by Libba Bray
“You make him look—” the Sherriff starts, but catching himself, stops.
The corpse painter has had all night to look at the body, he can see it with his eyes closed, now he studies the Sherriff whose fleshy face, usually as constant as a mask, twitches and contorts, a small muscle beneath the eye, the flare of nostrils, a pulse at the neck, a protrusion beneath the cheek, certainly the tongue working there. “How?” the Sherriff croaks.
The corpse painter knows the Sherriff is not asking about technique. The corpse painter also knows how much courage it took for the Sherriff to ask the question. But how? How to explain? He doesn’t think he can say it any better than he already has, on the body.
“You’re invited to the cemetery if you want. My wife will be there. She’s been making them do it nice.”
The corpse painter considers the offer. After all, this is not just any body, this is his father’s body, the man who made the corpse painter’s own body a harlequin of bruises, which is only a footnote to the horrible things done, and yet the corpse painter knows that creation never travels far from destruction.
“All right,” the Sherriff says, apparently mistaking the silence for an answer. He turns around, going back to the car for the box to carry the body in, knowing the corpse painter will follow.
The funeral goes the way they usually do. No one seems to care that the body, in spite of the cold, is beginning to leak through the poorly joined slats. The Sherriff knows that a few people think his wife has gone nuts, he resents the way they humor her, even as he appreciates it. The prison chaplain does the blessing and a reading of the Sherriff’s wife’s choosing, always strange and incongruent, though everyone pretends that excerpts from “The Velveteen Rabbit” and “Peter Pan” are perfectly normal funeral meditations.
The Sherriff doesn’t know what was read for the corpse painter’s father, though later, he wished he’d paid closer attention. He couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking of what lay inside that wooden box, a man who had done terrible things, made beautiful by one of his victim’s.
The corpse painter’s wife always invited the chaplain, the grave diggers, and the Sherriff to the house after the funeral. Embarrassed, they always declined. The Sherriff had no idea what strange emotion infected him that day, but he said, yes, he’d come home for lunch, then rested his heavy arm on the chaplain’s shoulder, more or less dragging him along. The wife blinked in surprise at this. She whispered to the Sherriff to drive home slow, which he did, arriving at the house with the strange company of chaplain and grave diggers, just in time to see her scuttle inside with a bag from the Piggly Wiggly, which they all pretended not to notice.
She set out a tray of lunch meat and cheese slices, a basket of rolls, pickles and olives. When the Sherriff saw what was lacking he went into the kitchen for the jars of mayonnaise and mustard which his wife spooned into small bowls. They ate off paper plates perched on the edge of their knees, the scent of brewed coffee filling the house.
The conversation was stilted and strange, but afterwards, when the visitors left, the Sherriff’s wife kissed him on the forehead before he returned to work. That night, she set the leftovers out for him, the bread slightly stale, the meat and cheese dry, but the Sherriff made a big deal out of how he was hoping this was just what they’d have for dinner, she turned away, so he wasn’t sure, but he think she smiled.
That night the Sherriff can’t sleep. He lies in bed with his eyes wide open, how can she sleep he wonders, with the light so bright? He finally gets up to look out the window, but there is not, as he’d supposed, a new streetlight there, and the old has not been repositioned to shine directly on him. The Sherriff, when he thinks about all this later decides that he must have been half-asleep, which would explain his strange behavior, he’d padded on his bare feet, cold across the floor to the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, certain that it was the source of light, and there was, in fact, a light there, burning whitely, but how did it remain when the door was closed? He has no idea how many times he opened and closed the refrigerator door, trying to work it out. His wife found him there and brought him back to bed. He tried to tell her about the light but she told him there was no light anywhere, to close his eyes, go to sleep, which apparently he did.
But the next night it happens again, and the night after that as well, until the Sherriff is so tired he can’t think straight. That night, he doesn’t even try to go to bed. He lays in his lounge chair and when the light arrives, he follows it out the door, to the end of the block in his pajamas before he comes to his senses and goes back for the car.
