A few women nodded and murmured their approval. Frank was still bent over, head hung, perfectly still. I was bored out of my mind.
And those of you who would see Fanchon again, he said, those of you who would see Fanchon again must believe this, as she did, must believe that this wracked, lifeless husk you see before you shall be made again pure and vibrant, if ye shall sit beside it at the throne of the Lord. Let there be no grief in your hearts at this parting; let there be only faith, and fear of thine own unworthiness, that such parting may be but temporary. For bodies, he said, bodies are nothing but seeds tilled into the earth, out of which, after their long germination, they shall uncurl their shoots, and bend toward the sun, and blossom.
He’s working on getting his arm down the sleeve of his jacket. He goes out to the cemetery every Easter and Thanksgiving so he can clean up the family graves, rake away the dry leaves scattered over them and scrub the streaks of black and green grime from the face of each stone and dig the pollen from their names, where it gathers yellow in the bottoms of the letters. I don’t usually go along, but now, after I’ve gotten up at six in the morning, in those last moments before dawn when everything in the dim, jumbled room looks made of rain and cloud, to roast the turkey and bake the green-pea casserole—he likes green peas better than green beans, so what kind of casserole do I make?—and get the gravy thickening on the stove, get the cranberry sauce and deviled eggs congealing in the fridge and the pumpkin pie cooling on the counter, and he’s listened to a bite of each one and set his fork politely down, after I’ve cleaned up the whole mess by myself, which takes nearly two hours, and gotten his grave-scrubbing brush and bucket and rag from the closet, and run water into the rag so he doesn’t have to go all the way down to the spigot by the caretaker’s shed, and rummaged the artificial flowers out of their drawer in the hallway and finally managed to hobble myself into the living room, half-crippled with the ache in my back, he can’t quite manage to get his own arm into his own sleeve. He’s got one on, but he can’t twist himself around enough to shove his arm into the other, even when I hold it out for him.
“Here.” I tug the sleeve off his arm and hold the jacket spread wide open and upside down in front of him. He walks forward, both arms held stiff straight out, and slides them into the sleeves.
“You’ve got it on the front of me,” he says. “And it’s upside down.”
“Lift your arms,” I say.
He raises them wriggling over his head. I tug the hem until the jacket falls into place around him.
“Well, I’ll be,” he says. “Just like magic.”
Daisy follows us out the door and waits patiently while he gets himself situated in the car. He has a lot of trouble with it, has to grab the open door with one hand and the doorframe with the other and slowly lower his rear end to the passenger seat—I do all the driving now, which I thought he’d resent, but he doesn’t seem to mind—and those last six inches he drops through so hard the seat sounds like it’s giving way beneath him. Some spring reverberates loudly in panic and hurt. Then he pulls his legs in, one at a time, grabbing each knee with both hands to help it bend. The glue between the ceiling and its fabric has come undone in several places, so the gray cloth hangs down in sagging bubbles. It brushes the top of my head, but it falls down over his eyes so he’s got to lean forward to get out from under it if he wants to see much.
Daisy hops onto his lap, lands so heavy she knocks him back in the seat. She’s gotten a whole lot fatter in just the few weeks she’s been here. He gives her a treat for waking up in the morning and a treat for going to bed at night, a treat when we leave the house and a treat for still being there when we come back, a treat for eating all her dinner or a treat for her self-restraint if she’s so full of them she can’t bear to look at her bowl. And you know you’ve given a dog that fat far too much food if she doesn’t want to eat any more of it. I can’t even open the cabinet her biscuits are in to get a can of beans without her stumping in there from the living room looking desperate and starved. She knows that cabinet from all the others, by the particular sound of its opening, or by the sound’s particular point of origin. I don’t have the heart to tell him to stop, though. The only way he knows to treat a dog is to spoil it.
She clambers over into the backseat and rides perched there on the very edge, pitched precariously forward so she can rest her chin on Frank’s shoulder and look over it out the windshield. She loves riding in the car, scampers back and forth between her spot at his shoulder and the back passenger window, gunky and smudged with nose prints. Her hot breath pulsates clouded on the glass. Frank rolls it down so she can sniff the crisp, dusty smell of dead leaves. They’re a month past their peak by now, most of them flared out and smoldering, or just embers crumbling to ash and falling to the ground every time the wind tries to stoke them. She stretches her head out far as she can, squinting against the buffeting air. She never falls down, even when I hit the brakes, has the best balance of any dog I ever saw. Bears down on Frank’s shoulder with her chin to steady herself every time we turn, and uses that broken tail for support, presses it flat across the seat with the tip of it up the seat’s back, like a bracket. Being fat helps, too. It’s hard for any force to sling around such a great mass.
Frank shifts in his seat, spreads his legs wide, trying to get comfortable.
“We ought to think about getting ourselves a new car,” I say.
“This one runs just fine,” he says, which is the exact same thing he said about his old truck, even after it started coughing black smoke every time he started it. Thank God they started picking up the trash, or he’d still be driving that thing to the dump, burning oil and breathing in the fumes.
“I feel like I’m closed up in a coffin in here.” I bat away the loose lining over my head. “And you nearly fall down every time you get in. We need something that sits higher up.”
