by Larry Watson
Yet it was as a murderer that I kept trying to think of him. Since we were confined to those hard pews for an hour, and assigned, so to speak, to reflect on Raymond Stoddard’s life, I scavenged my memories for anything that, with the benefit of hindsight, I could now point to and say, yes, there it was, murder’s earliest sign. Raymond Stoddard was a murderer for only an hour of his time on earth, but that deed’s stain immediately seeped backward throughout his existence. He would be defined forever after as a murderer, but that identity must have shown up before his final day.
Yet for the life of me, I couldn’t see him as anything but one of the standard fathers of my boyhood, less outgoing than some, more generous than others, a father who took his turn giving us rides to the movies or picking us up after the basketball games; who gave his son money to buy ice cream at the Dairy-O or a hamburger at Jack Lyon’s; who taught Gene how to throw a spiral or oil his baseball glove; who borrowed money to send his daughter to college; who mowed his grass in summer, shoveled his walk in winter, put up his storm windows in autumn, and turned over his garden’s soil in spring. I couldn’t think of a single example of behavior tinged with cruelty, much less evil, or any instance of a violently insane act.
The best I could come up with was an incident that occurred a couple years earlier. For much of August, Mrs. Stoddard had been out of town, gone to Fargo to help an elderly aunt recovering from surgery. In her absence Mr. Stoddard was in charge of preparing the meals for himself and Gene, and for Marcia on the few occasions when she was home. One evening Gene invited me to join them for supper, and I accepted.
On the menu were tomatoes and corn on the cob, both products of the Stoddard garden, pork and beans, and fish—walleye caught in a Canadian lake and given to Mr. Stoddard by a coworker. If the fare wasn’t particularly notable, the method of preparation was.
At the edge of their lawn, Mr. Stoddard dug a shallow pit and bordered it with stones. From the garage he brought out scrap wood, a small stack of lath, and blocks of two-by-four. He arranged those in the pit with some newspaper for kindling and squirted on a little lighter fluid. He lit the pile, and over the blaze placed a wire rack. The Stoddards, like everyone else in the neighborhood, had a conventional charcoal grill for cooking outdoors, but Mr. Stoddard insisted on this open fire. It was, he said, exactly how his father used to fry freshly caught fish when the family spent their summers in a cabin on the bank of Lake Liana.
Mr. Stoddard seemed uncharacteristically lighthearted as he built the fire and fixed the meal, his mood perhaps attributable to what was in the glass he sipped from as he worked. He made a special effort to show us the steps of preparing the fish. He dipped the long white filets in egg and milk, and then dredged them with a mixture of crushed soda crackers, corn flakes, and bread crumbs. He had placed an iron skillet with a half inch of oil on the rack over the fire, and when the oil was heated to bubbling, he dropped in the slabs of walleye. While he cooked and moved back and forth from the kitchen to the makeshift grill, he kept up an almost steady stream of talk, behavior as unusual as his mood. He chattered about how his father used to time himself—with his railroad watch—to see how quickly he could have the freshly caught fish transferred from the lake to the frying pan, and how the entire Stoddard family would get in on the game—calling out the time when their father pulled his boat up to the dock and then continuing to shout out the elapsed minutes.
Next door to the Stoddards lived Bill and Mary McCutcheon and their three children, a family fairly new to Keogh Street. While we were watching the fish fry, Mr. McCutcheon walked over from his yard to the Stoddards’.
“Your grill rust through or something?” Bill McCutcheon asked. “I would’ve loaned you ours.”
From the way he glowered at the fire and hesitated before answering, it was apparent Mr. Stoddard didn’t welcome the question or the offer. “Just thought I’d try an open fire,” he said.
“Using a frying pan isn’t exactly the same, is it?”
Mr. Stoddard poked at the fish but said nothing. The smoke from the fire and the frying fish mingled in a blue-gray cloud, and when the wind blew it in Mr. McCutcheon’s direction, he waved it away with an exaggerated motion.
“That fish come with some guarantee of freshness?” Mr. McCutcheon asked. “Because I have to tell you, you can smell it up and down the block, and it sure as hell ain’t doing anything for my appetite.”
At this remark, Mr. Stoddard rose from his crouch next to the cooking fire and walked away without saying anything about where he was going or why. He soon came back with the spade he had used to dig the fire pit.
Still without explanation, he scooped up a shovelful of the loose dark loam from the pile next to the fire, and he dumped the dirt on fish, pan, grill, and fire. The oil ceased its spattering with a final choking hiss, and the smoke plumed out to the sides. Raymond Stoddard kept shoveling dirt onto the fire until it was extinguished and only the frying pan’s handle stuck up from the tiny burial mound.
“Jesus Christ, Ray,” Bill McCutcheon said, but I’m not sure Mr. Stoddard heard. When he finished shoveling, he flung the spade into the garden and marched toward the house. Gene and I followed him, and once we were all in the kitchen, Mr. Stoddard, his usual dark and doleful demeanor returned, announced that he would boil wieners for our supper.
To his son’s stricken face, Mr. Stoddard said, “Don’t worry. They’re the skinless kind you like.”
