The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  “Sweetheart, nobody thinks you can’t handle things. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine! I’m fine.”

  “Bring Jack home today,” Sam said. “I’m going to fix up his room. Tell him his old room will be waiting for him. Tell him I can’t wait to see him. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Annie promised to tell her father all of that as soon as Sam let her hang up the phone so she could go to Golden Days.

  It was an accomplishment to take a shower without screaming, to dress, to walk Malpy, to return the dog to the room (Dan made a noise but didn’t stir) and then to leave Brad a note at the hotel desk explaining that she was “out dealing with the Dad thing.”

  Sunglasses and aspirin enabled her to drive to Golden Days by 8:10 a.m. On the lawn of the pink stucco building, the old men and women sat under an already hot sun. In their waffled bathrobes, with their walkers and wheelchairs and tanks of oxygen, they had settled in to wait for lunch. Two of them, recognizing Annie, hurried over to ask her where Malpy was. They were disappointed that she hadn’t brought the little dog along to visit.

  In the lobby, the receptionist with the fat made-up face raised a manicured hand to stop Annie from heading to the elevator. But this time Annie had a registered name to throw her. “I’m here,” she said, “to see my father, Coach Ronny Buchstabe.”

  To her surprise, Miss Napp’s tight features immediately crumpled like an old jack-o-lantern. “Coach Ronny Buchstabe?” Her voice shook. “That’s who your daddy was? Coach Ronny?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Is there some problem?” Annie wondered if her father had been arrested, despite Dan’s assurances that the case had been dropped. “And I’d like to speak with Dr. Parker.”

  “Doctor who?”

  “My father’s doctor, Dr. Tom Parker.”

  “I’m not familiar with that name. But your father…You don’t know about him?”

  “Know what?”

  The receptionist looked strangely sympathetic, even stretching out a plump hand to pat Annie’s. “No one’s told you?”

  Alarmed but not wanting to give anything away, Annie pulled her hand back to grip the curved edge of the counter. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He passed away. Passed away?” Miss Napp put an interrogatory glide on the news as if that would help. “Your daddy?”

  Annie’s lips and tongue felt heavy. “Passed away?”

  “Coach Buchstabe died in his sleep yesterday. I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “…Coach Ronny Buchstabe? Room 540?”

  The receptionist nodded sadly.

  A curious thud at Annie’s heart moved her back a step. Miss Napp was saying something more but she couldn’t understand it. Words bounced around crazily as bingo balls, refusing to spell anything meaningful. How could her father die overnight?

  Waiting for Miss Napp to stop talking, she bent down and retied the laces of her running shoes, remembering her father’s claim that if it hadn’t been for him, she couldn’t have tied her shoelaces, couldn’t have brushed her teeth, couldn’t have walked, talked, read, written…couldn’t have, what? Couldn’t have loved? Was that possibly true?

  Miss Napp was leaning forward sympathetically. “I guess there’s some problem between you and your siblings?”

  Hope stung Annie. “My siblings?”

  The receptionist’s face bobbed. “I know y’all have been expecting this for months and months, still it’s always a shock. And why one of your brothers or sisters didn’t manage to reach you before now is anybody’s guess but theirs I guess. Did you leave town or something?”

  Annie looked around as if these unfamiliar brothers and sisters might be standing behind her. “Where are they?”

  The receptionist glared at her watch. “Honey, they’re getting ready for the family service right this minute. Not the one back in Tallahassee. But your big sister Jackie told me she already had this private family service ready to go for the past week; I mean, knowing it was only a matter of, well, days with your daddy. Jackie made the final plans yesterday and they’re already at Rest Eternal.”

  From a distance, Annie heard herself stupidly repeating, “Jackie made the plans…” She was thinking that, okay, it was remotely possible that her father had another daughter, older than Annie, whom he’d named Jackie, for himself. Yet hadn’t he been under twenty-one when Annie herself was born?

  Indignation at the precipitous Jackie led Miss Napp to pour Annie a paper cup of water from a pitcher beside her. “She didn’t tell you about Rest Eternal? Why, this is just awful! I just don’t even believe this!”

  Annie drank the water. “You said he had a stroke? But I thought his heart was fine. He was young.”

