The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  Those rare and excellent moments in my half-life since, when the clear eyes of ancients or lovers or babies have made me momentarily certain that this life is a gift, whether randomly given or by design; those times when I was filled with thanksgiving for the day that was in it, the minute only, for every tiny incarnate thing in creation—I’ve measured such moments against that first night in Moveen where staring into the firmament, pissing among the whitethorn trees, I had the first inkling that I was at once one and only and one of a kind, apart from my people yet among them still, the same as every other human being, but different; my own history afloat on all history, my name and the names of my kinsmen repeating themselves down generations, time bearing us all effortlessly, like the sea with its moon-driven, undulant possibilities: we Irish, we Americans, the faithfully departed, the stargazers at the sea’s edge of every island of every hemisphere of every planet, all of us the same but different.

  THE SISTERS GODHELPUS

  My sister Brigid’s yellow Lab bitch Baxter was put to death last Monday. What can be said of such proceedings? That every dog has its day? The following from my sister’s partner, Kathy, tells the tale.

  It is with a heavy heart that I write this e-mail to notify family of the death of Baxter Bailey (11 1/2 years old) on Monday, July 14th. Kidney failure. She was buried in a deserved spot, at Mullett Lake. She is survived by her sister, Bogey Bear (who is a little lost as to what has transpired) and her mother/best friend/companion—Brigid. A brief ceremony will be held the weekend of the 25th on Mullett Lake.

  Whether you loved her, feared her or were entertained by her, she will never be forgotten. Long live her memory.

  Kathy

  In receipt of which I replied:

  Dear Kathy and B,

  Thanks for the sad and tidy news. I will not pretend to have admired the deceased. She was, however, a walking (more lately hobbled) example of the power of love. She was not bright, not lovely, less communicative than most mum plants, and drugged into a stupor for most of her life. But here is the mystery—the glorious mystery—that a woman as bright and lovely, articulate and sober as our B loved her, loved her unambiguously. For a man of my own limitations (and they are legion) the love B showed to Baxter was a reminder of the lovability of all God’s creatures—even me. In that sense she was a constant beacon of faith and hope and love. If this is what they call the Dog’s Life, I say more of it is the thing we need.

  You and B will be in my prayers for a brief if deserved bereavement.

  Love & Blessings,

  T

  PS: Pat and I will get the stone and willn’t stint.

  It was a hasty but heartfelt sentiment, managed between the usual mélange of mortuary, literary, and family duties. I meant only comfort by it. And though we get the headstones at wholesale, the gesture was genuine.

  PART OF THE comeuppance for calling our small chain of funeral homes Lynch & Sons is that the daughters—our sisters—control the purse. Three of my father’s six sons, I among them, went off to mortuary school and got licensed, years ago, to embalm the dead and guide the living through the funerary maze. Before our father died, we bought the enterprise from him. His three daughters—ever his favorites—went to university and business schools and were installed in various key positions. Mary is the bookkeeper and paymistress. Julie Ann is her factotum. Brigid handles trusts and insurance and pre-need finance and is the de facto comptroller at my brother Pat’s funeral home. We call them “The Three Furies,” and they travel between my establishment and Pat’s, bringing light and joy and accountability.

  When I see them together—Mary, Julie, and Brigid—I often think of the headlands on the Dingle Peninsula called “The Three Sisters,” which rise in a triad of sweeping, greeny peaks to protect the Irish countryside from the ravages of the North Atlantic. Like those features in the West Kerry topography, they are strikingly beautiful, immovable, and possessed of powers we know nothing of. They are, it is well known, Irish in origin—the powers, the sisters. The source of all that is holy and hazardous about them is a matrilineage that finds its way back to a kitchen and cauldron in a boggy parish in the old country where only marginally post-Celtic mystics bedded with poor farmers who never knew what they were getting into. It is a lineage of women who emigrated on their own, in numbers equal to or greater than men, enduring steerage and indignity, years of indenture, to better themselves and their American children.

