I set the flowers and cleaning bucket on the hood of the car and wait leaned against it. Frank’s plot is laid out in front of us, looking like any other stretch of lawn. He wants a real military funeral, the bugler bugling “Taps” up its rusty, somber peak of mourning. I suspect it’s just so there’ll be somebody at the thing besides me, the honor guard to fire their rifle salute that I alone or no one will hear. When they fold the flag back from his coffin and into its triangle, I don’t expect they’ll lay it across my waiting arms and thank me for his service. They’ll send it off to some next of kin he never met, who won’t know until they receive it that he’s dead, or that he ever lived.
Even when he’s gone, and left me the house and all his money, the story to anyone who asks is that we were very dear friends.
I always thought I’d be the one to die first. I used to worry about it, didn’t want him having to see yet another body, but I suppose I don’t need to fret about that anymore. Most likely the postman will spy my rotting corpse through a part in the curtains when he can’t jam any more bills and advertisements into the mailbox. By then, Daisy may have begun eating me. And I’m sure nobody will be at my funeral. I always said I wanted to be cremated, make some space in this world for something else, but the truth is they can shoot me from a cannon at the county fair if they like. I won’t be around to care one way or the other.
Or maybe we’ll finally get lucky and go together. Tragic accidents are happening all the time.
Frank leans beside me and stares at his daddy’s marker, his eyes just a little squinted like there’s something in it he’s trying to see but can’t quite make out yet. I know now he can’t get down on his hands and knees and scrub the markers clean, but he could at least brush the bird droppings from their tops. He could at least wipe the leaf dust from his parents’ names.
I pull the flowers out of their plastic bag and fluff them a little. I bought them on closeout sale last spring. They practically had to pay me to take them. They’re real pretty, though, blue hydrangea heads with some deep orange daisies between them, and some green and white sprays of baby’s breath here and there, even if they are a little smushed from being shoved in the drawer. And they smell funny, like damp old carpet. Everything you put in that drawer starts to smell like damp old carpet after a while.
“Will you hurry up?” I say. “I didn’t come all the way out here because I thought it would be nice to spend my Thanksgiving in a graveyard. Get to work.”
Daisy turns her solemn, sorrowful face to me in silent rebuke. Frank crosses his arms on his chest and looks troubled. His shoulders, without moving an inch, seem to buckle under some great weight, the way they do when he’s mad about something but wants me to have to draw it out of him.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
He gives me an exasperated stare. How is it, this stare asks, that he’s managed to live his entire adult life with such an oblivious fool?
“You’d better go on and say it. Before you sulk away the little bit of daylight we’ve got left.”
Daisy sits slumped against his mama’s stone and starts licking her privates. Makes a real loud, wet clicking sound. Frank and I stand here listening to her for about five minutes, until I can’t take it anymore and go and shoo her away, knock the droppings off the stones myself with a twig, wipe their faces with the damp rag, collect the faded roses from the urns, the edges of their petals frayed, and replace them with the hydrangeas, which still look crumpled no matter how much I fluff them, lean lopsided over one edge of the urn like they’re about to fall out.
The wind picks up, blows his jacket open and his shirt against him. It molds itself to his jutting ribs. They keep showing clearer and clearer under the skin, like fossils being slowly excavated, the years of dust and dirt that cover them carefully brushed away, a little at a time.
“This ain’t a graveyard,” he says.
“It sure looks like one to me.”
“A graveyard,” he says, with the kind of voice you’d use to explain the most basic facts to a class of exceptionally dull schoolchildren, “is a yard full of graves. The yard is part of a church. It’s a churchyard. The yard, of a church, full of graves. That’s a graveyard. This is a cemetery. A cemetery stands alone. It don’t belong to nobody but the dead.”
“You’re a regular poet,” I say.
“And I didn’t even know it.” He chuckles, and just as quick as it rumbled in, his bad mood disintegrates.
I throw the rag and the old flowers in the bucket and the bucket onto the backseat. It’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold. My fingers are stiffening. “Well? Is there anything you want to do? Or can we go home now?”
He makes a face like he’s thinking about it real hard, that sort of face nobody ever makes when they’re actually thinking hard about something. Then he slowly walks forward, with both hands shoved in his pockets and shaking wild, so it looks like there’s a squirrel squirming around in each one. He stands over the graves for a long time, looking down on them, and then he rests one hand on his daddy’s marker, his fingers spread wide, and bows his head as if in prayer.
“A tombstone,” he says, “is the stone that goes on top of your tomb. Holds it shut in case you decide to try climbing out.” He pats the top of it, walks back to the car, and lowers himself in. Daisy follows him closely.
I get myself into the car, turn it on, buckle my seatbelt. Frank leans back in his seat and presses the loose fabric against the ceiling. It sticks there for a second, and he watches his handprint disappear, slow, like it had been pressed into wet sand that fills itself from underneath. The fabric falls loose again.
“What’s gotten into you?” I say.
Daisy, curled on his lap, looks up at me in warning without lifting her head.
