The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  So maybe the word today isn’t circumcision.

  Maybe it’s faith or works. Or sin and the law. Those chicken-and-egg games that Paul rolls out for us to kick around the yard for the rest of history. Did God give Abraham a son in old age and make him the father of nations because of his faith or because of what he was willing to do to prove his faith? If there were no law, would there be no sin? Can ignorance be bliss if not a defense? Your man argues all sides of these and related issues in his letters. The true words are in there blinking, but I cannot find them. Not today. Today I’ll have to get by on faith.

  Maybe it’s not the word today at all. Maybe it’s a number. The language is full of them. You could start counting now and never finish. Like words, they’ve got us, well, outnumbered. All you can do is hunt and peck for the good word, the lucky number, the truth of the matter.

  My father’s lucky number was thirteen. He was born on the thirteenth and wore number thirteen on his jersey in high school and signed his best deals on the thirteenth of the month and died in a condo that was number thirteen. He always said that thirteen was his number. Who could blame him? So I’m looking at the thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans because my wife is Italian and I’m not drinking this morning and no one’s coming to take me golfing and here’s what it says there, word for word: “Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.” Now, that mightn’t make the hairs stand on the back of your neck, but the Romans were done no harm when they heard it and for me it sounds like the voice of my father. Not that he talked like that, mind you, but still it’s a concept he could get behind. Because he was the kind of guy who wasn’t looking for all the answers. Just enough to get him through the day. Just one little something that rang true enough that he could hang his hat on it when he came home and find it still there in the morning. Unlike Abraham, he didn’t want to be the father of a nation. Unlike Paul, he didn’t want to save the world. He just wanted his children to outlive him, his wife to love him and everything to work out in the end. It did.

  Same for me. Just enough good word to get through the day. It’s liable to turn up anywhere—a good book, the Good Book, the bumper of a car, something on the radio, something your daughter says, something that comes to you in a dream, like “Eat more fruit, Adam,” or “Say your prayers,” which is what my sainted mother frequently says when I dream of her. Or maybe it is something your true love says, like the time mine said, “Everything is going to be all right.” I believed her then, I believe her now. Or, let’s say you’re standing in the shower, counting syllables, when it comes to you that nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine has exactly nine syllables in it and is exactly the number of dollars you can deposit in cash without the tax man getting involved, or line those nines up, all four in a row, and they look like the day and the month and the year you’re thinking this. Who invented wonders like that? Or maybe it hits you like a bolt of lightning, like preaching to bishops is like farting at skunks. What disgruntled cleric first told me that? These are words to live by? I don’t know. What if Paul had written them to the Romans? Maybe they’d have learned to lighten up. Maybe they wouldn’t have gotten so schismatic after all.

  Or maybe you go looking for the one true word, like last fall in Barcelona when I climbed to the top of those towering spires in Gaudi’s cathedral, La Sagrada Família. It’s a hundred years in the making and not done yet. Maybe they should declare it a shopping mall and finish the thing. Maybe they just like it as a work in progress. Anyway, I’m climbing to the very top of the steeple, overlooking the city like any good pilgrim, and at the top I say “Here I am Lord” and the wind is howling in my ears like Moses on the mountain. “Give me the Good Word, God! I’ll cut it in stone.” And the city out before me and I’m whispering so that none of the other pilgrims will hear me, but I’m saying it out loud: “Show me a sign and I’ll write it down!” And you know what the sign said, the one I first saw when I turned to make my way down from the heights? It said, WATCH YOUR STEP. In Catalan and in English and in Japanese, which is, I suppose, a sign that God speaks in all our tongues. Maybe next time I’ll go looking in Venice. Maybe next time I’ll take the gondola. Maybe I don’t have to go looking at all. Maybe it will come to me. On its own. When I least expect it.

  So what are we to make of these things?

  You want to get some good words like these? I say don’t golf, don’t drink, marry an Italian—it could happen to you.

  But maybe you’ll make a different deal with God. There’s other things you want? Instead of words? A scratch game, a good Beaujolais, a date with a shepherd from the Hebrides? That’s fine. God knows your heart. God knows you want your children to outlive you, your beloved to love you, everything to work out in the end.

