by Lynne Spreen
“Yeah, right behind the mosquito spray truck.” Lorraine turned into a grass driveway, centering the tires on two cement strips.
Karen opened the car door, and the smell of creosote and diesel hit her, roiling the deep sediment of her memory. The lawn in front of her childhood home had thinned to dirt in places. A blue fir tree, planted early in the last century, towered over the house. The cement still bore tiny imprints of her hands, the fading impressions almost half a century old. How small the porch seemed now, and how inadequate the wobbly handrail. The screen door was handmade, the mesh rolled out tight and tacked down under wooden strips.
“Hey Mom, it’s us.” Lorraine opened the door without knocking. Karen trailed after, struck dumb by the familiar aroma of beef stew and freshly-baked bread.
“Lieb kind.” Aunt Marie wore a floral shirt tucked into the elastic waistband of a pair of polyester slacks.
Karen embraced her, trying not to crush the woman who looked to have shrunk a foot since her last visit. Aunt Marie held her at arm’s length. “You’re thin.”
Karen studied back. Her aunt still wore her gray hair braided and wrapped around her head like an elderly version of Heidi of the Alps. Her face was lined, and her frank blue gaze required no explanations.
“The calves aren’t going to feed themselves. I have to go.” Lorraine kissed her mother. “See you tomorrow, nine-fifteen.” The screen door banged shut behind her.
Aunt Marie’s knobby fingers tapped Karen’s arm. “Did you eat? I made supper.”
“I had a snack on the plane.”
“You have to eat. You know an empty potato sack won’t stand.” Aunt Marie led her into the kitchen where two chairs nudged up against the old Formica table. On the table sat her mother’s tin salt and pepper shakers, half a century old. A dish rack stood empty next to the sink, waiting for the next load, just as she remembered. The varnished maple cabinets shone as if Marie wiped and waxed them monthly, the same as her mother had. Karen grasped the back of a chair to steady herself.
Aunt Marie ladled stew from a Dutch oven into a yellow Pyrex bowl. “Should be good and done. I started it this morning.” She clanged down the heavy cast-iron cover and set a loaf of round bread on the table next to a jar of dark purple jam.
Karen pressed the wax down on one edge and popped the round seal out of the jar. She almost couldn’t resist licking it. “Chokecherry!”
“From the trees out back. Go ahead and eat before it gets cold.” Aunt Marie wiped the counters, rinsed and wrung the dish cloth, and hung it over the neck of the faucet to dry.
Karen sunk a battered spoon into the stew and raised it to her mouth. At the taste, her eyes stung with unshed tears, and she choked down the warm broth. Of course her aunt would make it the same way her mother had.
Her mother’s tools still decorated the kitchen walls. A wood and metal washboard hung by the back door, and a metal rug beater next to that. These weren’t curios from an antique store. They were family history.
Aunt Marie set a plate of apple streudel in front of Karen. “A little sweet to help you digest.”
Karen tried a taste, but found it impossible to swallow around the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to finish if you’re too tired. Come. I’ll help you get settled.”
Karen carried her suitcase to the bedrooms at the end of the hall. In her old room, the twin bed was covered with a white chenille bedspread. A narrow chest of drawers, the one she had used as a child, stood on one side of the bed. On the other, the night stand held a glass lamp on a crocheted white doily. Across the room stood her mother’s treadle-foot Singer on which Karen had learned to sew. The polished wood pedestal looked almost new, except for a missing knob on one of the drawers. Her mother had refinished the surface every ten years or so; the last time, Karen had helped, scrubbing away with steel wool until she thought her fingerprints would disappear, but she loved the machine with its determined needle and insistent foot pedal, and the free-flying hum of a long, straight seam. All during her teenaged and young adult years, she made her own clothes. She remembered how the hours passed, her mind at peace as her foot worked the treadle, her fingers easing the fabric toward the needle. She didn’t sew anymore, but Karen still knew which way to press a dart, and that a dry bar of soap worked better than tailor’s chalk to mark stitch lines.
