Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  You’re laughing.

  “It’s not funny. It was a ghost and it was wrecking everything. It was scary.”

  “Sorry, Janae. But – well –congratulations. You’re starting to be ready to get pregnant again.”

  “Yuck.”

  “I didn’t say you were happy about it – just preparing for it. It’s okay. Go ahead.”

  “Do you really think I am?”

  You sigh loudly enough for her to hear you through the phone. “This has got nothing to do with what I think. It never does. I’m only telling you what you think.”

  The phone call veers off somewhere else and doesn’t end until about an hour after I’ve left the apartment. Scottie has finished eating breakfast but you leave the milky cereal bowls on the table and lie down in bed again. It’s been another rough night, bouncing the bad baby in the dark.

  Your head touches the pillow and it all comes back to you. There’s something in the smell and feel of your own side of the bed that resurrects the dream you were having, just hours ago. It’s another variation on an old theme – not quite a tooth dream, but close. It’s the one you say you hate more than any other dream in your entire repertoire.

  Your dream is not clever or artistic or mysterious or – anything. It’s just literal and lame and – if you ask me – as unlikely as heck. It’s just me, leaving you.

  “Stop dreaming that,” I say, shaking you back and forth where you lie on your back in our bed, later that night. I won’t stop shaking until you start to laugh at me. “What have I ever done,” I say as I climb on top of you, “to make you think I’m going to leave you? Aren’t I nice to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And good to the babies?”

  “Yes. But it’s not like I can help what I dream, Brigs.”

  “No?”

  “No – and you can’t help what I dream either.” We look at each other, quiet for a moment, just inches away from each other’s faces. “Hey Brigs, if you weigh almost twice what I do, how come I’m not squished flat every time you lie on top of me?”

  I smirk. “Because when I’m on top of you I’m always supporting most of my own weight with my arms and legs.”

  “What? No, you’re not.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “Show me,” you say.

  I shake my head. “I’m actually really heavy. You won’t like it.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like it. You have to show me. It bothers me to think I might not really know how heavy you are. I mean, what if you were to drop dead someday, right on top of me?”

  I laugh. “That could definitely happen.”

  “Right. And I need to know I can escape – if it ever does happen.”

  I sigh and all your hair blows back against the pillow. “Alright then. Are you ready?”

  You nod, and I feel you tense your muscles underneath me, bracing yourself. And that’s when I collapse, every ounce of my body from the neck down crushing down onto yours.

  Your eyes get wide and your breath hisses out as your ribs compact beneath me. “Brigs,” you gasp with an extra-long S.

  “See what I mean?”

  You cough. “Yeah. Okay. Get off me.”

  I don’t move at all. “But I’m dead, remember? You have to figure out how to escape without my help.”

  You start to struggle, pulling your arms free, pushing my shoulders away. It jostles me from side to side but the bulk of me stays right where I dropped it in the first place. “Dude, I can’t even scream,” you rasp.

  “Yeah?” I let myself settle even further, resting my forehead against the pillow, beside your head. “This was a great idea. Imagine if we hadn’t practiced this before it really became an emergency.”

  You try to thrash yourself free. It lasts until you pant out a little laugh and drop your arms so your palms are upturned in a surrender pose. “You’re too heavy. I can’t get away.”

  “Sure you can.” I say it languidly. “You have to. I’m still dead.”

  Your breath is getting fast and shallow. “Brigs – I’m going to have a panic attack. I’m not kidding.”

  “Yes, you are. Come on. Use your legs. They’re way stronger than your arms.”

  You’re panting and making weak little Kung Fu sounds underneath me. I don’t admit out loud that it’s all very enjoyable. I don’t have to admit it.

  “Hey,” you snap, “knock it off. This is not sexual.”

  I laugh. “Sure it is. It always is.”

  “No. It isn’t.” You’re trying to be stern.

  “Come on,” I drawl, “you’ve got to get away. How are you ever going to manage to mutilate my dead hand and cut a bone out of it the way you’ve always wanted to if you’re trapped underneath me until the end of time?”

  “Ha!” you yell as you throw one of your legs free.

  “There ya go,” I cheer. “Now all you have to do is roll away from me.”

  You’re twisting and writhing. “I can’t.”

  “That’s right,” I say, still deadweight on top of you. “You can’t get away.”

  Underneath me, you’re popping P sounds. “P-patriarchal violence.”

  I shake my forehead against the pillow. “Nope. It’s not me. It’s got nothing to do with my own force. It’s just gravity. You know – the earth and space and everything. All of nature pulls me down right here.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Neither can I. You and I – this is not something we can ever get out of. Okay? Do you believe me yet?”

  Your only answer is to start fighting again. Your effort is stronger but its effects are weaker as your muscles burn off their oxygen – the air your lungs can’t expand to replace anymore.

  “Now,” I say, moving toward the ending. “Will you please stop dreaming that I’m trying to leave you?”

  You still don’t say anything. But you stomp your free foot into the mattress, yelling as best you can without any breath. You rock back and forth until you create enough momentum to pry yourself out from underneath me. All free and triumphant, you sit up, laughing, panting, smacking me on the back with one hand.

