Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  No one has said this to me, of course. No one has said I am not allowed there. It is simply something I cannot do, I cannot make my legs cross the dusty yard, nor my hand turn the doorknob. I know this makes me bad, for I have not gone to sit by Mother Maurie’s bedside and commiserate with her on losing her grandchild. Sometimes I think no one but me notices that Tom and I have lost our son. As if the deep grief is some sort of honor we are unworthy of, so his parents have assumed it to themselves. No cars stop by the little house to ask how I am, to bring cold dishes and words of comfort. They all go to the big house, all day, coming and going, dusty station wagons and pickup trucks, women with casseroles and Jell-O salads, like emissaries come to bring tribute. I watch them come and go, sitting on the steps of the little house like a retarded child, silent and empty-eyed and ignored. As they roll past me in a puff of dust and hot air, they do not look at me. It feels like they know what I was doing that day, but of course they can’t. I feel obscurely guilty at the way they ignore me, as if losing my son is a crime I have committed, and shunning is their punishment for me.

  The big day finally comes. We get up early, we dress in dark clothes, Tom in his new suit, me in the dark skirt and jacket that I wore on the plane coming down here. We say very little, save for Tom telling me what time it is, how many minutes are left before we have to leave. Lately he has become very aware of time, counting down to this day, this hour. Tom has washed all the cars the day before, and they have little black pennants tied to their radio antennae, so everyone will know we’re a funeral party. Steffie picked up the pennants yesterday from the funeral home; she made a special trip to get them. She’s making sure it will all go perfectly.

  Tom goes over to his mom’s house to make sure everyone is ready, and to help get Mother Maurie from the porch steps to the car in the folding wheelchair they have rented for the occasion. I do not believe she really needs it; I think of it as a prop for her role of bereaved grandmother. I stand inside the little house, watch him load her into the car, his struggle to fold up the wheelchair and get it into the trunk. Everyone else is ready. Tom’s father looks fit for a wedding; his white shirt is too tight and bulges of scarlet neck redder than a turkey’s wattle layer over it. Ellie wears a black scarecrow dress that strains at her wide shoulders and flaps around her calves. Steffie should always wear black, she looks so elegant. Her little black dress is perfect for going anywhere, but especially to a funeral. She clutches a little black lace hankie in one hand.

  Tom is driving his parents’ sedan. He and his father are in the front seat. I am supposed to sit in the backseat with Mother Maurie. I stand for a long time, wishing they would go without me. Then I put down our copy of Where the Wild Things Are and go out the door to them. I had wanted to take it with me, had wanted to set it in the coffin and put his little hand on it. But I cannot find the courage to even do that.

  I sit in the backseat with Mother Maurie. When I get in, she is staring out her window. No one speaks to me. I take the cue, and sit close to my door and stare out my window. Up front, Tom and his father talk softly, deep heavy voices droning like summer insects. They talk of people who have called, and people who haven’t called. Tom’s father mentions how brave Steffie is, and Tom agrees. They never once speak Teddy’s name or say words like funeral or dead.

  We go to the Baptist church. None of us are Baptists, but they have a very nice church, and Steffie went to school with the minister’s daughter, so it has all been arranged. Steffie thinks it is better than the funeral home, I heard her tell Tom, because they have several funerals a day there, but Teddy’s will be the only funeral today at this church. So it’s more familyish and privatelike. Steffie thinks that’s how funerals should be. Familyish and privatelike.

  But the church parking lot is full of cars, the church packed with people. Potters are an old-time family in this valley, and everyone has turned out to honor them. They have left us parking spaces right in front of the church. The body has already been delivered and put on display, right on schedule. The flowers are exactly as ordered, but Steffie has to go up and move one vase a foot or so to the left. The front pew for the family has been roped off with black crepe-paper streamers. After the funeral and burial there will be a potluck in the church hall. The smell of baked beans and macaroni salad drifts in with the gymnasium smell of the hall and mingles with the women’s chemical perfumes and overpowers the flowers. It takes me back to Parish Rummage Sales and St Judith’s Spring Carnival. I wonder if there will be a ring toss and a fish pond to keep the kiddies busy while their parents are eating and commiserating.

