Gravedigger's Cottage

by Chris Lynch

  “This is simply—”

  I interrupted myself. I was looking at Dad’s daffy bright face as I spoke, and I realized. Realized what I did and did not want.

  “Simply what?” Dad asked hopefully.

  See? See, that was the thing. Hopefully. That old stranger, hopefully. Was I nuts, trying to chase hopefully away? Sense could wait.

  “Simply not enough time,” I said. “Twenty minutes? That’s not a lot of time, Dad.”

  “Especially in a place like this,” Walter added.

  “That’s tough,” Dad said, laughing. “Adds to the challenge.”

  I fingered the money. I had a good bit, probably less than they did, but plenty still. “This is crazy, Dad,” I said.

  “Here.” He handed me twenty dollars more. “Don’t use that word anymore.”

  Walter made his whining that’s-not-fair noise.

  Dad shoved twenty dollars at him. “Don’t you say it either. Or any of those other words that mean the same thing. Now, who buys for whom?”

  “I call Dad,” we both called.

  “Well, that won’t work. Here.” He pulled out his trusty little notebook and pen, both battered and mucky from all his sweaty housework. He scribbled the three names, tore them out, crumpled them up.

  He extended his open palm with the three scrunched McLuckies in it.

  “Pick one and scram,” he said. “Don’t look at it first, because I don’t want any reactions. Just grab and go and be back at the fountain in twenty minutes. Only stop if you get your own name. Sylvia, ladies first.”

  “Well…I don’t think I agree with that ladies-first nonsense,” I said primly, “but I do agree with being first.” I grabbed it and ran.

  I was thrilled, I was energized, I was pretty much happy as I bounded along, passing old folks like they were standing still—which they may have been, but I felt Olympian all the same. This felt good. This felt better, which was good. Better than before. Almost practically like old times but better, if all worked out, because we would have recovered from bad stuff. Against all odds we would be saving the ritual and improving on it because, peculiar a school-shopping day as this was, it was feeling like the best school-shopping day ever. All things considered.

  Rituals. Beautiful rituals.

  Things were all right. I could feel it. We were coming out of it now, and things were falling into place. I could feel it. It was true.

  I didn’t care whose name I had in my fist because I was up to the job. I was going to buy something perfect for lucky whomever I held in my hand.

  It was very cute, and well thought out on the part of the gentlemen. They had both beaten me back to the fountain and were standing at opposite sides, staring across at each other with packages behind their backs. They both turned toward me as I ran up.

  “Ladies first,” I called before anybody could argue. I rushed right up to Dad with my bag.

  He put his bag on the floor beneath his feet, then looked inside mine.

  Big smile. He reached right down and pulled that giant apple cookie out, brought it straight to his face. He held it under his nose and closed his eyes as he took a mighty, mighty inhale of the cinnamon-nutmeg-apple-toffeeness of it. It was like a church scene, a communion scene, and it was very real.

  He took a great big bite and then simultaneously dropped the cookie back into the bag and withdrew the box that was in there.

  He pulled out the box and opened it.

  “Wow,” he said.

  He meant it when he said wow. Wow is a mostly meaningless sound, a sound that can mean anything so usually means nothing, but my dad worked on his wow until you could believe it, and then saved it for when he needed it so you could still believe it.

  So he did really think his shoes were wow. Because he said it.

  They were like high-tops almost. Thick, rough black leather with black leather laces and a thick, waffled, black rubber sole. They were just a bit too on the stylish side for Dad, but that was what we always did and he always let us. Bring him just that little bit further up into the trendy area of things. That was what his new shoes did. That was what we did.

  “Wow,” he said, and he hugged me.

  “Your new shoes for going back to work,” I said, in case he had missed that bit.

  “I know,” he said with a little laugh. Not a hearty laugh, but a near-enough one.

  “I’m up,” Walter called, rushing around the fountain to get to me. I giggled as he held out to me what looked like another shoe box. He giggled. Then I giggled again.