He follows the light through the quiet streets, about half way there he thinks he knows where he’s going, and it turns out that he is right. He parks his car at the cemetery, the light emanates from there, brighter than anywhere else, the Sherriff shakes his head against the impossibility of what his mind has imagined, he is a rational man, this isn’t happening, but still he must follow, he must, he walks slowly over the hill, past the headstones decorated with pumpkins and turkeys to the grave he knew he’d arrive at, the headstone carved with a small lamb, a little pot of yellow flowers beneath it, his son.
The Sherriff begins pawing at the ground, scraping his cold fingers against the hard earth, he will get in there if he has to use his teeth. He isn’t even embarrassed when Sam, the graveyard’s neighbor and unofficial guard, finds him and tries to get him to stop. The Sherriff refuses to answer and after a bit, Sam leaves. When he returns, the Sherriff’s fingers are bloody. Sam, whose own son was born the same years as the Sherriff’s, has a pick axe, a hoe, a shovel, a large thermos of hot water, and chains. The morning sun is bleeding the sky pink by the time they hoist the tiny casket.
Sam doesn’t ask why. Not then, or ever. He doesn’t want to know. He hopes never to understand this particular kind of madness brought on by this kind of sorrow.
They carry the casket to the car together. The Sherriff turns back to repair the damage left in the cemetery but Sam tells him to go.
“Get out of here with that,” he says.
Which the Sherriff does, driving carefully because of the bright light burning in his car, almost blinding him. It’s a good thing he knows these roads so well.
The corpse painter tends to sleep in during the winter, catching up on his rest after all those nights of painting the dead, he sleeps a lot, sometimes he doesn’t change out of his pajamas for a week. Once the frost arrives, he prunes the roses back, his mail is delivered again, he spends his days catching up on bills, paging through thick catalogues of art supplies and magazines with photographs of perfect little teapots, expensively framed paintings, artists with tossled hair and knowing smiles, which he finds deeply disturbing. The corpse painter drinks coffee and watches Oprah. He falls asleep wherever sleep finds him, the couch, the lounge chair, the kitchen, sitting at the table, he dreams about the dead, working with the flesh coarsening beneath his fingers, waking with the terrible knowledge that when he dies, there will be no one to do the same for him, which seems a terrible waste.
He is in the midst of such a terror, waking in the chair where he’d fallen asleep, when he sees the Sherriff’s car turn into the driveway, disappearing around the side of the house, the way he does when he brings a body. The corpse painter wipes his hand across his chin, feeling the stubble of whiskers, he is so confused. Why is the Sherriff here at this time of year? Was winter’s approach only a dream? Is it still summer, the roses embracing the mailbox, the grass green, everything in the house, the stacks of mail, the catalogues, the mugs with moldy coffee a symptom of spring? Has the corpse painter slept all winter? He shuffles in his slippers to the back door, where the Sherriff stands, knocking on the aluminum frame.
The corpse painter opens the door wide for the Sherriff who shakes his head, turns, walks down the steps towards his car. The corpse painter, not sure what else to do, follows, though it is cold out here in pajamas, and his feet hurt in the soft-soled slippers, walking across stones.
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The Sherriff inserts the key in the latch and raises it, ignoring the corpse painter’s protest. He is struck silent anyway, by the small casket there, once white, now muddied. He knows who it is. He wipes his eyes while he tries to work out what to say.
“I know, I know,” says the Sherriff. “It’s really bright, but you get used to it after a while. Like the sun.”
The corpse painter shakes his head.
“Hey, I got a pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment. You can have them.” The Sherriff walks to the front of the car. The corpse painter watches a clod of dirt slide down the casket. The Sherriff returns and hands the sunglasses to the corpse painter who can’t think what else to do with them, he puts them on.
“Hey,” the Sherriff says, “you look good with those on.” He scratches his chin, that’s when the corpse painter notices that the Sherriff’s hands are scraped and bloody, that he, too, is wearing pajamas.
“Come inside,” the corpse painter says. “I’ll make coffee.”