  I have loitered, staring around, and I suddenly notice people are looking at me. Even Mother Maurie is in place, having been wheeled up in her chair like an Empress Dowager, and carefully aided to her place in the pew. They are all in the pew but me, and Tom glances back at me, and something like annoyance flickers over his face. I am doing it wrong, I suppose, but I have never been to a funeral before. Someone should have cue cards for me.

  I enter our pew, kneel, and make the Sign of the Cross. Wrong-O! Tom’s family is all sitting. They are here for a funeral, not to pray, and I am holding things up. I take my seat carefully. No one has given me a program. I have to watch for clues. Someone starts playing an organ, no hymn I know, it seems to be only a repetitive series of solemn chords. People rise and file up to look at the dead child in the box. I watch the people look at Teddy. Some merely glance in, with an “oh, hey, sure enough, it’s a dead kid in there” look and file past. Others stare avidly, eyes roving over him until they are reluctantly forced to move on by the push of people behind them. A carny sideshow. That’s what it reminds me of.

  Soon everyone has seen what they came here to see, except for the family. Then we are rising and filing up, Mother Maurie eschewing her wheelchair this time but leaning heavily on her husband and Ellie. I follow them, still groping after procedure and protocol. Some part of me suspects that this has all been orchestrated by Steffie anyway, and that no amount of funeral experience would have saved me. I feel like an actor who hasn’t seen the script, and as we approach the coffin, I am sure I am going to blow this scene.

  Each has a little grandstand play. I wonder if they have planned them, discussed them, perhaps rehearsed them in the big house living room, using the coffee table as a coffin prop. The farther we go, the less real any of this seems. Bix goes first. He glances in at his little nephew, says audibly, “Damn it all, anyway,” and moves on. Steffie pauses, reaching into the coffin to rearrange a lock of his hair and mutter something soothing, as if to a sleeping child. She stands there, unmoving, for just a moment too long. Then she begins shaking, and Bix has to take her arm and lead her away. Ellie, Mother Maurie, and Tom’s father view him as a group. Ellie grips the side of the coffin, while Mother Maurie breaks into stifled sobs and leans into her husband’s shoulder. Tom’s father looks old and tired and bitter, but strong still, the pioneer father shepherding his family through hard times. He moves on first, taking his sobbing wife with him. Ellie trails behind them, wiping her eyes on a large white hankie.

  Then Tom is looking into the coffin. Or not looking. I am right beside him, and I can tell he is not looking at the body, but is staring at a place on the blue satin lining of the box. I step up beside him, force myself to look in. A sudden wave of relief washes over me. It’s not Teddy! I grip Tom’s hand, squeeze it, force him to look at this child. It’s not Teddy, there’s been some awful mistake, but it’s over now. Someone else’s child is dead, not ours. The child is smaller, paler, the bones standing out in his face, his blond hair nattily wet-combed to one side, his legs skinny in black pants. This isn’t our husky, hearty wind-browned boy. “It’s not Teddy,” I whisper to Tom and squeeze his hand again. “It’s someone else.”

  “Evelyn,” he says in an awful voice, full of rebuke. There is terrible anguish on his face as he reaches in to touch the small mark on the boy’s hand, a mark like from the sharp edge of a can of dog food, a mark
like Teddy had from when he was three and tried to feed the dog himself. I stare at it, trying to make it not enough, but it is. I look again, and this shrunken body is all that remains of our son.

  It’s real.

