Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  After the last amen, Quinn strides up to the urn and takes the measure of what has to be the smallest audience in his experience. Apart from the priest, an altar boy, an organist, and a couple of choir members, there aren’t a dozen of us under the steepled roof of the A-frame. Everybody else Mom knew is dead. Yet Quinn throws himself into this performance like he’s speaking for the ages on a worldwide broadcast.

  “As the poet Horace wrote,” he starts off, and I cringe, afraid he’ll quote that rhyme about how our parents fuck us up. “Every one of us walks on a fire hidden by treacherous ashes. We’re never sure what lies beneath our feet much less how painful the path is for others. We don’t know what’s ahead of us and half the time we’re blind to what we’ve left behind. But we all know we’re going to die, and so we mourn the death of those we love because we miss them and realize we’re bound to end up like them.

  “My mother, I feel confident in saying, is in heaven. She was a saint who raised three children as well as she could under very difficult circumstances. But she was also a human being and she had her faults. I don’t need to dwell on them now, and it’s not my place to judge her. That’s God’s job, and as the church teaches us, there’s nothing that He won’t forgive. There’s no sin too great, no crime or betrayal or failure beyond absolution.

  “Mom knew that, and from the time I was a little boy she swore that if I told the truth, she’d always forgive me. Even if I killed somebody, she said, she’d love me just the same. She said this so often I wondered whether she had someone in mind that she wanted me to kill. But of course she was just impressing on me that she was forgiving and God is forgiving. I hope it won’t sound presumptuous then if I say I forgive my mother even as I pray that I am forgiven.”

  For my money Quinn should’ve stopped right there. But he’s on a roll. Like an Oscar-winning actor who loves the sound of his own voice, he rattles on and on, throwing in a quote from, of all books, the Koran. The Prophet, Quinn says, wrote that God is as close to a man as the vein in his own neck. He swears that Mom, in death, will stay that close to him.

  Well, let him speak for himself, not me. I need space. I need to marry Lawrence and wave farewell to Maryland. I don’t care to think that Mom is as close as Quinn claims. This is a happy ending. The answer to my prayers. I refuse to let anything ruin it. Quinn will return to London and Maury to California. May God guard them both and grant them good fortune. And please grant me the strength to move on.

  Maury

  Mom asked not to be buried in a box. She left word to burn her. But her ashes come back in a box. A little wooden one. So she’s going to be buried in a box after all.

  Once the funeral mass is finished, the three of us go to Candy’s kitchen, and she opens the box lid and spoons some of the gray powder into an envelope. In her will, Mom wrote for her ashes to be sprinkled over the grass at Dad’s grave. But the cemetery said no, that’s illegal. They don’t mind, though, if we spread a handful.

  Candy jabs the spoon and hits a hard spot and makes a face. It sounds like a rock or a root. But it’s bone. At the bottom of the box, there are solid chunks of Mom, and when I hear the spoon hit them again, I hurry into my room and hold onto the floor.

  I bet Candy and Quinn believe I hurt Mom and that’s why she died. I half believe it myself. But I know I didn’t. Like Quinn said, I’m a good person. People change.

  In church the priest told us Mom was dust before she was born and now she’s dust again. He doesn’t say what she was in between. My mind’s on the frogs in the woods that sleep underground in winter, then wake up in spring and squirt black eggs on the creek. In a couple days the eggs grow fishtails, then legs. Then the tadpoles lose their tails but not their legs and become frogs for a summer before they go back underground. Over and over, year after year. I’ve changed. I’m different and I’m not dust yet.

  On the trip to the graveyard in Candy’s car, Quinn tells me I’m not riding the bus back to California. I’m flying. They’ll drop me at the airport at domestic before he boards at international. “We’re all too old to waste time traveling by road,” he says. “You’re a rich man now. You can afford it.” Then he asks, “Is there somebody you trust?”

  “I trust you.”

  “I mean somebody in the States.”

  “I trust Candy.”

