Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  The space shuttle vacuum cost more than any car your grandparents had ever bought, so they kept their complimentary knife set and sent the salesman away. But maybe if they’d let him clean the whole house – every pillow and mattress and bath mat – the coffee table would have been covered in a heap of dead skin as big as both your grandparents put together. It would have been finer than dry, prairie snow – deep, and inextricably blended, a million individual flakes combined so well it doesn’t matter anymore if they aren’t all exactly alike.

  Maybe your grandparents’ house seems so singular in your memory just because it was different from the aluminum sided, split level boxes where you and me and all our friends lived out our childhoods. All along its outside surfaces, your grandparents’ house is armoured with hard grey stucco bristling with tooth-sized bits of gravel and broken glass coloured green, brown, and white.

  Underneath their house, there’s a basement that’s more like a cellar – an uninhabited concrete box with one wall hidden behind columns of oversized, bare aluminum cans labelled with thick, black letters hand-printed onto their sides.

  “Powdered Skim Milk, Elbow Macaroni, Salt.”

  The cans hold your grandparents’ emergency food supply. Your Dad told you they had enough food in those cans to keep themselves alive for an entire year without ever needing to go grocery shopping. If one of those Cold War doomsday bombs had ever dropped out of the sky, your grandparents could have sealed themselves in the bunker of their basement, dry-swallowing dehydrated potato pearls by the light of a hurricane lamp, perching on boxes stuffed with old newspapers and military service medals, observing that this wasn’t the first time they’ve seen the end of the world.

  In your bedroom, on the night your grandfather dies, you open your eyes and admit that there must not be any latent ESP hidden inside your brain. It’s time to forget your grandmother long enough to make your own way toward grief. You turn over in your narrow girl’s bed, trying to call back to your senses the pungent herbal smell that wafts out of your grandfather’s bedroom door whenever you walk past it on the way to their bathroom. Your Mom told you the smell was from the tubes of ointment your grandfather massaged into the bone spurs in his knees before he went to bed every night. Its smell rubs off on his sheets, penetrates the mattress as he sleeps, and hangs over the bed like incense while he’s gone all through the day.

  Sometimes, you and the other grandkids would stand on the threshold of his bedroom – held at bay by the gloom cast over everything by the heavy Black Watch fabric of the drapes that stayed drawn across the window all day long. The curtains were scary, but so was the shallow water glass where you knew his teeth spent the nights. And you’d all stand there on the threshold arguing, trying to decide what familiar smell most perfectly matched the ointment on your grandfather’s bed sheets. Everyone used to shout you down whenever you claimed the smell was just like homemade root beer. But you’re so convinced that’s what it was, you don’t even remember what the other kids used to argue in return.

  In the pixels on your bedroom ceiling, you are starting to see flashes of deep brown between the greys and blacks. And that’s when you know for sure – the ointment did smell like root beer. You know it did. Maybe that is the seat of your kinship with the first dead person you’ve ever known – the secret of your grandfather’s ointment.

  It’s a fine bond, but you grasp at it, stretching your fingertips up toward the flecks of brown flashing in the ceiling. You even close your fist, as if you’re actually holding onto something with your small white hand. And you pull your fist back, toward your chest, holding it tightly enough to squeeze a single, cool tear out of one of your eyes. You stay awake, marking the tear’s slow trail out of your eye, across your temple – falling and falling until it fractures into a hundred tiny rivulets, pouring into the delta of your hairline.

  Four

  But wait – tonight, in your grownup world where you live with me and our sons in our house in the suburbs, there’s something in the newsfeed on your computer screen that makes you choke out a little cry. I can hear you all the way from the kitchen, upstairs. Down in the basement, you’re reading a story about the rediscovery of the body of King Ramses the First, founder of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt – though that’s not how you’ve always known him.

  “It’s them,” you call up the stairs to me. “Brigs, come see.”

  “Them.”

  “Yeah. It’s those mummies from that daredevil museum in Niagara Falls. I told you about them. Remember?”

  And then I do remember that story of yours about the childhood summer vacation when you looked into case after glass display case of desiccated, pillaged human bodies. They were on display in a tourist-trap museum. Your family ended up there after you’d finished watching all you could bear of the Niagara River falling over a cliff in the rain.

  Something occurs to me as I follow your voice down the stairs: your mother was wrong. Your grandfather wasn’t really the first dead person you’d ever seen. She herself had shown you other corpses, years before you saw his – the mummies, a whole cavalcade of dry brown death. For some reason, she must not have thought of the mummies as truly human – or as truly dead. Before she took you to your grandfather’s funeral, your mother had pushed the admission money through a hole in the ticket-seller’s glass and brought you to see the world famous mummies of the Niagara Falls Daredevil Museum.

  The computer tells us your mummies came to the museum after losing their way and falling among thieves sometime in the nineteenth century. That’s how they ended up lying in rows of glass sarcophagi in a carnival-style museum upstream from Lake Erie. And that’s where they stayed for years and years, caught in a bad funeral that threatened to go on until the end of the world.

