I see the sweater, left behind in this world, somehow. It’s no heirloom – nothing here is. We can’t keep it – not with that smell tangled between all its tiny fibres. I look away from where my wife stands with my mother’s second skin pulled taut over her knuckles. But there’s nowhere I can turn where I don’t see the rest of my mother strewn all over the yard in heaps of reeking ruins.
The funeral director stops short in the glossy, walnut-trimmed doorway. He’s every bit as tall and white-haired as an angel from the Book of Revelation, but something about the sight of you and me has startled him. He still has one foot outside the windowless basement vault called the “Family Consultation Room” when he says, “A little young to be down here, aren’t you?”
My phony laugh comes back, making you wince toward the tabletop.
The funeral man himself looks like he’s about Mom’s age. And he’s reluctant to accept my order to cremate her body. But then I remember that she once requested it in writing in a legal will made defunct by her remarriages. I move to show him, sliding the old will out of a big manila envelope I’ve been keeping sealed inside one of those locking plastic bags. The smell of it shouldn’t bother a guy like him too much. Actually, I think it may be what finally gets him to start filling out the paperwork.
The sunny little boy we call Levi bangs his head against the bottom of the table again. You’ve had enough and you’re pulling him out by his thin white arms. He doesn’t like anything about the wine-coloured quiet of the consultation room. The darkly plush showroom full of urns and caskets is no better for him. The funeral people give him a hard candy and one of their special sorry-for-your-loss stuffed toys, but Levi would rather comfort himself from the horror of his boredom by walking through the showroom smudging his little fingerprints all over the shiny, hot-lacquered finishes of the coffins.
We manage to laugh at the fifteen thousand dollar copper coffin that looks like an escape pod from a science fiction movie. The urns are in an area by themselves – ceramic replicas of Ming vases, metallic capsules that look like they’re meant for mixing cocktails. And then we find it: a mahogany case about the size and shape of a jewellery box out of the Sears Christmas catalogue. That’s what we order.
“If you want to visit with your mother – before,” funeral man begins, “I think I should tell you –”
“No, we’re good. We’ve seen enough,” I interrupt.
He’s nodding. “That’s just fine. Sometimes people have strong ideas about ‘closure’ but it’s certainly not necessary in every case – and it’s downright unfortunate in others. Oh, by the by, the husband’s already been here to see the deceased.”
I know he doesn’t mean Dad. I hate that I need to ask him to make his comment more specific. “What did he say his name was?” I ask.
The funeral man tells me the name. It’s the Monster-man – the one Mom lived with for two-and-a-half weeks before she had the police come take him away. Ever since she walked out on Dad five years ago, you’ve been calling Mom a serial marry-er. But you never say it in front of Dad. It’d bring on his sigh and his, “She’s a romantic.” I kind of like the way it hurts me to hear Dad making her excuses. I kind of like the way he tells us, “In her way, she was always a romantic.”
Monster-man is the latest in her series of post-Dad marriages – and the final one, I guess. I met him once. It was at their wedding. She wore white every time. As far as the state knows, Monster-man is still my legal stepfather. It means he got to come gawk at her body and then walk out of the funeral home with an application for a government widower’s pension.
When we’re finished at the funeral home, you start the run-around of ordering the funeral flowers and the food. And I make the rounds with a big folder full of unpaid bills and overdrawn bank statements to show the ex-husbands, in case any of them still believes those stories she used to tell about being on the verge of a million-dollar pyramid sales breakthrough.
When I get to Monster-man, he’s bawling like some kind of grizzled, aging reptile on the steps of his social housing complex. He’s grabbing at me and trying to get me to step through the screen door so we can – I don’t know – comfort each other with a bunch of nostalgic slander about her.
“I went to the funeral home.”
“Yeah, they told us.”
“You should have seen her–”
My voice is dry and – I hope – decisive. “We did.”
That’s when he offers me the rest of a half-used blister pack of erectile dysfunction tablets. “You know, my heart condition was every bit as bad as hers ever was. And she cared just as little about me having a heart attack as she did about having another one herself.” He pushes the sheet of pills against my chest. “Seriously, man, get these out of here. I don’t know how she got her hands on them but she could have killed me, feeding them to me the way she did.”
By the time I remember to call the social worker and the probation officer, they’ve already seen her obituary in the newspaper. I wish I didn’t notice the way they sounded almost happy for me – like I’m suddenly and unexpectedly off the hook, or something.
Another wakeful night goes by on the sofa bed in Aunt Marla’s rec room, and then it’s the morning of the funeral. I guess we still haven’t slowed down enough to properly explain what’s happening to our own kids. I’m leaning over the bathroom sink trying to hold my necktie out of the way as I spit out mouthfuls of toothpaste when I hear Scottie, our oldest son, ask you, “What is a funeral?”
You only pause for a split second before you answer. “It’s kind of like a wedding reception – only the bride has to be a dead person.”
For now, that’s good enough.
