by Amy Spurway
Nanny got sick and went into the hospital before I got a chance to give it to her. I was livid that nobody would take me in to see her. I knew from the hushed voices and red eyes of everyone around me that she was dying. Still, I wrapped the brooch up in a brown paper lunch bag and sent it to the hospital with Mama. Mama went on about how she adored it, how it made her feel better, brightened her right up. Nanny died two days later. They wouldn’t let me go to her funeral, so I spent hours imagining it: Nanny looked happy and peaceful with the peacock brooch pinned over her heart for eternity. But now there it is, clinging to the centre of Peggy’s gelatinous bosom. And it’s pinned on crooked.
“Oh! ’Member this thing? Fortune family heirloom, what.” Peggy laughs, chest heaving, fingering the brooch when she notices me staring. “Surprised none of them cheap little rhinestones fell off, even after all these years. Look, the gold paint ain’t even peeling.”
“How’d you get that?”
“Didn’t try to steal it, like a certain someone who shall remain nameless. But I’ll look at that party and whistle.” Her painted sausage lips scrunch into an O, and she lets out a long trill as she pitches as far toward me as her seat belt will allow.
“Don’t be a quiff all your life, Peggy. Take a day off,” I say in my most pleasantly passive-aggressive tone, with the tightest of smiles.
“Listen, I’ll leave you both here on the side of the road if there’s any more snark.” Mama’s foot hits the gas pedal harder.
“For your information,” Peggy says, “after Ma died, a nurse found a paper bag under her pillow and was about to toss it in the trash, but I stopped her. Thought you’d get a kick out of seeing it. You want it back?”
“No.” I try to ignore the green-grey zigzags that are suddenly reducing my field of vision to pinholes.
“Good,” Peggy snorts, “because it’s the only thing holding my blouse shut.”
[…]
There are two things I now know for certain I do not want at my funeral: family brawls and flowers that smell like cat piss. To be fair, the reeking chrysanthemums were not Allie’s fault, even though she blames herself. Reenie’s funeral plan was very specific in that there should be as many potted flowers as possible crammed into the church, and that they should come from Bridie at Nicholson’s Greenhouse. What Reenie could not have anticipated was that by the time she died, her dear friend Bridie Nicholson would be in the throes of dementia and housing a dozen or so rescued cats in her greenhouse along with the plants. And that Reenie’s sons would be too stunned to notice that the chrysanthemums smelled like cat piss when they picked them up and proceeded to pack them into the church. Thank God the minister lit up some holy incense.
“I thought only Catholics did the incense. What was Reenie, a Quaker?” Peggy whispers. “Them Uniteds will bury anyone, I guess.”
Mama shushes her as Allie steps up beside her mother’s casket, a guitar slung over her shoulder. Allie clears her throat, passes a thumb over the strings, and starts to play her mother’s favourite Beatles song. The words of “In My Life” flow from Allie’s depths, and ascend to the arched ceiling, filling the space, drawing tears from every eye. Except Allie’s. Allie’s voice and composure don’t crack, even for a second. She’s been practising this song, these words, these dry eyes for years. The rest of us are sniffling and sobbing. Allie just smiles in sympathy. With her soft face and nerves of steel, she can do things that other people can’t. She can hold dying hands and sing sad songs without breaking. Maybe she’ll even sing at my funeral.
“Oh Crow, it’s so nice to see you.” A dozen people pat me on the arm and offer some iteration of this phrase as the funeral crowd disperses.
I just nod and say, “Nice to see you too,” to anyone who speaks to me. I have no clue who any of these people are, and my eyes have gone so wonky that I can’t see much of anything anyway. What people don’t do is let on that they know why I’m home, not in words at least. But it’s written all over their faces, in their solemn tone, in the sympathy-laden arm pats that are heavy enough to make me cringe.