The Sherriff frowns. “I don’t know. Don’t you think he’ll—”
“He’s fine,” the corpse painter says.
The Sherriff tilts his head, then, with a slight nod, closes the hatch and follows the corpse painter into the house, which is a real mess, but is warm. The Sherriff has never sat at the corpse painter’s kitchen table, not when he was a boy and came with his father, and not in all the years since he’s been bringing bodies here. They sit together in the dim light, though the Sherriff can still see the glow emanating from the car beyond the window. They drink coffee and talk. The corpse painter delicately addresses the limitations of bones but the Sherriff says he’s not worried. “I’ve seen what you can do,” he says. “I know you’ll do it right.” The corpse painter is not beyond being flattered. He agrees to something he is not sure he’ll get done. He even nods, as though it’s no problem, when the Sherriff says he wants it in time for Christmas. “A gift for the wife,” he says. “Anyway, I should get back. I don’t want her to guess what I’m up to. I want it to be a surprise.” The corpse painter walks with the Sherriff to the car. One of them could do it alone, but they carry the casket together, into the house, set it on the kitchen table, surrounded by all the mail. Suddenly self conscious, not used to the newly established camaraderie, they say an awkward good-bye.
Sometimes in the weeks that follow, when the Sherriff wakes up in the middle of the night, he wonders if he imagined everything, the boy’s death, the horror, the guilt, the long hours, the emptiness, the wife’s sorrow, the corpse painter, the darkness, and the light. In the dark, the Sherriff thinks, chuckling softly to himself, it is so easy to think that the light was only a dream. He lays there, with his hands behind his head, watching the shadows on the ceiling, and considers how much of life is filled with the shock of all those certain things. Every year it happens like this. The frost is shocking, as is the snow, the first flakes drifting past the window and sticking to nothing at all, very shocking. Sometimes, when he looks at his wife, expecting to see the woman he married, but finding instead this one whose face has morphed into something resembling a marshmallow, a not unpleasant face, but old, he is shocked, and he is shocked by the mirror as well. They were all shocked by the boy’s death, though that of course was the only thing certain once he was born. The Sherriff’s wife snores softly. She’s been better lately. He thinks. And that is not shocking at all, it is almost ordinary, though not ordinary of course, because if it were ordinary he would not be laying in his bed thinking about the ordinariness of it. The Sherriff has never been very philosophical, but what person doesn’t stop on occasion to take account?
Lately, they’ve been sleeping with the curtains open. His wife objected at first, but told him after a few nights that she’d grown to like it. Sometimes, they lay together and look out the window at the moon, or watch the snow drift past the streetlamp. He thought, on just such an occasion, to tell her about the light that had woken him, shining from their son’s grave, but he wanted to surprise her.
So, on Christmas Eve, when he drives to the corpse painter’s house, the sky gray with clouds, the Sherriff is pleased with himself for keeping such a big secret. This is going to be good, he thinks.
The corpse painter had never worked like this. He had not used these tools, and he had not worked with bone before. He had not worked in the winter, with its poor lighting and the cold that rendered his fingers stiff. For the first time since he was running the place, he ordered a cord of wood for the wood-burning stove. The corpse painter worked by fire day into night, listening to boy’s choirs on the classical station, their voices filling the corpse painter with beauty as though beauty was something that could become a part of being human, not something seen, but something known, like breath. He carved, and etched, filed and sanded. A child has two-hundred and eight bones, but of course many were broken, shards of sharp points, strange shapes he couldn’t identify. Some he set aside. He couldn’t possibly get them all done, he concentrated on the largest. He sent for wax, it came just in time, in bricks he melted on the stove. He forgot to eat, only remembering when his hands were shaking, he ate nuts and cheese, he sang along with the boys, remembering the boy he had been, as he worked on the bones, and in this way he worked until Christmas Eve and the corpse painter showed the Sherriff, and the Sherriff said it was good, and invited the corpse painter for Christmas dinner. The corpse painter surprised them both by saying maybe he would. The Sherriff carried the box in his arms, it was a large box that they had lined with paper so the bones wouldn’t rattle. The corpse painter told the Sherriff about the other bones, the tiny pieces, the broken shards, the bits he hadn’t used. The Sherriff just shook his head, no, no he said, you keep them. Never mind.
