“What’s that?” she’d asked, even though she had a pretty good idea. She was thinking about the fact that it was her fifteenth wedding anniversary, her husband was dead, and never once had they had sex with her on top.
Malwyn McKeever repositioned himself so that she no longer had a view of Waldo’s nether regions. “It’s a reflex,” Mal said, clearly embarrassed by the question. “A common postmortem reflex.”
“That figures,” Viney muttered. She had stopped crying and was starting to feel the undertow of a fierce, angry grief. She was young and foolish enough back then to believe that the worst thing in the world had just happened to her. She didn’t know anything.
She was curious to hear about how embalmers deal with postmortem stiffies—imagining this almost made her laugh—but Mal’s face was as pink as a medium-rare steak. So she picked out a coffin, signed the papers, and (vowing to never put herself through the experience of laying eyes on him again) bid farewell to her beautiful dead husband’s erect remains.
She could never in a million years have gotten Waldo to drink carrot-ginger juice on a daily basis or sit through a program on educational television.
Why, just last night she and Welly were watching one of those science shows on PBS about stem cell research and a whole new branch of study called regenerative medicine. There’s a group of doctors now who believe that people with spinal cord injuries can walk again. They’ve done things like remove stem cells from people’s noses and pack them into the spinal cords of people who’ve broken their backs or necks or are suffering from some other kind of damage to their nervous systems. Lo and behold, those cells start regenerating. People who’ve never been able to do so much as wiggle a toe have started flexing their feet! They’ve even done this with a person’s heart, a young boy whose idiot friend was playing around with a nail gun and shot him right through the left ventricle. Nobody believed it was possible to regenerate heart tissue, but sure enough, they’ve done it!
Viney tried to engage Welly in a conversation about the TV show when they were getting ready for bed, but for some reason he was unusually quiet (possibly the subject matter was upsetting given their shared history, the wheelchair-bound, and so forth) so she didn’t push him.
Even though they have never officially tied the knot, they are bound together in all the ways that matter—through the rituals of everyday living, dependability, courtesy, and an innate sense of when to talk and when to keep still.
All the emphasis on honesty these days is, in Viney’s opinion, a bad idea. Living with another human being is a stormy enough proposition without stirring up trouble over this and that and every last little thing. As far as she can tell, this obsession with talking and listening, sharing feelings and so on, hasn’t done one blessed thing for the institution of marriage. Just look at the statistics. Viney’s own children are example enough of the state of things: one divorced, one separated, one in counseling. None of Welly’s kids have ever even gotten married. Viney has always felt sad for them—and for Welly, too, with no grandbabies—but maybe it’s for the best. Cohabitation is not for the faint of heart.
Viney regrets getting snippy. She shouldn’t have made a fuss, pushed him like that. It’s one of those men things, a matter of pride, and there’s nothing she can do now to stop him. She watches him slam the trunk closed and walk around to the driver’s side door. He could use some new golf shoes. She got him that pair a couple of Christmases ago. It’s not like he hasn’t gotten good use out of them.
A wind kicks up. The bamboo chimes shudder; the whirligig in the rose bed spins madly. Welly starts the car. A cloud of exhaust is instantly dissipated.
It’s August! Viney thinks with sudden clarity. That’s what it is, that explains everything. The Joneses always get owly in late August. Criminy, the whole town does for that matter, it’s not as if what happened to them didn’t happen to the rest of us.
Welly’s children must be feeling it, too—Bonnie a few blocks away, Larken and Gaelan up in Lincoln. Poor kids. None of them are happy, none of them have ever really settled down. Viney glances at the photographs of Llewellyn and Hope’s children, prominently displayed on the fireplace mantle along with the pictures of her own blood kin.
Feeling a burst of sympathy and contrition, Viney hurriedly pushes open the screen door and scurries out to the curb to wave good-bye, but it’s too late. Welly is already turning the car onto Bridge Street. He doesn’t see her.
Viney sighs. That man does love to whack things with a stick. Funny. He’s not even very good at it.
