by Joan Chase
“Shut up,” Gram said. Her crinkled old face looked as distorted as the heap of peelings mounding around the pan.
“Momma.” Aunt May, the oldest, spoke firmly. “Nobody wants to do this. It simply has to be done and in the best spirit possible. We can do it best. We’re going down to the funeral home,” she explained to us, and we felt how brave they were, how much love they had.
“I hope when my time comes they’ll throw me in a pit,” Tom Buck said. “This business makes it just about impossible to die.”
“Scientists do cremate ordinarily,” Aunt Elinor said, “but in this case . . .”
Gram had refused to pay for that kind of burial. She had said she wasn’t going to get mixed up in any heathen ways when not a bit of it meant anything anyhow. “She’ll lay up there aside of me, where she belongs,” Gram said then. Grandad was already there, on top of the hill at the cemetery, and Gram had bought plots for herself and her five children. “I don’t know what the rest of us are supposed to do,” Uncle Dan had said. “Just wander, I guess. Outside paradise.”
“There’s more where that come from,” Gram had told him. But Uncle Dan said he wasn’t going in the back row and the way he said it, we could tell none of it did matter to him.
As they went out the door, the sisters were crying. Aunt Elinor carried the alligator cosmetic case with the jars of rouges, oils and perfumes which clients in the advertising world had given her. “If Dan calls, tell him we’re coming,” Aunt Libby said. He had been gone all day, making arrangements.
With their leaving we felt the house more, its great weight on us, heaviness not so much of brick or atmospheric pressure as of experience. We leaned in close to protect Anne and Katie, whose faces were so white and remote, it seemed they felt an incomprehensible freedom.
Gram finished peeling the apples in silence. Her daughters had wanted her to rest, but she had gone on with what she was doing.
“Jesus, Neil. What’re you going to do now?” Tom Buck didn’t look at him, but got up to pour again from the bottle and then returned to the stool, his elbows propped up on his knees.
“The same,” Neil said, pouring whiskey.
“Not around here, you ain’t,” Gram answered. We’d been waiting for it to happen—all that unresolved bitterness in the angle of her face. We had felt it when her four daughters had left, the persistent past, heavy and actual.
Neil took his careful walk for more ice, going past Gram so quietly he might have walked on tiptoe. Then he sat down again at the table and leaned back against the wall, watching her through eyes narrowed to spell danger. “You never could keep your trap shut, could you?” We felt him taunting her, trying to make her wild, showing in that way that he thought he had the advantage. “Don’t worry, though; I’ll be gone soon,” he said.
“Yeah. I bet you will.”
“Now that must mean something. You got something on your mind, Lil?” Neil tilted his chair, forcing her hand, enjoying it too.
“You’re a widower now. It’s done and finished. So you can pack your bags and git.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t reckon you’ve got a cent to pay on them bills.”
“I might have known.” Neil’s hand was shaking when he put his glass down. Then he wagged his head back and forth, with his head lowered and his mouth tight. “Well, maybe”—and he looked up at her, disgust showing in his face openly—“maybe you can return that fur coat. Seems to me it’s still nearly brand-new—since she had to be about half dead before you were good for it or any of the other promises.”
“That ain’t none of your business.”
“No, it probably isn’t.” Neil stood up then and started toward the door as if he were going to leave; he looked suddenly ill.
But Gram had begun. “I told her what she’d get if she married you. Nothing. That’s what. Now just go on. Git. Maybe we can have some peace and quiet around here. And decency,” she added in a lower, different voice.
Neil turned toward her, stopped in his tracks, and his face was blood red again. “Decency. I declare. Decency. You know, Lil, you rather disappoint me. Just about the time I think you’re going to take action, really give it to me, maybe just outright hand me an accounting, you back off and begin to preach. I suppose you have some idea about that. Decency.” He sat at the table again.
“Let’s go down to the Elks, Neil,” Tom Buck said. Gram stood up and looked at Neil, fit to kill. A chalky-white froth was oozing from her mouth, the way it does out of an abused and lathered-up horse.
