Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  Visiting Creature, James’s voice said inside my head. The sound of him was so sharp and present that I stopped in the middle of Katherine’s walk, clutched at my stomach as if he might be in there, somewhere in the vicinity of the mustard seed. As if his actual voice had vibrated up through the earth, through the black lava fissures, through my bones and into my body. To hear his voice when I knew he was gone shocked me more than any other experience, more electric than the sight of X in the booth at Sombrero’s, running the butter knife along his tongue. In a moment I realized it was only a memory,

  that James had not spoken to me from the Celestial Kingdom, robed in white. Synapses in my tired brain had misfired and tickled alive the ghost of the sound of my husband. These were bits of him, the atoms, the electricity. James was laughing in the memory, laughing with relief as our Visiting Teachers left our house. Until next time, James intoned, his eyes shining, his arm around my waist. In the middle of Katherine’s walk I tipped my head back so the tears ran down to pool in my ears, and I laughed along with him. I slipped the ring off and on my finger.

  I could not go straight home. X would wonder why I had been away for such a short time when there was planning to do, and I didn’t want to talk about Katherine, about the town’s inevitable suspicion that I had driven my husband to suicide. Instead I drove to the Dairy Queen where James and I had often sat during our three months of courtship, eating sundaes, discussing books. But I could not go in, couldn’t even make myself leave my car. Instead I settled for a convenience store, where I bought a pack of grape bubblegum. This I slid into my pocket and walked up the hill to the college.

  The college library was nearly deserted, but a few summer students huddled in groups over the long tables, smiling over stacks of books, whispering. I wandered deep into the stacks, alone in the cool light with the smell of paper and binding, the smell of James. I let my hand run along the spines of books as I walked, felt their leather surfaces and covers in plastic protectors that crisped faintly beneath my fingers, a wistful sigh of a sound. Too many books that James had never read. When I grew tired of walking I sat, right on the floor with the shelves stretching above me, somewhere in the 212 decimals. I asked James, Now what?

  At first he didn’t answer. But then he said, quietly, Now I fall apart. Now I transform.

  I put a piece of gum in my mouth. I sat by myself in the brown light of the shelves, blowing bubbles and popping them and breathing in the air that had been inside, sweeter than any real fruit could ever be. On my way out of the library I paused beside the bronze bust of Rexburg’s town founder, gazing sternly out the library door. Without even looking to see who might be watching, I pulled two bits of gum from my mouth and stuck them into the holes of his pupils. His eyes lit up, purple, staring. His face at once came alive.

  It’s an improvement, James said.

  I agreed.

  7.

  When I returned to my house on the Bench the smoke of the farmers’ fires in the valley below had just begun to rise. I walked through the side yard, ducked under the crab apple. The grass had grown long, though not as long as it should have grown in the weeks I had been away. Somebody, some kindly neighbor who wished no ill on me or on James, maybe Marsha’s father, had taken it upon himself to cut it in our absence. In the back yard I stood with my arms folded and watched the columns of smoke ascend to heaven. Rexburg was a tidy, soft blanket laid over the slope of the land. The children who lived on streets lower down still made the most of their summer, flashing through yards between fences on bicycles or skates, bright blue and apple red, calling from swing sets. Surely some of them, the older ones, knew already that the nice professor who lived at the top of the hill had died. They played the afternoon away all the same. I longed to join them, running, yelling, outrunning all of this, passing it by. Insects buzzed in the long weeds at the rear of our lot. A dog barked. Soon a milder sound drew my attention, a repeating sound but not rhythmic, quiet; yet it filled my ears to the exclusion of all the rest, traveling up by bones: the creaking of my knees as I wavered where I stood. You’re tired, James seemed to say. You’d better go inside. Get some rest.

  Inside. X had been inside the house all day, laying low. In the mudroom I kicked off my shoes, just as I did that day when I first met him, when he dropped his business card into my purse and walked away grinning. I set the funeral home papers on the exact spot on the kitchen counter where James used to leave me his notes.

  X sat in an easy chair near the bay window, the natural light falling across his face, limning the edges of his short dark beard with a halo of white. He looked apologetic when he glanced up at me, his eyebrows raised and knitted, his ankle crossed on one knee, his sketch pad resting shyly on the triangle of his bent leg.

  “What’s the matter, X?”

  “I hope you don’t mind. I never knew him, except for that one time we met, when you and I left town together. I was looking at some of the pictures on your wall, and....”

  I approached. He held the sketch pad up to me, timid, afraid I would be angry at the intrusion. But oh, the sweetness of what I saw. Page after page of James alive, precise and known, and flawless and beautiful, exactly as he was.

  **

  You drew him, X. You saw him. You moved through the home we had shared and looked into my husband’s face. You looked at the pictures on our walls, of James smiling with his arms around my waist, me in my sleeved bridal gown, James in his crisp suit, the temple white and straight behind us. You looked at James as a younger man, capped and gowned and clutching his scroll, his mother tucked under his arm and a future on his face. You looked at him in frames, in albums, in loose photos in drawers. James grinning at a ball game, James asleep on a car ride, James unaware the camera was trained on him, looking off into the distance with the weight of something hidden inscribed in the lines on his face. Every James I had ever known lived again on your pages, quicksilver lines, real.

