North

by Frank Owen

  When the holes were dug – three side by side, just as she’d imagined – she jammed the spade into the sand and slid, boneless, down the dune.

  ‘Ladies first, Mama.’

  She went backward up the dune in increments, yanking Ruth by her wrapped feet. She stopped to cough in between her efforts; her lungs ached. The plastic of the shroud rustled, and Vida thought of crickets, of the beetles that would soon be making their own families in her mother’s slick orifices. She spoke to Ruth so that the unfairness didn’t blind her with its terror.

  ‘Don’t look yet, Mama. Save yourself for when we get to the top. I know I should have made some headstones, but I didn’t have the time. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, isn’t that what you always said? But I’m trying. I hope you know that.’

  And they were there. Vida pulled the plastic off the body until the creamy velvet was exposed. She had been right to choose it: Ruth looked like the queen she might once have been.

  She tumbled her wrapped mother into the hole. She would undo the curtain and cover her over later: that was the easy part. But for now she had to press on. One last trip. Get it done.

  Back down by the truck she tried to rest in its small noonday shade, leaning against the tire until she had the energy to handle Dyce. It was somehow worse to put her hands on his dead body – he who had always been flushed and feverish, with sickness or with desire, throbbing with blood and eagerness.

  She hauled his flopping corpse off the flatbed, and that was all right, but then he was impossible to move – so heavy that if she didn’t hold onto him he slid all the way back down.

  ‘Please, Dyce,’ she panted. ‘Please. I need your help right now. Just help me, one last time.’ She could hear her own voice rising, and she knew she was on the edge of something that would undo her for good. She tried to force herself to calm down, to breathe through her damaged nose and ignore the spatters that sprayed with each exhalation. But the sweats were back too now, and there was some kind of fever inside her again. Maybe it had never really gone away. Could sickness do that? Lie dormant?

  When she looked up from her struggle, Dyce was on the sand and the sun had moved. She couldn’t tell if she had passed out. She made her way on weak legs to the cab of the truck and found the dregs of her cold coffee.

  When she could begin again, she did. It was easier to grab hold of him under the arms, the same way she had done before, keeping the most substantial part of him closest to her. The sun blazed down on them as they ascended by degrees.

  ‘Maybe it’s your heart, Dyce,’ she told him as they went. ‘That’s what’s so big in there, baby.’

  And then they were up at last and he was lying beside his grave. Vida hunkered down, her biceps burning, and removed the outer plastic sheeting. Then she rolled him, still sheathed in the cream curtain, into the hole as gently as she could. Her legs were shaking too much to support her, so she lay down, thinking of the way the sand had already trickled in over the velvet.

  65

  The sun was sinking when Vida came around. She sat up, the sweat drying on her back, her eyes dry in their sockets. She looked over at the graves but they were both as they should have been, the white-shrouded bodies regal and still.

  ‘One more trip,’ Vida told the baby. ‘The last one. This time I mean it. Help your mama go and get the grave goods for your daddy and your grandmama. Send them off the way they deserve.’

  She slid down to the pickup one last time. She found the objects she was looking for exactly where she had left them – beside her bag in one of the rear footwells.

  She took them back with her up the slope, a prophet with an offering on a mountain.

  She sat for a while beside the two graves that already had bodies lying in them, trying to drum up the words. Then it was time. She reached inside the bag and held up a book, bloated and stained, all the paltry human knowledge of the world sustained between its pages.

  ‘Look, Mama. You know what this is? That’s right. Your recipe book. I was thinking about what a waste it would be just to bury it with you – all the useful things in it down there in the dark. Who’s going to come along and page through it there? Nobody.

  ‘But it’s yours, so you should get to keep it. I figure all those seeds in it will grow right here. You’ll be a garden, Mama, a medicine garden, with half the plants from home and half from here. There’ll be proteas and baobabs and lucky bean trees growing right here on this dune, and between their stems will be all the useful plants this continent ever produced – goose-grass and alumroot and dogwoods. You’ll be a drugstore, Mama, a one-stop oasis, just like you were for me.’

  Vida waited. Then she leant forward and placed the book on her mother’s chest and kissed the shroud over the place she thought Ruth’s lips were most likely to be. The velvet was animal-furry, unscarred.