  “To the loved ones, any age is young.” The receptionist leaned so far forward that her large breasts rested on the countertop.

  Annie asked if she could look at her father’s room. Miss Napp hesitated a long time, glanced at her computer and her phone and the lobby, then suddenly agreed.

  Room 540 was empty, its bed stripped to the mattress. Annie looked inside the metal drawers of the bedside table. There was nothing in them. There was nothing in the closet or the bathroom.

  Miss Napp walked her down the hall again, growing confidential. “Miss Buchstabe, you can’t imagine the things I’ve seen here at Golden Days. I could make your hair stand on end. The old do have to make way for the next generation and life is for the living, but there’s such a thing as taking time out to be respectful. Well, at G.D., that is not the policy and you are just whistling Dixie if you go around believing it is.” With that bright-faced admission, Miss Napp wrote out the address of the funeral home on a pad she was carrying and thrust it at Annie with fierce nods. “All a father’s children are equal in the eyes of death. You need to leave now to make the service on time.”

  Annie drove to the nearby funeral parlor as quickly as she could. From her Blackberry, she left text messages for Dan Hart, briefly explaining where she was going and why. She stopped at a service station and tried to call Clark in Emerald but he was in the OR and couldn’t be reached. She tried to call Sam, but couldn’t reach her either; she was doubtless still on the road back to Emerald and there were pockets without service on that highway. Nor could she leave a message like, “There’s a chance Dad’s dead.”

  She called Georgette. The sound of her old friend’s voice mail (“Hi there. You’ve reached the home of Dr. Georgette Nickerson, where I live with two unleashed Doberman pinschers”) was so reassuring that she could feel her chest loosening. “Georgette, it’s me. I guess you’ve left for work. The rest home down here in Miami says my dad died. People claiming to be his other children are having some kind of service for him right now. He was using the name Ronny Buchstabe. I can’t reach Clark. I don’t want to leave this message for Sam. Don’t tell her anything about Dad’s dying. I’m going to the funeral.”

  That she couldn’t get in touch with Sam or Clark strangely distressed her. Here she was, twenty-six years old; it had been a long time since she’d lived at home. She didn’t even see them that often; might not visit them for months on end, might not think of them for weeks at a time. Yet suddenly their not being accessible to her was a wrench. Stopped at a red light, she watched her hand on the gearshift knob; her fingers looked blue; her chest hurt.

  Ten minutes later Annie pulled into the new flat parking lot beside the entrance of Rest Eternal. It was an ugly place.

  How awful that her father, who had always had, if not morals, certainly taste, should have to leave this world—if in fact he was dead—via such a tacky route as Rest Eternal, a tan concrete cube squeezed between a log-cabin-style restaurant called Good Mornin’ and a car lot called Touchdown that advertised itself with a ten-foot-high balloon of a football player kicking a big dollar sign over a goalpost.

  A white stretch hearse waited by the curb at the Rest Eternal entrance. Inside the building, in a fake-marble lobby, an electronic wall scroll
listed all the upcoming services one after another, as if the dead were stocks or headlines. Annie slipped quietly into the room where the “Coach Ronald Buchstabe Family Memorial” was just beginning.

  In this small auditorium there were fifteen people in folding chairs gathered at one end. They sat dutifully listening to lugubrious music that poured like syrup from large speakers. Floral displays had been tidily spaced in front of a saturated blue curtain on a small stage.

  The audience did not look like people Annie would have expected her father to have known, much less bred. The idea kept springing up like a punching bag that Miss Napp’s report of his death was a mistake. In what were clearly three generations of Buchstabes, Annie could see no resemblance to Jack Peregrine, nor to her aunt Sam, nor to herself. It was not possible that these Buchstabes were his. Huge and flat-featured, six men and women sat clumped together, flanked by even larger teenagers, all of whom—both male and female—had long lank brown hair. Two young women struggled to hold onto big red squirming babies. A teenaged male surreptitiously checked for messages on his cell phone.

  When Annie slipped into a seat near the back of the room, the whole group of mourners turned to look at the young slender woman in a white naval uniform. Frowning mulishly, they turned their backs. She was puzzled by their hostility.