  Then the box made a noise. A scratching noise.

  “No,” I snapped, and jumped back as if I were scared of it, but I wasn’t. Not in that way anyway.

  “Oh, come on,” Walter pleaded, pursuing me.

  “No,” I insisted, backing further away.

  “Walter…” Dad said, “what did you do?”

  “Shush,” Walter said.

  Which made me stop in my tracks.

  I turned to look at Dad scowling. But he kept it at that.

  “Sorry, Dad,” Walter said, but took the opportunity to open the box himself.

  I turned quickly away and covered my eyes. “I don’t want to see it. I won’t look at it, so just don’t bother. Take it away.”

  He did not take it away. He did not even answer. In fact, the entire mall seemed to come to a complete stop—not that that was a tremendous change.

  And then, it was on my shoulder.

  “Walter,” I snapped, keeping my hands over my face.

  I was not worried by what I felt on my shoulder. I did not get nervous about such things. In fact, I was famous for my thing with animals, and their thing with me, and my ability to bond with and work with and love every creature the world’s sense of humor could produce. Like Dr. Dolittle, except for them all dying at my hands.

  So the little light, clingy weight of a thing on my shoulder did not spook me. It was looking at it, seeing it, relating to it, and then fast-forwarding to the inevitable, hurtful, unfair, and gut-wrenching end that shook me to my soul.

  “No,” I said rather weakly.

  Nobody said a thing.

  I felt it, though. Moving, so slowly, the lightest pressure being applied to my shoulder. It weighed practically nothing. Like a bird. Four legs, though. Or feet and hands. Tiny, deliberate motions, with a sure, clingy grip of me.

  Oh. Hell. I hated this. I was forming some kind of mental picture of it. I could feel it. So sweet. So little, so light and sweet. It was light, and fragile, and gentle. No. Hell. No.

  I opened my eyes and turned my head.

  Its eye met my eye. It was right there on my shoulder—no, it was part of my shoulder. It was exactly the same navy blue of my T-shirt.

  I twisted my head to see it better, and as I did, it twisted its head, tipping it in a kind of huh? pose. Then it took me in with its curious eyes.

  One at a time. Moving independently. Up one side of my face, down the other.

  “You got me a chameleon?” I said to Walter without taking my eyes off it.

  Walter laughed excitedly.

  “His name is Lloyd,” Walter said.

  “I don’t want to know his name,” I insisted.

  But it was of course too late.

  “Hah,” Walter said, “too late.”

  I was a sucker for this and everybody knew it. But I wasn’t ready. I really did not want this again.

  “He is very cute,” Dad said. He came up close and we watched Lloyd move around me with his very slow, deliberate, careful motions. He changed from deep blue to a lighter neutral shade as he passed from my shoulder to my bare and unsummery upper arm.

  “Look at his little hands,” I said, gasping. They were. They were little hands that he used in little pinching motions as if he were playing with the world’s tiniest sock puppets.

  “I hate you,” I said to Walter as I moved my hand in front of Lloyd for him to crawl onto. He was so sweet—Lloyd, not Walter.

  Ok
ay, Walter, too.

  “Yess!” Walter said, pumping his fist in the air.

  I was entranced with Lloyd, in love with him already, fascinated to the point of distraction in both a National Geographic way and a motherly way. I couldn’t stop watching him, so I missed the beginnings of Dad presenting Walter with the remaining gift of our most unusual but most welcome of all back-to-school trips.

  But I heard.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” Dad said, agitated, speedy, nervously happy. But not. “Go on,” he said to Walter. “Go on, go on. You’ll love it.”

  Something there. Something in his voice…

  I looked up at the transaction.

  Walter pulled the long thin box out of the bag, and stared, slack-jawed and google-eyed.

  “You like this kind of thing,” Dad said. “I knew you liked this kind of thing. Something, huh?”