  I was no ghost to you. I knew it now. How could I have doubted? I saw the image, and knew it was the last time I would see it, of Adam picking his shirt up from the pavement. His glasses flashed white in the sun. He was growing faint around the edges. When I blinked the tears from my eyes the boy was gone. You were there with your sketch pad. I put my hand into your hair and felt how warm you were, warm and solid, just like me.

  **

  “Can you paint him?” I asked, kneeling beside the chair, my voice weak. “I want to see him again in color.”

  X said, “I can.”

  We worked on the painting for hours, together, first in the clean clear light of day streaming through the view window, filtered and colored only slightly by the smoke of the fires, then by lamp light as the moon rose. X started it over many times. Each time he determined the portrait had gone wrong, he sent me off to the bath tub to stretch new sheets of watercolor paper on his drawing board, soaking the sheets and holding them up to drip down into the water, taping them down, sponging them until they were barely damp. The repetitive work soothed me. And X was determined to capture perfectly the subject in all its beauty and complexity. He knew he hadn’t yet got James right, because he asked me, talked all the time about James, listened as I told him how my husband’s mouth had curved up more at the corners, how this small bit of hair over his ear had always stuck out and he could never make it lie flat. We worked late into the night, and when at last I saw the James I had known, and when X was pleased with the delicacy of color and the accuracy of line, we crept into the guest bed we had shared weeks ago, in another lifetime.

  What do you think? I asked James.

  Pretty good.

  I would give you more if I could.

  I know.

  This is it, you know. This is the afterlife. You’ve gone to pieces and electricity, and X took your energy and turned you into something that will live forever. Seems kind of inadequate, compared to what we all expected – the white place, and all that.

  I know.

  What else are you now
, James? Besides just this painting?

  I am wind and lightning, he said. I am red rocks in the desert. I am the holy ghost, the tracks you find in the sand.

  Is it my fault? Did I do this to you?

  James did not answer. I pressed myself against X’s side and tried to sleep.

  8.

  The painting sat on an ornate easel surrounded by bouquets of lilies and hollyhocks and the casket where James lay still. In the glass over the portrait I saw the squares of the overhead lights glowing dimly, slanted, the faces of mourners shrouded by reflection, featureless and all the same.

  My mother had scowled when I brought the painting in. I asked the funeral director for something to put it on.

  “The whole town knows you ran off with an artist,” Mom said quietly, tensely. No mourners had arrived yet except for my parents and me; there was no one to hear her words, but the shame of them compelled her to keep her voice down. “There’s no need to rub it in our faces.” The easel arrived. I thanked the director and ignored my mother.

  “That doesn’t belong here,” she said, louder now, in a tone of weighty disapproval that would have terrified me once.

  “Leave off, Karen,” Dad said, and helped me straighten the portrait on its stand.

  Mom tried to take the painting down. I seized her wrist and held it hard, looked her in the eyes with a strength that surprised me. She retired to her seat and refused to look at me.

  “Take it easy,” Dad said quietly. I recalled the look of the back of his head as he drove the van out of the Grand Canyon. I recalled the smell of juniper smoke in his clothes, the sound of nail guns. No – that was another time, another visit. Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. I had to keep the memories straight or else the afterlife would be confused, a maze I could never follow.

  Throughout the service I sat beside my family in the front row and watched the portrait of James for signs of life. The curve of his mouth, perfect. The light in his laughing eyes. The shape of him, the delicacy of color. We stood and sang the songs. Eventually my mother slipped her cool hand into mine, and I held it and squeezed, accepting what little peace she could offer. Over the general chorus I heard Katherine’s bright voice rise and soar, and I wondered at the thing she said to me days ago at her home. It’s not your fault. I hope you don’t think so.

  It seemed every person in Rexburg had come to the service in their Sunday best, eyes wide with shock, though the capacity of the parlor was only two hundred and fifty. It was more than I could bear to accept all that sympathy, yet I could not leave. I was James’s wife. I belonged here. So I stood and shook the men’s hands and put my arms around the women, and said words that must have sounded right, for no one looked at me more askance than to wonder why I’d done it, why I’d left such a good man who had only wanted to do the right thing. I went on shaking hands and hugging and speaking; my eyes recalled the backward flash of the hazards on the distant desert highway. Blue bouquets of light obscured the faces of the people I spoke to. Inside my head I was already far away, already leaving, driving down a long stretch of inviting highway that curved toward an unseen destination. Afterward there would be a potluck in the gym of the church, the one where James and I had played our roles. Feed all the hungry mourners. I would not be there.

  His sisters and his mother were the hardest. I clung to them and wept, and one of them, I don’t know who, whispered in my ear, her breath hot and thick with grief and absolution, “It’s okay. I love you. I love you.”

