And just as the funeral director re-emerges, my mother lowers her voice. He holds a silver tray, on which are a white coffee pot, white sugar bowl, and two smaller white bowls, one with cream and one with milk. Hidden by the large coffee pot is a snifter of cognac.
“They does-stock Hennessey in a funeral home? Boy, what a thing!” my mother whispers. She smiles, and pinches me on my leg. “I hope it ain’t enbamming fuel they serving we, eh, boy?”
The man is too close for me to comment.
My mother puts the glass to her lips, holds her head back slightly, her eyes closed, and swallows the rich, brown liquid.
“Hennessey!” she says, squinting her eyes.
“Hennessey,” the man says.
“Nothing but the best, eh?”
“Nothing but the best for my best custom—clients!”
“Praise God, boy!” my mother tells him. She steals a glance at me, and in that glance, she winks furtively, and says, “For small mercies.”
“Coffee, now?”
“Coffee, now.”
She sips hers, making slurping sounds as she cools the hot liquid. The little finger of her right hand is cocked out, at an angle of forty-five degrees, from the adjoining finger. I have not touched my coffee.
I am preoccupied trying to find a name to give to this smell that surrounds us. It is now around me, and I feel I can touch it, I can feel it, as if I am submerged in warm salt water in the sea near our house, back there in the island. It is now around me, and I can sense it on my clothes, in this peaceful, white waiting room. Perhaps, I am the one breathing it out. Perhaps, the smell comes out through my pores. Perhaps, it is fear. Perhaps, it is my discomfort at being in a funeral home to choose a coffin. Perhaps, the smell comes from me.
“Take your time, ma’am,” the funeral director says. “We have time.”
“All the time in the world,” she says.
“We have time,” he says.
“Time, boy,” she says. “Time, and more time.”
“I didn’t exactly mean it quite that way.”
“Still,” she says. “But I still have time . . . I will take my time choosing a nice coffin, a proper one.”
“That’s why we are here, aren’t we?” the funeral director says. He puts on a sorrowful and compassionate countenance, with a face matching his words, spoken in a soft baritone. “In this time of deep, sad sorrow . . .” He does not complete the sentiment.
“Ready. I ready now,” she says. And to me, she adds, “Come, boy!”
We go down a flight of stairs covered in thick white carpet, in silence, my mother sliding her left hand on the banister, as we go down into a basement.
We come to a large door. It is stained in a dark, mahogany-like colour. Mr. Goes presses something in his hand, and the door opens without a sound. Arrayed before us are coffins.
Coffins according to model, coffins according to manufacturer, coffins according to the material used in their construction; coffins from wood, durable wood, and from wood easy to rot in the earth, coffins from a material that is not wood; coffins according to colour. They reach almost to our necks. Rows and rows of coffins.
And all of them are on stands, as they would rest on biers that sit in the chancel of a church. And from them comes the unidentifiable smell.
My mother stands at the door opened for her to enter. But she does not move. She bursts out into a moan, from the bottom of her belly, a sound of deep, bruising defeat, and pain.
And then she falls.
The coffins, in their number and power, are too strong a force for her composure, and they force her to the ground. In total collapse. I get to her, when she is already fallen. Her weight is now in my arms, heavy and pure and raw. And dead.
“I am all right, boy!”
She brushes my arms away, and passes her hand over the coffins, touching them, and then removing her hand a moment afterwards, and breathing a heavy “Ahhhhh!”
I feel the revulsion she must feel from being here, in this basement, to do this choosing. To touch this wood, and have the wood come alive, take on a personality, perhaps one to match her husband’s spirit, to have her entire body shake with the sadness from that touch, and shudder from what that touch really means. Touching wood. One week before the coma buried him in his own powerful introversion, she had said, “Daddy ain’t had a day of sickness, in all his years. Touch wood.”
The coffins surround her, like lifebuoys in the sea back in that island.
“This coldness, boy! This coldness. . .”
She is writing something. Not with her own ballpoint pen, but with the funeral director’s Mont Blanc fountain pen, which he offered her. When she finishes writing, the golden nib flashes, and she gives the pen back to him. A smile of satisfaction comes over his face. It is another day: another dollar. This is the end.
The smell in the basement dissolves, and vanishes.
“We got him a good one, didn’t we, sir?” she says.
And the funeral director smiles, but says nothing.