  “He means somebody out west,” Candy says, “who’ll look after your money.”

  “There’s Nicky.”

  “Maybe we should fix it,” Candy says, “so you get paid in installments. That way you’ll have what you need each month.”

  “Whatever you want.” Cars tear past us with a tire noise that I’d like to imitate.

  “It’s not what we want,” Candy says. “It’s your money. It’s what you want.”

  “Send me a little every month.” The tire noise is like a Band-Aid pulling off a cut.

  The cemetery has a big clock at the gate, and everything except the circling red hands is made of flowers. In this freezing weather, they have to be plastic is my first guess. But up close they’re cabbages, pink, purple, and yellow cabbages planted in the shape of numbers. The cold wind that bends the tree branches and kills the grass doesn’t bother them.

  On the roads going past gravestones and statues and stone houses with iron-spear fences I don’t notice any street names. But Candy knows the directions. She drives real slow, and even though there aren’t any other cars, she switches on the blinker light at each corner. I like it best when she turns right then right then right. When she goes left it feels wrong in my head.

  Dad’s grave marker lies flat on the ground, like the cover on a well. You can’t read the carved writing on the stone unless you stand right over it and stare down where it says Beloved Husband and Father. He was young. Forty-something. And here I am almost an old man. Candy with her gray bangs and Quinn with his bald head look old too, and tired. We’re all ready to sleep a long time.

  I expect Quinn to start talking, like he did in church. But he keeps his mouth pressed into a tight line. Candy undoes the envelope and before she has a chance to sprinkle the ashes, the wind blows them everyplace. Not much ends up on the grass. It dusts Candy’s hair and the front of Quinn’s coat, and they both cough. When I breathe in, it shoots up my nose. You’d think ashes would smell like smoke. Instead, they sting like fire and I sneeze. Still, a lot stays inside, in my chest.

  Candy cries a little, and Quinn wraps an arm around her. When the wind slaps at my hair, I imagine it on his shaved head. His skin is purple-red with cold. He looks like he’d rather be on the plane, flying home to London. I’m the same myself, ready to be up in the air and going back to Slab City. People complain there’s no color, nothing growing in the desert, just sand and sky. But they should see this cemetery in Maryland when the grass is dead and clouds cover every inch of blue sky. Cabbages and nothing else grow in this weather.

  Candy shakes the ashes from her hair, and Quinn brushes at his coat. I feel like I should be doing something too. But what? Mom said she had something to tell me and something to give me. Well, she told me to kill her and she gave me money in her will. It wasn’t what I wanted but it’s too late now.

  On the ride to the airport, Candy asks again if I packed all my stuff. Do I know my flight number? Did I phone Nicky to pick me up? Do I understand I have to take off my shoes at the metal detector?

  “The security guards may frisk you,” Quinn says. “Don’t get upset or say anything suspicious.”

  “Don’t scare him,” Candy says.

  “He’s not scared. Are you, Maury?”

  “No, I went through plenty of pat-downs at Patuxent.”

  “Better not mention that,” Candy says. “You don’t need to check your bag. It’s small enough to carry on. Just go to your gate.”

  “I have to buy something first.”

  “What?” she wants to know in that voice she has when something’s wrong.

  “A present for Nicky.”

  “Don’t wan
der around and miss your flight.”

  “Like me to keep you company?” Quinn asks. “I could wait with you until they call your flight.”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Sure, you are.” He smiles at me from the front seat.

  Near the airport, planes roar over the road so low they look like they’re about to crash on our car. I can see the windows, but not the people behind them. The wheels hang down like bumblebee legs with balls of pollen. The noise zooms into my ears and zigzags off where Mom’s ashes are.

  Candy parks at a curb crowded with families and cabs and suitcases and black guys carrying people’s bags. The two of them climb out to say good-bye. Quinn shakes my hand and seems about to say something, but doesn’t. Candy puckers up for a kiss and I let her have one. There’s already so much electricity forking through me, I barely feel it. A traffic cop blows a whistle and hollers for them to move it.