We shuffle through the receiving line, and Peggy stops to talk to everyone. Funny how the woman who can’t work and has been on disability for twenty years because of her various “environmental sensitivities” has no trouble holding us all hostage in a crowded, confined space that stinks of cat piss, patchouli, and musty Bibles just so that she can glean some more gossip from this side of Ceilidh Mountain. Loch Bhreagh — and the surrounding communities snuggled in the misty green highlands, with their quaint rural dialects, their fiddlers and dancers, and their cursing in Gaelic — is Peggy’s ex-husband Skroink’s territory. Peggy wants to make sure she’s seen and heard around here so it gets back to him. She lumbers around, shaking hands and chit-chatting like this is a grand social occasion.
“Good to see you, Marilyn. How did Ron’s mother’s surgery go?”
“Now, Donnie R., don’t you look like a million bucks! What’s this I hear about a new girlfriend you met square dancing?”
Oh, hello random Old Scratch! Would you mind telling me what colour shit you had this morning so I’ll have something to post on the Facebook when I get home?
“Can we hurry up?” I say. “I’m not feeling good.”
“It’s a funeral. Nobody here feels good. A sin they’re not doing a proper reception after. People need conversation here. To lighten things up.” Peggy’s jiggly elbow jabs me in the ribs.
I turn to Mama in the hopes that she’ll put Peggy in her place and help me hustle things along. But she just stands there, ignoring us both, her hands clasped and resting over her belly, and her eyes closed. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was praying. I link my arm in hers as the receiving line begins to move again, and drop my head onto her shoulder when we come to another standstill. Mama reaches up, and I feel the heat of her freed hand as she tucks my hair behind my ear and strokes the side of my temple.
She pulls me closer and whispers, “So help me God, if you throw up in here, you’re getting a boot in the arse.”
When we finally reach the Walker family, I give Allie’s brothers some quick hugs and condolences, then make a beeline for Allie before she’s swallowed by another wave of semi-strangers.
“Oh honey, this must be so tough.” There’s not a hint of tears in her eyes or sobs in her body. I hug her tight.
“Could be worse.” Allie’s voice is distant and dreamy, the way it was during exams in university, before she had to drop out to care for her mother full time.
“You ate enough tranquilizers to choke a horse, didn’t you?”
She finally hugs me back with noodle arms. “You bet your ass I did.”
This is another good reason to have Allie by my side when I begin my painful descent into feebleness and whatever other oblivions await. She possesses a wealth of knowledge about the precise combos and quantities of prescription medications needed to render oneself comfortably numb yet meticulously functional. Or not.
“You have to come to the burial with me,” she says. “You can stop me from shoving Dad and my brothers into the hole with Mum.”
“Whatever you need, babe.”
“K, c’mon. Before my tranqs wear off,” she says through the corner of her mourner’s smile as she slips past me to receive a few final sympathies from more strangers. I go tell Mama and Peg that I’m going to the graveyard for Reenie’s burial instead of home with them.
“Feeling better, all of a sudden?” Peggy’s voice is too loud and too light, and despite the fact that my nausea has passed, my vision is still as squirrelly as hell. Peggy’s oversized head swims in a sea of yellow-green circles.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I feign clumsiness, and bump Peggy’s tits right where the peacock brooch is pinned, as I move to hug my mother, before I go help my best friend bury hers.
[…]
Even at the graveyard, Allie remains perfectly stoic, while I’m doing my damnedest to be a good, supportive friend and not look
like I’m ready to crawl out of my own skin. I squeeze Allie’s hand and close my eyes while Reenie’s casket is lowered into the ground. As the minister prattles on about her special place in Heaven, and God coming down to wipe the tears and heal the hearts of her children on Earth, a couple of scruffy guys come along and start pushing dirt over top the flower-strewn coffin. I forgot how much graveyards give me the heebie-jeebies.
It is not because of the stones and the bones and the myriad ghost stories I read as a kid. Not even because of my own circumstances, although I’d like to think I can do better than being boxed up and dropped into a hole in the ground. Graveyards remind me of my mother’s youngest sister, Janice. In my earliest memories, she was my gorgeous, glamorous, teenaged aunt who’d come to babysit. She’d bring me Popeye cigarettes and root beer, doll me up with glittery eyeshadow and red lipstick, and let me prance around in her high heels. Everybody in Town called her Crash, because the mere sight of her walking down the Halfway Road was known to distract male drivers and cause accidents. But on a sweltering summer day when I was eleven and a half, Crash Fortune herself crashed. Or snapped. I was with her when it happened.