“It is hard on my hips,” he concedes. “And my knees.” They’re folded up almost to his armpits.
“What we need is one of those big sport things. An all-terrain vehicle.”
“All-terrain vehicle,” he says. “I like the sound of that.”
“The Schiller dealership’s having an after-Thanksgiving sale. Maybe I’ll go by tomorrow.”
“Schiller?” He raises his eyebrows so high he’s lucky they don’t fly off his forehead. “You think I’m going to buy a German car?”
“Every single consumer report that comes out says they’re the best. And it would save us a fortune in gas money. They’re very efficient.”
“I ain’t forgot what they did,” he says. “They were efficient at that, too.”
“The war’s been over for nearly sixty years. The men you fought are too old to have a thing to do with building these cars.”
“I’m not too old to build cars,” he mutters. “I could build cars if I very well pleased.”
“They’re our ally now. Our friend.”
“Maybe they’re your ally. You never bashed one of their heads in with a rock.”
“And I’m sure they’ve all been chomping at the bit for their chance to take revenge on Frank Clifton. I’m sure they’re waiting in the factory right now with bated breath for the order to plant a bomb in your new sedan.”
He crosses his arms and looks at me like I’m a traitor.
I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know why I even tried. It’s only American-made cars for us: he hates the Japanese almost as much as he hates the Germans.
“You bashed one of their heads in with a rock?” I say.
He shrugs. “That ain’t the worst I did.”
The graveyard’s the biggest one in the city, and one of the oldest, right smack in the middle of downtown in the shadows of the tall, shiny office buildings and the banks with their big digital clocks always flashing above the doors so nobody forgets the time, pressed against a busy four-lane road that runs all the way from the sagging, gutted factories on this end of town to the rolling cow past
ures on the other, and landscaped such that the ground of the graveyard sits a full six feet higher than the road, with an old stone retaining wall that curves and bulges just a sidewalk’s width from the curb to hold back the dirt. The graves run right down to it, and some of the tombstones, the oldest ones with their inscriptions so worn away and streaked with grime that the names of the dead have been completely erased, lean over it toward the street, tilting and crowded against each other like crooked teeth and pushing their dirt against the wall, bowing it out so far that a crack runs clear down it and rends the moss that’s grown on the stone.
“Would you look at that?” I say. “That wall’s going to give right out. Spill dirt and tombstones all into the street. Or through somebody’s windshield.”
“Shoddy craftsmanship,” Frank says, shaking his head.
We turn into the cemetery and drive slow along the narrow road that winds through it. It’s wide and vast, all rolling hills and tombstones lined up one after the other, so much that the openness and repetition of it starts you to feeling it’s one hill, even one row of graves replicated over and over until the road bounds its multiplication. Someday soon they’ll run out of space—from the looks of that wall, they already have—but by then, I guess, the residents of the oldest plots will have fallen completely apart. They’ll pull those rotten teeth from the earth and throw new people in the sockets as if the old ones had never been anything but soil. That’s what I’d do, anyway.
On the radio they’ve already got Christmas carols playing, some new pop starlet embellishing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with so many trills and runs and arpeggios you can’t even pick out the soft, sad melody they’re supposed to be emerging from.
“You’d think they could let us get through Thanksgiving Day before they started pushing Christmas carols on us,” I say.
“I like Christmas carols,” Franks says. “Might cheer things up around here.”
“You think things need cheering up?”
“I think you need cheering up.”
“I’m full of cheer,” I say.
He hums along with the radio that slow, mournful current the singer’s trying to make us forget, moving steadily and softly forward into that someday soon when we all will be together: if the fates allow.
The cars of the funeral procession wound across town, from church to graveyard. I rolled my windows down to enjoy the afternoon. I could have gone home then, I figured I’d fulfilled my faithful duty, but I soldiered on and stood at the edge of the mourners and did my best to look somber. Under the tent there were three large stones, above his daddy and brother and sister, and beside his daddy the open grave, and beside that two more plots, one for Frank and one for his wife, waiting for the shovel to break them open. His mama bought them all when Harvey and Iris died. Graves were going fast back then, and the proprietor said those particular spaces were hot commodities, in high demand. Had to sell her mother’s heirloom jewelry to get them all while they lasted.
The hearse backed up to the pit so fast and close, its tires pressing runny mud from the dirt like juice from pulp, I thought it might fall right in. The funeral director opened the back doors and jostled the casket halfway out. It was a nice, dark mahogany, lacquered smooth. Frank leaned over it, his face tight, as if against real, physical pain. I wanted to ache for him, to hurt for him. I wanted to feel what he felt, and I arranged my face into all the proper forms, the lowered brow and clenched jaw of grief, but I couldn’t find those things in me, no matter how hard I tried. Inside my chest, something folded itself shut, like a bird drawing its wings in close, about to take flight.
He placed his hand on the coffin lid. Inside the wood, dark, shining fingers reached up and pressed their palm to his.