At the service, it’s you who gives the eulogy. You’ve been in the family for ten years now, but the American relatives still don’t know you very well, and they’re worried and unsure what to expect when – small, sleep-deprived, secretly pregnant – you stand up at the pulpit and speak on their behalf. It seems like the whole town gathers to hear how we’ll spin her story – chronicle all the mental illness, physical disease, false starts, hurt feelings, squandered money, wasted time – now that it’s over. At the end, when you read that bit about “the lilies of the field,” everyone’s shoulders heave, almost in unison, and we understand that none of us is going to be angry with her forever.
Tomorrow, you’ll step out of the nine-foot-tall funeral home doors with a blue velvet bag held horizontally in your hands. I’ll be watching from the curb, inside the car where our drowsy little boys will be strapped and bolted into their safety restraints.
“I just realized something,” you’ll say as you twist into your seatbelt. “I think I was a pall bearer just now.”
I’ll nod. “Definitely.”
My ashes and bone meal mother will be in the velvet bag, in the mahogany box, in the trunk of our Honda-cum-hearse bound for the sprawling, yellow-green, big city cemetery two hundred kilometres away. It’s called “The Garden of the Holy Martyrs” with that headlong Catholic flair that always makes me kind of nervous.
When we get there, we’ll find the posthole they’ve dug for her grave – round and bored only three feet down instead of six. I’ll use my own bare hands to plant her in the earth, lowering the box in the velvet bag on the end of a gold cord a lot like the one your mother uses to hold back her living room drapes all day long. Then someone will pray before we all just walk away, leaving her there for the invisible groundskeepers to finish her burial.
“You know, Brigs,” you’ll tell me as I steer our no-longer-a-hearse car onto the township road that will lead us back to the living world, “the next time we go to a funeral, we’re just going as guests, okay? We’ll come and cry, eat everything we can off the deli trays, and then – we’ll leave.”
And I’ll agree with you even though we both know it’s not true. The next time it will all be just the same as it
is now. You and I will be the ones left standing forward as the rest of the line falls back. It will always be you and me – banging on the windows, stepping over the bloodstains, mouthing the apologies, paying the cheque, giving the body to be burned.
Two
Now you’re trying to convince me to be cremated too.
“It was so elegant,” you insist. “You can’t have forgotten that. Everything paper dry, no more than five pounds left by the end, all sealed up in a pretty jewellery box. Your body doesn’t even really catch fire during the process. It’s more like going into a super-dehydrator than an incinerator. That was what they said, anyways. Remember when they said that, at the funeral home? I mean, dust to dust, right?”
You’re adamant that your body is never going to rot. I guess that’s fine for you. It’s the part about me jumping on the pyre along with you that’s still unresolved for me. I don’t know where you got it, but you’ve seized the idea that we both need to dispatch our bodies in exactly the same way – slipping into the Spirit World perfectly matched like a Baby Boomer couple dressed in twin anoraks, tapping squash rinds at a Farmers’ Market. I can’t quite agree to matching cremations yet. Someone told me once that cremating a body is a desecration of it, and I still haven’t decided if it’s true.
You’re lifting your head from my chest and making that scoffing sound. “How was what was happening to your Mom’s body before we cremated it anything less than utter desecration?”
I let a long breath out my nose. “I know how it looked, but maybe it wasn’t really so bad in the big scheme of things. Maybe it just seemed irreverent to us because she started breaking down outside the usual, accepted context–”
“Above ground, below ground, in a box, or out – letting a body rot away is an abomination, Brigs. And I can’t imagine there are very many people around here who know that better than you and me.”
We’re lying in the creaky old bed you bought us the week before we got married, ten winters ago. You paid for it with the money you earned working at the gift-wrap counter at the mall during the Christmas holidays. That was a long time ago. Tonight, the few non-childrearing, non-sleeping hours we get to ourselves every day are almost over. In the quiet and the dimness, you’re pressed against me so closely that I don’t have much of a sense of the form or texture of your body anymore – only its heat.
Even though you’re not quite a full year younger than me, neither of us doubts for an instant that you will outlive me. Maybe it’s based on nothing more intuitive than the fact that I’m the male in this marriage. But somehow, we both know that eventually you will be left alone with the two-hundred-pound unanswered question of my corpse.
“So – there is one more deathly thing we need to talk about,” you’re saying now. When you move against me to look up at my face, I can discern your shape again – yours and a trace of the baby’s too. The tips of your fingers lightly press the top of my hand, tracing the bones beneath the skin and veins. My hand-bones spread out in rays, spanning the distance between my wrist and knuckles.
“I wish I knew what it would take to get one of these bones out of your hand after you’re dead – before I put you in the furnace,” you say. “These bones here – they’re the perfect size for keeping...”
I laugh and tell you I don’t think it would be legal – something I’ve heard mentioned in crime stories on the radio about “offering an indignity to a dead body.” I think it’s an indictable offence and everything.
You’re getting angry, dropping my hand onto my chest, leaning away to prop yourself up on your own elbow. “So the state will take your dead body, cut it just about in half to let a stranger help himself to, like, your entire liver, or whatever. But it wouldn’t give your own wife one little bone out of your hand? Not even if you wrote instructions for it in your will?”