Janice showed up on our doorstep just after sunrise, insisting that she needed me to come on an adventure with her. I assumed that she had a long day of beach bumming and junk food scarfing planned, but instead she took me to graveyards. One after another, after another, searching for something. Someone. She wouldn’t — or couldn’t — say who.
“I’ll know it when I hear her,” she’d moan, as she writhed around on top of people’s grave plots, grinding her ear into the ground so hard that her strawberry blonde hair got caked with grass and dirt. “I’ll know it when I hear her.”
By sundown, Janice had heard nothing but me complaining that I was starving, exhausted, and more than a little freaked out. She finally took me home, but when we got there, she leapt out of the car and ran into the woods. I told Mama what happened. We found Janice a short time later, just past the spot where I’d begun construction on what would become the world’s most epic stolen road sign tree fort. She was on the ground again, curled in the fetal position, eyes red and teary.
When she saw us, her voice erupted in a manic speed and pitch, “I heard her! Among the coal black heart’s tendrils! Crow, she sang to me!” Mama told me to go back to the trailer and call Peggy.
The next time I saw Janice, she was locked up in the Butterscotch Palace, which is what everybody called the old psychiatric hospital. She remained there for the better part of her life. And I say that not meaning “most of her life,” but quite literally “the better part.” There, she had three meals a day, a roof over her head, and couldn’t get arrested for running down Main Street naked as a jaybird, and then trying to burn down the bridge with Molotov cocktails. She was kept in a comfy chemical straightjacket, a shell of her former wild child self. But at least she was safe.
When the Butterscotch Palace closed in the mid-nineties, Janice moved in with Peggy for a time, then abruptly dropped off the face of the Earth. No one knew where she was or what had happened, and after a while, no one even mentioned her name. Until I got the phone call in Toronto, five years ago. It was the police. They’d identified the body of an OD’ed hooker in my Toronto neighbourhood as one “Janice Fortune.” On her paperwork at the shelter she frequented, she’d listed me as next of kin. Aunt Janice was three blocks away from me when she died. I’d probably walked past her in the street a dozen times on my way to the subway station.
Mama came up to Toronto, and the two of us sneakily spread Janice’s ashes around the edge of a park in the ritziest part of the city. To this day, I like to think that the spirit of Janice “Crash” Fortune is directly responsible for all the fender benders that happen around there. Especially the one Dave got into with his precious Porsche a few days after we broke up. That would almost make it all feel okay.
As the last few shovelfuls of soil are laid over Reenie’s casket, I get another round of queasy. I try to ease it by staring up at the clouds, as they grow ever more pendulous, grey, and start to spit. Or weep.
“Happy is the corpse that the rain falls on,” Allie sighs, as water droplets dapple the freshly turned earth. She casually drapes an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go sit in the car. My mascara isn’t waterproof.”
Allie’s father yells after us as the rain picks up and we dart toward the car, “Allie honey, you’ll be home for supper, right?”
“Yes, Dad,” she sings back. Then mutters to me, “They forget how to turn on the damn oven. I don’t even know if it still works. The four of them lived off microwaved baloney and cold beans right out of the can after Mum moved to Halifax.”
“So you’re staying, I take it.”
“Nowhere else to go.”
“Good,” I say, before registering the sting of my own selfish honesty. “I mean, not good, but, you know what I mean.”
Allie nods and produces a tiny joint from the depths of the centre console, lighting it as she slides into a tired slouch in the driver’s seat. She’s handling all this better than most folks would expect. But I’m not one bit surprised.
“Picked up some of Gimp’s Grade A medicinal,” she squeaks, passing it to me. “Puts the ‘fun’ in funeral.”
“Funerals. I need to have one of those.”
“So, they’re sure the tumours are . . .” Allie’s voice trails off.