  At last no more hands were offered. I was alone. The funeral director drifted into the parlor with an empty trash bag, and, business as usual, bent over a garbage can to change out the liner. She saw me and blushed, scuttled out again. A pause, the smell of lilies and the ticking of a wall clock, and X entered the room, stood with his arms out, waiting for me. I moved to him, navigating blindly around empty chairs. I pressed into his chest. He was as firm as stone and as warm as the desert. He was there. I let my tears fall onto his shirt. I soaked it, as it had been soaked by river water; my sorrow lay all across his skin, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was there. How could I ever have thought he had Adam’s eyes? They were his own, bright and loving and seeing everything, everything.

  “Look,” X whispered after I had cried against him for a long, long time.

  I raised my head and by instinct turned to face the front of the parlor, where the portrait stood. A man approached it timidly. We watched, hardly breathing, as the man gazed at James, hands in the pockets of his well-pressed trousers. His shoulders were hunched. He was short, thin; his orange hair was curly and too long for Rexburg, too shaggy. It was mussed, too, flattened on one side, evidence of a sleepless night and a distracted morning, the kind of morning where one can spend so much energy ironing the perfect crease into trousers but can’t bear to look at one’s own face in the mirror. “That man is not from around here,” said Katherine’s voice, or mine. I did not see this man at the service, did not shake his hand or receive his sympathies as the line of townspeople filed out the door. I would have remembered him. Like X, he had stayed outside until the coast was clear. And then I knew him – of course I knew him, though we had never met before.

  When he raised his hand to press his fingers against the portrait’s glass, against James’s cheek, I went to his side. The least I could do was stand beside him while he grieved.

  “Hi.”

  He looked startled; he had not heard me approach. An instant later his eyes were shadowed by guilt. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “You’re Brian,” I said. “You of all people should be here. I’m glad you came. Thank you.” The first genuine thanks I had given all day. Thank you, oh God thank you for being here, Brian, you don’t know what it means.

  I took him in my arms, held him to me as insistently as he held me, as if we may be lost, swept under a fierce current, if either of us let go of this thing we both had known and shared.

  9.

  Brian announced his arrival with three sharp knocks on the door. X had fixed dinner for three and uncorked a bottle of red wine, the first wine I had ever tasted. It was bitter and tangy, as forceful as a psalm on my tongue. I answered the door to the house on the Bench and offered Brian his own glass, a water tumbler half-full of garnet-red wine. He smiled on the threshold. His smile was kind and boyish, sweet, with crooked canine teeth that gave him a look of mischief. James had loved this man. James had loved this smile. I led Brian inside.

  Over dinner we did not talk of James. It was still too near and cutting, our loss. Instead X cheered us with stories of the strangest illustrations he had ever been hired to create. Brian and I both laughed louder and longer than we might have under other circumstances, but it was not forced. Laughter in the midst of grief feels like surfacing after a long dive. X played butler and entertainer, serving us both, binding us together with wine and good food, drawing in his quicksilver way permanent lines between us. Throughout the evening, Brian often paused to look around the house, taking in the angles and shadows of the place where James had lived, this plot where the man he loved had staked out his life and toiled.

  “I’m going to put the house up for sale,” I told him. It seemed important, that he should know that I would not remain, that I, like him, would carry James’s memory away from this place.

  “Where will you go?”

  X and I looked at each other over our tumblers of wine. “I’m going to Seattle.” “Maybe it’s time for me to go somewhere else, too,” Brian said. “Idaho Falls is too small for me now.”

  “You ought to take a road trip,” X said. “It does wonders for your perspective.”

  I told Brian of the things I had seen on our drive through the West, the redness of the desert, the shape of tracks in sand. X left us talking on the sofa while he cleared away our dishes. At last he beckoned Brian into the kitchen with a discreet sideways jerk of his head. I swirled the last of the wine in my tumbler, watched the moon travel over the valley.
X and Brian held a brief whispered conversation, heads down, man to man, and when it concluded they shook hands in a businesslike way, slapped each other on the shoulders, and Brian’s face was flushed. He turned from X with brimming eyes. I pointed him in the direction of the bathroom.

  X watched me from the kitchen, leaning one hip against the counter. I remembered the time I had kissed him there – apples – and to my relief the memory brought no guilt with it. I went to him. I leaned my forehead against his warm, welcome shoulder. Framed by the kitchen window, a spray of stars clamored in the late summer sky.

  “I gave him the portrait,” X whispered.

  “I love you.”

  Brian cleared his throat. X and I broke away from each other to play host and hostess once more. Brian said he ought to be going, ought to get some sleep; he had to drive home in the morning.

  “Stay here tonight, if you want to, if it’s not too hard on you.”

  He thought about it a moment. “I’d like that. Thank you.”

  “We’ll all sleep here, right here on the living room floor. There are air mattresses in the garage.

  We’ve got plenty of blankets. I don’t want you to be alone.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “There’s more wine,” X said.

  “Good.”

  The stars brightened the lace curtains in the window. They glowed – energy and matter. The smallest parts of everything I loved about you, James, motes, indestructible, drifting all through this place, in the air between Brian and me.