  “I’m out,” you say. “I broke the gravity. How do you like that?”

  And the truth is I like it just fine. I’ll never tell you, but I cheated. The truth is I used my own muscles to help rock myself away from you in the end. I let you out. The truth is nothing is broken.

  Sixteen

  The conduit is opening again. It happens through the phone, as it often does. This time, the caller is your Dad. And he’s mad – so mad he’s quiet and speaking almost a full octave below his usual pitch.

  “I can’t trust myself to deal with it like a civilized person,” he’s telling you. “I need you to take it from here.”

  “Dad thinks I’m civilized?” you ask me after you’ve hung up.

  And I almost laugh. Your powers of civility are not what have moved your father to call you. He’s not looking for decorum. He’s looking for justice. I can imagine him right now – still sitting on the edge of his bed with the phone in his hand, thinking about how he’d made a mistake when he failed to name you Wormwood.

  It makes me laugh because it’s funny – the way the family wants you to stand up at their funerals when they’re sad and say something to tilt the hurt until they can feel it just right, in a way they can manage. But when they’re angry, the same people you comfort want you to stand up and say something awful – something to rattle a load of brimstone out of the sky.

  That’s what your Dad is calling for today. He wants brimstone. He wants it yellow-green and stinking and burning and falling all over the crummy municipal cemetery where his parents are buried under sandy gravel and a skiff of grass that never quite gets green. It’s a cemetery set into the side of a hill with a view of the Rocky Mountains on one side and a cus
tom cattle feedlot on the other – cows and flies and manure as deep as muskeg. The feedlot cemetery – it’s not Butcher Hill. It’s the graveyard for the dead on the other side of your family.

  “I can’t believe it,” you’re telling me now. “I cannot believe something this ridiculous is actually happening.”

  I listen as you explain how your uncles went to visit your Granddad’s grave on Father’s Day – just a few days ago – and discovered the headstone that had been sitting there, waiting for the end of the world, marking their father’s grave for the last twenty-one years, was gone.

  “Unbe-frickin’-lievable,” you say as you’re looking up the number for the offices of the town that manages the Feedlot Cemetery.

  The missing headstone was one of those slabs the government will award to veterans, if they ask. I don’t remember seeing it myself, but you tell me it was grey granite cut into a rectangle, flecked with starry black and marked with your grandfather’s name and his rank in the Canadian Armed Forces.

  “Warrant officer,” your Dad has told us. “That means he earned it – in Sicily. Normandy wasn’t the only beach.”

  And now the headstone is gone.

  Before they got too mad to deal with it, your Dad and uncles found out a cemetery groundskeeper had moved their father’s stone. The almighty man with the mower said he couldn’t take it anymore – that tiny space between your grandparents’ headstones that made it too hard to maneuver his machinery, or whatever. So he took one of the headstones out – the smaller one, the one we got for free through a government program, the soldier’s stone.

  “They claim they’ve still got it, and it’s safe and sound in a shed somewhere.” And that’s all your Dad can tell us before he knows he can’t say another word about it.

  You’ve punched your way through the touch-tone menus and connected with the town hall. I can hear you speaking into the telephone. Your sentences are short and hard.

  “I need to talk to the town manager – Right now – No – I understand – No, I don’t need the cemetery bylaws explained to me. I need my grandfather’s headstone back. I need someone to show a dead veteran some respect – Listen – You have got until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon to send me a photo of the headstone. Two o’clock – Write it down. I need proof that someone knows exactly where the headstone is and that it’s undamaged – If I don’t see the picture in my email inbox, I’m calling the police – I’m going to tell them the truth. I’m going to tell them the headstone has been stolen. And I’m going to send the police looking for you.”

  It doesn’t end there. You’re on the computer for the rest of the night, writing a press release, sending it out to newspapers, pasting it up on the baffling stonewall the town administration has thrust up to protect the petty despot who cuts the grass and rearranges the monuments at the Feedlot Cemetery.

  “He must be the mayor’s troubled nephew or something,” you say into the computer screen. “They’re all inbred and nepotistic down there. And you know what we are to them, Brigs – a family like us? We are nobodies.”

  I squirm the way I always do when you get like this.

  “Well,” you’re still saying as we lie in bed that night, “they’ve messed with the wrong family of obscure little nobodies this time.”

  Your press release is picked up by the daily newspaper in the city closest to the Feedlot Cemetery. They devote most of a page to the story, complete with a photo you sent of your grandfather standing by a fountain in Italy in the 1940s.

  Across the country, back in Halifax, the story runs in the newspaper your grandfather used to deliver when he was a kid. Its tone is cautionary – a warning about moving out west and vanishing into oblivion.

  The newspapers all quote the sound-bite you’ve crafted for them. “My grandfather fought the Fascists for us, so the least we can do is fight city hall for him.”

  It works. There’s a town councillor and then the mayor on the phone apologizing and telling you how disgusted they are and promising this never would have happened if they hadn’t been away on summer holidays.

  “So do you want us to have the groundskeeper re-install the marker? We’ll make him waive the fifty dollar fee and do it for nothing.”