“Nothing’s gotten into me,” he says. “Besides your turkey.”
“Not nearly enough of it, that’s for sure. You’re probably delirious from hunger.”
“Delirious?”
“You’re not yourself.”
“Don’t know who else I could be.”
“Stop joking around. I wish you could be serious for two minutes. Just two minutes. Long enough to act a little solemn at your own parents’ graves.”
“It’s Thanksgiving,” he says. “I’m just giving thanks.”
“Thanks for what?”
He makes his thinking face for a long time, then shrugs.
“That’s what I thought,” I say. “And you’re going to be giving thanks from the ground beside them pretty soon if you don’t start eating something.”
He frowns and leans away from me in his seat, looks out the window at his silhouette pressed flat to the glass, trying to get inside: just his empty shape, no detail or features, nothing within it but dark trees and tombstones. He could lean into it like Narcissus, until he drowned in himself, and never see his face.
I turn the car around, tall grass rustling against its undercarriage. Its headlights scrape the trees’ scarred bark, slide bright across the smooth face of a stone. Soon as they sweep away, on down the road, the darkness rushes back in to fill the places they’ve pushed it out of. This world never will let an empty space exist in peace. Every gap’s got to be filled, every hill and valley leveled out. As we turn out of the cemetery and head home, the vast, dark space between here and there funneled through our high beams and beneath our wheels, the bulging, broken wall struggles to hold itself up against the pressure, and all the while gravity’s trying to tear it down, and all the while the dirt and bodies behind it strain to break through.
He showed up that afternoon while the sun was still shining, still in his funeral clothes but with his shirt untucked and wrinkled and the jacket left who knows where, looking ragged and red-eyed and exhausted, like he hadn’t slept for days, just as I was pulling a deer’s cape over the fleshing beam. He leaned in the doorway a long time, then sank into a rickety wooden chair and leaned it back on two legs, his crossed ankles and muddy shoes propped on my wor
k table, and watched in silence as I drew the fleshing knife, a long, barely-curved blade with a wooden handle on each end, light and swift across the hide, skimming away pink flesh in thin, delicate curls from the bluish-gray skin beneath. My whole body moved in rhythm with the blade, back and shoulders rolling as if rowing a boat, and when I’d cleared one strip, I turned the hide on the beam, pulled it tight like stubbled skin over a jaw, so the razor has a flat surface to scrape clean, and started on the next. You’ve got to get all the meat and fat and flesh off, every little bit, so there’s nothing left but skin when you put it in the pickle, just the thinnest, outermost surface. Everything underneath, the real substance, the heft of a thing, you’ve got to let go, and use your memory to recreate it as best you can, just a little streamlined, and a little smaller, so you can fit the skin back over it without too much trouble.
“Who were those boys?” I said.
“Just some pals from school. We used to play football together.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Downtown. Got a bite to eat. They said I needed a break from old ladies fawning all over me.” His words smelled like juniper and bile.
“Were you drinking?”
He considered this a moment.
“I may have had some gin,” he said.
“How much?”
“Can’t remember.” His words sounded loose, slipped from his mouth before his lips had time to shape their edges. “I do know that I’ve thrown up twice.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. He gave me a disapproving look. “You didn’t go to the luncheon?”
He shook his head. Sweat was beaded all along his hairline.
“The women of the church will be scandalized.”
“So will my aunts. But I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t care.” He sounded surprised by this.
With a smaller knife, I pared peelings from the deer’s face: the thin edge of his lip, the smooth insides of his cheeks. “You have to be careful,” I said. “If you shave too much away, the whiskers all fall out.”
Frank nodded.
“You acted like you were real close,” I said. “With those boys.”
“We were.”
“You never talk about them.”
“I don’t hardly see them anymore.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. I held the face up to the sun, setting in one of the tiny, tempered windows high in the cinderblock wall. It burned pink through each eyelid, red inside the tiny, empty blood vessels visible in the skin like fossils in mud, the ridged spines of extinct animals. Not even bones: just the feathery imprints they left in the sand.
“Well,” I said. “It was nice of them to come.”
“I want us to move someplace,” he said.
“What?”
“I want us to move someplace.”
I draped the hide across its beam and sat on the edge of the table facing him. His tattoos showed dark through the thin white sleeves of his shirt, like twigs and leaves under the surface of a frozen pond. The fresh-leather smell of his shoes mingled with the damp sourness of the sweat inside them, and the cuff of one pant leg was caught halfway up his calf. I twisted the hairs on his shin together, let them go, and watched them unwind. They held their shape in a loose peak.
“Not too far,” he said. “Just—outside town someplace.”
“You’re drunk.”
He gave me an exasperated, self-righteous look. I opened the fingers of his right hand. White, blistering welts had risen from the pink rope burn across his palm.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he said. “Our own little place out in the country?”
“What about your house? You love that house.”
“There’s too many people around,” he said in disgust, swinging his hand as if to knock them away. “Too many families.”
“You like people,” I said. “You like families.”
“But you don’t.”