I don’t know, of course. How could I? I fold my hand into a fist and raise it in front of my face where I can see its outline in the near-dark of the northern summer’s all-night twilight. You’ve always had a – thing – about my hands. You call them the perfect archetypal male hands.
“They’re like the ones drawn in old anatomy textbooks or in art classes or in religious kitsch,” you’d say.
“They just look like regular hands to me,” is what I’d say.
And then you’d roll your eyes and tell me, “That is exactly what I mean.”
Knowing your fetish for my hands, maybe I should have expected to hear something like this from you all along. I open my palm and find the back of your head where you’ve lain down again with your ear on my ribs.
“Your heart always beats so slowly in there,” you say, not mad anymore. “It must be humungous.”
All your yellow hair is draped over my chest like a spider’s web. You haven’t bleached any of those trendy white streaks into it – the ones you’ve started referring to as “turn-of-the-century skunk-hair,” as if they’re already dated. I don’t really care what colour your hair is as long as you don’t cut it too short.
Remember that total stranger who rounded on you in the lineup at the grocery store to tell you how selfish it was to keep your hair long while you had little babies in the house? She said she’d heard of a baby once who got a piece of long hair wrapped around his pudgy finger so tightly and for so long that the whole thing had to be amputated. Poor little guy couldn’t even remember having that finger. Sure, it’s a sad story – if it ever really happened – but I just comb my fingers down the length of your hair and hope for the best.
Should I ask you why you’re afraid you won’t be able to love me anymore after I’ve gone all dead and abstract? Is that why you want to take something concrete out of my body to keep with you until you’re dead and abstract yourself? But I know you’d just answer me with one of our favourite eschatological maxims about how it takes a spirit and a body to make a soul. Lots of people try to believe it, I guess. But you know it’s true. Instead, I ask, “What would you do with one of my hand-bones anyway?”
“I told you what I’d do with it,” you say. “I’d keep it – just keep it.” You promise to treat any bone cut from my hand with careful reverence, insisting you wouldn’t use it for anything grisly. “I wouldn’t even let anyone else know I had it. And it wouldn’t be left out with the living forever. There’d be a secret addendum in my will leaving instructions for the boys to bury it with me.”
“You mean, instructions to have it burned up with you.”
“Right, right.”
While you live, you promise, my hand-bone would stay hidden, tied around your neck as a token of my life, dangling inside your clothes – clean and white in a secret reliquary, hung low on your breast.
I still don’t know.
And there’s no way to resolve any of it tonight, so I start to fall asleep. I wish you could sleep lying across my chest. But you can’t, so you pull away from me. You’re rolling over to sleep on your back beneath the high, taut dome of your womb. You told me once that the baby feels like a sack of ball bearings rolling and spilling inside your guts. It’s not something I like to think about too much.
I’m not afraid to see you sleeping on your back, even though the ever-shifting gnosis of the pregnancy books stashed under our bed tells us a sleeping position like that one is anathema. But there it is – sleeping on your back, growing all that hair, burying a husband with his skeleton intact – I guess there’s always some kind of risk to be taken.
Three
Still alive, the first of your grandfathers to die comes lurching toward the light in the doorway over his head. He bends, ducking beneath the slope of the ceiling’s low overhang much too soon, climbing the stairway out of his basement, hunched low enough for his fingers to graze the tops of the grey wooden stairs. A rebuilt washing machine motor sits on a sheet of two-year-old newspaper on the cement floor below. Today, his fingers are stiff and faraway, unfit for grappling i
nside something as dim and close and greasy as the washing machine’s innards.
In the narrow basement doorway, he slumps at the edge of your grandmother’s sunlit kitchen. His left arm rises in front of his face, lifted against the hard sting of noontime glaring through the window. Beyond the bright squares of sunlight falling onto the dark yellow floor, a little woman stands slicing potatoes into a battered aluminum pot.
Sometimes, when I’d come into a room too fast at a family reunion, when I was looking at something else but I could see her in the periphery, I might think your grandmother was you – hardly five feet tall with a cranium I could palm like a softball and that skeleton built almost like a little boy’s but definitely not like a little boy’s. She’s your grandmother, all right. Anyone could tell.
You make the same kind of mistake sometimes too. Remember the last time my family got together for a picnic – the time you came up behind my brother and clamped your arms around his waist before you realized he wasn’t me? I can still see him, dark eyebrows arched high, holding your wrists at arm’s length while you strained against him. You were screaming and cackling and trying to explain yourself.
But you’re not quite a part of this chapter of the story yet. Right now, you’re fifteen years old, sleeping through your summer holidays in a perpetually unfinished bedroom without a door, in a corner of your parents’ basement. You’re nowhere near the house where your grandfather starts to die over a broken washing machine. He is about to become the first dead person you’ve ever known – just like your mother always promised you.
Your grandfather still doesn’t know for certain what’s begun as he stands in the kitchen facing the back of your grandmother’s blouse. It’s a white field muddied with a print of large, brown flowers like no one ever sees growing anywhere in real life.
“Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” she says to him without turning. Water sloshes in the pot, displaced by the backyard-grown vegetables.
Love Letters of the Angels of Death Page 2