  “Visit me,” Quinn calls out in his London voice.

  “Phone me soon as you land,” Candy says.

  They pile back in the car and wave, and I wave too, flinching as a plane roars past.

  In the terminal, a two-seater plane dangles from the ceiling by cables. It’s full-size and has a pilot wearing a helmet and goggles. It doesn’t take a minute to realize that the plane’s real, but the pilot’s a dummy.

  In the shops there’s clothes and shoes and food and beer. Carts up and down the hallway sell sandwiches and salad in plastic boxes. I find what I’m looking for at a newspaper stand. A tiny airplane on a key chain. It’s silver. Even the windows are silver, and when I look in them it’s like a mirror, only so small you can’t make out more than a slice of your face. To see inside, I scratch the silver off one of the windows, and the girl at the cash register says, “You break it, you own it.”

  I pay her three bucks and go to my gate and sit on a bench and snap the key chain off the plane. This cracks a hole in the side. Careful not to poke the wing in my eye, I hold it up close and have a look.

  “Watching the in-flight movie?” asks a man beside me, much too near.

  I slide away from him and take a second look at the inside of the airplane. It’s like the bus—a bathroom in back and a seat for the driver in front. Now that I know where he’ll be and I’ll be, I feel the noise dying down. Mom’s still in me, but her ashes aren’t stinging and I’m not afraid. I’ve always wanted to fly. I’m just waiting for my call.

  Author’s Note

  Lying with the Dead and Life for Death

  The genesis of most novels is as opaque as the human psyche and as elusive as dream logic. But Lying with the Dead had its origin in specific childhood experience that shaped the man I became, and has now been reshaped by the imagination.

  In 1961, a friend, Wayne Dresbach, age fifteen, murdered his parents and was sentenced to life in prison. If the event was devastating for the Dresbach family, it was only a little less monumental for me and my family. It changed the already precarious emotional equation of our lives, as Wayne’s younger brother, Lee, moved into our home, and as my mother became increasingly obsessed with the case. For more than a decade, while raising four children of her own and running a day nursery for other kids, my mother served as a surrogate parent for both Dresbach boys and worked tirelessly to overturn Wayne’s conviction and get him released.

  Like Maury in Lying with the Dead, Wayne did twelve years at Patuxent Institute for Defective Delinquents, and like Maury’s siblings, I passed an adolescence in the shadow of the U.S. penal system. Sunday was visiting day. Christmas brought the annual convict party celebrated in a cell block with pretzels and Kool-Aid. Each New Year commenced with another parole hearing, an emotional mixture of hope and dread.

  As Wayne did his time, I went on to college, then graduate school, and became a writer, always intending to do a novel about murder and its ongoing effects on a family, the Greek tragic cycle of hubris, nemesis, and catharsis. But when Wayne was paroled, he moved in for a time with me and my wife and son, and I became persuaded that at least at first, I owed it to him to tell the events from his point of view as nonfiction. I did so in 1980, with the publication of Life for Death.

  But inevitably the story and its aftermath remained lodged like a stinger in my brain, and so now I have circled back to it, not just revisiting the past but reimagining events, reconstituting a family forever teetering on the brink of discovery and dissolution, and reexamining elements of personal biography and reframing everything as fiction. The result is Lying with the Dead, my eleventh novel, a tragicomedy almost fifty years in gestation.

  Copyright © 2009 Michael Mewshaw

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Poetry excerpt on page 192 from “This Be the Verse,” from High Windows by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1974 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Excerpt on page 212 from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying copyright © 1930 and copyright renewed 1958 by William Faulkner.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC,

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  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED

  THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Mewshaw, Michael, 1943-

  Lying with the dead / by Michael Mewshaw.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-355-2

  1. Adult children of dysfunctional families—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction.

  3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.E87L95 2009

  813′.54—dc22 2009008675

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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