A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  The wailing of my mother is not to be recounted. A summer of having taken to her bed had not strengthened her for his death at all but seemed instead to have cut a groove for the mourning of it. One night she came downstairs simply to shout at my father. “We never should have named him after you! Jews understand that. It’s bad luck! Why did you want that so much?”

  “I thought you meant it was bad luck for me!” my father shouted back. “And I didn’t mind that. I didn’t care about some old world hocus-pocus.”

  “Well, look at that old world hocus-pocus now!” she cried, then rushed back upstairs. My father hadn’t been there when the officers had come, and he, too, had gone into a state of stunned silence, though he did say heatedly, “I’m going to make some phone calls.” Though I’m not sure he ever made enough to satisfy himself. A demining expedition. An ambushed foot patrol. How about a whack on the head with a backhoe? Fractured by a forklift? The boys stayed too long in the nighttime mountains even as the monkeys screeched their warnings. According to the PL or the CO. A BBIED. There was apparently a brand-new way to die: by cell phone. And there was supposed to have been a quick-recovery deployment by an OEF convoy. But the DU didn’t have the ECDs up and running. No one actually proposed the possibility of Robert’s own fright and ineptitude or of “friendly fire,” but the jumble of alternative explanations raised suspicions. My father, the NOK, was spoken to incessantly in acronyms and gruesome euphemism. “KIA by Talib RPGs,” they said.

  “Well, I want a real explanation—ASAP!” my father cried in a voice of heat and ice. “What you mean is that his leg is in a tree somewhere?” Another officer had come to sit in our living room to explain things further.

  “Actually,” said this uniformed man, “his leg was obliterated. His hand was in a tree. It was very high up. We had to leave it.”

  My father did not lie in bed in the mornings the way my mother did, but busied himself in the fields without me. “You should rest,” I said to him.

  But he said, “I can’t lie there and just think. It’s too scary to lie there and just think.” Sometimes he spent the days just chopping wood.

  My mother covered all the mirrors in the house with pillowcases and scarves. The mirrors in the flowerbeds she covered with sheets.

  Robert’s body was flown home to Chicago and from there two men drove it the five hours north to the funeral home in a Hummer, as if here in Dellacrosse even the dead might need the protection of such a vehicle, though the body did require a refrigeration unit and so perhaps this was why. The driver, on greeting my father, gave him my brother’s dog tags, which my father took like they were a fistful of change, in one hand, not looking.

  The funeral, at a former Lutheran church Robert himself had never been to—one that was now Unitarian, for people who felt that God should be elected democratically and after a long campaign—seemed dominated by his friends. Chuck Buzlocki. Ken Kornblach. Cooper Dunka. They stood up, gearhead after gearhead, and you had to hand it to them: they had one boring story after another about Gunny, which moved them all to both laughter and tears. We his family sat startled and mute as if we did not know any of them, including the person they were talking about. Yet hadn’t we just seen all these boys at graduation? Listening to them, I realized why Robert’s grades had been so bad.

  The minister made only the vaguest mention of God, in terms that made God seem a design and a force but a little indifferent to our fates and therefore unworshippable. Like a railway system. It could get you where you were going, wherever that was. A transit authority! But it wouldn’t counter your own devotion with love. Here and there in the church sanctuary there seemed to be a prayer, but each sat in my ears nonsensically.

  Our father who art a heathen

  Hollow be thigh name.

  Thigh king is dumb

  Thigh will is dun

  on earth as it is

  at birth.

  I had nothing against prayer. Those who felt it was wishful muttering perhaps had less to wish for. Religion, I could now see, without a single college course helping me out, was designed for those enduring the death of their sweet children. And when children grew stronger and died less, and were in fact less sweet, religion faded away. When children began to sweeten and die again, it returned.

