Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  And they warned Nanny the lid of a casket like this one would collapse under the weight of the grave’s own dirt. It might be true but it won’t matter here – not in a county cemetery governed by bylaws that demand every casket be sealed in concrete at the bottom of every new grave. I guess the county must be afraid its dead might end up seeping into the groundwater or something, accidentally fertilizing hay fields or making the earthworms a little too human or – I don’t know what. “Grave liner” is what the concrete’s called on funeral man’s invoice. I think it’s actually the cheapest thing on there.

  The grave liner is on your mind too. “When do they put in the – the concrete?” you ask the Aunties from behind your hand. It’s the first sign of shame I’ve seen from you all day – the first thing to break through your façade of bossy frenzy.

  The Aunties nod toward the hole in the ground. “The concrete? It’s already here.”

  You make the tiniest perceptible stagger backward. “What? How can it be here already? We didn’t even put the coffin down there yet. There’s nothing for them to pour it over.”

  Then the Aunties are laughing at you – quietly, in snorts and muffled gasps because, church funeral or not, we are at the open edge of their mother’s grave.

  “What in the world do you mean, dear?”

  We cremated my mother, slipping her already sealed and sanitary into the earth, so you and I have never had to deal with burial by concrete before. I look at you as you wait for the Aunties to stop laughing. You’re standing with your lips open and your eyes wide and watery blue. And I think I might know better now, more than ever before, how you must have looked when you were a child.

  “They don’t pack her in wet cement,” the Aunties tell you, wiping their eyes. “When they say concrete they just mean a dry, pre-formed empty concrete box with a big, heavy lid – ”

  “ – like a crypt, only under the ground.”

  “Yes. A little, secret tomb within the grave.”

  Your hand clamps over one of the Auntie’s arms while you look into the face of the other Auntie. “Did Nanny know that?”

  The Aunties look at each other. One of them shrugs. The other shakes her head as she says, “I can’t imagine how she wouldn’t have known.”

  “Now dear, you don’t think she was expecting us to back a cement mixer right up to her open grave and – ”

  “Beep, beep, beep.” The Aunties are laughing again as they imitate the back-up warning signal of a heavy-duty cement truck.

  “Well,” you interrupt as best you can, “that’s what I always thought everyone meant when they talked about burying her in concrete. So maybe she – why else would she have been so mad about it?”

  One of the Aunties pats your hand where it grips her sleeve. “No, dear. Of course they don’t mean wet cement. Go see for yourself,” she tells you. “In the bottom of the grave – the concrete box is down there already. Go take a look – carefully.”

  And you’re bent over again only this time you truly don’t care who is watching or what they might see. I step up behind you to try to keep the wind out of your skirt as you lean low enough to see beneath the casket strung on a nest of nylon straps over the open grave.

  “There it is, Brigs,” you say, almost in a moan. “That’s all it is – a grey box just slightly bigger than the coffin itself.” You straighten up but you don’t stand back. “She must not have understood – the same way I didn’t understand. I mean, did you ever hear of her getting madder about anything in her whole life than the thought of burial by concrete? I tried, the Aunties tried, Mom tried, we all tried to settle her down but she just kept imagining herself on the morning of the resurrection, perfect and whole and sealed up in solid concrete forever. How’s that for eternal life?”

  You’re standing up, leaving me, moving to work the crowd. “Have you seen it yet?” you say, shaking your cousins by their arms. “Don’t leave here before you see the concrete grave liner stronger than the Resurrection.”

  You move through the crowd, threading through the small spaces between all the bodies, coming back to me, smiling and taking my hand again. “It’s just a box, Brigs – just another, bigger, stronger, uglier box.”

  “So it is.”

  “And of course she’ll find her way out of it.”

  “Of course.”

  But just as quickly as you took hold of my hand, you let it go again. “I’ve got to send something with her – just in case.”

  This time you go all the way down on your knees beside the grave.

  “Come on. That’s enough,” I say.

  Is anyone even looking? Is the rented funeral man so used to the sight of you poking around, in and out of this grave, that he’s beyond doing anything but rolling his eyes.

  I whisper your name and bend over you like a shield. My fingers are laced through the loose black weave of your cardigan, barely tugging you backward. It’s too much. You’ve got to get up.

  But you’ve inserted your face into the gap between the open earth and the coffin hovering in the air above it. And out of your small, warm mouth – there, one ribbon of saliva. Look, it’s already supernova-ed on the floor of the concrete box and shot into the tiny pores between all that well-cured cement. Even from outside the grave, we can see where the concrete’s stained dark with your water and enzymes – the same ones that make the yoghurt go all watery when you eat it right out of the tub and put it back in the fridge. There it is, already dissolving your grandmother’s tomb. There’ll be nothing on the rented funeral man’s invoice to show you falling fast behind her – landing with a splat and whatever faith she lacks.

  Even after the argument with your Mom where she tried to convince you the healthy, life-affirming benefits of letting people see our kids at the funeral would outweigh the cost and the agony of flying them all the way across country, we left the boys behind. They’ve stayed in the west, at Aunt Marla’s house, while we’ve gone to New Brunswick for Nanny’s funeral. This is what it takes for us to make our first trip alone since before the boys were born.