She gives an assessing look to the accumulating clouds off to the southwest, checks the thermometer on the garage, and sniffs the air. The wind is high now, and cooling. The thick humid air that’s hovered over town for the past few days is being pushed aside.
Viney goes in. She changes into footless tights and a leotard. She’ll do her exercise video and then figure out something for dinner.
Maybe he’ll get to the club and run into Alan or Glen. They’ll have a drink. That’s probably what he’ll do. He won’t tee off when it’s sure to storm soon.
Viney shoves Young at Heart Yoga into the VCR and pushes the Play button.
While the FBI reminds her of the penalties associated with video piracy, she unrolls her mat, sits down in lotus, and closes her eyes.
It’s Friday. They’ll have frozen lemon pepper filets and that new Stouffer’s Spinach Souffle. She’ll whip up a salad from Dr. Walker’s cookbook. She’ll make a fresh lime and celery juice tonic and mix it with spring water.
The music begins. The steady, sangfroid voice of the yoga instructor encourages her to relax, relax. Breathe.
And for dessert, they’ll have big dishes of that fat-free rocky road that Welly likes so much.
The living aren’t the only ones unsettled. The dead—especially the fathers—are also perturbed by the mayor’s behavior.
There he goes, they’re thinking: kicking up dust with that gas guzzler he drives, hell-bent to engage in his favorite form of outdoor recreation, putting himself in the path of what any fool could see is a developing thunder cell, and at the worst possible hour of the day.
Idiot.
The dead fathers of Emlyn Springs are obstinate homebodies. They value routine. They keep close to their caskets.
This rootedness isn’t entirely owed to the fact that they’ve been planted in the landscape. For the farmers, it’s a matter of habit. They spent their lives knee-deep in loess, spring water, and manure; laying drain tile; planting, tending, and harvesting crops. A shackled vigilance to the soil and to the moods of the provincial sky was essential. It was possible to leave, but for a few hours at most, and only for the most pressing of reasons: a drive into town twice a year without fail to go to church; up to Beatrice to pick up a new transmission for the tractor; over to Branson, Missouri, to see traveling magicians, lion tamers, Up with People, or some other cultural event that the mother of their children arranged, and at which their presence, however grudging, was mandated. Ever black about the face and hands, pungent, abidingly crumby with dirt no matter how much they scrubbed, their bodies over time became so embedded with earth—and most of them lived long—that their skin evolved, adapted, developing a subdermal stratum composed of equal parts skin and soil. For the farmers, the transition to being dead and buried was hardly noticeable.
But even the nonfarmers are perfectly happy staying put. There may not be anything spectacular about the landscape in this part of Nebraska, but it’s home. If you leave, you’re gonna cry is what they’ve always said, but not everyone listens.
The most compelling reason behind their constant presence, however, is this: The dead are often called into service as what for lack of a better term could be called outfielders, catching those disquieted souls who die unwillingly, with rude, terrifying suddenness (victims of car accidents, gun blasts, natural disasters, and the like) and conveying them home. These kinds of deaths aren’t common in Emlyn Springs, but the dead
fathers maintain a proud readiness.
In the meantime, they are not idle. Far from it.
Several of them are plein air painters. Being submerged in the landscape has given them a new appreciation for it. Their awareness of color is deeper and more refined; after all, they themselves provide at least some of those colors: the robust burgundy of milo seed heads, the eerily dense green of emerging soybeans. Many are engaged in ongoing scientific experiments. Others are linguists.
To label their pursuits as hobbies would be misleading. The dead fathers of Emlyn Springs are not dilettantes. They work long and hard. They postulate formulas and equations with assiduity and then set about the long, slow, solitary business of proof. This makes them very happy. Eternally happy.
Meet some of them. Observe their labors. Tread lightly.
Mr. Merle Funk, farmer (1874–1930), is preoccupied with subtle differences in grasshopper physiology. Waldo Closs, insurance salesman (1930–1962), studies the fragile nervous system of the four-leaf clover. Obediah Purdy, pharmacist and bicycle enthusiast (1826–1899), transcribes dialectical variations in bee-speak. And leading the landscape artists is Dr. Gerallt Williams (1902–2000), family physician and specialty carpenter.