  But sitting there, I began to realize that part of me didn’t believe Robert was dead. Part of me thought perhaps the whole thing was a prank. Like everyone, Robert would have loved to have attended his own funeral. Of course, one did always attend one’s own funeral. But usually one was so deep in the role of the dead person that one didn’t get to pay attention to the nice things people were standing up and saying about you.

  The minister continued calling for others to come forth, to step up and speak, and a few more did: one teary girl and a geometry teacher. “I loved Gunny,” they both said. The girl read a poem called “Gunny Finally Got His Gun,” which was unbearable.

  At the end my father stood up and shambled to the front. He clutched the lectern and looked out at all the gathered and just stared. It was not an especially uncomfortable silence as the whole occasion was so uncomfortable that his silent staring didn’t really add anything additional. Yet he did bear a look that to me seemed to say, How have your own repellent and ridiculous sons remained alive when mine has not?

  He began with a story. “When Robert was little he liked secretly to swing on the ropes in the haymow. Both my kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying, and so sometimes I looked the other way. Perhaps this was bad of me. Knowing when to look the other way and when to jump in has never been my strong suit. Once when he was about six he fell from the rope, down off the mow, and hit his chin against a rusty old bucket. He came to me holding the metal pail and said, ‘Daddy, don’t yell: I know I’ll need stitches and a shot, but it was awesome.’”

  This story had nothing more to it, and my dad just stood there, as if searching for another one that might be more engaging to the crowd, something more revealing and entertaining, as even at funerals people shamelessly hoped just for a moment here and there to be amused. But I could see that this one story summed up everything for him. I stayed seated with my mother, who was not doing well. She was wearing the black hat with the feather sticking straight up. She drew the dangling sash of it across her quivering lips. I was wearing my hair pulled back in a black barrette fashioned in the shape of a crow. “What can a man say about losing his boy?” my father cried out, finally. He had raised his voice as if he were calling. “His only son? Well! I miss him more than any words can remotely convey. He was not just a good son, a good person. He was the very best kind.” That was all he said before his face clenched and purpled and he had to turn and come back down. My mother had given him a handkerchief, which he did not use to dab at his eyes but instead pressed completely over his face, like a barber’s hot towel. When my father walked back toward us from the pulpit, he took my mother’s hand and led her outside, leaving me behind. Organ music started up and everyone began to leave, to go out into that September sunshine to comfort my parents. I simply sat there. Soon the organist, too, got up and left, giving me a smiling nod as she did.

  Alone in the church, I did not move for a long time. Then I craned my head around and couldn’t see anyone at all, and so I slid out of the pew and went up to the coffin, which was on a gurney draped with a heavy velvet blanket. On top of it was the cognac-colored casket, a large varnished thing, a shiny parlor piano with a flag draped over. I petted the lid of it. A yellow jacket, the kind you see trolling the trash cans at picnic spots, was walking on the edge. I took off my shoe and smacked it. Then in wiping it off with the folded program that had Robert’s photo on the front and the list of biblical readings inside and on the back the stunningly absurd numbers 1984–2002—what could they truly mean, especially with a bee’s guts now yellowing the second two?—it occurred to me that the coffin might be unlocked. I jabbed my fingers into the corner crack. One could open it—so I did. When I lifted
the lid, the flag slid to the floor. It was not one of those fitted flag casket coverings they later made plenty of.