  As we were leaving, driving away from Aunt Marla’s house, moving down the broad streets of that small town where Mom died, you were all fretful and slumped against the window of the car. “I don’t know, Brigs. Benny’s still in diapers and everything. I can’t believe we’re leaving them here.”

  I knew your reluctance was real but I also knew there was no way we’d turn the car around. Your Aunties had already asked you to speak at Nanny’s funeral. Ever since that eulogy you gave at Mom’s funeral, you always get asked to stand up at the very end and speak for the dead. And now, there’s no way you’d tell any of them “no.”

  Despite the Aunties’ claim that you were Nanny’s pet granddaughter, you know her only through years of birthday cards stuffed with old paper dollar bills – that and one long summer stay by yourself, and the few cross-country road trips that could be arranged during your lifetime. But Nanny is yours, nonetheless. You’re easy about accepting and multiplying real though implausible love – so easy you don’t even realize it’s a gift.

  Now, in the afternoon after Nanny’s funeral, we’re out of our mourning clothes and into pairs of borrowed, leaky gumboots and heavy, red-checked lumberjack shirts. We’re tramping through the woods between the swift brown river and the old house where Nanny used to live when she was a little girl. It’s too early in the season for blackflies, so the forest is wet but not unpleasant. It’s all mist and quiet in here, and you’re calling to me through the stillness of the soggy trees, telling me how you and your brothers passed the time on those long, coast-to-coast car rides playing Go Fish with postcards you’d collected.

  “Do you have any ‘Moncton’s Magnetic Hill: Canada’s Third Greatest Natural Wonder?’”

  “Nope. Go fish.”

  In these woods, you’re acting bold and well-oriented, but I know it’s mo
stly just noise and bravado. You’ve been here many times before, but these are still not quite your woods. The trees crowd the ground around this Maritime river differently than they do in the scanty stands of trees on the prairies where we grew up.

  Nanny’s forest is close and canopied but there’s room for us to walk between the long trunks of the deciduous trees. I keep plucking maple leaves, eyeing them like I’m going to press them in books and keep them forever – even though you’re laughing at me.

  “What?” I protest. “Maple leaves are cool. They don’t grow wild back home.”

  Ahead of me, you stop walking and look around us. It kind of freaks me out, the way we know this forest spreads to the very edges of the continental landmass where the earth is worn away to bedrock and butted onto the sea. In the light filtered by the leafy trees, spruces grow out of the moss in tightly spiked copses and let their sap stand out on their trunks in yellowed, purple knobs. You tell me people used to pick the sap and chew it up like gum. But when I dare you to show me, all you do is get close enough to notice the spruce gum is actually covered in tiny spider webs. After that, you won’t even touch it.

  And I know what the real difference is between these trees and the ones I know from the west. These ones are more human, less wild. Centuries before people like my ancestors were anywhere near the prairies, these woods had already snagged and held small traces of settled, human life. There are still wet remains of old foot bridges across streams, or flaky red nails rusting where they have been pounded into tree trunks and bent over for some long-forgotten purpose. The forests here have overgrown and outlasted generations of families like ours. All the history makes the place heavy with your ancestors’ lives and deaths. It’s like they’ve left an imprint here you can almost sense – like you’re just on the verge of remembering something.

  And we are trying to remember something. The Aunties say there’s an old family cemetery out here somewhere – the place where your grandmother would have been buried in an alder wood crate, without a cement liner, if the county still allowed it. Instead, she’s buried up on Butcher Hill in the “new” cemetery. The new cemetery was started just in time to receive the nine of your great-great- grandmother’s eleven children who died in an influenza epidemic still known by the old-timers around here as “The Black Death.”

  “Yep,” you’ll rasp out of bed at me at least once during the course of every flu you ever get. “It’s true. I come from a long line of miserable Scottish people who coughed themselves to death.”

  Influenza isn’t what scares you out here in the woods today. You tell me how the last time you traipsed around here looking for the old graveyard, you were just a kid terrified of your Mom’s canon of true, family ghost stories – stories you’re repeating to me now, as we walk over the moss, side by side but metres apart, like a search-and-rescue party.

  “And as they ran, they could hear old Sarah – off in the distance, always ahead of them – waving her blue-white light and justa screamin’ in the dead of night.”

  I think it’s funny how you start to take on their Maritime accents more and more with every hour we stay here. But I don’t mention it now. Instead, I just laugh as the ghost story ends. “You don’t scare me.”

  “That,” you say, “is only because you’ve never been out here at night. There’s no light at all in the woods after the sun goes down – nothing. It’s like being locked in a closet with nothing but spruce trees hanging from the rod.”

  “I don’t know.” I’m a little bit worried about you, so I’m trying to sound sceptical. “I guess I don’t find trees that spooky. It’s just a bunch of wood planted in the ground, right? It’d be like being afraid of the dining room furniture, wouldn’t it?”

  I hear your scoffing sound. “It’s not the trees themselves. It’s what’s in them – all the ghosts and shadows and stuff. And I still say it’s easy to be cavalier about it in the daytime. When the sun’s up even these old graveyards are just part of the Earth. You know – like any features on the landscape.”