  Work hard. Have faith. It will.

  One last thing. A word to the wise. Like with me and my father, like with Peter and Paul, like with Moses and Abraham—when dealing with God, or rabbis and bishops, any of that crowd—a thing well worth knowing is where to cut.

  —TL

  MILFORD, MICHIGAN

  BODIES IN MOTION AND AT REST

  So I’m over at the Hortons’ with my stretcher and minivan and my able apprentice, young Matt Sheffler, because they found old George, the cemetery sexton, dead in bed this Thursday morning in ordinary time. And the police have been in to rule out foul play and the EMS team to run a tape so some ER doctor wired to the world can declare him dead at a safe distance. And now it’s ours to do—Matt’s and mine—to ease George from the bed to the stretcher, negotiate the sharp turn at the top of the stairs, and go out the front door to the dead wagon idling in the driveway and back to the funeral home from whence he’ll take his leave—waked and well remembered—a Saturday service in the middle of April, his death observed, his taxes due.

  We are bodies in motion and at rest—there in George’s master bedroom, in the gray light of the midmorning, an hour or so after his daughter found him because he didn’t answer when she called this morning, and he always answers, and she always calls, so she got in the car and drove over and found him exactly as we find him here: breathless, unfettered, perfectly still, manifestly indifferent to all this hubbub. And he is here, assembled on his bed as if nothing had happened, still propped on his left shoulder, his left ear buried in his pillow, his right leg hitched up over the left one, his right hand tucked up under the far pillow his ex-wife used to sleep on, before she left him twenty years ago, and under the former Mrs. Horton’s pillow, I lift to show Matt, is a little pearl-handled .22 caliber that George always slept with since he has slept alone. “Security,” he called it. He said it helped him sleep.

  And really there is nothing out of order, no sign of panic or struggle or pain, and except for the cardiac-blue tinting around his ears, the faint odor of body heat and a little early rigor in his limbs, which makes the moving of him easier, one’d never guess George wasn’t just sleeping in this morning—catching the twenty extra winks—because maybe he’d been up late playing poker with the boys, or maybe he’d had a late dinner with his woman friend, or maybe he was just a little tired from digging graves and filling them, and anyway, he hadn’t a grave to open this morning for one of the locals who was really dead.

  But this morning George Horton is really dead and he’s really being removed from his premises by Matt and me after we swaddle him in his own bed linens, sidle him on to the stretcher, tip the stretcher up to make the tight turn at the top of the stairs and carefully ease it down, trying to keep the wheels from thumping each time the heavier head end of the enterprise takes a step. And it’s really a shame, all things considered, because here’s George, more or less in his prime, just south of sixty, his kids raised, his house paid off, a girlfriend still in her thirties with whom he maintained twice-weekly relations—“catch as catch can,” he liked to say. And he’s a scratch golfer and a small business
owner with reliable employees and frequent flier miles that he spends on trips to Vegas twice a year, where he lets himself get a little crazy with the crap tables and showgirls. And he has his money tucked into rental homes and mutual funds, and a host of friends who’d only say good things about him, and a daughter about to make him a grandfather for the first time, and really old George seemed to have it made, and except for our moving him feet first down the stairs this morning, he has everything to live for, everything.

  And it is there, on the landing of the first floor, only a few feet from the front door out, that his very pregnant daughter waits in her warmup suit to tender her good-byes to the grandfather of her baby, not yet born. And Matt’s face is flushed with the lifting, the huffing and puffing, or the weight of it all, or the sad beauty of the woman as she runs her hand along her father’s cheek, and she is catching her breath and her eyes are red and wet and she lifts her face to ask me, “Why?”

  “His heart, Nancy . . .” is what I tell her. “It looks like he just slept away. He never felt a thing.” These are all the well-tested comforts one learns after twenty-five years of doing these things.

  “But why?” she asks me, and now it is clear that how it happened is not good enough. And here I’m thinking all the usual suspects: the cheeseburgers, the whiskey, the Lucky Strikes, the thirty extra pounds we, some of us, carry, the walks we didn’t take, the preventive medicines we all ignore, the work and the worry and the tax man, the luck of the draw, the nature of the beast, the way of the world, the shit that happens because it happens.