“When they took her breast, you was told: leave her be. But you wouldn’t. Couldn’t restrain your manhood, rooting in her —killing her is what it amounts to. Pregnant. She lost it but you killed her, same as if you’d taken a gun.”
Neil came out of his chair. Fast. Gram braced herself, but stood her ground. He pounded on the table once with his fist and the sound was emphatic and alarming. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” His face was white.
“For Christsake.” Tom Buck stood up, wobbled and sat down.
In the quietness, Gram stood facing Neil directly, holding the pan of peelings, the rotten and wasted parts against her stomach, the paring knife in her hand. “They ought to have cut something off of you,” she said.
“Maybe you’d like to try your hand at it, Lil.” Neil was walking toward Gram. Deliberately. “Come on, let’s see what the old war-horse is really made of. Actually you might be doing both of us a service,” and this time he laughed, as if he truly meant it, that it was funny to think she could do something he wanted done.
“Christ in heaven.” Tom Buck’s drink spilled into the lap his legs made perched on the step stool. He gave out a little yelp. “Cold,” he explained when we looked up. Then he stared down, wondering at the stain as it spread over his pants. He brushed at it helplessly, shrugged. “Looks like I peed my pants,” he said, as if he might have done such a thing to get attention.
We threw ourselves down and laughed our heads off. Raged with laughing, rolling and gasping. It seemed wonderful that he was going to be in the family. When he walked away, he stumbled over a chair and we laughed all the harder.
“Another goddamned drunk,” Neil said, and we thought it was funny to hear him sounding like Tom Buck. “Lil, you seem to draw them like flies.” Tom Buck was splashing his face at the sink and Neil said seriously, “A legend that might interest you women—the Amazons. They removed the left breast of their warriors and then they hung the quiver of arrows there. Now that was a sign of something out of the ordinary. What you might call resolve. Courage. Seems none of us has what it takes.” He followed Tom Buck out of the room. They were talking a little. Then we heard Neil mounting the stairs, going up toward the empty room, where the snow blew in the lace curtains and embellished the netting.
When they had gone and we were left with Gram, she said, “Anne, quit your howling,” though we were all laughing and fooling around. Anne was quiet then, as though she’d been slapped. Gram didn’t notice, went on making her pie crusts, not measuring anything, going fast with a kind of flair, as though all the movements and ingredients came to her out of a dance she had in her head. “So that’s what he wants,” she said out loud, and then went on to form the dough into generous circles.
Later the sisters came home. Saddened and spent-looking, they went off to rest. When it was dark, we all left together for the funeral home.
“She looks so beautiful,” Aunt Rachel said. “I’m grateful for that. You did it perfectly,” and she buried her face for a moment into Aunt Elinor’s collar. Aunt Libby drove with her usual inner absorption, like a chauffeur. Gram didn’t say a word.
Aunt Elinor turned back to us. “Now when you go in, I want you to remember: Life never was or will be in the body. The body is the outworn shell left when the Soul flies away. Kind of like moving out of an old house into a new one.”
Aunt Libby almost interrupted her, thinking and saying her own th
oughts. “When I see her now. So peaceful and at rest. It’s hard to believe how she suffered. Just yesterday. What was it for, I ask you?”
“Maybe it was for us,” Aunt Elinor said. “So that we could be brought to know God.” Then we thought that maybe it was: Aunt Grace a living sacrifice made perfect and acceptable to God, chosen to bear all for us, who were lost in sin.
But when we walked into the large old mansion that had been converted into the funeral home, we paused in the vestibule; there was in that enveloping silence the profound presence of something more final even than the things Aunt Elinor had told us, in the knowledge of which we felt at last the exceeding wonder of living. We were drawn both ways. Beyond the bank of cut flowers which Gram had wanted, in spite of Aunt Elinor’s beliefs, we felt the fascination of it, this dread combining with an exquisite excitement. The women took us in to where the body was.
Since the night before, there had been a transformation; the figure lying there, serene, redeemed, was severed radically from the woman whom we remembered in the darkness. Now those pain-blasted eyes were forever closed and her mouth was a fixed crimson curl, untouchable. They had dressed her in a gown that was ineffably blue. With all pain and desire wiped away, she was now more lovely to us than we could remember, and totally unfamiliar. Anne and Katie were crying.
