After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  #

  The funeral. There’s maybe forty people. The church, so empty. The downside of a long life: so few friends left to mourn you, to witness you home.

  My brother and I give eulogies. My mother tells us she cannot. “The ‘petition-the-Lord’ thing,” she says. “I’ll do that instead.”

  #

  I drive us home from Resurrection. My mother and Brooke and me. At the gate to the cemetery, waiting for a break in traffic, I think: At last my grandmother is where she wants to be. Next to him. Her little Franta.

  GRAVE 4

  LOT 13

  BLOCK 21

  SECTION 59

  #

  As we approach home, we pass a meadow and some woods. Standing quiet in the lowering sun are twenty, maybe thirty deer.

  “Lookit,” Brooke says. “Let’s stop.”

  We sit on the side of the road, watching, none of us speaking. Every so often another one or two emerge from the woods on the far edge of the meadow.

  Then my mother says, “Where’s the Ritz?”

  She’d packed snacks—Ritz crackers, a tin of Planters, bottles of water. “It’s going to be a long day,” she said in the morning, before we left her house for the funeral home. “It’s good to have something to keep our energy up.”

  From the backseat, Brooke hands her a sleeve of crackers sealed in brown wax paper.

  My mother opens the door and the next thing I know, she’s walking into the field.

  She clutches the crackers in her outstretched arm, like she’s a missionary holding her crucifix aloft, approaching wary natives on the riverbank, her birch-bark canoe put ashore behind her. The deer go on eating. My mother walks toward a large buck in the center of the herd, his head crowned with a broad rack of antlers. He lifts his head and considers her. My mother stands less than an antler’s worth away. My mother looks at him and then opens her tube of crackers and places one in her palm. The buck shifts toward her, lowers his head, and slowly, gently, nuzzles the cracker from my mother’s hand. He chews it, orangey flakes falling from his wet black lips. My mother reaches out and touches the thick of his neck. The buck is motionless as she strokes him, softly. And then my mother offers up to him another cracker and once again he eats from her palm. My mother looks back toward us, a smile on her face.

  Other deer start to move toward her.

  Brooke says, “I think you better go help your mother.”

  I go to my mother like a man navigating a minefield. I don’t want to spook them.

  By the time I get to my mother, the deer have formed a soft circle around her. But they’re polite. Standing there, waiting patiently for a Ritz. My mother beams.

  “Take some, Mike,” and she gives me a fistful.

  I start to hand out the crackers. Wet tongues snatch them from my hand. When we’re out of crackers, my mother says to the deer, “Sorry, guys. Holy Communion is over.”

  From her wax paper sleeve she shakes the crumbs into her palm, scatters the remains over the meadow.

  #

  Later the night of the funeral, I find my mother sitting in her Solitaire Chair in the kitchen, papers in her hand.

  “Well, that’s odd,” she says. “Take a look at Cause of Death.”

  She hands me my grandmother’s death certificate.

  “How did you get this?” I say.

  “They gave it to me at the funeral home this morning. They do that for you.”

  Under CAUSE(S) OF DEATH the medical examiner has written

  1. Anorexia

  2. Dementia

  “What do you think of that?” she says, looking to me.

  “I guess it’s the truth,” I say. “She didn’t want to eat anymore.”

  She folds the paper and returns it to the envelope. This is what we should have done with my father’s death certificate all those years ago: sit around the kitchen table, pass it around, discuss it.

  # # #

  The next week, I return to Ohio. Bobbie’s sister-in-law Teresa tells me to meet her at a strip mall on the edge of Tiffin. “There’s a coffee place there,” she writes in her e-mail. “You’ll see it.”

  But outside town, I get lost. And my cell phone gets no coverage. I find myself on a street that dead-ends at a railroad track. There’s a little building. Tate’s Chainsaw & Small Engine. A deer hide is stretched and drying near the door. I knock to ask directions. No answer. Finally, a watchman tells me how to find what I’m looking for.

  #

  The only people in the place are a man and a woman at a table in the window.