  But Nancy is not asking for particulars. She wants to know why in the much larger, Overwhelming Question sense: why we don’t just live forever. Why are we all eventually orphaned and heartbroken? Why we human beings cease to be. Why our nature won’t leave well enough alone. Why we are not all immortal. Why this morning? Why George Horton? Why oh why oh why?

  No few times in my life as a funeral director have I been asked this. Schoolchildren, the newly widowed, musing clergy, fellow pilgrims—maybe they think it was my idea. Maybe they just like to see me squirm contemplating a world in which folks wouldn’t need caskets and hearses and the likes of me always ready and willing and at their service. Or maybe, like me, sometimes they really wonder.

  “Do the math” is what George Horton would say. Or “Bottom line.” Or “It’s par for the course.” Or “It’s Biblical.” If none of these wisdoms seemed to suit, then “Not my day to watch it” is what he’d say. Pressed on the vast adverbials that come to mind whilst opening or closing graves, George could be counted for tidy answers. Self-schooled in the Ways of the World, he confined his reading to the King James Bible, The Wall Street Journal, Golf Digest, the Victoria’s Secret catalog and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. He watched C-SPAN, The Home Shopping Network and The Weather Channel. Most afternoons he’d doze off watching Oprah, with whom he was, quite helplessly, in love. On quiet days he’d surf the Web or check his portfolio on-line. On Sundays he watched talking heads and went to dinner and the movies with his woman friend. Weekday mornings he had coffee with the guys at the Summit Café before making the rounds of the half dozen cemeteries he was in charge of. Wednesdays and Saturdays he’d mostly golf.

  “Do the math” I heard him give out with once from the cab of his backhoe for no apparent reason. He was backfilling a grave in Milford Memorial. “You gonna make babies, you’ve gotta make some room; it’s Biblical.”

  Or once, leaning on a shovel, waiting for the priest to finish: “Copulation, population, inspiration, expiration. It’s all arithmetic—addition, multiplication, subtraction and long division. That’s all we’re doing here, just the math. Bottom line, we’re buried a thousand per acre, or burned into two quarts of ashes, give or take.”

  There was no telling when such wisdoms would come to him.

  BUT IT CAME to me, embalming George later that morning, that the comfort in numbers is that they all add up. There is a balm in the known quantities, however finite. Any given year at this end of the millennium, 2.3 million Americans will die. Ten percent of pregnancies will be unintended. There’ll be 60 million common colds. These are numbers you can take to the bank. Give or take, 3.9 million babies will be born. It’s Biblical. They’ll get a little more or a little less of their 76 years of life expectancy. The boys will grow to just over 69 inches, the girls to just under 64. Of them, 25 percent will be cremated, 35 percent will be overweight, 52 percent will drink. Every year 2 million will get divorced, 4 million will get married and there’ll be 30,000 suicides. A few will win the lotto, a few will run for public office, a few will be struck by lightning. And any given day, par for the course, 6,300 of our fellow citizens, just like George, will get breathless and outstretched and spoken of in the past tense; and most will be dressed up the way I dress up George, in his good blue suit, and put him in a casket with Matt Sheffler’s help, and assemble the 2 or 3 dozen floral tributes and the 100 or 200 family and friends and the 60 or 70 cars that will follow in the 15 mile per hour procession down through town to grave 4 of lot 17 of section C in Milford Memorial, which will become, in the parlance of our trade, his final resting place, over which a 24-by-12-by-4-inch Barre granite stone will be placed, into which we will have sandblasted his name and dates, one of which, subtracted from the other, will amount, more or less, to his life and times. The corruptible, according to the officiating clergy, will have put on incorruption, the mortal will have put on immortality. “Not my day to watch it” will be among the things we’ll never hear George Horton say again.

  Nor can we see clearly now, looking into his daughter Nancy’s eyes, the blue morning at the end of this coming May when she’ll stand, upright as any walking wound, holding her newborn at the graveside of the man, her one and only father, for whom her baby will be named. Nor can we hear the promises she makes to keep him alive, to always remember, forever and ever, in her heart of hearts. Nor is there any math or bottom line or Bible verse that adds or subtracts or in any way accounts for the moment or the mystery she holds there.