  Within, as if placed in a quilted quitar case, lay a smashed guitar: a uniform of green, part pine, part portabella, part parsley, with parts of a man inside. I put my shoe back on and my program in my purse. “Hey there, Robert,” I said, but was afraid I might cry. I knew there were superstitions about touching dead people. But one belief had it that if you touched one you would never be lonely again. I climbed atop the gurney, up into the coffin, and fitted myself inside to nestle next to him. I was thin from all my weeks as a hawk in the salad fields, and I curled in against him, even with my purse, panting shallowly, as I hardly dared to breathe, dreading some stench or other. But one had to breathe. His smell at first seemed a chemical one, like the field fertilizer used by the agribiz farms. Field fertilizer! You could not make up stuff like that! Though the interior of the casket was quilted white, like a beautiful suitcase, what I could see of my brother looked like garbage tossed inside. He had no legs, it seemed, so there was room for mine. Beneath his uniform he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt put on backwards so that the hood could be pulled up over his face. I carefully pulled it down to see. Beneath the hood someone had stretched a clear plastic shower cap over his features. Beneath the shower cap, which I didn’t dare touch, I could see his nose and jaw were gone but there was still his full lower lip I knew so well, now lavender, and blistered, and the upper one, with its smattering of gingery freckles beneath the whisker stubble that still seemed fresh and black as pepper. His skin, what little I could see, had the jaundiced look of bad weather that had come and not left. His stammerless stillness seemed the loneliest and most dumbfounding thing.

  “Robert,” I whispered. “It’s me.” We would be kids again, lying in the woods somewhere, except the smell was starting to seem horrible, and I was curled against him in such a way that I realized he’d been stuffed with things, styrofoam or something, as so many parts of him were missing. One sleeve was filled with stuffed newsprint, a paper sausage, which crunched when I lay my head on it. The hand protruding from the uniform cuff was a mannequin’s hand, knuckleless as a fish. I could see that death had settled him, flattened him, the way that a salad—of, say, three-season spring greens—flattened and settled after initially being fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl. How he had once been fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl!

  In case I started to cry, I pulled the lid down back over us, a sateen ceiling, and it became very dark inside, although the hinge side of the lid, I could see, was not flush with the rest and there was a line of daylight there I could make disappear by closing my eyes. The space grew hot and cramped.

  I could hear Robert’s friends come back into the church. Suddenly they became pallbearers again. “Hey, the flag slipped off,” said one, and they put it back on. “Bad luck,” said another. “Shut the fuck up,” said a third, and soon we were being trundled out of the church to the hearse. I listened for my father’s voice but didn’t hear it. We were lifted up and slid into the vehicle and then I did hear my father’s voice. “Where’s Tassie?” and then my mother’s: “I don’t know. I think maybe she went on ahead to the cemetery with some friends.”

  I would lie in there with my brother forever. I would rescue him from this heap of trash that was oblivion, perhaps our old mending mortar of gum and glue and sesame seeds would help; a good drink of water; a snack of cheese. We could send out for pizza and Coke. The hearse started and we rode off to the edge of town near the Dellacrosse Village Cemetery. A name that seemed to suggest that all who were buried there lived in a kind of village. Well, we would have a kind of brute picnic of things when we got there, perhaps; we’d snap the bones of the drummer’s drumsticks and see whose wish came true. I petted Robert and the crumbledness of him and the terrible smell—like moldering shit in a plastic pencil case—made me no longer feel I was close to him. I’d been closer to him in the lettuce field that night. This was not actually, truly, him in this fetid spot.

  My nose began to bleed. I had thought I was crying but then I could taste the metal of it. I had little experience with nosebleeds, and my mouth filled with coagulated clots like small chunks of liver. I wiped my nose and could feel the clots amid the mucus and blood. Still I lay next to his remains—there was no more apt word for the cobbled-together form I was curled against—I would lie there and preserve him somehow with memories. I would reassemble him with chat. I would say Good morning in the morning. I would say Good night at night. Not to do so ever again was just unthinkable. I would lie there and tell him the story of every movie I’d ever seen. I would not be no guy’s sister. I would lie in there until—until I began to weigh my options.

  When we arrived at the parking lot and the funeral men set up the gurney and the pallbearers again came to carry the body out of the hearse, I decided to make my presence known. It was getting out not exactly when the getting was good but at least before the smallest crowd. As Robert’s friends lifted the casket onto the gurney I pushed up on the lid, poked my head out, and made my presence known. I clambered out the rest of the way. The light of the world hurt my eyes.

