiling locust shells. Dylan described to me the plot of Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction book, Communion. My uncle Darrel, who sold insurance and worked part-time as a Walt Whitman impersonator, raked his fingers through his great gray beard and lectured me about quitting smoking. Eventually, everybody but my sisters went home. My father had disappeared into his room and fallen asleep fully clothed on the bed. Do
lores offered to wake him before Lynn and I and the kids left for South Jersey, but I told her not to.
Two days later, I called my father to see how he was getting along. He told me that the night of the funeral he woke up with a splitting headache, so he went down into the basement to have a cigarette.
“There’s a good idea,” I said.
“It didn’t help. The pain was really bad, I could hardly see. I went upstairs, found the Tylenol and took about half a bottle of them.”
“Jeez,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it made me feel dizzy, so I decided to go out in my car and drive around with the window open.”
“Hey, why not?” I said.
“I felt like I was going to pass out, so I pulled the car over and parked. Then I passed out.”
“How long were you out for?” I asked.
“Not long, a couple of minutes maybe. I realized I hadn’t eaten in about three days, so I drove to the all-night deli and bought a half pound of turkey breast.”
“How was the driving?” I asked.
“A little wobbly.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“I ate that turkey like a sideshow geek,” he said. “Right in front of the store.”
“Did anybody see you?”
“Who gives a shit? I stumbled to the car, got back in, and drove home.”
“What then?”
“I went to bed and woke up the next morning.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
“Yeah, sure, but wait a second…By morning I was feeling fine. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside and sat on the back stoop. It was a nice day. I was just sitting there, thinking, when suddenly I heard this loud cracking sound. I thought maybe the neighbor behind us was working on his house. A few minutes passed, and then I heard it again, only louder. I looked up and saw some twigs and crap fall out of the oak tree in the back. I looked closer and noticed it was swaying slightly. And then there came a sound of splintering wood and a crack so loud I jumped! I watched that giant oak tree break nine-tenths of the way to its base and just fall. It crushed the tool shed, blasted apart your mother’s bus stop thing, and sheared off one side of the cherry tree.”