  FISH STORIES

  I taught my son to fish when he was four. It was a pond in Westchester County, New York. We’d gone there from Michigan to visit his mother’s family. I brought a bass rod with an ultralight spinning reel, hooks and sinkers and bobbers. We dug worms. I cast out the line and handed him the pole and launched into the usual preachments on Patience. I hadn’t ten words out of my mouth when the red-and-white bobber started popping, the line tightened and the pole shook and Tommy, without further instruction, set the hook and reeled in a bluegill the size of my hand. My first son’s first fish.

  He held the thing, still hooked, both of them round-eyed and gaping in amazement, both of them gulping the blue air in each other’s face. He was hooked. He wanted to take it and show his mother.

  I said if he took it to show his mother it would die and we would eat it. Or we could put it back in the pond and it could go see its own fish mother and tell her about the boy it’d caught and it would live to get bigger and bigger and bigger. “No, Dad,” he said, he’d just go show his mother. He didn’t want to eat it. He’d just go show his mother and come right back and send it back to its mother and everything would be right with the world. But I told him the fish couldn’t live out of the water. It couldn’t breathe out of the water. It would die out of the water. It was in its nature.

  He wanted to keep it. And he didn’t want it to die. And I could see in his bright blue eyes the recognition that these aims were at cross-purposes. This was a game he couldn’t play for “keeps.” He was crying when he put it back in the water. Catch and release, like love and grief, are difficult notions. We’ve been fishing together ever since.

  I know you’re thinking that’s cute enough to make you puke. I know you’re thinking to yourself, Oh, sure, I’ll bet—bluegill, blue eyes, the blue day in Westchester County. But it’s true. He was hooked.

  After that it was carp fishing on Sunday mornings at the secret
spot south of town. We’d pack soggy Raisin Bran around big treble hooks and heave it out and let it sit on the bottom until some old carp would come and suck it up. Tommy was a carp-killing boy. And long after I learned to sleep in on Sundays, he’d bike out to the secret spot and kill carp all spring and summer and bring them home to plant them in the garden, where now, near twenty years since, the perennials grow thick and hardy and fishy. Once I remember him golden among a dozen shorter admirers returning from fishing with a carp the size of a small child hanging from his handlebars, blood and creamy milt oozing from it, its tail dragging in the dust and all of his amazed compatriots poking it and holding their noses and putting forth a frenzy of questions. “What kind? How big? How long the fight? Was it dead?” And even the one some noisy boyo advanced about the white substance proceeding from the dead carp’s lower parts, to which Tommy replied, as if he knew what it meant, “Spawning.” They took him at his word. In just such ways young boys get attached to trophies.

  Then he got crazy for bass and pike and all the other pan fish that habited the inland lakes around our town. Arbogast Bug-eyes, and Fat Rapallas and plastic worms in every flavor filled his tackle box. He’d fish mornings before school and afternoons after school and show up at home shortly after dark smelly and content. He never excelled at his studies much.

  When he was nine I took him to the Pere Marquette—the long river in western Michigan named for the French Jesuit who died in its estuary. It was early March. It was freezing. But the river, working its ninety-mile way west from Baldwin to its eventual spillage into Lake Michigan at Ludington, never slowed enough to ice over. We hiked in, in Red Ball waders and snowmobile suits, through the snow and frozen swamp. I remember holding him up, afloat, his left hand high in my right hand, like dancers, to keep him from dipping his waders through deeper spots in the river bottom. The place we fished was called Gus’s Hole because the man who showed me the spot some years before had called it that. We drifted spawn bags on long light leaders below split shot through gravel runs and a deep sandy hole for winter-run steelhead and resident browns. It was here Tommy learned to distinguish the tick of the tiny sinkers moving through stones from the bite of fish. It was here the topography of the riverbed began to make sense to him. He could close his eyes and see the bottom, its undulant waterscape of runs and pools and holes and flats, the pockets of curling water, the structure of tree stumps and rock forms, the gravel beds where fish would hold, the shaded and the sunlit water. The only fish caught that day was an eighteen-inch brown trout, beautifully speckled. All fathers pray for their sons to outfish them. My prayers were answered and have been answered ever since.