  “Something,” Walter repeated. “I can’t believe you got me one. I never thought you were going to.”

  “Well,” Dad said haltingly, “yah. Well…we’re all growing up, aren’t we? Time’s changing, things are changing…time seemed right. It just seemed like the time. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”

  Lloyd had climbed up to the top of my head now, and I left him there. I was watching this now.

  “A beauty, Dad,” Walter said. He was managing the difficult trick of smiling and frowning, one half of his mouth up and the other half pulling it back down.

  “You see what it is, don’t you? See it says there on the box. It’s a rat gun. You are a little young…but adult supervision is okay. It’s a rat gun, you see. As long as you have the supervision of a parent…”

  “I see, Dad,” Walter said.

  He saw. I saw. Lloyd up on my head saw. A rat gun.

  Daisy Chain

  MORE THAN ANY OF the others, I considered her a gift.

  I came out one morning and found her just sitting there on the lawn among the riot of daisies, and unlike most things I found lying on our lawn, she was alive.

  She was a rabbit, Daisy Chain was, a thick puffy fuzzy lop-eared beauty with the softest face since faces began. She looked up at me from the most peculiar angle. Her head was completely tilted over, her ears aimed at six and twelve o’clock as if she were listening to the ground for approaching footsteps.

  But she wasn’t listening for anything. That was how her head always was. She sat there looking at me with her head tipped just that way, she took a few steps toward me with her head tipped just that way, and she serenely chewed a few of our many tasty weeds with her head tipped just that way. We took her to the vet, and he said her condition was the result of a massive ear infection she had at one time but she did not have anymore. There was no fixing it, but she was probably not suffering any longer with it.

  She had suffered before, though. She suffered in a big way, out there, by herself in the wild. The vet said she was lucky to have lived through it.

  But she did live through it, and now she had this funny angle to her, and she was fat and robust, and she picked me.

  Daisy Chain picked me. She came to me, like magic, out of the woods someplace, to settle here, with me, in my yard.

  She was a love. She was completely at home from the minute she arrived. She let me pick her up. She ate strawberries right out of my hand.

  Her tipped-over face made me so sad, though. It made me pick her up and squeeze her every time I saw her. Every time. She was probably fine with her affliction, she acted fine with it, the vet said she was fine with it. Except something in me was not fine with it and I got to be like one of those maiden aunts who go all crazy and grabby and pinchy when they see babies until the babies scream and scramble at the sight of them.

  Only she never screamed and she never scrambled. Daisy patiently allowed me to pick her up and stroke her and suffocate her until I was calmed, until I was better, and I could let her go about the business of being the world’s cutest deformed rabbit on our lawn.

  The one time she ever kicked up a fuss was when I tried to take her in the house. The first time and then every time I tried to bring her indoors out of the rain or snow or just out of my wanting so bad for her to live with me, she put on a show of just how powerful the kick of a hopping mad rabbit could be. She simply refused, with all she had, to be domesticated into our house. We had a relationship, was what she was telling me, but she was going to call the shots.

  She chose me. She chose the conditions. She was the tilty-headed boss. That would be that.

  I would stare at her some days from the window of my room, and my heart would split with my wanting her. There she would be, munching, wiggling her nose, hopping a couple of steps, munching some more.

  I wanted more. I wanted her more.

  I thought I was punishing her sometimes, up there at my window denying her snuggles.

  I saw that I wasn’t the only one though. I saw Dad walk by, on the way to the car. I saw him stare at her, twist his head to look at her at the same angle she looked at him. I saw him overcome just the way I was overcome, pick her up and squeeze her and hold her and nuzzle her. And I saw her let him. Then I saw him put her down again, look all around to see if he was seen, and then hurry off again.

  I saw Walter squeeze her, too. I heard the TV downstairs again, his Warner Brothers cartoons again, I heard the commercials come on. I saw him burst outside, run across the lawn and gather Daisy Chain up into his arms, and his face just disappear into the fatty, fluffy folds of her neck. I saw her let him. He was gentle and intense at the same time. He had learned.