A card table stood cluttered with pieces of cloth, a glue gun, and various notions. Karen picked up a piece of felt. It was cut in the shape of a rabbit. “Her crafts for the church…”
“Lena was always working on something.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“You’re so tired. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Would you mind telling me now? If it’s not too hard.”
Marie settled into the rocker. “I was watching TV in the living room,” she said, the floor creaking as she rocked. “Lena was working on her crafts. I heard her call out. I got scared and ran in here.” Marie’s fingers worried the plastic pearl chain attached to her reading glasses. “She was in that chair over there by you. She said she couldn’t catch her breath. I called for an ambulance, but she was gone too fast. They said it was her heart.”
“I should have been here.” The words scratched Karen’s throat.
“There was nothing you could do.”
“Still.” Karen looked away from her aunt. The near wall was covered with family pictures, the tarnished gold frames picked up at yard sales, ten for a dollar. In one, her father stood beaming in his army uniform, hugging a young Lena. Another showed him standing by his work truck, his tank-like body ramrod straight, brimmed hat pushed back on his big, round head. Dakota Gas, the sign on the truck said. There was a black-and-white snapshot of the three of them, Frank and Lena in their Sunday best, holding baby Karen in her baptismal gown on the front steps of St. Joe’s. “I didn’t know she was sick. Whenever I asked she said she was fine. The only thing she admitted was that maybe she was a little tired.”
“I don’t think she knew either.”
Karen walked over to the window. A single street lamp illuminated the tree on the front lawn, its branches fanning gently. The street was quiet. At seven thirty on a weeknight, all the residents were inside, finishing supper, watching TV, or maybe working on a favorite quilt.
Marie brought an extra pillow from the linen closet down the hall. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day. You should sleep.”
Tired as she was, though, Karen couldn’t sleep. She lay in the light of the street lamp, breathing the familiar air of her old bedroom and suffocating with guilt.
Three decades ago, she had abandoned her parents and boarded a plane to California, returning only for short visits. Even when her father died, she stayed only two days and then hurried back to the west coast, worried about her job.
After a period of mourning, though, her mom had done fine. Lena wasn’t one to slow down, not even for grief. Right after the funeral she invited Marie to move in, and the two sisters went about the business of widows, making themselves useful to church and community. Karen tried to be a good daughter from afar, calling often and remembering birthdays and holidays, but her gifts and phone calls were a poor substitute for her actual presence, and she and her mother had aged separately, half a country apart.
Now she pounded her pillow into different shapes, none helping to bring sleep. She wished tomorrow was over, and felt bad for the thought, but how does a girl get through a funeral Mass for her own mother? She would try to remain stoic in the German tradition, but like everyone in her family, she had overactive tear ducts. And after all, it was her mother. No one would judge her if she collapsed, wailing, on the church floor.
And oh God, the Mass, with its choreographed standing, kneeling and verbal responses–rituals familiar only to the regulars. Karen would be outed as someone who no longer attended. She would embarrass Aunt Marie and Lorraine, and sully the name of her poor mother, burdened even in death with that selfish daughter
from California.
She remembered her dad’s funeral, and the grief that had overwhelmed her. Tomorrow, strangers would surround her, crying and hugging her and saying how much they missed Lena. To bear the pain alone was hard enough, but to see other folks trouping into church–to see them grieving for Lena–would slay her. It would be too much. Karen rolled over, mopping at the sudden deluge of tears with the edge of the scratchy, line-dried sheet. She wished she could have stayed in California, dealing with the pain in her own way, buried in work, caffeinated and stress-driven. At least there she would function normally, familiar in her routine, running hard to keep her job, ignoring all the evidence of her poor excuse for a life.
She punched the pillows, trying to get comfortable. Outside the window, an owl hooted softly.
Chapter Three
Karen stared at the full-length mirror in the corner of her old bedroom, and the mirror stared back, thankfully without laughing. Clearly, she had forgotten how to dress for prairie funerals. With its gold buttons and white piping along the edges, the expensive pantsuit seemed gaudy.