  The sisters come by their powers honestly. They are their late mother’s daughters and have inherited that sainted woman’s charms and spells, blue eyes and Parian complexion, intellect and idolatries. They are, as she was, devotees of the votive and vigil, rosary and novena, perpetual adorations, lives of the saints, imitations of Christ, statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sacred Heart, Stations of the Cross, relics, waters, ribbons and badges, prayerbooks and scapulars—all of which make them morally superior and spiritually dangerous. The arsenal of their godly wraths and blessed tempers would, in the best of circumstances, be turned on their spouses, to their betterments. But as each has partnered and consorted with the most amiable soulmate, they’ve only to train their tantrums upon their older brothers, whose puny potvaliances, collective and individual, are no match for The Furies. It makes them, I suppose, easier women to come home to.

  Wednesdays Mary and Julie come to my funeral home in Milford for payroll and accounts—receivable and payable. Brigid remains at my brother’s office but calls to consult with her sisters three or four times on the day.

  Last Wednesday, when Mary and Julie read my sympathy note, they rolled their eyes and smote me with their disapproval. “How could you say such an awful thing about Baxter to your grieving sister?”

  “What awful thing?” I asked, “a beacon of faith and hope and love?”

  “This bit about the mum plant and stupor. . . . Couldn’t you have just said something nice? Something about her loyalty?”

  They did not see that stating the obvious about Baxter’s life and times was central to the art of condolence and, a fortiori, the construction of the note’s kindlier sentiment.

  Truth told, the dog was a disaster, which had worn out her welcome by eleven years with everyone except, of course, my sister Brigid. A female assigned a fashionably suburban, chicly Anglo-Irish, but still oddly mannish name, “Baxter Bailey” never seemed to know whether she was coming or going, whether to hump or be humped, whether she ought to lift a leg or squat. When she had just achieved adult size and indoor continence, she bit my sister—quite literally the hand that was feeding her—thereby missing the only requisite point of Dog 101, to wit: Don’t bite the humans. B had her neutered. Later she growled and snapped at B’s infant and toddling nieces and nephews as they approached to pet her. On the strength of these misdemeanors and distempers, I once had B talked into putting her down, citing the liability presented by a dog that might attack neighbors or their pets or children, houseguests or passersby. I reminded her of the One-Bite Rule, with roots in the Book of Exodus, near where the ordinances on the seduction of virgins are recorded (alas, the emergent patriarchy!), which held that an owner would be called to account for the second infraction of a domestic animal. I’d gone so far as to set an appointment with the vet for the euthanasia and had Baxter leashed and loaded in the backseat and B agreeably disposed to the good sense of it all. But when she got there, she waffled in her resolve. She asked the vet, instead, for medication, something, she pleaded, “to calm her down”—Baxter, not Brigid. The cocktail of pharmaceuticals thus prescribed amounted to the nonsurgical equivalent of lobotomy. She was given phenobarbital to control her seizures, Lasix as a diuretic, something for her stomach disorders and insomnia, and a giant daily dose of canine Thorazine—enough I daresay to dull an orangutan—to quiet her demons, real and imagined. Baxter remained more or less on the edge of a coma for the rest of her life. Like some of those old lads you’d see in the pubs, the tooth gone out of them, supping up their daily sedation. She nev
er snapped at anyone or anything again. She roamed about, bumping into the landscape and geography and furniture, like an outsize, spongy orb in a game of pinball or bumper-pool. At the lake, Mullett Lake—where we’ve recreated en famille for years and ruined the property values—she would sometimes walk into the water, as if some distant memory of her breed still flickered in her. Brigid would have to wade in and lead her ashore. People would toss Frisbees and tennis balls in her direction, hoping to engage her in the usual play. They would bounce off her snout and hindquarters, causing not so much as a flicker in Baxter’s glassy eyes. The customary commands—“Sit,” “Fetch,” “Heel,” “Come”—meant no more to Baxter than a recitation from the Tain or the Annals of the Four Masters. To the voice of her mistress or any human directive, Baxter was uniformly nonresponsive. The only trick she ever performed was, “Breathe, Baxter! Breathe.”