“It’s not that I— Let’s talk about it later. When you’re in your right mind.”
“They could put us in jail for this, you know.” He said it real casual, like it was just an interesting little bit of trivia he’d learned.
“Is that what the chief of police was telling you?”
He laughed wearily, sadly. “The chief of police was telling me what a fine, upstanding young man I’d turned out to be. How proud my mama and daddy were up in heaven.” He shook his head. “They could lock us away for sixty years. It’s a crime. We’re criminals.”
“We’re not criminals.”
He raised his eyebrows to indicate he wished he could be as blissfully ignorant of the laws of our state as I was.
I twisted a whole mountain chain of hair down his shin; I smoothed the whole chain flat.
“Didn’t you think that preacher was a little low-class?” I said. “Using your mama’s death as an opportunity to spout his own dogma?”
“She would’ve liked it.” He laughed, and leaned back in his chair, and stared up at the nubbly popcorn plaster of the ceiling. He ran his hands down his face, as if trying to wake himself.
“I wanted to tell her,” he said. “About you. I did. I know you think I—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. It does matter. I wanted her to know me. I wanted her to know I was happy. That she’d done all right. But I couldn’t—I never—”
“You were home in time for dinner,” I said. “Every night. Just like you promised her.”
He sat forward quickly, the chair’s front legs clacking loudly on the tile. He pressed his face to my stomach and sobbed great, heavy sobs that wracked his chest and shook his shoulders until I thought they would shake him apart; he wrapped his arms around my waist and clutched me so tight it hurt. I brushed the hair from his temple, and I kissed his forehead. His tears soaked hot through my shirt.
I think I loved him then most of all: drunk and crying in those quiet, empty hours, while the evening light grew heavy, filled with copper, and sank to the floor.
And when we’re gone, nobody will remember any of it. Nobody will see our photos and marvel that we, too, were young once; nobody will wonder about the things we never told them. It will be as if none of it ever happened. I wish, sometimes, I do wish that I could have believed that old preacher, that the Judgment Day would come, and the righteous would rejoice and the guilty would suffer, and Gabriel would toot his horn and all the bodies of the dead would rise from their thousand years’ slumber, clean and naked and pure as Adam in the garden, fingers not even sullied from clawing open their coffin lids, and those who’d been dead so long that even their coffins and vaults had crumbled would find their hair pulled in threads from the trees whose roots they had nourished, unraveling their bark, that corpses would burrow their way up from the earth like cicadas and swarm to meet their souls in the air, that the bodies of the dead would clot the sky until the sun was sealed over with their flesh and left the world in darkness.
But I’ve lived too long to believe foolishness like that, and I’ve seen too many living things disappear from this world to believe that anything, anything at all will survive of me. No, the best I can hope for is that some child, ten or twenty years from now, will see a dusty deer raising its head in a shadowed corner of his grandfather’s house and think, for one moment, that it’s living.
I turn on the Christmas carols, as loud as I can bear.
ELEVEN
We drove for weeks that fall along the narrow country roads outside town, looking for houses we’d seen in realty pamphlets, sometimes long after dark when the trees stretched into an endless blur alongside the car, out of which I could pull one trunk at a time if I picked it at a certain point precisely halfway between the window and the unfolding darkness at the furthest edge of the headlights, sifted it up and out so it held itself within the borders of its bark, and turned my head with it as it slid past and fell away behind us. But as soon as I let my concentration drift or my eyes go fuzzy, even for a moment, it me
lted irretrievable back into the long smear of bark and leaf. The FOR SALE sign at the end of the dirt driveway flickered white between them, and when we slowed the car, when we stopped with the headlights turned on high and shining up the drive, the commingled trunks and muddled branches separated themselves into individual hickories and oaks, dogwoods and pines, so many that you couldn’t see the house any more than when they were all smudged together. The driveway curved off behind them and disappeared.
We inquired about and visited the house separately, days apart from each other. It had been a hunting retreat for some crazy timber baron who may or may not have hanged himself in the woods. We never could get a clear answer on that one, but Frank bought it, and the land surrounding it, with a GI Bill loan and the money he got from selling his mama’s house to an old philosophy professor and his nice young wife.
We both thought it was a little too small, and that the rooms inside it didn’t quite fit together, as if they’d all been stolen from other homes, other lives. But it was a good forty-five minutes from town and a good mile from the next house, and we thought we’d make it bigger, fix it up, redecorate it so the rooms all looked the same, tear down the wood paneling and paint everything light, make it all wide and open. I drew the plans on drafting paper so thin it seemed the letters and numbers, no matter how light you sketched them, would fall right through. I loved the straight lines, the precision of the angles. We were going to knock out the whole back wall of the house, so the hallway floor, instead of running into the bathroom, would unroll across the backyard, with the bath and a guest bedroom on one side and a dining room on the other, attached to the kitchen with no door between them, just a big open archway where the window looks over the sink, and at the end of the hall, stretching along the back of the house, a screened-in porch where we would sit every night after dinner, looking out on the yard.
Hide Page 11