  “What the hey?” one of Robert’s friends exclaimed.

  “It’s Gunny’s sister,” said another.

  “What were you doing in there?”

  And then my mother came running over, tears raining down her face, and she just brushed me off and held me and motioned to the boys to close the casket lid.

  In the cemetery there were rifles fired in the air in salute. More guns for Gunny. I recall that. There was a concrete park of angelic gargoyles or beastly cherubs—who could tell one from the other? There were white crosses and covered pots of geraniums and perfectly coned yews. There was a drummer, as I had expected, though no one broke his sticks and made a wish. There was “Taps,” mournful and familiar:

  Day is done,

  Gone the son.

  It will stun,

  No more fun,

  Have a bun.

  And then the bridge off which the bugler hurled his lungs:

  Night is nigh.

  Say good-bye.

  People die.

  There was a large flag folded neatly, amazingly into a triangle, then given to my mother, who neither held it to her heart nor thanked the skilled folder. She hurriedly crammed the thing into her handbag. And then the driving home. There were casseroles people had brought with tinfoil over the top, and the kitchen table was piled high with them. It looked like someone had died. And since someone had, this look at least did not contribute to any lies. I went upstairs to my pink room and basically stayed there for a month.

  My parents arranged for a medical leave from school for me and I was told I should rest until I felt better. Our house had become a kind of krankes Haus. The local newspapers were brought to my room and I tried to read them. In our county, I learned, all the loons were stuck: I would just be one of them. But in fact it was widely reported that all the county’s loons were flightless, had caught a kind of botulism—from the fish they ate that had drunk bad water. Was this tainted water from clinic runoff or the natural occurrence of toxins in a lily pad? Who knew? There were some arguments on each side. But the birds’ wings had frozen in place, so the birds not only couldn’t fly but drowned right there in the water. Other articles told of ducks, deranged by mercury, who were reputedly wandering off from their nests and then making new ones, forgetting to go back to the first. I lay in bed, sick and not eating, storky beneath the sheets, my thoughts landing arbitrarily on this or that, like light moving past a window. The fulfillingness of my life’s every day had not just faltered but completely stopped.

  The weather cooled; Japanese ladybugs, brought years before as pest control for the soy, had taken over the farmhouses, ours included. They formed shiny orange coverings on our windows and doors, and if you brushed at one it bit you. At night the ones that had made their way inside spent their time whacking themselves against the lamp
shades.

  Songbirds, drunk on fermented mulberries, and leaving purple fecal puddles on branches and railings, once again got themselves confused and failed to get going south, lingering instead in the bare trees.

  On Hoopen Road three cows were electrocuted in a storm.

  Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. I was reliving my old homework from Mythology for Freshmen. The work of grief, where only unsteady progress could be made, seemed at first Herculean. Then Sisyphean. Then Persean. Then Echovian. Then one was turned finally and prematurely into a flower or a tree, with a flower’s curvature and a tree’s yearning reach. Paralyzed. But with shoes. And dinner. And chores. I did improve, to use a medical verb, without actually feeling better, and as the autumn weeks went by more and more I left my room and began to help my father with the harvest and sometimes even rode with him, taking the small roads, among the drumlins and moraines to Chicago, delivering potatoes and our three-season spring mix to some restaurants, as well as occasionally setting up at the farmers’ markets there. My father wore my brother’s dog tags wherever we went. Certain moments the whole earth seemed a grave. Other times, more hopefully, a garden.

  We would start off bright and early into the rising sun, the ground billowing up its dew in such heavy, magical vapors that when one was in the troughs of the highway one couldn’t see a foot ahead and the fields looked as if they were on smoky fire, preparing for the visitation of ascending or descending gods. Which could it be? Perhaps it was true what people used to say about our county: outer space was interested. But then the air would clear and the day would be awash in light. I studied the third-cutting hay rolled into tight coils on the fields and placed at perfect distances from one another, as if by an art department.