  “Where there’s life there’s hope,” Brigid would say, ever the loyal human, as if the dog’s damage were reversible. It was a sad thing to witness, this zombified miscreant working her way through a decade and then some of meaningless days. Her end was a mercy to all and sundry.

  But what my sisters Mary and Julie seemed to be saying was that no empathy or fellow feeling could be tendered that did not include the ruse that Baxter was Rin Tin Tin done up in drag, or Lassie or Old Yeller—a great dog to be greatly grieved and greatly missed—a loyal, loving, exceptional specimen of Man’s (read Woman’s too) Best Friend. When I protested that Baxter would not want to be placed on a pedestal, or to be loved for other than the amalgam of distress and misfortune that she was, that authentic feeling could not be based upon a vast denial of reality, they both rolled their eyes in counterclockwise turns and said, one to the other, “He just doesn’t get it.”

  That I just don’t “get it” is the conventional wisdom and the conversation’s end with the several women in my life. Though I am the son of a good woman, now deceased and lamented, and sibling of three of them; though I am the father, friend, and spouse of females, like most of the men of my generation, and almost all of the men of my extraction, I just don’t get it and maybe never will. A library of literature currently exists on the whys and whatnots about Irish men—with the notable exceptions of Bono and Liam Neeson—which render them denser than other specimens when it comes to “getting it” so far as women are concerned. The Irish-American male is similarly disposed, unless there is a remedial dose of Italian, Mexican, or Russian in his genealogy, in which case not getting it gives way to not giving a rap.

  FIVE MORNINGS OUT of every seven, the woman across the street in the gingerbready Queen Anne with the Martha Stewart garden emerges with her two snow-white toy poodles to attend to what Victorians called “the duties of their [the dogs’] toilet.” Each is the size of a bowling ball and their tiny feces like wee, green, cat-eyed marbles—about which more, alas, anon. These daft and dainty little sexless things are named for their mistress’s favorite libations, “Chardonnay” and “Champagne,” which are shortened in the diminutive to “Chardy” and “Champy,” as she is heard to call out when they go bouncing about the neighborhood in search of somewhere to take their tiny designer shits. Most mornings the entourage looks a little dazed, as if they all might’ve gotten into the vodka-and-tonic late. But who am I to say?

  She doesn’t like me—the woman across the street. The list and variety of our quarrels and quibbles on civic, cultural, and neighborhood issues is a long and exhaustive one. I’m sure she thinks I just don’t get it. Truth told, I’m not that gone on her. Except for the occasional wave or sidelong glance and nod, we make no effort at neighborliness. We knew from the get-go we would not be friends. And though I admire her refusal to maintain any pretense or decorum, it is better to do so from afar. Maybe we remind each other of each other’s former spouses.

  Still, I uphold her right to her ways as she upholds my right to mine. This is America, after all. Though we hold forth from opposite sides of the street, the name of the street is Liberty. So the insipid little dogs, the fellow she’s married to (who must on the weekends attend to Chardy and Champy’s morning office), the overgrowth of garden—these are situations I accept like variations on the theme of weather. It could be worse, is what I tell myself. In the same way, she tolerates me and mine: the overflow parking from the funeral home, the mysterious vans arriving at all hours, the bright Impatiens we plant every year among the uninspired juniper and yews and, the Dear knows, my manifest personal foibles. Like me, she has much to tolerate.

  It’s only when she brings Chardy and Champy over to the funeral home to sniff about in search of a proper shitting ground that I take especial umbrage. To give her and her poodles their due, she always comes armed with a plastic bag and a rubber glove—the latter effecting the transfer of the turdlettes from my greensward into the former. She is, in keeping with local and regional custom, fastidious about the fecal matters. I think she uses them with her prized delphinium. But for some reason I cannot shake the sense that I and my real estate have been shat upon, and that there is a kind of message hidden in the act, that there is some intelligence she intends for me to “get” by the witness of it. Nor can I shake the temptation, so far resisted, to mosey on over and shit on hers. There’s liberty in it, and a kind of truth.