  He was back inside by the time the commercials were over. She was back to weeding. She was wonderful.

  I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I had this feeling in my stomach every time I saw her. The feeling you get when a secret surprise is making you want to burst, the feeling in your stomach when you are playing hide-and-seek and the person who’s it is three feet away and cannot find you, the feeling you get when the teacher reads out only one story because it is such a fine story and it is your story and she doesn’t tell your name so you get all of the thrill and none of the embarrassment.

  I was feeling like that all the time, when I saw Daisy Chain, and while it might sound good and exciting it wasn’t. It was excruciating, and I decided I had to do something about it. After all, I was the person and she was the bunny and I was big and strong and she was little and had her head tipped over and it may have been a struggle at first but we would get over it and we both knew that I was the person in the world to make her happy and she was the rabbit in the world to make me happy. And so.

  And so. I went to the yard in the morning after the night of my decision, and she was not there. I waited. I stood on the lawn, waiting. I sat on the lawn, waiting. I lay down on the lawn, waiting, with my head tipped over on its side in the grass.

  Eventually, Walter came out and lay down with me, with his warm, round head resting against my back, and we waited forever for her to come back.

  Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria

  “WE’RE HAVING A FUNERAL, Dad,” I said to his back as he patched a hole in the living room wall that I knew for a fact had been caused by him and his putty knife in the first place, searching for a draft.

  “What?” He sounded genuinely surprised, almost shocked. But he wouldn’t turn around.

  “What are you doing there?” I asked. “Is that Spackle? Are you spackling again?”

  “Yes, I’m spackling again.”

  “Take a break. Come with us. We have a funeral to do.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “The fish.”

  “The fish. What fish?”

  “Our fish, from our pond. The rat’s victims.”

  He didn’t say anything right away. He did some extraloud scraping on the wall.

  “Dad?”

  “You didn’t even know those fish. Those fish were total strangers.”

  “Dad. We are not just leaving them. They deserve better. Walter and I have
decided to give their remains a burial at sea.”

  “What remains? I didn’t think there were any remains.”

  “Bits and pieces. Walter has been keeping them in his pockets.”

  “Ugh. Maybe that’s what I’ve been smelling.”

  “Come on with us to the beach, Dad.”

  He long-paused me again, but it wasn’t for spackling.

  “I thought,” he said quietly, thoughtfully, “we weren’t going to do this anymore, Sylvia. I thought we had left all that behind, when we left the old house.”

  Though he couldn’t see me, I shrugged. I shrugged a long, slow shrug.

  “I thought that, too,” I said. “But I was wrong. We were wrong. Fish need burying. Come on, Dad.”

  I watched his back inflate, expand with the intake of breath. Then I watched it all collapse and shrink back down again as he let it out.

  “No,” he said. “You guys go without me.”

  And that was that. His voice was replaced with the scrape-scraping of the putty knife, while the back of his head remained the back of his head.

  Walter emptied the gamey contents of his pockets into a brown paper lunch bag, and we took it to the waterfront. As we reached the beach, we came upon Carmine standing on one of the sand dunes.

  “Whatcha got?” he asked.

  “The dead fish,” Walter said. “We’re going to give them a burial at sea. You want to come?”

  “No,” he said, shielding his eyes even from the bag. “Funeral stuff makes me cry.”

  I liked him better already.

  “You going to be at school on Monday?” he asked with more trepidation than you’d expect.

  “We are,” I said definitively.

  He almost gave himself a hug. Clasped his hands together instead. Altogether more dignified. “I’m sorry, about your fish,” he said, and backed away.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “See you at school,” he said, just checking to be sure.

  “See you at school,” Walter said, to help him out.

  We went to the water by ourselves.

  “They were freshwater fish though,” Walter said with deep seriousness.