  “Teresa?”

  “You must be Michael.”

  I tell them I’m sorry I’m late.

  “That’s okay,” Teresa says. “Tim decided to come. I’m glad he did.”

  They’re in their early fifties. He has short sandy hair, close-cut. He leans on the table, and his forearms, exposed by the pushed-up sleeves on his OSU sweatshirt, are powerful. She sits beside him, her hand on top of his. Her hair is reddish brown and wavy. She’s wearing a faded sweatshirt from Put-in-Bay, Ohio. “The Key West of the North,” it says. Around her neck there’s a small metal pendant, electro-engraved with a portrait of a young boy.

  I tell them my story.

  Teresa says, “We were thinking you might be his son.”

  I tell them that I came because I want to know who Bobbie was. “What can you tell me about her?”

  She had blue eyes. She was tall and skinny. What was she—five feet eight, maybe? She loved animals, but she was allergic to cats. She looked like Meryl Streep. Or sometimes Audrey Hepburn? She smoked like a chimney. Never dated much in high school. She was devoted to her mother. Called several times a week. She loved jewelry. She was a bad driver. When she was sixteen, she broke her father’s shoulder in a car accident. She had a bubbly personality. Her father was very protective of her. She loved to travel.

  “Did she ever talk about that night?”

  “Never,” Teresa says. “It was just understood that we could never ask her about her personal life. And we certainly knew we could never ask her about that night. When I came into the family, Tim’s mother took me aside and told me what had happened. She told me it upset Bobbie very much and that we just didn’t talk about it. I don’t think Bobbie’s father even knew.”

  “My mother never told him,” Tim says. “He was very protective of Bobbie. He had a hard time with the idea of her going off to college.”

  Teresa reaches down to a scratched-up plastic shopping bag sitting at her feet.

  “I made this for my kids, so that they would know their aunt Bobbie. I thought maybe it’d help you.”

  Another scrapbook. Inside, photos of Bobbie as a teenager, her hair flipped like that of a girl screaming for the Beatles at Shea. A letter of acceptance to Ohio State. A letter inviting her an interview with the Sun-Times.

  “She traveled the world,” Teresa says. “That’s what she did, since she didn’t have a family. But you know what? You won’t find any photos of her enjoying herself. Just photos of monuments. She said she didn’t have any photos of herself because, once, she gave her camera to a man on the street to take her picture, and he ran away with it. She never trusted anyone again.”

  Page after page of old greeting cards.

  “The Hesses are big on those,” Teresa says. “Bobbie once told me, ‘Our family makes a big deal out of remembering.’ What’s funny: She died on November third, and the next day in the mail I got her trick-or-treat card.”

  There’s a photo of Bobbie’s apartment building.

  Teresa says, “After Bobbie died, it fell to us to pack her up.”

  “Took us ten days,” Tim says. “My mom said, ‘Be sure you get the violin.’ When Bobbie was a little girl, my mom had a small violin made for her, and Bobbie still had it, hanging on the wall.”

  “Every room had bookshelves,” Teresa says, “and they were all filled—doubled up. You’d pull a book out, and there’d be another book hidden behind it. She
collected first editions. Mysteries especially. Did you know she wrote a column for the paper where she reviewed mysteries? ‘Book ’Em, Bobbie!,’ it was called. And then there were the teddy bears. She had at least fifty or sixty teddy bears.”

  They show me a photo of Bobbie surrounded by family. It’s Christmas and she wears a sweater with a large tree sewn onto it. Teresa points at the people in the photo, tells me who they are. Her finger comes to a teenage boy and she goes quiet. She looks to her husband.

  “This is hard,” she says. “That’s my little Zach. My baby. Eight months after Bobbie died, he was riding his moped and got hit by a car. He was medevaced off the road.” Tears form in her eyes. “We think he was dead even then.”

  Her hand reaches for the pendant that hangs by a thin chain from her neck, raises it toward me.

  His image is small, the size of a bottle cap.