  Now, this minute, my son is dead for the first time for me. Before I was just going along with them, making believe that what they told me was true, to be polite, because I didn’t seem to have any choice. No, really, I thought I had believed it before this, but I didn’t, not really. I hadn’t seen the body. Teddy gone was not Teddy dead. I couldn’t “feel” him dead, somehow he’d been still there, around the corner, in the barn, at the big house. Some part of me had not believed any of this, had thought it was some sort of elaborate torture, and that sooner or later they’d have to give him back. I hadn’t believed he could be dead. But now I do. I can hear I am making some weird sound, not crying or laughing or hiccuping, just this weird animal sound. And Tom is closing the coffin, pushing me back from it so my fingers won’t get shut in it, and his father has come up behind us and is saying, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Evelyn!” Like he’s really totally disgusted with me this time. He grabs me by the shoulder, I don’t know what he plans to do, but Tom is stepping between us, saying, “I’ll handle it, Dad, just let me take care of it.” And Tom takes me firmly by the arm and walks me down the dim aisle of the cool church, with everyone gaping at us, like a wedding procession in reverse, and out into the hot dusty day outside.

  It makes it worse. This is summer, the day is hot and bright, no one could be dead today, death is something that happens at night in cold places, or it happens on TV, right before the commercials, but it never happens to the main characters, never to the important ones. How could it have happened to Teddy? And I can’t stop making the noise. I’m not even trying. Tom takes me by both shoulders and shakes me. “Stop it,” he says, and not gently. “Just knock it off. Damn it, I’ve got all I can handle already. So just knock it off. Don’t you see we’ve got just this last little bit to get through? Just burying him, and that damn supper, and then it’s done, it’s over.”

  His words aren’t making sense to me. Teddy is going to be dead forever. There is no way that doing these last few things will put an end to it. I stare up at him, trying to see him through my tears. His face mirrors his disgust. I know I must look awful, my nose always runs when I cry and my face blotches into red and white. My green eyes are bloodshot right away. I know I must look awful and disgusting, but Teddy being dead is so big and awful a thing that it shouldn’t matter to him right now. Nothing should matter but that our boy is gone forever.

  I grope for a tissue, find none, drag my sleeve across my face. That seems to be the final straw, for Tom releases me abruptly, turns away. “Shit!” he says, bleakly, without hope. I get myself under control, swallow the noises even though they make huge dents in my throat. Tom stares over the parking lot. Finally he turns back to me as suddenly as he had turned away. Something else is in his face, something I have never seen before. He is almost smiling, like sometimes little kids look like they’re smiling when they’re trying very hard not to cry. “Why are you doing this now?” he demands, his voice gone cruel but choking. His eyes are very bright. “To make a big show for everyone, show them how much you cared? Hell, you weren’t even around that day! If he’d been home with you, none of this would have happened. Hell, if you’d even bothered to come with me, to at least keep an eye on him, none of this would have happened. But no, you had to have one of your sulks, go off alone, and leave Teddy for me to handle.”

  It is not true, not one word of it, and as I look at him in horror, I know he knows that it is not true. But some part of him is begging for me to admit it, the way he has had to admit it to his family every day since it happened. I can see how it was. In the Potter family, nothing bad ever just happens. It is always someone’s fault, someone always has to take the blame for it. Flat tires happen because you drove too fast, or took the wrong roads, or hit that last bump too hard. Washing machines break because they were overloaded, or you used too much detergent, or you didn’t vacuum under it. Teddy died because his father took him haying. Or because his mother didn’t keep him home.

  I think he is asking me for something. I don’t think he knows it, but he is. He has nothing left. What was between us is gone, has been dismantled brick by brick over the last few months. His son is dead. What he has left is maybe his family. But only if he isn’t guilty of killing his child. How they must have been working on him these last few days, I don’t want to imagine. But it is all there, in the lines graven in his face, in the hair that is dead straw now instead of warm gold, in the eyes that are starved and flat. The shock of all this has made my own grief a distant scream in the night. I wipe my sleeve once more across my slimy face, see him wince in disgust again at my unladylike ways. He loved me once. How that must shame him now.