  “No,” you say. “We’re coming to do it ourselves. You can tell the groundskeeper he’ll never touch that headstone with his bare hands ever again.”

  Plans are made for me and you and your Dad to go to the Feedlot Cemetery to put the stone back on the grave. Of course, you’re pleased about how it’s worked out. I don’t mind that. What bothers me is the way you glory in this – I’m not even sure what it is. We’ve come calling for justice but maybe this is more than just a settled score. Maybe it’s vengeance. I’m never sorry you don’t really have wings, but sometimes I’m gladder than ever – like now, when the wings on your back might not be downy and henhouse benign but hard and hooked like a bat’s.

  I am here with you anyway, in the sun and the high August heat, stomping the sole of my boot against the back of a shovel, cutting into the upper layer of the cemetery turf like the most brazen, daylight grave-robber ever. The real grave-robber – the one you foiled – the Feedlot Cemetery groundskeeper, is leaning against a backhoe at the entrance of the graveyard, working hard at not watching us. You’re in the back of our pickup truck with a square-nosed shovel, pushing a load of gravel toward the tailgate so you can rain it down into the trough I’ve dug for your grandfather’s stone.

  Your Dad levels the gravel and tamps it down – slowly, sadly. If the gravel bed is uneven, the stone might strain and crack over time. And there’d be no one to blame for it – no one to accuse in the press release – no one but ourselves.

  When it’s ready, it takes all three of us to lift the granite marker into place. We set it at the foot instead of the head of your grandfather’s grave – in a place flanked with swaths of grass wide enough for anyone to turn a mower without any complaints. The stone is much heavier than we expect it to be, but we manage it anyway.

  We’re all sitting on the ground, panting and sweating, when it’s over. The air is blowing down the cemetery hill like the blast from a hair dryer, stirring up the smell of manure and hay from the feedlot.

  “Hot,” you say. And you’re bending, lower and lower, bowing until your cheek rests against the smooth, granite plane of the headstone itself. The granite beneath your cheek draws the heat from your flesh, diffusing it outward, away from you, across the stone’s hard surface. The serif etched at the top of the W in “Warrant Officer” looks like it’s about as long as the top of your thumbnail is wide, so you slide the end of your nail into it. It fits perfectly.

  I hear you hum, like you’re happy – or at least satisfied. “It’s nice down here, Daddy,” you say. “It’s cool.”

  Your Dad isn’t looking at you. It’s been too much and he’s had to pull away again.

  But I’m still here. And I rest my hand on the stone, beside your face. Even in the sun, the rock is cold against my palm. Just like you, I feel something leaving me – something hot and dangerous we need to abandon here if we’re ever going to be right again.

  You’re still on your knees with your face on the rock. But you’ve moved the nail of your thumb to the letter C, tracing its arc back and forth in the groove cut near the centre of a long Scottish name. It’s your grandfather’s name, your father’s name, your name – the one you used to call yourself before you took mine.

  “Feel it for yourself, Dad. It’s smooth and cold and it’s good.”

  Your Dad is turning to look at you. He doesn’t quite smile. “Come on,” he says. “Get off it. Move out of the way so I can take a picture of it for your uncles. We need proof that it’s safe.”

  You’re slow to leave the stone. “Isn’t it weird?” you begin. “It’s so weird. Somewhere, in the earth there’s a big, cold, billion-year-old rock like this already waiting
for everyone.”

  “Come on.” Your father jostles you, holding out his hand, his palm pressed right into the hollow between your shoulder blades – the flat, empty expanse of your back.

  Seventeen

  It’s you who takes the RSVP card out of the wedding invitation envelope and mails it back marked yes. You do it even though I tell and tell you I don’t want to go.

  There’s no arguing with you. “Forget it, dude. Deirdre is finally getting married to a man of her own. It looks like she’s given up on you. It’s got to be tough for you, but we need to make an effort to celebrate with her anyway.”

  You make me crazy sometimes.

  I never should have told you about Deirdre – the woman from my class in university who once looked at me across a table as messy as an unmade bed, strewn with notes for the group project we were working on. She sighed and hauled out that hackneyed old line – the one that goes, “How come all the good ones are married?”

  “She is just a colleague,” I tell you – again. It’s true – for me, anyways. It’s still true even though Deirdre has gone from studying at the same school as me to working for the same big petroleum company as me.

  You ignore my protest – my honest statement of a fact. When it comes to Deirdre, you always do. “I don’t get this girl,” you say. “Every engineering school in the whole world is jammed full of men. She should have had her pick. Why did it have to be you?”

  “It’s not me.” I’m loud and petulant. “It’s this guy – this Mitch guy.”

  You purse your lips and hum. “I wonder if Mitch knows about you.”

  You’re enjoying it. It’s clear. And it’s not just because, all this time, Deirdre has been paying you a dazzling kind of compliment. She affirms our life together far more than she’s ever threatened it.

  “Of course he knows about me. Mitch works for us too,” I hurry. “He’s an engineer in the Edmonton office where Deirdre works. He knows me. And I’m sure he never bothers to think about me – ever.”