“Oh, my babies,” Aunt Elinor said, and hugged them with tears moistening her smile, the joy she felt at the spirit’s release blending with her own human insufficiency, as she called her grief. We stood by Gram. Aunt Rachel said that it was getting too morbid for her. After a while she went for Anne’s and Katie’s coats and drove them home.
Gram seemed not to notice anything, just nodded whenever anyone came up to offer condolences. Sitting on the straight chair with the hooped baskets of flowers near her, she was strangely like a girl, her feet barely touching the floor, her gaze innocent, without the accretion of her usual expression of impatience.
Aunt Minny came. Huge, almost six feet tall. Gram called her a holy roller. Sometimes Gram warned Aunt Elinor that she could get to be as ridiculous, might even begin to throw fits. We were always hoping Aunt Minny would throw one when we were with her, but she didn’t, although Gram said it couldn’t be so very much different from the way she generally acted. Right away Aunt Minny leaned down to kiss the face, eagerly, fervently. We imagined her touch—lips unwarmed despite thousands of such encounters.
“She’s washing her feet in Jordan tonight. Amen and praise the Lord.” Aunt Minny seized Aunt Elinor and, sisters in the faith, they stood together. “Praise Jesus,” Aunt Minny exulted, witnessing boldly in the enemy’s stronghold.
“Steal away,” she crooned, and went over to Gram, pulled her out of her chair to hug her entirely, Aunt Minny enormous all over, so that Gram hung limp against her like a doll. “Lil, the Lord’s watching after you for certain. These angels he has provided for your comfort and blessing.” That was us somehow. We shrank back, afraid of her touch, but when she’d reached us and had clasped us to her bosom, it was warm and billowy. “Do you recollect the night He washed our sins away?”
Gram looked startled. Then she blurted out what she’d been thinking: “Ain’t no sense to it. Leaving me here. An ugly old woman.” She turned her back and walked away, then appeared in her coat, her pocketbook dragging. “You come on,” she snapped at the rest of us. We took one final look, going toward the door, at the stranger bedded in satin. In her waxed paleness we already imagined her as Snow White, asleep under the dome of eternity, though beyond any charm we knew of.
When we got home, Gram moved straight to the fireplace and struck the gas, yanking up her dress and standing with her legs close up to the spiraling run of blue-gold flame, her expression urgent to feel the heat. She stood on one end of the Persian rug and her feet pointed in the direction of the pattern; she had told us once that the rug was woven so that the design directed the Moslem’s prayers to the east. She’d placed her rug that way too. It was one of the only disinterested facts she had ever told us, pure information unrelated to her life or ours, and it amazed us. Just then, her face calm and absorbed by the fire, she could have been facing Mecca, although not kneeling. Anne and Katie sat with Aunt Rachel on the couch. They had stopped crying and even smiled when we came in.
“Momma,” Aunt Elinor teased, watching Gram toast herself. “One of these days you’re going to set yourself on fire.”
“Well, then, lady, you better pray for me.” So prayer was on her mind. She looked at Anne and Katie and said, “I wisht it was different.” And we thought maybe she was wishing that she was.
When we went to bed we felt the immense absence. Katie woke up screaming, “Don’t make me. Don’t make me go.” Aunt Rachel came up and said hush, rocking her in her arms. She left the hall light on. We were next to Anne while she was crying —we were all more to each other now. And more separate too, for Anne and Katie didn’t have a mother anymore. The light in the hall enhanced the height of the stairwell. The four of us got into one bed, and in that closeness, pushed against each other, we forgot about the aloneness of sleeping the unbroken night of eternity.
Sitting at the kitchen table the next morning, we heard Neil run down the stairs, the back uncarpeted ones, and slam out the side door. No goodbye, just his ancient car coughing and lurching out the drive. The sisters shrugged at each other and frowned when Gram gave them a withered I-told-you-so smirk. “Guess he’s had his wagon fixed. Knows what’s what.”
“Now, Momma.”