This was the episode I thought back to while Pastor Lundgren intoned his vague and uncertain eulogy. It was, however, exceedingly difficult for me to dwell on Raymond Stoddard’s soul when the body of Marie Ryan was so solidly beside me.
She was sitting close enough—the cotton sleeve of her white blouse brushed the wool sleeve of my suit coat—that I could feel her heat and smell her hair spray and hear her sniffling attempts not to cry too loudly. Ah, but not a single sensual detail—or a page full of them—can adequately convey what it felt like to have her near me! I could only hope that if anyone noticed how I kept trying to take in great gulps of air, they would merely think that I was trying to compose myself. Like the speaker of Robert Frost’s great poem “To Earthward,” when I was young it didn’t take much to stimulate me, and for the span of Raymond Stoddard’s funeral, it seemed as though I too “lived on air / That crossed me from sweet things . . .” That day I would have said that to breathe in the warm essence of Marie Ryan was enough. Forever. That’s what I would have said that day. But read the poem for yourself.
In the car on the way to the cemetery we replicated the seating arrangement from the church. I drove, Marie sat next to me, and my mother sat by the door. My father rode in the hearse, two vehicles ahead of us in our abbreviated procession through the city.
During the ride, my mother asked how Gene was holding up. Although her question may have been meant for both of us, Marie and I shared the assumption that Marie was the one who should answer.
“He hardly talks at all,” Marie said. “He just goes around with this look like he’s not really there.”
“Pastor Lundgren asked me if I thought he should call Gene in for a talk.”
“I don’t think that would do much.”
“A psychologist? I wonder if it might not be better if Gene visited someone like that.”
Marie shook her head so vigorously that I could feel the movement.
“I know he wouldn’t like that,” Marie said. “Mr. Wallich”—he was a guidance counselor at our high school—“suggested Gene come see him, and Gene got mad. He said, ‘I’m not the crazy one in the family. That was my dad, not me.’ ”
I wondered if Gene had said that only to Marie or to Mr. Wallich as well.
“Is that what he believes,” my mother asked, “that his father was insane?”
Marie turned toward my mother and asked, a note of incredulity in her voice, “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Out of the small group of mourners at the church, fewer still made the trip to th
e cemetery. North Dakotans will sometimes say that “it’s too cold to snow,” but the day that Raymond Stoddard was buried provided one more example of the falsity of that belief. The sky had been clear that morning but soon turned leaden, and while we stood clenched and shivering around the grave, a light snow began to fall. The flakes were so dry they hardly had weight to find their way to the ground, but a few caught in Marie’s hair and remained there until the end of the ceremony.
Hardly had Pastor Lundgren finished his final words regarding the certainty of resurrection when Marie fairly ran to Gene and threw her arms around him. When she tilted her head back to look up into his red-rimmed eyes, those same snowflakes that I had watched gather tumbled from her hair.
Just as quickly as she had raced into the embrace, Marie broke free and walked away from the small gathering.
I had never been to a graveside service before, and its sudden conclusion—as well as Marie’s departure—caught me off guard. I was still dwelling on other matters of weight and weightlessness—weren’t we going to witness Raymond Stoddard’s coffin lowered into the earth?
But I soon collected myself and ran after Marie.
“Where are you off to? Aren’t you coming back to the church?”
She shook her head and swiped the tears from her cheeks. “I have to get home.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“I don’t mind walking.”
“It’s a long way. Just wait a minute. I’ll tell my mother, and she can ride with someone else.”
“I want to walk.” Her jaw was set determinedly. “Thanks for bringing me today.” And with that she was off.
It didn’t take me long to decide what to do. I ran back to my mother, gave her the keys to our car, and told her I was going to walk Marie Ryan home. “Wait,” she said. “How far is it? You’re not dressed warm enough. . . .”
But I was already on the move and making my own heat, sprinting after Marie.
I caught up to her as she was exiting the cemetery gates, and she seemed unsurprised to see me. When I paused to catch my breath, she didn’t stop but only slowed and, walking backward, said, as if we had been discussing this matter all along, “Did you know Mrs. Stoddard had to pay extra to have the ground thawed?”
My puzzlement must have shown.
“To bury him,” Marie said. “When the ground’s frozen, it has to be thawed. Otherwise they store the body until spring. So of course people will pay. No one likes to think of their loved one stuck in a freezer.”
“Is that what it is—a freezer?”
“I assume. I mean, it has to be someplace cold.”
“You’d think it would be storage you’d pay extra for.”
“Maybe you do. They probably charge you more no matter what. They’re such crooks. Anything to get their money . . .” Marie was walking so quickly I had to lengthen my stride to keep up. “Did Gene tell you about the coffin they ended up buying?”
“No.”
“He was excited about it because it’s almost the same color as their Ford. My God, if I hear another word about that car, I swear I’ll scream. Gene keeps talking about how he’s sure he’ll get the car anytime he wants now.”
“Yeah. He said the same thing to me.”
“Did he? I mean, I know he’s having a hard time, and he’s just trying to find something good in all this, but if he says that around the wrong people, they’re liable to misunderstand and think he’s happy his dad died.”