I have been left out of the transaction.
We sit in the visitors’ parking area, in the New Yorker, and for a while, I do not turn the ignition key. And she does not speak to me.
My mother is far away, on some journey, perhaps back in the hospital ward; perhaps she is rehearsing what she will say to the nurses and to the doctor, when she takes up her vigil, later tonight. Perhaps, on her watch tonight, he will sense her presence, in some kind of telepathy, and acknowledge and feel the soothing, cold washcloth being rubbed against the bristles on his chin.
I turn the ignition on, and the New Yorker says, “Your door is ajar.”
“Shut your blasted mouth!” my mother tells the New Yorker, and laughs, as she was laughing when we were drinking the Hennessey from the brown paper bag, in the parking lot of the shopping mall.
The road disappears before us, in the blazing headlights. It is night. Outside the car, it is black, and soft, and thick, as if we are in the South. I imagine a smell. A different smell from the one in the funeral home. The smell, that comes into the car with us, is the smell of magnolia. In this new glee of perfume, we reach the driveway of my mother’s large house; and I park the New Yorker car.
My mother prepares herself for getting out. She touches her face, while she looks into the small mirror in the sunshade, and she presses her lips together, and shows her teeth, and passes a pink Kleenex tissue over her teeth, as if it contains toothpaste. And finally, she squirts a “sprig” of freshener into her mouth.
Music comes bursting loud and with iron in its beat, from deep inside the house, when the door is opened. My five brothers are home.
The door is left unlocked. The windows are wide open. And unlatched. This has never happened before, in the twenty years she has lived in Willingboro. My mother always keeps her house shut, bolted, protected, and safe, from “them,” meaning her neighbours.
She is disoriented, and confused.
“Those five brutes bringing Brooklyn up here in Willingboro!” she says, limping out of the New Yorker. “Today cost me a good penny, boy!” She looks tired, and her limbs are cramped. “I argued all I could, to get that man to agree to a refund, in case Daddy emerge from out the coma. But all that duppy agent tell me was, ‘Madam, all sales is final. I think you can understand that, Madam.’ Christ, Daddy-boy, you cost me a good penny . . .”
And the voice of Bob Marley sweeps over her words, burying them; and she acknowledges the softening of her own disgust in the words of the song:
No, woman, nah cry,
No, woman, nah cry . . .
We are climbing the single step to the front door.
“You looked good today, the way you were dressed,” my mother tells me. “You made me proud, boy.”
The telephone is ringing.
She leans her weight heavily on me, and I walk with her, slow in this embrace, through the long hallway, with the music of Bob Marley on the stereo in the basement, where my brot
hers are drinking, pounding into our ears.
“Look how those five brutes have this heathen-music licking-down the house, all day!” she says to the house.
The telephone is still ringing. It is eight o’clock, the hour that she takes up her nightly vigil beside his enamel bedstead.
“He gone,” she says. “He’s gone. Oh, my-God-in-heaven . . .”
Her face is serene. And there is almost a trace of a smile of relief, moving across her lips.
“Don’t answer it,” she says. “Let it ring. I know the meaning of these telephone calls, this time o’ night. For years and years, I took them when I was a practical nurse at the Brooklyn General Hospital . . .”
And then the expression on her face changes, and the smile becomes a grimace, and it’s like tanned leather, tough and old. And her shoulders droop.
She picks up the telephone, and holds the instrument at her side. I can hear the static of a woman’s voice: “Is anybody there? Hello? Is anybody there? Anybody home?” I take the telephone from my mother’s hand. And put it to my ears. The voice of the woman says, “Missis Springer? Missis Springer? This is the hospital . . .”
And my mother sits now on the stool attached to the small table on which the telephone rests, saying over and over, “After all the money I spend on him, today? After all this money? Is this the gratitude he repay me with?”
My mother takes the telephone, still crackling with the woman’s voice, out of my hand.
I look at her sitting on the telephone bench, the receiver in her hand, holding it at her side, and then at her heart, and with her face washed in tears. The large white gentleman’s handkerchief covers her face.
“You believe this?” she screams. “You bloody well believe this?”
And there is a pause, and the pause grows into silence, and I can hear her breathing, and then she tells me, “Daddy came outta the coma.”
And she remains sitting, and sobbing, into the large white handkerchief she had taken from his chest of drawers, that hides her face.
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