  It’s a little like shooting your dog. I’ve had to do that only once in my life. You see the crushed body the semi has rolled and humped over, and it’s like your dog is trapped inside something that isn’t part of him anymore. He’s dying, but not fast enough. If death had a door, he’d be scratching and whining at it, he wants out that bad. And only you can let him out. So you jack your father’s black military .45, and it makes the deadliest sound in the world. You hold it two-handed, and your fingers are barely long enough to trip off the safety. You flash for an instant that if there’s a rock in the dirt under Rinky’s skull, then that bullet may come flying right back up at you. But somehow that doesn’t seem so bad, and you put the muzzle into the pink inside his ear, and it’s stupid, how he can still flick his ear to try to dislodge it, like it’s only a bug instead of cold metal, like something in his ear is more important than bone sticking out of his side right through the fur. And you pull the trigger. In love. In mercy. In a horrible explosion of stinging sound, and the gun leaps in your hand like a live thing and bits of Rinky spatter against you with a hot force like they’re going to go right through you. And it’s done and he’s gone and you don’t even have a good memory left of his wise eyes and broad skull and velvet ears under your hands, it’s all gone to shattered bits and wet fur.

  But it was what you had to do. What his subaudible cries had been begging you to do. So you did it. You destroyed what’s left to set him free.

  “I have a lover,’’ I say. “I was with him when Teddy died. That’s why I sent him with you instead of keeping him home and safe. So I could be with the brown man.”

  The day is hot and dusty and still, and the sun is white in the sky. There is too much light to see clearly. I think that is it, because at first I don’t see his face change at all. Then it’s like colors washing through an octopus I saw in an aquarium once. This is a flushing of Toms, many Toms flickering across his expressions, all taking a turn at looking at me out of his eyes. Some believe and some don’t, some are hurt, some angry, and at least once I glimpse one who knows exactly what I am doing. But he is gone quickly, and it is the last one, the outraged Potter, who steps forward and slaps me, hard, so it throws me sideways up against the hood of the sedan. When I can straighten up, he already has his back to me and is headed into the church, back to his family. The door swings shut slowly behind him, silent on its pneumatic closer, until I hear the snick of the catch. Good-bye, Tom.

  All of the Potter cars have secret keys in magnetic holders under the hood. It takes me a minute or two, because I can’t figure out the hood catch, but I get the key and I start the car and I drive away. The little black pennant flies merrily in the breeze, and blood from my nose and split lip drips off my chin until I open the window and let the hot wind dry it on my face. Mother Maurie will be upset with blood on the steering wheel and road grit inside her sedan. Tom will probably have to clean it up. Steffie will probably help him. Maybe it will be then that he will confide in her, will tell her what it was I said that explains why I left the funeral. She will tell her parents. And they will all have been right about me, and Teddy’s deat
h will have been all my fault. Poor Tom. And life will go on for all of them.

  The bright tackiness of the little house seems sharper the last time I go into it. I move quickly, as if I am a burglar, as if I will be interrupted at any moment. Not by Tom and his family. By Teddy. The empty house has a haunted feel, I almost expect to hear the light rumble of a Tonka truck down the hallway, the clatter of a dropped cereal bowl.

  But there is nothing. I fill my overnight bag quickly. It is a shoulder bag with lots of compartments, one of those cheap under-seat pieces you buy through the mail that never really fits under the seat of the airplane. Jeans, underwear, shirts, socks. Not much to take, really. Toothbrush, deodorant. Sheath knife, matches. I change into jeans and a shirt, lace and tie my sneakers. I leave my discarded clothing where I drop it. What happens to it is Tom’s problem. For a moment I consider taking some of Teddy’s things, the Mickey Mouse shirt that still smells like him, the battered copy of Where the Wild Things Are. But in the end, I leave them, too. I think very seriously of setting the house on fire. But it is a brief thought, only occurring as I go out the door, not a revenge thought but a symbolic thing, to not only have it be ended but have it be cleansed by fire as well. But I suspect that not even flames could consume Poems for the John, the gaudy rooster plates, the plastic unreality of that house. I have no doubt that in a matter of days Tom will be back in his old room in the big house, where his high school pennants still fly on the walls. Steffie and Ellie will clean me out of the little house, and I’ll be gone. Ellie’s Clorox and Pine Sol and Endust are more effective than flames.