“Let me guess: she’s mad,” you say when the call is over.
I shrug. “It could have been worse.”
The final call is to the brother I only lived with for eight years before I grew up and left for the Philippines, never to live at home with him again. He’s the one I can’t help feeling like I abandoned – a little brown boy left to himself in the wasteland of our parents’ disintegrating marriage. In some ways, he’s like a long lost relative of mine, almost a stranger. And then in other ways, he’s so close he’s like the unofficial fifth son of my marriage to you, even now that he’s grown up.
If death is my province of the family, then love is my brother’s – voracious, child-like love. Maybe that’s why I’ve never seen in-laws take to each other as easily as he took to you. Even though he was almost as tall as you already, he was still just a kid the first time I brought you home to my family. I can still see him, capering around the car in the bright prairie sunlight as I rolled to a stop under the hollow poplar trees in my parents’ front yard. As an adult, my brother looks like me only toasted brown and buffed up for skilled manual labour. But as the child you met that afternoon, he was all knees and elbows and no personal space at all. He darted around you like a Cupid celebrating an emerging Venus – my own mildly heat-exhausted Venus, stepping out of the car and onto the grass.
For the first time in all of today’s death knelling, you come and stand still, right there at my side – all pain and tension – as I dial my brother’s number into the phone. The only contact information we have for him is a cell phone number that hardly ever connects.
“It’ll be a miracle if you can get him to pick it up,” you say.
And maybe that’s just what it is. My brother answers his phone. He answers it even though he’s at work. I can hear the air compressors that power his pneumatic tools pounding up the pressure in the background. It doesn’t matter. He keeps still while I tell him what’s happened to our grandmother and then he starts to bawl – right on the jobsite, right into the phone. It’s awful. It’s even worse than when I called to tell him about Mom melting into the floor of her trailer. There was never any ambivalence in my brother’s love for our grandmother. She never hurt him, disappointed him, left him – not like Mom. This death of Grandma’s – there’s no relief in it for him, no vindication, just grief. On the other end of the phone, our Cupid is crashing in a heap of feathers and arrows.
I’m pinching the bridge of my nose, the pads of my fingers dammed against the tear ducts in the corners of my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him.
He can’t speak but I hear him struggling – all breath and tears – miles and miles away. And somehow, you know it all even though you can’t hear any of it. You’re leaning over me at the kitchen table while I’ve still got the phone held to my ear. Everyone knows angels lost their wings ages ago – back in the Renaissance, I’m pretty sure. We’ve outgrown the need for them ourselves and we’re each left with two arms in their place. You fold yours around my shoulders. They draw me against you. And you’re whispering my little brother’s name like a warm, wet prayer, your face pressed into the side of my neck.
Eleven
You’re sitting with your father, looking out at the winter darkness from inside the frosted windows of his car. The heater is roaring in the dash, and you’re parked in a vast, empty, snow-drifted parking lot outside a closed-up shopping mall. The two of you are eating cheeseburgers out of foil paper and drinking diet cola through straws by the light of the neon signs overhead – because as far as either of you know, that’s love.
It’s been days and days since you’ve last talked to your father like this – not since before he bundled your splotchy, teary mother onto an airplane and took her to her father’s funeral, far away, in New Brunswick, on the east coast of this huge, frozen country. It was the funeral of your last surviving grandfather – the one you were raised to call “Grampy” – the one who died shovelling heavy, wet, Maritime snow off the roof of his little red brick house. They’re still not sure if he fell off the roof and then had a heart attack or had a heart attack and then fell off the roof. I guess it never really mattered.
At age nineteen, you were left at home with your strange little heap of grief and your mob of younger brothers while both your parents were gone across the continent. It wasn’t an easy assignment, but you thought you were coping well. That was before your sweetie-pie German professor stopped you in the doorway as you left her classroom to ask if everything was alright. She told you to stay behind and offered you a cup of peppermint tea and the chance to talk to someone about your Opa. All that German tenderness – your Grampy wasn’t the kind of old World War II soldier who would have still found it ironic. He understood about duty and reconciliation and how the universe needs to operate.
“So the funeral service was nice, eh?” you ask your Dad in the cold car.
He nods into the paper wrapped around his hamburger. “It was fine,” he agrees. “At the luncheon afterwards, your grandmother’s cousin called me fat right to my face – but she meant no harm. They never do. It’s just what I’ve learned to expect when I go among people like your mother’s – people ‘in whom there is no guile.’”
It makes you smile.
“Really,” he continues. “Did you know they call their town’s cemetery site ‘Butcher Hill’?”
You laugh. “No, I was not aware of that.”
Your dad shakes his head. “They don’t mean to be morbid, and I’m sure they have some perfectly innocent explanation for it. They always do.”
You nod. “No one out there’s trying to make it sound ghoulish on purpose.”
“Yeah, your mother’s family are good people.” He’s nodding too. He means what he says. Even when his in-laws don’t seem very good, he knows by now to give them the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, the indoor parts of the funeral were all fine. But the weather outside – the weather was – awful.”
“Mom was saying the same thing. But that’s February in the Maritimes for ya, right?”