  One of the mummies, you tell me, had his wrappings peeled back so the tourists could see his face and his reddish beard. Another one – the one you’re calling your favourite – had thick hair, plaited into long braids, and heaped up like a pillow around her head. You say the body that disturbed you the very most was not really a body at all – just an unattached hand and a foot.

  “I never thought of it before, but looking back,” you tell me now, “I don’t know why I assumed that hand and foot belonged to the same person. It wasn’t like there was anything in the display to prove that they ever did.”

  Still, the appendages lay next to each other, under glass, in Canada for over a hundred years. Maybe that was the beginning and the end of their connection. And maybe it was enough.

  You don’t remember anything in particular about the only mummy mentioned in the news story on the computer today. He’s the one found shifted into a mislabelled coffin, resting with his arms crossed high over his chest – just like Tutankhamen and the rest of the desecrated kings. He’s the one the archaeologists rescued right out of the “Hall of Freaks” exhibit, years after your visit. They scanned and examined him – centrifuged flakes of his papery skin – until they became almost certain he was truly King Ramses. His fame doesn’t make any difference to your memory – you still can’t recall a single thing about him.

  You just shrug when I question you about King Ramses. “It’s because he’s completely bald. I was a little girl, remember? At the time, I had been indoctrinated to value everything according to hairdos.”

  Now, I’ve crouched down beside your chair at the computer, looking through a disgusted kind of squint at the online mummy photo gallery. Even on the small, flat screen it’s pretty ghastly. Over the images of the mummies, I can see my own face reflected in the glare of the screen – dark and ghostly and pinched. “Tell me again how old you were when your parents took you to see these guys in person?”

  You do some kind of math on your fingertips before you answer. “Nine.”

  “And all your younger brothers were there with you?”

  “Yup.”

  “That means Troy w
ould have been…”

  “Three years old.”

  I don’t know how the parenting choices our mothers and fathers made under the influence of the I’m-OK-You’re-OK ethos of our childhoods can still surprise me, but sometimes, they do.

  “That reminds me.” You’re turning away from me, back to the light of the screen. “They had a mummified baby exhibited there too. Let’s see if we can find him.”

  But I’m reaching for your hand, knocking it away from where it curves over the computer mouse. “That’s enough,” I’m saying in my Dad-voice. “You’re going to give yourself nightmares again.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is exactly like the time we stayed up late watching that online slide show of the Holy Catholic Incorrupt Saints.”

  I know you remember those pictures – all those bodies unearthed and dressed up and laid out in shrines at cathedrals and monasteries. The captions on the slide show claimed the bodies of the saints’ smell like flowers or honey, and they aren’t really rotting. But I can see as well as any pilgrim and – I hate to sound disrespectful but – I don’t know, I guess there must be lots of different ways not to rot.

  Still, I know you remember Clare of Montefalco with the image of a cross burnt into her heart muscle. And Saint Sylvan with his head thrown back and his throat still slit. And Zita who lies there in her fancy dress without any of the usual wax coverings to obscure the view of how her skin has turned black all over her face and hands. Then there’s that saint lying incorrupt in Winnipeg, not quite a thousand miles from here. We could drive there and see his shrine ourselves – even though they admit some of his toes have fallen off by now.

  We saw all those pictures of the Incorrupt Saints just hours before you spent the night dreaming nothing but nightmares. We watched their images flick by on this same computer screen in our basement. The slide show was five minutes long, the soundtrack was an Eastern Orthodox funeral chant, and it was almost over by the time you finally turned and asked me, “How in the flaming heck did we come to be looking at this?”

  And now that we’ve found the Saints’ heathen cousins in the digital photos of the Niagara Falls mummies, you’re shoving me out of the way so you can see them better, pulling the plastic mouse right off the desk so I can’t take it away from you. “No, I will not be scared. This is not scary, Brigs. This is different. This is my childhood.”

  “I know you honestly don’t think you’ll be scared now, but in a few hours you’ll be waking me up doing that thing where you moan out loud in your sleep like a frightened little girl. It freaks me out. And then I have to shake you awake and bring you back and tell you it was just a dream. I hate it. It’s too – sad.”

  You’ve never heard it yourself – that sound you only make when you’re asleep. You don’t know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

  So you keep struggling with me, trying to click on the links to rest of the gallery, looking for that mummified baby boy. We tangle until you’re on your feet, out of your chair. It falls over, backwards, onto the floor. And you’re scream-laughing and making ridiculous threats at me as I grab at you. We’re down on the floor and I’m growling with my mouth pressed to the side of your face, hot-breathed and wishing the boys were already in bed.

  The boys – they know a crash means a good time and they come running at the sound of the chair clattering onto the hard floor. They’re capering, laughing, ready to fight for or against either of us. Scottie, our biggest boy, leads them, of course. He’s the first of them to come careening into the basement, advancing with all the noise of someone spilling a bundle of yard tools down the stairs.

  There’s just an instant left before we know they’ll tumble past the turn-around in the staircase and get to where they can see everything – you and me, breathless and flushed, and the mummies, all dry and brown. We’re pulling apart now, getting to our feet, rushing against the boys’ coming, the both of us standing at the desk again. I plant myself in front of the monitor, moving to block their view so all they’ll see will be the back of my T-shirt. You’re thrashing at the wires and keys, desperate to shut it all down, to cut the power to this ancient, worn-out kind of death, burnt in bright liquid light across the screen.