Aunt Marie stuck her head in. “You look nice.”
“Is it too much?”
“You’re from California, so people understand. And you never know what the weather will do. It might be sunny, or you can get a thunderstorm. Last summer when we buried Amos, it snowed.”
Karen hung the jacket back on the hanger. “How long do we have?”
Marie glanced at her watch, a big, round black-and-white job with a fake leather strap. “Lorraine should be here in a half hour.”
At the kitchen table, Karen opened her computer to the memo she had tinkered with on the plane. Reading the words made her mad all over again. Wes wanted more cuts, but her staff were so burned out it was affecting their home lives. As the director of human resources, Karen had listened to many closed-door tales of crumbling marriages, kids doing drugs, and employees barely holding off nervous breakdowns. She had become so adept at finding good treatment and counseling services for her staff that she felt like a social worker. At least she was able to help. That part made her feel good.
But it wasn’t just her staff that was burning out.
“You work too hard,” people told her. “You worry too much.” Those people were stupid. Karen was running hard, both figuratively and literally, because the company she worked for had been sold four times in the last dozen years, and she needed to be even sharper than usual. She got up before dawn each day to run on her home treadmill, and after a ten-hour-day and a microwave dinner at the office, she often stopped by the gym.
Driven by fear of a metaphorical Katrina, Karen worried if she failed to stay in shape, both physically and mentally, change would hurl her life around and drown her in deep, dirty water. She envied people who lacked that primal fear. They were probably more at peace than she was, popping pills like candy to quell the acid in her stomach. Some nights, when she pushed the seated leg press, her glutes and quads screaming, she remembered the videos of helpless, three-hundred pound women being lifted into lifeboats.
In the living room, the sounds of the morning crop report intruded from the TV. Corn was looking good, but soybeans were too early to tell. How many mornings she had heard that same report while she dressed for school, cleaned her room, and waited for permission to leave. Before she walked out the door, her father required her to summarize her studies from the night before, and her mother checked her room, sometimes handing her the dust rag or requiring the bed be remade over a minor wrinkle. The penalty was weekend restriction.
Karen stared at the computer screen, trying to refocus on the memo. Lately she was more easily distracted, especially by noise. She would reread the same paragraphs, absorbing little, her mind dancing from subject to subject. It may have been the relentless pressure at work, but work had always been rough. No, she suspected it was her age. One had only to look at one’s face to know the truth. Now the skin near her eyes creased into a starburst of fine lines when she smiled, and parentheses bracketed her mouth. Her young staff would be horrified if they knew she had been around when pantyhose were invented, and her first computer was an Apple IIe with five-inch floppies. Now, having a phone plugged into the wall in your house was considered so archaic they resurrected a word from World War II to describe them–land lines–although people didn’t use the phone to communicate anymore, and even email was almost passé in favor of texting. To remain relevant, you had to belong to a half-dozen social networks to alert your friends when you were about to brush your teeth.
Karen was on top of all of it. She wasn’t going to be steamrollered by the passage of time and changing conventions. Even though it took a lot of energy and constant vigilance to compete, she didn’t intend to lose her job to some kid. Over the years she had developed a thick mental playbook for managing young employees confused by W-4s and the need to hide their belly-button rings. She nurtured them, but not too much; used humor, but only to a point. Hovered discretely and disappeared. So far it had worked, and she planned to continue that strategy until she retired.
She shut the laptop. There would be time enough after the funeral to save the world.
At the church, a white hearse stood vigil at the curb and a long line of cars snaked out of the parking lot and into the street. Half of Dickinson seemed to have turned out to pay their respects. Mourners surged across the parking lot in waves, dressed in modest dark clothing and low-heeled shoes. Karen didn’t see “Juicy” written across a single butt, bellies were covered, and bra straps stayed tucked inside blouses. Small town life had its compensations.