  After a long restless silence, the blue curtain slowly opened, revealing on an otherwise empty stage a table draped in blue and yellow satin on which sat a small mahogany box with silver handles. A large-boned white-haired woman made her way heavily onto the stage and began to slide in and out of the tune of “God Bless America,” accompanied by a sullen female teenager at an electric organ keyboard.

  Annie looked around for Rafael Rook, who wasn’t in the room, despite his claim to be Jack’s best and only friend. She searched the room for Dan, who’d spent so much time trying to put Jack behind bars, but she didn’t see him either. She stared at the little mahogany box with silver handles. Whoever these alleged brothers and sisters of hers were, they had cremated Coach Ronny Buchstabe in a hurry.

  She asked herself, if these remains were Jack Peregrine’s, was she upset that she’d missed her chance to view them before the cremation? No; better not to think that this little box contained that fast-moving man. Better not to see how such vital noise, speed, laughter, could be shrunk to such a small container of gray ash and chips of bone.

  Two of the dough-faced males carried a cardboard photograph up onto the stage and placed it on an easel beside the crematory box. The photo was a colorized portrait of a big bald male wearing a blue and yellow sweatshirt with the letters SFU on it. He had a whistle around his thick neck. Annie let out a long audible breath. If this was Coach Ronny, he definitely wasn’t her father.

  After the woman finished “God Bless America” and left the stage, a younger, even bigger woman, in her sixties, with long straight grayish brown hair and puffy eyes, stomped up and asked everyone to clap for the singer, “Daddy’s sister Clara Louise, widow of Francis W. McGreb of McGreb and Son—that’s Frank, Jr., there on the third row with his family from Cincinnati—Wholesale Plumbing Parts. Aunt Clara’s the oldest here by far and came the longest way by far, all the way from Winner, South Dakota, where she and Daddy were raised to be winners!” Everybody clapped except the widowed Mrs. McGreb, who looked put out at being described as “the oldest by far.”

  The long-haired woman’s black shiny dress sported green flowers fluffed out at her waist like sprigs of parsley on a glazed duck. The flowers quivered as, in a voice as flat as her features, she introduced herself. “You all know me, I’m Daddy and Mama’s oldest girl, Jimmy Stump’s wife, and Jimmy and I are here from St. Pete’s, where he’s retired. We’re sorry our daughter Barbra couldn’t make it but it’s the Once a Year Sale today at Barbra on the Beach, downtown Sanibel, fine women’s casual wear, and her manager called in with a 103 temperature. I’m here the same as you, to honor Ronny Buchstabe. My daddy. Frankie’s daddy. Your granddaddy. Your brother. Your friend. The Coach has left the stadium. He’s gone from the fields of this life to the fields of a better. He played his last game and it was a hard one. But death, where is thy victory?”

  A sob was stifled in the first row. Jackie acknowledged it by pausing. The crier, a stolid and stiffly dressed gray-haired man, blew into his handkerchief. Beside him, the teenaged boy checked his cell phone again. Signaling with a hostile gesture that he should pocket the phone immediately, Jackie opened a spiral notebook and flung over a page. “We all know Coach Ronny was all-American all the way. He preached what he lived and he lived what he preached—hard work and family values.”

  As the speaker went on, Annie looked inquiringly around the room. She saw nothing on anyone’s face to suggest that Jackie’s eulogy was being delivered tongue-in-cheek. People were even in tears. That this woman should attribute hard work and family values to Jack Peregrine would mean (were she actually Jack’s namesake) that she was a deadpan joker in a league with the world’s greatest comics. And frankly such didn’t appear to be the case. There was no doubt. The dead man really was a man named Coach Ronny Buchstabe. Her father had lied when he said he’d made up the name. The relief she felt surprised her and she started to slide out of the row of seats when she suddenly felt it would be unfeeling to leave in the middle of someone’s funeral. She sat back down.

  “Daddy loved his God and his country, he loved his children and his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, and he loved every boy he ever coached at SFU.” Mrs. Stump suddenly strode in her huge high heels over to the colorized photo of the man in the sweatshirt and kissed his bald head. “Daddy,” she said, “you were the best thing that ever happened to the defensive line at Georgia Tech and the best coach they ever had at Southeast Florida University.”