“No.” His voice is low and grave. “It wasn’t just the season. It was – awful.”
“Awful.” You hold tightly to your paper cup and you wait.
Your Dad begins to tell you how freezing rain was falling all over the region for days before and after your grandfather’s funeral. Ice coated all the cars until buckets of hot water had to be carried out and poured over their doors to melt the ice sheets long enough to get them open. And all of Butcher Hill, right up to your grandfather’s graveside, was coated in thick, glossy hummocks of slick, new ice. It was constantly washed in cold water from the rain still driving at the land, coming in sideways from the Atlantic Ocean to the east.
“Wet ice,” he says. “There’s nothing slipperier than that – not even in the Maritimes.”
He tells you how even with all the road-salt caked over everything, the tires of the funeral cortege abandoned their usual solemnity and screamed against the icy hillside – the long black cars swaying back and forth, all the way up Butcher Hill on the narrow cemetery road.
He pauses to comfort himself with a sip from his straw before he tells you about the procession of pallbearers. They came forward in their raincoats, sliding over the wet ice toward the grave, the casket pitching between them like a badly made boat as they lost and found their footing, over and over again.
“They’re all slipping around in leather-soled fancy dress shoes – no traction at all.”
And your Dad waited with your mother under the umbrellas the funeral home lent them, standing near the lip of the open grave. Everyone watched – gasping, frowning, praying – as the pallbearers made the slow, tortured trek over the ice.
“Everyone was looking at the pall bearers. And maybe that’s why no one noticed – not a single one of them noticed – that the bottom of the grave itself was full of ice-water. No one noticed besides me,
I mean.”
Your grandfather’s grave was a meat locker machine-cut out of the frozen mud of Butcher Hill. And in the bottom of the hole, a full foot of brown water lay pocked with the ever-falling ice rain while your father, helpless, waited for something unspeakable to happen.
In the car, the two of you are staring out the windshield, straight ahead, as if your grandfather’s burial scene is playing where you can’t help but see it on the dirty glass in front of your faces.
“So they’re coming across the ice with the casket – holding onto those pretty metal bars with both hands, their feet slipping and tripping all over the place. And I keep going from gaping at the funeral director to the minister they borrowed from the local United Church and then back into the grave-water. I have no idea what to do.”
“No, of course not.”
“So I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s fine, Daddy. It’s fine.” But you’re already choking.
“Inside that box was my wife’s father, all freshly washed and dressed and – clean. I’d just seen him for myself in the church at the foot of the hill. And we’d all whispered and acted like he was something holy and then – then – don’t put him in the water.”
“Just – just try to think of it as a burial at sea,” you offer.
Your Dad coughs, nodding. “Yeah. Anyway, the pallbearers made it to the grave – though I had to grab your Uncle Ray by his coattails to keep him from sliding into the hole as he set his corner of the coffin down on the straps.”
“Poor Uncle Ray.”
“Yes, poor Uncle Ray,” he sighs.
Then it’s quiet in the car. The scene on the windshield isn’t moving anymore. The coffin stands in the ice-rain over the grave. It’s right at the back of the cemetery where the avenue of dwarf blue spruces standing against the barbed wire fence is so laden in ice it looks like every needle has been crafted out of glass. The waterlogged grave is open, waiting.
You hear your father swallow. “And then, as if it was a perfect spring morning, they lowered it – flipped a switch and the machinery hummed away and the eight thousand dollar glossy, golden oak casket sank into the water, with him still inside it. Just when he must have thought he couldn’t get any colder...”
And the scene on the windshield changes from a rainy hillside to darkness – just darkness with the rush of cold, cold water through the hinges and clasps and tiny breaches in the heavily lacquered wood and the white satin upholstery.
You close your eyes but the image stays with you until you shake your head. You’re mouthing words to yourself. “Burial at sea.”
When you speak out loud, your throat is dry and tight. “Mom didn’t see – did she?”
Your Dad shakes his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. And how can I ever ask her about it now?”
You shrug against the stiff vinyl of the car’s passenger seat. The cold air has crept into your nose and you sniff against it. Your Dad hears and turns to see you.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he says, crumpling his handful of greasy foil paper and jamming it into a waste-bag on the floor at your feet. “Maybe I was wrong to make you hear all that.”
“No, no. Not if it makes you feel any better to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t. I should know that already. It never does.”
And it’s true, what they told you in your classes at the university – in the vast lecture theatres full of young adult hubris and lingering teen-aged angst. When it comes to human happiness, catharsis, they taught you, is one of the oldest lies we have.
“No.” Your Dad knows. “No, telling doesn’t help a dang.”
It doesn’t make any difference that you agree with him. In the dark of the parking lot, inside the cold glass and steel of the car, you close your eyes. You let your hands rest on the tops of your thighs, upturned, your fingers relaxed into curves like rows of crescent moons. And you breathe in through your nose, so deeply that your head tips back against the seat of the car. You draw in the same air your father moved with the sound of his story – sucking it into yourself. You pull it so far into your own body that your ribs strain and your throat aches around it, crushing from the inside with the pressure of it all. And then – you let it go.