“Don’t now Momma me. He’s been begging for it.”
“I don’t think Grace did it for the reasons you think at all,” Aunt May said. “She just wanted the girls to have something from her. For when they’re older. You know how she hated it, not seeing them grow up.”
“All the same, she’s left him without his house. Not that anything much that went in it was ever his to begin with. I give it to her. Now he’ll have to mend his ways, scramble some. I didn’t know she had it in her.”
They had found Aunt Grace’s will in her Bible, along with instructions for her funeral service, texts she wanted read, everything written out clearly in her schoolteacher’s hand. It hadn’t been witnessed by anyone, a simple statement of final wishes bearing an unmistakable intention. Aunt Grace had amazed everyone by requesting that the house Gram had helped her buy, the house she had never lived in, be sold and the proceeds held in trust for her two girls. We didn’t know when they had shown the will to Neil. They had held it back as long as they could. Now that he knew, no one was relieved, except maybe Gram a little.
“But where will they live?” Aunt Rachel asked, and we all looked at Gram, except Anne and Katie, who looked at the floor. Gram got up and went to work at the sink. We were quiet. There was nothing anyone could do, no power left. With the vanishing of Aunt Grace, something that had bound us together and had given us strength beyond the ordinary had vanished too. Now we were simply going on, with what we’d ended up with, which was not enough but would have to do.
It was the day of the funeral, the third day. Aunt Elinor continued to teach. “Your heavenly Father-Mother God will supply all your needs.” She was watching still. We hid our faithlessness to protect her, as though it would seem to be her failure too. But when we took our places beside her in the anteroom by the chapel, set aside for the family, we doubted our own doubts. We wanted to believe again. She knew something wonderful. Was wonderful. The solemn and benevolent Mr. Besaw, director of the funeral home, would come in, leaping for joy, bearing witness to the resurrection. It seemed possible, and the psalms and hymns we had learned by heart during that long time of devotion seemed now to be our own poems.
Through the brief service we were waiting. Then Mr. Besaw did come in. We were expecting him. He whispered something to Aunt Elinor and she shook her head after glancing at Gram’s lowered head. Leaning forward, we watched him enter the room by the altar, and then he lowered the cover to the coffin, clamping the white satin rim so
that the braid of brass made a continuous loop. In that moment there was absolute silence. We looked into his face. Before its clean-shaven acceptance our spirits fell. The glass amethyst lily aglow over his head on a curved leaded stem seemed more intense with life than we would ever be.
We stood for the final hymn:
Abide with me!
Fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens:
Lord, with me abide!
None of us sang, our sorrow accomplished. We heard the footsteps of the men who carried the coffin and the closing of car doors. We went outside with the others, blinking our eyes as if we’d walked into first light. Without a comprehensible past or imaginable expectations, we had entered into another lifetime. We held hands. A family friend drove us home. Rossie came too. It had been so long since he had lived with us that we felt shy; as if we hardly knew him.
After a while cars began to arrive, coming from the cemetery, where they had not wanted us to go. We could not conceive of that place. The women immediately became busy, laying out the food neighbors and friends had brought, finding the good set of dishes in the buffet, everybody acting as if they belonged and knew what to do.
Uncle Dan poured drinks for the men. They stood in the kitchen. “Right in the way,” Aunt Libby muttered to us. They drank, their eyes downcast as though they might be doing something even they disapproved of. Perhaps it was that connivance that also lent them a kind of conviviality, although there was none of the usual joshing between the swift-moving women, intent on their preparations, and the drinking men.
Neil came in. Had he been at the funeral? We couldn’t remember. We felt afraid of him. There was a hot glitter about him that made him look mean. We thought he might do anything.
But nothing in particular happened. He poured whiskey, his usual pale drink, and took his place at the back of the kitchen table, against the wall, keeping a distance around himself. The men shifted, found excuses to disperse. For the rest of the time, while people were eating, Neil sat there in the black-painted Windsor chair, staring at the glass he slid over the table or moved up and down to his mouth. Most of the time he smoked, quick jabs toward his face. He spoke once to a man he’d known in college.