  A few of the women tried to clap but it was difficult because of their squirming babies.

  “When you retired,” Jackie told the photograph, “SFU should have sent you that Northstar Cadillac you always wanted with a giant-size wreath that said, Thank You in letters of gold.” Suddenly she slapped shut her notebook and spoke from her heart, a bitter one. “But they didn’t. They never gave Coach Ronny the time of day from the day he retired to the day he died. And I’ll never forgive them for that. Never. Frankie’s girls, the Daughters of Destiny, will now entertain us in this mournful hour.” She shuddered, too indignant to say more, and strode off the dais. Three young fat girls clambered up the steps and sang harmonies in a medley of “Amazing Grace” and “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech,” their grandfather’s undergraduate song.

  Midway through their performance, to Annie’s shock, Jackie suddenly lurched out of her seat, marched as aggressively up the middle aisle as if she were in her father’s line-up at SFU. She clopped right over, grabbed and shook Annie by the arms. “You’re the slut Daddy married!”

  Annie was stunned into a loud protest. “Stop that! No, I’m not!”

  On stage, the fat little girls slid to an end in a blended slur of vowels. “Was blind but now I see…a heck of an engineer.”

  Jackie lost control. “Believe you me, Paisley or Pammy or whatever your name is, I will fight you in court till the day I die and I swear before Almighty God you will never set one foot in my mama’s house!”

  Annie had pulled her arms away from the woman’s strong grip. “I’m sorry! Jackie, I never met your father. I’m at the wrong funeral.”

  “Ha. You just happen to know my name and show up here. Nice try.” Jackie spit the words at her as two big flat-faced men, calling to her sympathetically—“Come on now, sister”—tugged her back up the aisle and shoved her down in her chair.

  The male teenager who’d been forced to shut off his cell phone joined the singers on the stage. Tall and pasty, he swayed back and forth for a while then began in a loud aggrieved tone, “My grandpa was a complete A hole. But like hey okay who isn’t?”

  Annie heard hsst, hsst! behind her. It was Rafael Rook at the rear of the ro
om, dressed in lime-green floppy trousers and a yellow shirt with alligators cheerfully dancing on their hind legs. She glared at him then turned back to the stage.

  The teenaged Buchstabe, dirty-haired, acne-faced, and with his huge hands clinched at his sides went on to say that his grandfather should never have bothered coaching at SFU and that in fact no one should bother attending any college anywhere in the miasmic swamp of meaninglessness that was “this total shit ass dog crap, like listen up, the fucked up world you fucked up, you assholes!” There was a gasp from the front row. Jackie lurched forward bellowing, “If Daddy was alive, Martin, he would kick your filthy mouth right off of your filthy head!”

  “I’m keeping it real here, Aunt Jackie, so fuck you.”

  Jackie’s brothers pulled her back into her chair.

  A hand squeezed Annie’s shoulder. She looked around, recognizing the cinnamon-colored fingers. Rafael crouched in the row behind her. “It’s Rafael Rook,” he whispered unnecessarily. “It’s okay, Annie, it’s okay, really. Your dad’s not in that box. It’s Coach Ronny Buchstabe.” He sighed. “SFU didn’t even send him a lousy wreath. People just have lost all sense of gratitude and I consider it a shame.” Annie glared furiously at him. “Really,” he repeated. “It’s not Jack. A mistake.”

  She whispered in a rage. “I figured that out! You and my father told me he made up the name Ronny Buchstabe! Golden Days sent me here to his funeral!”

  “Miss Napp?”

  “Yes!”

  “Doesn’t have a brain in her head. Poor Chamayra, they just fired her. And she has—I regret to say—possibly as a result, expressed the desire never to see me again in this world, or the next. ‘There is no following her in this fierce vein.’”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “We need to talk about that.”

  One of the young mothers with a big baby turned around. “Shhh!” she said loudly. The teenaged girl had resumed playing a mournful “Amazing Grace” on the electric organ keyboard.

  Rook leaned closer to Annie’s ear. “Chamayra let your dad, well, borrow Room 540, I guess because the poor old coach had gone to ICU and then I guess the coach all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn’t sudden, died. ‘Gilded monuments of time, tomorrow and tomorrow and—’”