Along with five other pallbearers—they’d tried to convince him to let someone else do it, but he insisted—he carried the casket over the grave by a fine silken rope tied to one of the handles, then lowered it into the earth. All the others did it carefully, as they’d obviously been coached, hand over hand, but Frank let the cord slide through his clenched fist. The sun was bright, and the air was cool and crisp, the clouds set impossibly high in the sky, and the light ran in a gold liquid line along the coffin’s edge as it descended, and as the pallbearers bowed their heads, muttered a prayer, and let the tasseled ends of their ropes go, I felt gravity open wide, felt it loosen and flatten the knotted curve of space so that it stretched out in one vast expanse, and any move you made would carry you through it in the straight line of inertia, effortlessly and endlessly forward and up and out in the direction you meant to go.
How easy it seemed it would be then to live unfettered, and open to the world, and in it. I hadn’t even known that was something I wanted.
As the bereaved began to disperse, I hurried to my car before somebody could greet me. From inside it, through the bird droppings my windshield wipers had smeared across the glass, I watched Frank shake the hands of his comforters, smile and take their condolences and tell them how good it was to see them, how much it would have meant to his mother. I’d never seen him with other people before. The chief of police was there in full regalia, out of respect for Frank’s daddy. Frank talked to him a long time, listening thoughtfully and nodding and standing up unnaturally tall and straight, and at the end the chief of police held him out at arm’s length and squeezed his shoulders as if to fortify him somehow.
He told jokes, and laughed, and gently ribbed the children, and appeared to genuinely enjoy himself, and when most of the family and friends had either gone home, or driven back to his house for the luncheon the Women’s Auxiliary was busy spreading over every available surface, or walked off through the cemetery to pay respects to their own dead while they were in the respect-paying mood, three young men, strong and broad-shouldered like Frank, in suits they must have had since they were teenage boys, with constricted arms and wrists jutting past their cuffs, ambled over to him. Some part of him seemed to open when he saw them, to throw his chest wide. He looked younger all of a sudden. He looked happy. One clapped him on the back, and another, with a headful of curly red hair, tossed his arm across Frank’s shoulders and left it there, hand dangling loose, with absolute ease and familiarity. They closed around him the way brothers would, with a brother’s combination of tenderness and bravado, and herded him toward a car. He glanced at me over his shoulder, with a muddled expression I couldn’t understand, and let them sweep him away.
Daisy jumps out the window. It happens so fast I don’t know what it is she saw—I don’t even see her do it—but all of a sudden, with a wild scrabbling commotion, she’s not looking over Frank’s shoulder anymore but landing on the road behind us in my rearview mirror, so hard it splays her legs out from under her and smashes her belly on the asphalt. I hit the brakes. Tentatively she gets back to her feet, but she stays where she is, quaking in shock and bewilderment, and looking around like she, too, has no idea what happened or how she got there.
“Is she all right?” Frank says, panicked, trying to twist around in his seat.
“Open your door,” I say. He does, and I put the car in reverse and roll it backwards.
“Careful,” he snaps. “Don’t run over her.”
“I’m not going to run over her.”
She’s still standing in that same spot when she slides into view through his open door, legs shaking, looking as stunned and ashamed as a dog can when it’s already forgot what it did to be ashamed of. Frank pats his lap. She hesitates before she leaps onto it. He turns her on her back and examines her belly, brushes the dirt and bits of broken acorn from its thin fur and dabs the scraped skin with the sleeve of his jacket. Her belly’s pink and spotted like a cow’s. Gives off a warm, mulled smell. He takes each of her legs and guides it through a wide range of movement, watching for twitches of pain. Daisy looks like she’s receiving a therapeutic massage, closes her eyes and lets her head rest on the pillow of his knee, tongue lolling out of her mouth.
“S
he’s so fat she probably didn’t even feel the impact,” I say. “I’m sure it couldn’t make it all the way through to her bones.”
“Quiet,” he says. “She can hear you.”
“I just wish you’d feed yourself half as much as you feed her.”
He pats her full belly. “Tight as a tick,” he says with evident satisfaction.
She climbs up on him, her front paws on his shoulders, and sticks her head over his shoulder, back out the window. I hit the button to raise it. She keeps her nose extended through the shrinking crack until the very last moment, pulls it in right before it gets caught. He holds one paw to his nose and breathes deeply.
“I do love the smell of dogs’ paws,” he says.
“You’re going to get sick from their germs, pressing them up against your mucous membranes like that.”
“Smells like the earth,” he says.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep those thoughts to yourself from now on.”
We’ve got maybe forty-five minutes of light left. They’ve planted some trees alongside the drive since the last time we were here, little bare saplings. The hood of the car slips under the long shadows of their skinny, naked branches and pries them up from the road, one after the other, each one scraping a little easier than the last across the metal. The moon hangs barely visible in the sky, a faint projection of something more real.
All his family is along one edge of the cemetery, near the back, by some old twisting oaks whose roots heave stones out of the earth now and then. I pull halfway off the drive onto the grass beside his parents. I don’t think we’re on top of them. Frank grabs the top edge of his open door with one hand and the doorframe with the other and tries four times before he succeeds in slow-heaving himself out of his seat. Daisy promptly marches over and makes a rainbow on a stranger’s grave, then kicks up the grass covering them to mask her scent.
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