Her remark pleased me because she apparently thought she and I belonged in the same category—people who understood, and although I knew it was concern for Gene that was truly supposed to unite us, I didn’t care. I would welcome anything—a funeral, a friend—that brought Marie Ryan and me closer.
My mother was right. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and Marie’s house was miles away. I could hardly complain, however, since Marie’s winter coat was thinner than mine, and under it she had only a cotton blouse, while I had the additional layer of a suit coat.
We walked mostly in silence, and not only because I was tongue-tied in Marie’s presence or because funerals push everyone deeper into their own thoughts. Theories abound on the reasons for Midwestern taciturnity, but anyone who has spent time outdoors on a sub-zero day knows that at some point speech becomes physically difficult. The hinges of the jaw stiffen, the nose becomes clotted with mucus, and real effort is required to form words and propel them toward another person. Even then every utterance comes out cloaked in its little cloud of steam, a visual reminder of how difficult clear communication can be.
Nevertheless, some signal must have been transmitted between us because when Marie and I came within a block of her home, we both began to run.
We entered through a garage door and then into the house, but I didn’t get far. A short flight of stairs led up to the kitchen, but Marie stopped on the first step, turned, and in a whisper thanked me again. It was all so abrupt that I knew I was not being invited to stay, something I certainly wanted, not only because it would have given me more time with Marie but also because it would have afforded me a chance to warm up before the walk home, still another mile.
“Anytime,” I said breezily. “Feel free to call whenever there’s a funeral you don’t want to miss.”
She scowled and put a finger to her lips. I had forgotten that her parents had forbidden her to attend the funeral.
I turned to go, but Marie put her hand on my shoulder to stay me for a moment. “Don’t ask Gene what he saw when he went into their garage. Don’t ever ask him. Trust me—you don’t want to know.” She didn’t say so, but her warning made it clear: Gene had told her what he saw.
She released me, and I left the darkened entryway for the dim garage and then the barely brighter day.
I walked a long way before the sensation of being cold replaced the tingling in my shoulder where Marie had touched me. She had touched Gene’s shoulder in the church . . . and when she stood on the step above me, she had been standing, I knew, right where Gene often kissed her good night. He was willing to tell me about every increment in the physicality of their relationship—kisses, their variance in number and kind, where and when he touched her and for how long—and he had said that Marie especially favored kissing just inside her door, where that step made them nearly equal in height. . . . I didn’t want to be Gene Stoddard, I didn’t—no matter that she had put her hand on his shoulder and mine, had stood on that step. . . . But I wore glasses and he did not; I had tonsils and he did not; while he stood at his father’s grave, I was walking at his girlfriend’s side. His girlfriend. His.
In time, I would be invited inside Marie’s home, and I would learn that the reason she was reluctant to allow me—to allow anyone—inside was that her mother was an alcoholic. When Marie entered the house on the day of the funeral, she immediately recognized the signs—no lamps burning on an overcast day, dolorous piano music coming from the living room—and knew her mother was drunk.
And eventually I would see for myself the process by which the earth was thawed for winter interment. When I, like so many other Americans, took up jogging, one of my preferred routes was through a cemetery in the city I lived in at the time. Oak Lawn Memorial Gardens had flat paved paths, little or no traffic, and enough shade to be slightly cooler in summer than the surrounding city streets. And when I ran there in winter, I occasionally saw placed on the ground a fire-blackened metal hood, shaped like a large coffin lid, and inside a hole on one end of the dome, something like a large blowtorch was inserted, its flame heating the ground until the backhoe could dig it to grave depth. Later still I had a friend who dug wells for a living, and he informed me that in some snowless winters the frost line can go so deep that every burial must wait for spring—ice’s triumph over fire.
Both my parents asked to be cremated, and I often wondered if their decisions originated on that January day when the earth had to be heated to receive Raymond Stoddard.
As I walked home from M
arie’s, I passed the Stoddards’ and saw their Ford, lightly sprinkled with snow, in the driveway. Were the day’s rituals now complete, and all the Stoddards returned to Keogh Street? Or had Gene or Marcia left early and returned home? I didn’t speculate for long on why the car was there, because its color commanded my attention. Yes, I supposed its dark blue, a shade just short of black, was the same color as the coffin. And without question, Raymond Stoddard had loved that vehicle. How often I had seen him in the driveway, carefully washing, drying, and waxing the car, jobs that other fathers often entrusted to sons and daughters. You probably remember as well as I the media reports of a man who was buried in his beloved car. Raymond Stoddard was ahead of his time. I never rode in that Ford again without thinking, I’m climbing into the coffinmobile.
Then I crossed the street and soon was in front of my own home with its warmth and normalcy. Yet in spite of the fact that I was so cold I could barely feel my toes, and my shoulders were hunched so tightly to my neck they felt as though they might never come down, I would have turned around gladly and walked back to Marie’s and, risking frostbite, circled her block endlessly if I had thought there was a chance she might see me and ask me in. It’s tempting to say that that’s what it is to live in love—the willingness to sacrifice even physical comfort just to be near the object of one’s love—but I was probably experiencing an even more accurate definition: Love is the willingness to turn away from one’s home.