  #

  They tell me how, in the span of eighteen months, Tim lost his brother, his sister, and their son. Tim just stares into the table, says, “ ’Course, then I lost my mom shortly after all of that, too.”

  “We’re hoping things get better,” Teresa says. “But I’m sure you know from your own loss how difficult life can be. How much time it takes.”

  I tell them how all of this—my search for the truth and my decision to take on my fears—has confirmed for me that all of us have to choose life, that I’m trying to learn to live each day.

  “I tell Tim that,” she says. “But he doesn’t think he has long to live.”

  I say, “I used to believe that because my father died young, I would never outlive him.”

  Teresa looks at Tim.

  “Tell Michael,” she says.

  He says, “I know my time here ain’t up.”

  She interrupts. “Tim was in a motorcycle wreck. Six months ago,” she says. “They medevaced him to the same hospital where they took Zach.”

  Tim turns his face to mine and starts to speak. “Deer walks out. Next thing I know, I’m seeing the light. And I start to go toward it. I hear music. And I see my family. My mother, my brother, Bobbie. They’re all calling me over. Beckoning. And I start to cross over. I feel happy. All of a sudden, I hear a voice say that I still have business to take care of, that I need to go back. It says it isn’t my time. Now I know—I got work to do here.”

  I ask him, “Were you a believer before this?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Now,” Teresa says, “he goes to church every Sunday.”

  “When you talk about a purpose,” he says, “I know what you mean. Nothing can trouble me now.”

  Teresa squeezes my hand. “Maybe you’d like to say hello to Bobbie?”

  # # #

  The body of Bobbie Hess rests in a remote corner of Saint Mary’s Cemetery on the edge of Tiffin. It’s a small patch of manicured earth, just an acre or two carved years ago out of the meadows that once surrounded the town. A cornfield borders the north side. The dead stalks brown and withered now, their season past. In the October wind, the empty husks scrape against one another, like skeletons trying to keep warm. The Tiffin Farmer’s Cooperative squats on the west side of Saint Mary’s, with its pens for crops waiting to go to market. And behind everything, a stretch of tangled woods.

  Bobbie’s plot is in a section of Hesses: Raymond W., her father; Rosemary A., her mother; Bobbie; and then Richard, her brother. At their feet, in the row below, is Zachariah T. Hess. Teresa kneels before her son’s grave and brushes grass clippings from his dark stone to reveal a chameleon etched next to his name. The creature clings to a branch, its tail curled like a fiddlehead fern, eye big and bulging.

  “Zach loved chameleons,” Teresa says, her finger slowly tracing down the tightening spiral of the tail. “He loved how they could change colors. How they could be there, and then not there. He knew everything there was to know about them.”

  “It’s true,” says Tim. “If you come by the house tomorrow, you can see me get that same chameleon tattooed right here.”

  He points to his left biceps.

  Teresa walks us toward a gray granite headstone, flush to the earth.

  BOBBIE HESS

  9-10-45 † 11-3-03

  To the left of her name, the stonecutter has chiseled an open book. The pages, blank. To the right side of her name, he’s cut what looks to be a large zero. I ask why they chose those icons.

  “Those were the two things she loved most,” Teresa says. “Mysteries and Ohio State. For a while, instead of doing the Ohio State ‘O,’ we talked about a teddy bear. But we worried people would think this is the grave of a little girl.”

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” I say.

  “We should thank you. Your search for answers has brought answers to us. Tim and I both feel closer now to Bobbie. I think maybe now we understand her sadness a bit more.”

  She shakes my hand.

  “We’re going to take a drive. We want to see the leaves before they all fall. There’s a road we know.”

  #

  The ground on Bobbie’s plot is unsettled. It’s not like Zach’s grave. His is smooth. Lush.

  I feel the need to stand here. Summoned. In some way, it’s the same sense of duty I used to feel when I rode my bike to the cemetery and stood before my father’s grave. The belief that I need to honor this person and, when I do so, some sort of Moment will give itself to me.

  But it doesn’t.