“Inoperable. Even if they’re not malignant, I’m fucked. Just a matter of how fast,” I say. “Plus, you know my family. No secret how this kind of thing pans out for us.”
“Right.” She slumps a little farther down. Allie knows better than to argue with my family’s tragedy-riddled history.
She will not try to talk me out of my morbidity. Not like the silver-lining-obsessed Pollyannas I knew in Toronto. The ones who insisted that their “positivity,” their faith in the benevolence of an all-powerful Universe, and the manifesting magic of blueberry juice would buoy them along through life. Finding myself alone, seizing, and helpless on a piss-stained subway platform was one thing. But the thought of having a steady stream of dewy-faced, #blessed socialites chirp at me, Well, everything happens for a reeeeason. The Universe is guiding you to a deeper level of heeeeealing! was more than I could bear.
“So what are you thinking?” Allie asks.
“Dunno, but something different. Maybe avant-garde. Or ancient. Or both.”
“Irish wakes are kinda cool. Mum wanted one, but they’re not legal.”
“Oh man, if the police came and busted my wake?” I roar. “That’d be wicked. Dammit, I want to be there to see it.”
Maybe I will be. Maybe my Irish wake can start while I’m still alive. And maybe my death and everything after doesn’t need to be tinged with shock and sorrow and suffering. A little planning can go a long way.
In a traditional Irish wake, the women of the community are supposed to come prepare the corpse. But with a living wake, I’ll bathe and dress myself, thanks. I’ll do my own makeup too, because if Mama gets near me with a makeup bag, I will look like a corpse. The person being waked is supposed to wear white. White is not my colour though, so I’ll wear black. A brand new, smokin’ hot little black dress and red hellion high heels.
Irish wakes are pot luck. But no egg, tuna, or lobster salad sandwiches will be allowed at mine. And no mystery squares or funeral hams. My buffet table will groan with the weight of all my favourites, from the days when I didn’t give a shit about factory-farmed meats and non-GMO organic kale and MSG hangovers and the mid-life spread: suicide spicy chicken wings, donair pizza, poutine, bacon-and-cheese-stuffed bacon-wrapped cheese balls. Deep fried. Dipped in butter. Foods that Stacey-Fortune-in-Toronto avoided because she was scared they’d kill her or make her chubby. But Dying-Crow-Fortune-in-Cape-Breton doesn’t give a fuck.
My throng of family, friends, and fans can expect an eclectic mix of my favourite music. Nothing sappy. It’s my party, and you won’t cry if I don’t want y
ou to. Besides, it’s bad luck to start the keening too early. I’ll save the real tear-jerker tunes until the end, just before my wake transitions into the big sleep.
Once everyone is fed, libations in hand, the storytelling can begin. I want my life to flash before other people’s eyes, not just my own, so I’ll put my Viva Rica promotional video-production skills to good use by making a mini-documentary about my time on this Earth. A tribute. A testament to my life in all its knee-slapping, tongue-wagging, heartbreaking glory. I’ll record Mama telling the story of her eight-month-old baby pooping all over Peggy’s brand new sundress at the family barbecue. And how a mischievous ten-year-old Crow disguised sliced garlic as slivered almonds and slipped them into Peggy’s trail mix. Allie and Char will laugh their way through the tale of the night they pinned condoms — and a note with my address on it — to my underwear before we went out to the bars. And how both those things came in pretty damn handy that night. Maybe Willy Gimp can finally publicly reveal our years of clandestine teenage sexcapades. The old people will squirm. The young people will roar. And it will end with everybody talking about why they love me, and what they’ll miss most. I need to hear that while I still can.
Then, a party will rage until every soul either leaves or passes out, and I’m content with my send-off. After all that, I’ll probably be tired. And hurting. And ready to go. So maybe I’ll go back to Mama’s trailer alone, and I’ll take a little something for my pain. Maybe a little too much something. I’ll make sure the living-room windows are open, so my spirit — whatever’s left of it — can escape. From the comfort of the scruffy old couch, I’ll watch the sun rise. Then I’ll just close my eyes. The end.