  Five

  Before you even know you’re awake, your eyes are already open in the darkness – like maybe you were sleeping without closing them. What is this place? The light outside the window slants into the room from the wrong direction. There are no grey-brown pixels on the ceiling. Instead there’s an orange glow coming from a street lamp outside. You can see it through the floor-length sheers drawn across a large, street-level window. The light outside keeps back the dimness almost well enough for you to be able to read the time marked on the face of the wooden sunburst clock hung on the wall at your feet.

  But it’s the smell of the room – the pungent, herbal smell seeping from underneath the bedroom door at the end of the hall, out of the mattress inside, like homemade root beer – that finally orients you. And you remember you’re in a sleeping bag, on the floor, in the living room of your grandparents’ house. You’re waiting for the morning to come, when you’ll play a role you still don’t understand as one of the guests at your grandfather’s funeral.

  Of course, all of this happens long before our boys are born to teach you how to slam back into wakefulness at the smallest sound. It’ll be years before you learn to sleep with your hearing primed and alert. You haven’t yet reached the point you live at now, where you’re never more than just half asleep. No matter how long I live or how many kids we have it will never be like that for me. There will always be some part of my unconscious mind that hears the little cries in the night and sleeps on and on – fat, loathsome, and fatherly in a way that’s more reptile than it is human.

  “Hear that crying, Dude?” ugly, unconscious, reptile-dad will always drawl into my sleep. “Sure you do. But it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  Something unusual must be happening in the house where you’re staying on the night before your grandfather’s funeral – something strange and loud enough to reach you through the tsunami depths of your adolescent sleep waves. You lie awake and listen while your brothers breathe noisily from where they sleep on the living room couches, wrapped in their sleeping bags like plump nylon caterpillars capped with dark, hairy heads. On the floor beside you, bent delicately into a shape like a pretty crescent moon, is your cousin Janae. She’s your Uncle Ned’s oldest daughter – the only one Aunt Tammy agreed to let him bring to the funeral.

  In one sleepy instant, you’ve remembered all about the funeral. And you’re left alert and waiting for the sound that woke you to come again. There it is, sounding from beneath the floorboards. You hear a thud and a kind of grating as something heavy rolls along a cement slab. The grating ends when whatever had been rolling comes to rest against a hollow steel shell with a muted clang. Somebody is in the basement.

  You rustle out of the sleeping bag and onto your bare feet. The mucous-y racket of Uncle Ned’s snoring blasts from underneath a closed bedroom door. It really is awful. No wonder Aunt Tammy was so quick to throw him out.

  Through the kitchen, you can see that the basement door is standing barely ajar. No light shines through the spaces between the door and its jambs. You step onto the linoleum, moving toward the basement door on your bare feet. Isn’t that where they said it happened – in the basement? Isn’t that where your grandfather started pulling away from the rest of you, beginning the slow drama of his death?

  You reach out your hand toward the door, expecting it to creak when it moves, like a prop in a scary movie. But it swivels smoothly on its hinges, opening a black mouth with an oily silence that might be even more horrible than a creak. You imagine that the air the basement breathes up into your face smells like a newly dug grave – though you won’t know for sure what that smells like until you go to the cemetery tomorrow.
The earthy mustiness is really just the smell of last season’s potatoes. They’re stored underneath the basement stairs, spread in a single layer like starchy raisins withering and sprouting with white towers toward where sunlight sometimes breaks through the cracks between the treads and the risers.

  You stand on the edge of the basement maw, your skin prickling all over, because you know you’re a doomed heroine from a Gothic novel. If your grandfather has a ghost, it is in the basement – right now – grinding its bones against the concrete floor in the darkness.

  “Hello?” you whisper-call down the stairs.

  There’s another thud and a roll. You’re too scared now to keep from flicking on the light switch inside the basement door. Through your squinting, you see a rumpled sleeping bag lying at the foot of the stairs. A pile of shiny tin cylinders – the oversized cans from your grandparents’ emergency food storage – still rock gently into one another at the base of the washing machine.

  “Granddad?”

  There’s no voice to answer you. Holding onto the wall, you duck your head in case you’ve grown tall enough to bang it on the overhang as you step heavily onto the wooden stairs. Below the groaning of the planks under your cold feet, you hear a human sound – panting and a gasp.

  “Granddad?”

  Opposite the basement machines – the washer, the dryer, the workbench with a power saw under-mounted in its middle – something is collapsed on the floor. It’s slumped against the wall of empty shelves that should be stacked with canned food. Whatever it is, you know it’s not your grandfather. It sits on the concrete floor holding its right arm in its left hand and rocking back and forth, hissing with shallow breaths.

  And then you know it. His ghost – it’s your grandmother.

  You hurry down the rest of the stairs to crouch beside her. Somehow, you understand it’s desperately important to keep quiet. You’re young enough to know not to make any vain exclamations or start fussing or demanding an explanation of what she’s been doing, alone and hurt in the dark.