  ‘It’s time to go.’ She scooped the sand, slow and determined, over her mother’s face. ‘Think of me, Mama. The love was always real. You taught me everything I know. And everything I didn’t know, I found out, because of the way you made me. You taught me not to be afraid, Mama. Or maybe to know that I was afraid, but to do it anyway. I will see you soon, and I’ll have your grandbaby with me.’

  Vida turned to Dyce. ‘It’s your turn now.’

  She reached for the small, strange instrument that Dyce had been given in the Capitol Building, its brass machine heads shining bright and incorruptible.

  ‘Baby, I’m really, really sorry you never got to learn to play. You owe me those lullabies. I know you can’t take this where you’re going, but maybe you’ll get a harp up there, huh? And eternity is long enough to get the hang of playing, even if you don’t have the natural-born skill.’ She laughed, and then sniffed. The blood was watery now, as if her arteries were exhausted, weakening and shutting down.

  ‘I considered putting Ears in there beside you. But you know what? He wants to stay with me. So I’m keeping him for the baby. My mind’s made up now, so don’t argue.’

  She set the mandolin beside Dyce in the grave, then leant closer over him and lowered her voice. This was only for them, for man and woman, the way it would have been if they had lived in some other, peaceful century.

  ‘You know,’ she whispered, ‘I told my ma that I wished I’d never met you. But it’s not true. You were the one thing that made me want things to be better. Before I met you, I never wanted to live a normal life: have a house and a car and a kid – that kind of normal. But I wanted that with you, Dyce. You were everything. And I had part of that – something my mama never had: a baby that was stitched together out of love and passion. I wanted to see this baby’s face, Dyce. I really did.’ She realized she was crying, but she didn’t think he would mind. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t love you better. But sorry gave up, oh, a whole long time ago.’ She coughed hard into her fist and the slick wetness there was clotted red. ‘I’m glad I had you, Dyce. Save a space for me.’

  She wanted to see him one last time. She had to. She had to look at his face now; she had to see his lips and his nose and his hair. She searched for the loose end of the curtain and began unwrapping Dyce’s body where he lay. His head was sticky against the white velvet and she had to peel the material back as if it was their wedding night. But she didn’t stop. She would kiss him on the lips one last time, and then she would be spent. It was the right way to go.

  But the Dyce she saw was not the Dyce she remembered. From his mouth and nose the mushrooms had sprouted, their tiny, eager heads pressing against her hand. She stroked them and tried to weep, but no more tears came. He must have carried those spores in his lungs all the way from the Mouth, the same way that she was carrying his softly burgeoning button in her own body.

  She leant over him and inhaled the scent from where the life-giving fungi were most tightly clustered – around the terrible wound in his head. The mushrooms smelt as they always did, and the scent made her shudder in recognition: mold, and mistakes, and the return of the
good earth – but also, this time, the beginning. She would see her baby; it was Dyce’s last gift to her.

  She pressed her face into the mushrooms as if they were flowers.

  66

  The mushrooms did their work quickly, the spidery rot in Vida’s leg retreating until it faded into the red boundary around the slash. The sea air must have been good for the linings of her lungs: the cough got drier, and then it stopped altogether, though the muscles in her sternum ached.

  Now she sat in the truck as night fell, with her view of the fading sea. She had set Ears McCreedy on the dash for company. From the set of her mouth, it was clear that she was thinking.

  She switched on the cabin light and found the ledger and the pen she’d taken from Home Depot. There were a lot of decisions to make, and a lot of work to do too – but there was one thing she needed to get done before the restless waves of time washed over her memories, to leave her smooth and feature-less.

  ‘My child will know where she comes from,’ she said. ‘Ain’t that right, Mama?’

  She thought a while, the pen hovering over the lined paper, before she started.

  You’re not even born yet, but if I don’t set this down, I’m afraid that I’ll forget exactly how it was. Ma had her recipe book, but you’re going to have your own history written plain and clear.

  Baby, I want you to understand some things about the people you came from, how they fought and struggled so that you could be alive and here and with me. The world is going to be different by the time you’re grown up in it, and for that I can only be grateful.

  It was bad. And the War was only the beginning.