When it comes to the animal kingdom, their studies are focused exclusively on native birds. They’re done with cattle and hogs. They’re fed up with chickens. Ezra “the Egg King” Krivosha (1888–1982)—who put Emlyn Springs on the map by promoting it as the Fancy Egg capital of the world—no longer cares one whit about the inner lives of exotic laying hens, but he’s fascinated by the social interactions of snow geese. And since his death a hundred years ago, Fritz Bybee, Esq., has been recording the genealogical history of a single family of pied-billed grebes.
Other dead fathers are engaged in researching the impact of weather upon the underbelly of the Nebraska landscape—and, by extension, upon all remains that are there interred: Mr. Roy Klump, owner of Roy’s Roofing (1930–1998), records the varying sound waves produced by different sizes of hail and notes their effect upon postmortem hair growth. Myron Mutter (1898–1982), pastor, observes the way that electrical currents passing through the earth in advance of a thunderstorm affect hearing loss. And Mr. Ellis Cockeram, podiatrist and choir-master (1903–1979), is devising a means of measuring tornado-force winds by observing the escalating sensations that occur in his left fourth metatarsal.
The dead are just as certain as the living that a storm is on its way today, and soon—not by observing the sky, but through a particular chemical agitation in the soil, along with various corresponding skeletal anxieties. (Thankfully, Mr. Cockeram’s toes are unaffected.) Their softer remains are growing incrementally more acidic, and the earthworms, preferring a sweeter cuisine, are burrowing away.
Dead fathers don’t ask for much: solitude and quiet and detachment from the emotional vicissitudes of the living. They don’t thrill to demonstrative mourners. They can’t abide recklessness. And nothing upsets them more than willful stupidity.
Ergo, as far as they’re concerned, Llewellyn Jones deserves whatever he gets for behaving with such reckless disregard for the rules of storm safety, rules that each and every one of them can tick off in their sleep.
And now the mayor is at the country club, parking his ’89 Marquis next to Bud Humphries’ ’84 F-150, shouldering his bag and heading directly for the first hole tee-off.
What the hell is he thinking?
Decoding the motivating forces behind human behavior is the academic province of dead mothers. In contrast to their male counterparts (those curmudgeons, digging in their fleshless heels, barking out rules with a catechismal self-importance), dead mothers—ah!—they travel.
They would insist, somewhat defensively, that travel is a requisite of their studies in cross-cultural behavioral psychology. But truth be told, it’s mainly because they are weight-sensitive. When grounded, the dead mothers feel every footstep of every human being all over the world.
It was something like this when they were pregnant. Their children’s feet trounced around inside them like so many mischievous elfin sprites. Bubbly, they were. Effervescent when they quickened, like soda pop in the gut. That was how they made their presence known. So lightly.
But now! The heaviness of all of them. The pitter-patter of little feet has become a nonstop cacophony of stones.
The dead mothers’ travels are interrupted when something of significance is about to happen, something involving a living child, for example, or a spouse. At such times, they are called back from wherever they are, whether it’s across the state or on the other side of the ocean. They come willingly, without resentment.
One among them is being called back now: Aneira Hope Jones (1940–1978). She is halfway around the world, visiting the town of Pwllheli on the Lln Peninsula of North Wales. Among the dead mothers of Emlyn Springs, Hope tends to travel farther and stay away longer; but then, she’s always been different.
Hope knows this much: Her presence is required, and so she sets out, returning to the land and the people with whom she was once one flesh.
Llewellyn Jones is teeing off. The dead are paying attention.
Rule Number One! Merle Funk barks out. Don’t go under a large tree that stands alone!
Lightning illuminates the sky. The dead fathers start counting:
One cornhusker, two cornhuskers, three cornhuskers …
Llewellyn is in the rough. Hope arrives—her unexpected appearance is barely noticed by her comrades—and she watches with the rest of them.