A man stood at the parking lot entrance, wearing the black suit and cape of the Knights of Columbus. Waving toward the Lexus, he removed his feathered chapeau and bowed. Then he lifted a traffic cone out of their way and signaled them forward into the spot behind the hearse. As they passed, Aunt Marie turned toward the window. “God bless you, Robert.” She gestured toward the back seat. “Do you remember Lena’s girl?”
“So sorry about your mama,” the man said, reaching for Karen’s hand. She felt the sting of tears, and they weren’t even inside the church yet. At the base of the stairs, she was surrounded by well-wishers. Aunt Marie ran interference, calling out the names of long-forgotten friends and neighbors as they approached, saving Karen from the embarrassment of not remembering. She greeted stoic relatives and tearful friends who either nodded to her or hugged her desperately depending on their degree of anguish, but when the driver stepped to the rear of the hearse, every voice fell silent. Karen heard the clasp release as the driver turned the door handle. Strong young pallbearers, standing in for Lena’s elderly friends, eased the burnished oak casket out of the vehicle. A truck driver, approaching on the narrow street, stopped his rig and shut down the motor. The smell of creosote wafted across the field from the rail yard.
Flanked by deacons and altar boys, Father Engel waited at the door of the church. The pallbearers placed her mother’s casket on a rolling carriage and wheeled it into the foyer, where it was encircled by Karen’s family. When quiet fell again, Father began to speak, his voice magnified by the microphone on his collar.
“We welcome Lena, here in the narthex,” he said, “the part of our church where the sacrament of Baptism is performed. In this way we symbolize the cycle of life and death. We celebrate the end where we celebrated the beginning, as all life is everlasting.”
Karen swallowed hard as the priest sprinkled droplets of holy water onto the casket while murmuring a benediction. He handed the dispenser back to an altar boy and placed his hands on the wood, eyes closed in prayer. Then he stepped back, and the men eased the carriage through the double doors and up the center aisle. Karen and Marie, arms linked, trailed after to the strains of a violin from somewhere near the altar. At the front of the church, they genuflected and entered the first pew. Lorraine, her husband Jim and their children and grandchildren followed, filling the next two rows. She heard her nieces and nephews sniffling, but K
aren herself had no children to mourn the death of their grandmother. Even if she had, Lena would have been a stranger to them, a little old lady from far away who sent them greeting cards on birthdays, with perhaps a few dollar bills folded neatly inside.
At the altar, Father Engel waited until all were seated. When the music stopped, he made the Sign of the Cross. “The grace of God our Father be with you.”
“And also with you.” The parishioners sat down with a great whoosh, and Karen followed their lead. She no longer knew the rituals, having become what her mother called an Easter-egg Catholic.
The choir began a hymn, one she remembered from the early years, when she was required to attend Mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days. “You don’t want to die with a mortal sin on your soul,” Lena would say, as determined to save her daughter from Hell as from getting run over by a car. Even if they were on vacation, camping in some distant mountain range, Lena would find out the time and location of Sunday Mass, and for the rest of the week remind Frank and Karen to save one pair of jeans so they’d have something clean to wear to the campground service.
The rich harmonies of a Latin choir still had the power to bring her to tears. Their voices swelled along with the fragrance of burning incense as the censer clanged against its chain. Karen groped in her pocket for tissues.
When the priest strode across the marble floor of the sanctuary to the podium, the music ceased. “We are gathered here today,” he began, “to celebrate the life of Lena Hess Weiler, and her ascendance into heaven to join our Heavenly Father in everlasting joy.”
He glanced down.
“A reading from Paul to the Romans.”
Karen bowed her head, mindful of those who still believed. Father’s voice faded as her eyes wandered across the altar, and the marble floor made of sand-colored squares alternating with white, to the back of the church, the sanctuary, with its high altar holding the Tabernacle. On the floor at the base of the podium stood a clear vase filled with golden spears of wheat. Dickinson, community of farmers, revered the grain, the basis of life in biblical terms. An abundant harvest was a sign of divine favor.