  AFTER MY FIRST wife and I divorced, I was the custodial parent of a daughter and three sons from the time they were ten, nine, six, and four—until I was married again, some seven years later, to the Woman of My Dreams. It’s when I most wanted to be a feminist. The divisions of labor and money, power and parental duties—those good-for-the-goose-and-gander concerns of the third-wave feminism of the day—were themes I found the most intriguing. I read de Beauvoir and Friedan, Brownmiller and Millett, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. I read Robin Morgan’s man-hating rhetoricals on “cock privilege” and castration and Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook and Andrea Dworkin’s sad and incomprehensible screed and wondered if there were miseries out of which such people could really never be put. I was a card-carrying, contributing member of NOW. I vetted my personal lexicon for sexist terms. Postman became mail carrier, chairman became chairperson, ladies became women. I never said “girl.” I made my sons wash dishes and my daughter take out the trash and filed for child support from my former spouse, in keeping with the equal-rights amends I was trying to make. I was encouraged by the caseworker from the Friend of the Court’s office—a fetching woman with green eyes and a by-the-bookish style—who said the children should get fifty percent of their noncustodial parent’s income. This, she assured, was a gender-indifferent directive. The state-prescribed formula called for twenty percent for the first child and ten percent for every one after that. “It’s what you’d be paying,” she said matter-of-factly, “if the shoe were on the other foot.” I figured I could save it for their higher educations.

  The judge, however, overruled the caseworker’s recommendation. Her honor conceded that while in theory our sons and daughter deserved the benefits of both of their parents’ gainful labors, she could not bring herself to order a mother to pay child support, even one who saw her children but every other weekend. It was enough that the erstwhile missus was making her own way in a difficult world. Supplemental payments for the support of her children were more of an indenture than the judge was prepared to order. During the brief hearing, I was advised by her pinstriped counsel to leave well enough alone. I just didn’t get it after all.

  In Ireland at the time, they had no ex-wives and more than once I thought, “How very civilized.” There was no shortage of domestic misery, of course, no shortage of abuse, just no divorce. It wasn’t allowed. So people moved apart and lived their lives as, more or less, ex-spousal equivalents. There was a Divorce Referendum in 1986, but the priests all preached against it in the country places. It failed by a convincing margin. Still men and women wanted civil disunions and lobbied for them until the measure passed just as convincingly in 1992. Now gay men and lesbians want to get married
, and who could blame them, what with the bliss, for lobbying for the blessings and paperwork?

  Back in those days, I kept a lovely cur, free of any registered pedigree or jittery habits. She had a small head, a large body, and an agreeable temperament. We called her Heidi. When she was a puppy, I walked her ’round our little city lot at the corner of Liberty and East Streets and the half-block next door occupied by the funeral home and its parking lot and told her that she could come and go as she pleased but that if she showed up at home, more nights than not, she’d be fed and petted and sheltered well; she’d be loved and cuddled, bathed and brushed. In short, if she would do her part, we’d do ours. Such was the nature of our covenant.

  And though Heidi traveled widely, she never strayed. She would follow the mail carriers on their rounds, forfending them from more vicious dogs. She’d find her way to the corner butcher shop and beg for bones and to the bakery on Main Street to beg for day-old donuts. She was particularly fond of custard-filleds. She would stare balefully into the doorway of the delicatessen for hours until someone proffered some Polish ham or Havarti cheese or some other succulent or delicacy. Later in the day, she would make her way to the schoolyard to accompany my younger sons home from their day’s studies. Evenings she’d position her repose in the driveway of the funeral-home parking lot, acting the speed bump and sentinel whilst the children practiced their skateboarding or Frisbee or whiffle-ball. On weekends she’d be in Central Park, fishing with my oldest son or accompanying my daughter and her friends on their rounds through town, field-testing their ever-changing figures and fashions. She died old and fat and happy and was buried under the mock-orange bush where she used to shade herself against the summer heat. Near two decades since, she is still remembered with reverence; her exploits and loyalties are legendary.