Rule Number Two! Fritz Bybee chimes in. Don’t stay in a place where you are taller than your surroundings!
He’s certainly played better, muses Roy Klump. He used to beat me on that hole every time.
Llewellyn’s wedge shot—into the pond—corresponds with the next thunderbolt, as if he himself were summoning the elements.
The air inside the clouds a mile to the southwest is becoming agitated. Groggy humidity is being dragged up from the earth.
Llewellyn is standing knee-deep in water.
Rule Number Three! the fathers cry together, Don’t fish from a boat or stand on a hilltop or in an open field!
To which Ellis Cockeram adds, Lightning kills more people than all other kinds of storms put together!
A tunnel of supercooled air is gearing up to jettison downward.
Llewellyn crests the hill to the green. He sinks the putt. More thunder.
The dead mothers join the fathers, chanting One cornhusker, two cornhuskers …
Picking up his ball, Llewellyn hurries to the number five tee-off, the highest point of the Emlyn Springs golf course. From here he can see miles in all directions—over to his family’s land, long ago vacated by them, not sold, but turned over to more capable and less sorrowful hands. He can see the cemetery where a cenotaph marks the place his wife, Hope, would be buried, if only they could find her. To the north are his two oldest children, out of harm’s way, he hopes, out of the danger zone. He imagines seeing his youngest, Bonnie, on one of the back roads, pedaling her bicycle in the furious way she’s had since she was small. But no. Whatever else her siblings think of her, Bonnie has a good head on her shoulders. She wouldn’t be out on her bike in weather like this.
Here he goes. Burying the tee. Settling into his stance.
What is the fool thinking? wonders Alvina’s dead husband, Waldo.
Rule Number Four! warns Pastor Myron Mutter, desperately. Never hold on to or be near anything made of metal!
Mayor Jones—whose first name is pronounced with a sound not found in the English language, a palatal push of air—breathes in the sight of his homeland, and then …
Llewellyn … Hope whispers, sending her breath into the double l’s the Welsh way, giving his name the sound of a reticent breeze.
He looks down, prepares, still as granite. Suddenly he swings: his club arcs up—forcefully, theatrically, with intent—and then down, slamming into the ball as the thunder roars again,
swinging through, cutting a semicircular swath through space and then freezing momentarily, long enough to form with his club a straight vertical line, a perfect conduit between earth and sky, and then there is a crack and a sizzle and a sword of light.
The motion of the ball outlasts the living force behind it; it hurtles skyward with a marvelous ease, and even after the mayor’s heart is stunned into stillness by ten million volts of electrical current, the ball sails onward, upward, disappearing into the roiling clouds, moving in opposition to the hail that is now beginning to fall.
In the clubhouse cocktail lounge—where there’s a good view of the fifth-hole tee—the mayor’s friends are temporarily confused. They cannot see that the single hailstone that seems to be rising miraculously in resistance to the laws of gravity is really an ordinary pockmarked Titleist 100.
Then their eyes, losing sight of the ball, trace a line earthward and land upon the stilled form of Llewellyn Dewey Jones (1934–2003), physician, baritone, four-term mayor of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, and now-dead father.
Hail is bludgeoning the clubhouse roof. Bud Humphries, the country club bartender, town council chairman, and volunteer paramedic, snatches up the defibrillator and rushes outside. Hail, obedient, downward-falling hail, pummels his shoulders; he will be sore tomorrow and for weeks to come. This soreness will be fought with numerous applications of Bengay, which he will purchase from the town’s only drugstore, Lloyd’s Drugs, and here is Owen Lloyd now, pharmacist, war veteran, knocking over his martini glass in his haste to get down from the bar stool and call the fire station. The two other men in the clubhouse, Alan Everett Jones (no relation) and Glen Rhys Thomas, leave their peanuts and pitcher of beer and follow Bud outside, even though the storm is still directly, dangerously overhead. They go because they are men of Llewellyn’s generation, few in number, men who have stayed put as their sons and daughters moved away in all four directions, to bigger towns and even bigger cities.
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