Twelve
You’ve got nothing but hard, narrow eyes for the funeral director when the time comes to go east again, to New Brunswick, to bury Grampy’s wife. She’s your last grandmother, the one you all called “Nanny.” The funeral director’s feelings don’t mean much to me but still I hope he doesn’t hear you calling him the “rented funeral man.” In the Butcher Hill Cemetery, you poke me with your elbow to make sure I notice that his black suit is all glassy in the sun – like he left the iron sitting for too long on that polyester blend. You’re right – the thing’s half melted. But I won’t agree with you when you try to tell me how he must save his better suits for better families.
Thousands of miles from home, we’ve stepped out of the car (which really is rented) and into a cemetery where there are hardly any graves that aren’t connected to your family in some way. It’s funny, for once, to be somewhere I’m the stranger and you’re the not-quite-unfamiliar face in a huge, old clan.
Here in the cemetery, near the crest of Butcher Hill, there’s no rain, no ice, and we can see the blue shingled roof of the house in the valley where your Grampy and Nanny used to live. I’m just about to make sure you notice the view when I find you’re all agitated again, huffing about how the rented funeral man has thrown down a mat of plastic turf-junk right over your Grampy’s headstone. It’s too bad. Who did he think would already be buried in the plot adjacent to the one where we’re making Nanny’s grave today? Thanks to my mother, you’ve planned a funeral before, and you won’t be cowed by the officiousness of it all – not anymore. You step right up to the edge of the plastic turf.
“He’s right here. Look, I’ll show you,” you say to me.
But you aren’t quite bold enough to keep from glancing behind yourself to see if the rented funeral man is watching. You’re tugging upward on the frayed edge of the turf, folding the green plastic garbage-carpet off the bones of your ancestors. There it is, just like you said it would be: your Grampy’s headstone, planted there over the grave your father watched filling up with ice water, years and years ago. I wonder if it ever thawed out and drained away. Maybe your grandfather is sealed up in a dirty brown ice cube in the ground beneath our feet, like a cave man caught in a glacier. Maybe he’s a natural cryogenic wonder, frozen in the earth just as perfect as the day he fell off the blue roof and into the snow.
“I love how his headstone is so elegant and simple,” you say, defying the prejudices of no one in particular. “Remember that when you’re ordering one for me, Brigs. I don’t want anything too fussy – no statues of angels or lambs.”
“I thought gravestone lambs were just for dead babies.”
You’re turning away from me, waving one hand. “Everyone’s the same age in heaven.”
Now you want me to tell you if the rented funeral man looked our way while you were bent over. I don’t know so you give me your elbow again and tell me to watch him next time. You know he sees you. You’re hard to miss, standing with the wind blowing all your long hair straight up over your head like a stringy, yellow torch.
“Oh, come on,” I say when you complain about what the wind’s done to your hair. “What’s a funeral on Butcher Hill without a good hurricane blowing?”
You laugh – because this is an airy, churchy funeral, after all, and laughing is just fine. “Is it wind,” you ask, “or is it more like suction? Like someone left the door cracked between here and the Spirit World, and it’s all we can do not to get siphoned right inside.”
Whatever it is, your Nanny’s coffin sure looks rickety out here in all this wind. The box isn’t exactly the top of the line model. Your Mom’s older sisters, the ladies y
ou call “the Aunties” told us how mad Nanny was about the prices of the coffins in the showroom the day she picked this one out. They say she took one of the fancy, folded price tags – written in calligraphy like a place card at a posh banquet – snatched it right off the pillow inside a coffin, and threw it down on the floor where she could stomp on it.
“For heck’s sake, it’s a casket, not a coffin,” the Aunties correct each other. “Coffins are for vampires. And she was no vampire.”
But the word leaves you wincing. “I just hate the sound of it – ‘casket.’ Something about it makes me think of shucking corn or – the dry insect egg casings you find in the dust when you wash out the light fixtures in the fall.”
The Aunties roll their eyes at you. “This one was always Nanny’s pet.”
I think all of them – your grandmother and the Aunties following her around the casket showroom with the funeral pre-planning worksheet tacked to a clipboard – must have found something to enjoy in the ugly little scene. Nanny got to rage, rage right up against the dying of the light. And all her quiet, furious objections about how expensive everything was going to be in the end just seemed kind of cute to her daughters.
“None of it’s negotiable, Mom. There’s no point getting your shirt in a knot over it.”
At one point, the legend says, Nanny told the Aunties just to bury her in one of the rough alder wood crates the caskets are packed into before they’re shipped out of the factory. Everyone laughed, even though they knew she wasn’t joking.
So this wind-whipped casket standing out here on Butcher Hill is the bargain-basement model, just like she wanted. The Aunties say, when the family’s not around, the funeral people will refer to her casket as “the Pink Pauper” model. I don’t know about that, but the casket is pink, all right. The fibreboard it’s made out of is covered with a rough salmon-coloured brocade fabric – like it’s meant to look like a battered old skin, I guess. The funeral people trade in shame. Maybe they want us to think about how burial in a bargain casket is just a hair’s breadth better than getting thrown into the ground bare naked.
Love Letters of the Angels of Death Page 9