  There’s just the wind and the sky—like over a runway. Huge and blue. The sun on my face is warm. Autumn’s last crickets chirp, hidden in the meadow. Some night soon the first frost will descend, silence them. Milkweed, goldenrod, thistle, sumac—all faded now. Their seeds, ransacked. Safecracked by birds unseen. A white butterfly stumbles past and I follow it with my eye. As it rises toward the tree line, I see, on the edge of the cemetery, a lone purple-martin birdhouse, stuck high on a pole. Empty. Behind it, the woods are choked with crab apple, oak, and beech. Eastern hardwoods. Old growth. And now, from beyond the trees, somewhere at first I cannot see but only feel coming up through the ground—the steady rumble of a locomotive on iron tracks. A chain of rusting, groaning cars, coupled together. The Wisconsin & Southern. Boxcars loaded down with freight. Coal cars filled to spilling with the dark fuel that men pull from the earth. Car after car, farther than I can see. Borne on tracks to parts unknown. Borne.

  # # #

  In one of her final reviews for her “Book ’Em, Bobbie!” column in the San Francisco Examiner, headlined ART IMITATES LIFE IN “LAST CITY ROOM,” Bobbie begins with the novel’s opening scene, in which a twenty-four-year-old reporter named William Colfax is on a job interview with William Burns, the legendary editor of the San Francisco Herald, when suddenly a commotion from the far side of the City Room catches their attention. Both men turn to see two medics pushing a gurney with someone on it. Bobbie quotes from the book: “Colfax could see it was a man on the gurney and instantly knew, by his gray skin and blue lips, that he was dead. Across the city room, reporters were standing, more out of respect than curiosity, and the noise that had filled the room was suddenly muted. Then one of them, a woman with a cigarette in her hand, began clapping, scattering ashes on the wooden floor and sending up a puff of smoke with each clap. Soon she was joined by others until the whole room was applauding in a slow, rhythmic cadence until the doors to the lobby swung shut and the gurney was out of sight.”

  Burns tells Colfax that the staff of a newspaper always claps for a colleague who dies at their desk and that at the end of their shift, the newspapermen and women will walk to their bar across the street and drink to the memory of the dead man. Burns then goes on to say that, thanks to the dead man’s “sudden departure,” there’s an opening on the city desk.

  Bobbie ends her review by writing, “If you have been in the newspaper trade for any length of time, you have met every character in the book. The final day of the Herald will make you feel like you are reading your own obituary.”

  # # #
>
  Mysteries and a flawed obituary. What Bobbie loved, what my father was.

  In the end, my father’s mystery is undone by what he loved most and what he lived for: good reporting. Who, what, where, when, how, and why. All it takes is one man asking questions. One man filling in the holes in the story. His story. His obituary.

  My father. From the day he died, I wanted to grow up and be just like him. To follow in his footsteps.

  Careful what you wish for, son.

  Leaving Tiffin, all I can think about is my mother. How can I tell her what I now know? I think, too, about how close he came to pulling it off. Not just my uncle but my father. How it’s all just a matter of minutes. A minute later, he’s left her house. A minute later, maybe he truly does die on the street. A minute later, maybe he’s driving Lake Shore Drive, feeling ill, swerving into a light pole. He slumps against the wheel, chest to horn, a long wail that does not stop until help arrives.

  Too late.

  Minutes earlier, he’s at the bar with Tom Moffett. Feels a sting in his head. His eyes go focusless. He squints through the pain. Moffett looks at him: “Bob, you all right?” He puts his hand to his brow, thumb and index fingers on his temples, like a man trying to block out a prying sun. He squeezes his temples, angles his head down, his hand sliding down over his face, just before he crumples off the stool to the floor of the bar.

  Minutes later—he’s home, the kitchen door clicking closed behind him. He exhales. Made it, he thinks. Pulls a chair, sits down at the table, bends over, and unties his shoes. Whoa, he thinks, there’s something wrong here. He lifts his head. But the dizziness won’t stop. His head feels like a balloon full of lightning. A stinging, a striking. He can’t see.