By the time the Sherriff left, it was almost dark, the snow had stopped, there had been just enough to make the children happy, to create a winter wonderland like the one his wife had fashioned on the mantel with bits of cotton around the paper house. They hadn’t had a tree since the accident, but this year she’d hung a wreathe on the front door, and she’d bought some new decorations in strange colors, a pink feathery thing, a silver ball, even a reindeer, though it was a strange shade of green, not like Christmas at all, more the color of a bruise. The Sherriff understood. It was a way of starting over. Not from the beginning, which, shockingly (he chuckled) was gone forever, but from where they were now.
They ate supper at the table. She’d made mashed potatoes, and boiled chicken, then panicked when she realized how white it looked on the plate. “What are you talking about,” he said. “It’s perfect,” and it did taste very good. There were the usual phone calls, then they watched TV, he sat in his chair, and she on the couch, flipping past the Christmas movies, settling finally for the weather station, until it broadcasted Santa’s passage across the sky, she turned it off, and said, “He would have been seven this year.” This too, was shocking. He tried to imagine it, but could not. They went to bed. They lay side by side, watching the dark sky out their window, and the streetlights glow. The longer he lay there, the more certain the Sherriff was that this was the time to give her the present, obviously, why hadn’t he thought of it before? It was a gift for the dark, after all.
“Are you awake?” he asks.
“I was just thinking.”
“I forgot to tell you. I invited him for dinner tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure he’ll even come. We have extra, right? There’s always so much food for Christmas.”
“I haven’t cooked like that in years.”
“We could have sandwiches.”
The Sherriff’s wife is almost amused. How could he do this? What was he thinking? By the streetlamp glow, she looks at her husband. She hasn’t looked at him in years, only recently realizing that something’s not right about him, which she finds reassuring. How could anything ever be right again? For a while, she’d thought he’d moved on somehow, back to normal. “We’re not having sandwiches.
I bought a turkey breast and box of stuffing.”
“The corpse painter,” he says.
“He’s coming here? To our house?”
“Probably not. Hey,” the Sherriff says, as though he only
just thought of it. “I got you a present.” He jumps out of bed and trots out into the hallway while she lays there thinking about the strangeness of life. When he returns, carrying the large package, he is grinning broadly, like one of those crazy Jack O’ Lanterns. She scoots back, to sit up against the pillows. He places the large, surprisingly heavy package in her lap, kisses her on the forehead.
After the Sherriff left with the gift for his wife, the corpse painter considered the remaining bones. He thought of making jewelry, or delicate carvings, intricate knots, or infinitesimal vases but in the end he dumped them in the fire pit, after he scraped away the snow. This is what they’d always done on Christmas Eve, only later learning that the bones his father brought home were never his to burn, he said they were from the butcher, roadkill, something dead in the forest. The corpse painter had never imagined his father was a good man, he doesn’t know how his mother ever did, but neither of them had guessed at the cost of those bones.
He waits until the dark is settled like something permanent, the sky everywhere deeply black, starless, the clouds black too in the deep ink of night. He pulls on his socks, his boots, remembering in these simple gestures, the small fingers shivering at the buckles, daring to believe in the magic of a night he did not know was haunted. His coat his hat, a scarf and gloves. He opens the door, and almost turns back. It is so cold he can see his soul. He loves the sound he makes walking across the snow dusted stones, then just the snow. No one shouts for him to hurry, there is no uncertainty of how the night will end, like a tumor, though he does have to remind himself that his father is dead, painted and buried. He throws sticks in with the bones, that’s the way to start a fire. He watches it burn until it is good and set, then he feeds it until the flames shoot up to the sky, and he is warm, remembering the things he wants to forget, wishing he could cast them into the fire as well.