  I stop and scan the terrain around us. “Well, where is the graveyard then?” I’m starting to get a soaker in the toe of my gumboot.

  You’re not answering my question. “Hey, check it out.” You’re bending down and picking a little oval leaf off a twig growing out of a low, hollow spot in the moss that covers everything.

  I squint down at the groundcover. “Kinnikinnick?”

  “No. They’re teaberry leaves.”

  I’ve never heard of teaberry leaves, but you’re rubbing the dirt off them and putting the leaves right into your mouth anyway.

  “Come on, Brigs. You’re supposed to be the mighty forager in the family. Try a teaberry leaf. It beats the heck out of your lame prairie chokecherries. Trust me.” You pluck a leaf for me. It’s tiny and kind of disappears between my teeth when I bite it. The taste is strong and hot – like sandy wintergreen toothpaste spread on a twig.

  I’m nodding. “Sure. It’s nice.”

  But you’re grabbing me by the waist with both of your hands. “You didn’t swallow it, did you?”

  I sweep the cavern of my mouth with my tongue. “Yeah, I think I did.”

  “Brigs!”

  “What? Don’t tell me you just got me to put something in my mouth that you didn’t expect me to eat.”

  “Well – yeah. I mean, teaberry leaves are like spruce gum. You aren’t supposed to swallow them, you big animal.”

  “Why not?”

  “I – I don’t know. Nanny never told us it was okay to swallow the leaves whole so – I don’t know.”

  You’re looking up at me with the little girl face from the funeral again – all wild with the terrifying superstitions from the Stone Age of your childhood.

  I pull your hands off my torso and pile them on top of each other in my palm. “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m going to stay fine.”

  You’re trotting after me as I walk away from the teaberry patch. “Are you sure?”

  I hold out my arms. “Look at the size of me. One little leaf’s not going to hurt me – even if there is a possibility that they aren’t so good for eating.”

  You cross your arms and purse your lips. “So spit out the rest of the saliva left in your mouth.”

  “Come on…”

  “Brigs – please. Get rid of it. Please.”

  I turn my head and spit onto the ground. You jump up to kiss me on the cheek as I wipe my lips with the back of my hand.

  “Thanks, Sweetie.”

  I breathe out a noisy sigh. “Back to grave hunting, okay?”

  “Right.” You nod and start to walk again. “Remember: we’re looking for stones stood on their narrow ends, set in a group – like a small, haphazard Stonehenge.”

  “Not like that?” I say, pointing back into the grove where we just stood chewing teaberry leaves.

  And then you’re crashing past me, stomping over the twiggy vines, back into the open space in the trees where flat sheets of natural, ragged-edged shale – nothing like Stonehenge – stand on their ends, half buried in the ground. The earth in front of each of the stones bows down in long rectangles the size of small graves – the size of you. At least five of the shale monoliths stand in the glade, reverently apart from one another – uncut headstones pried raw from the earth and set in unnatural positions by people who are long gone. You stoop and scan their surfaces, but there’s nothing written on the stones – nothing that can still be read, anyways. So instead of looking any further, you stand up straight and you listen as if you’re trying to read something in the low, spiritual hum you so badly want to hear resonating though the forgotten boneyard. You look up through the trees, straight above us, where a flat white sky spreads like a drab, painted ceiling overhead.

  “Do you see Caroline anywhere?” you ask me. “Lost Caroline?”

  I know you mean the grave of y
our great-grandmother’s aunt – or someone like that. She’s what someone might try to call a “romantic” figure. She was a young mother – just a newly married teenager, really – buried somewhere in the ground out here with a tiny son still closed between her arms. We were warned that her grave wouldn’t have a natural marker hacked out of shale or wood but a real milled granite one – smooth and symmetrical and modern. They say Caroline’s stepson – one of the many of them born years after Caroline’s death, the children of her husband’s strong, new wife – had replaced her handmade, wooden cross with a real granite monument. Everyone said it was silly but the stepson was a prosperous person who could afford to be sentimental.

  I step into the grove with you, combing all the wet bracken into a kind of flatness with the side of my boot. As I knock the ferns down, it comes into view – the machine cut stone lying out of time and place in the moss.

  “Here she is.”

  You’re hopping over the undergrowth to see for yourself. “Here she is,” you repeat, taking my hand in yours. But you let go of me again before I can close my fingers around your flesh and bones – just like you did at your grandmother’s graveside this morning. You’re about to revise another burial – the second one of the day – no matter how late it might be for Lost Caroline.

  There’s a thin, creamy birch trunk – no leaves, no branches – standing dead and jutting at a forty-five degree angle out of the moss. You kick at its base and the trunk snaps off so easily you nearly fall down right along with it.

  “Help me break it into pieces,” you tell me, carrying the trunk to where I still stand over Lost Caroline and her baby.

  The wood snaps easily into short lengths when we crack it over our knees. “What now?” I ask.

  You hesitate, standing over the pile of white, broken wood. “Her headstone – it’s nice but it doesn’t quite belong here. Everyone says so but no one will do anything to try to salvage it. It just needs – something,” you say.