Given (12 page)

“People come in here all the time. They say, ‘Life is passing me by.' I tell them, ‘You don't want to make the same mistake with death'. Did you want these bad babies . . . my bad . . . you want those units delivered or will you be picking them up in the hearse?”

I remembered Vernal saying everyone here knew everybody else's business. I said I'd stop by for the coffins later, grabbed my parcels and left.

Ceese & Son had reopened for business — a sign in the window read, “Grand Opening Free Coffee Balloons for the Kids” as if it were a factory outlet selling unpainted furniture. I crossed the road to the Snipe hoping to see Hooker Moon's red truck pulling up outside, but when that didn't happen I wandered over to the cemetery, a stony shrubbery of gravestones that sloped towards the sea, behind the Church of the Holy Brew. I had to ask myself why I had let Hooker — a man I'd never met and only seen once — fill so many of my waking, and dreaming, hours.
He's the one they wrote the song about, “Bad Moon Rising”.

The graveyard was undergoing a facelift. During the winter high tides, a sign informed, parts of the graveyard were awash, and the dead were being evacuated and moved to higher ground: “Your Tax Dollars at Work: Another Project for a Growing BC”. I acquainted myself with some of the town's permanent residents. In the pioneer quarter I found the Shakespeare clan (including a William who had died at birth), the extended Ceese family, and a plot of Bend's. A tusked bronze boar, “Erected by His Wife” squatted impudently in the centre of Orbit Bend's grave: visitors, perhaps hoping to increase their sexual prowess, had rubbed shiny the tusked boar's testicles. I was tempted to reach out and rub them myself, they looked that trusting.

The world had changed in many ways since I'd gone to prison, but one thing that hadn't changed was graveyards. They were still sombre places and, like Vernal said, full of sober men and women. A granite slab with your name, birth-hyphen-death date, and someone else's idea — “Rest in Peace” — of how you should spend eternity.

I strolled on beneath the dark conifers, then stopped before a grave decorated with crushed beer cans that had been arranged into the shape of a cross. Someone, a girlfriend perhaps, had placed Mickey and Minnie Mouse figurines in amongst the cans, a strand of dried seaweed binding them together at the neck.

I was contemplating the tides, the graves in danger of washing out to sea, when I came upon the most woeful part of the graveyard. There were few trees here whose root systems might disturb the restless sleep of those who died before they were old enough to know the meaning of the word grief.

I walked without purpose, then sat in the shadows between a grave containing the ashes of Mary Joseph's five children who had been “lost in a fire”, and the memorial to Crystil Sam's three sons, drowned at sea. Other women had lost far more than I had lost — though I remembered a slogan from the one NA meeting I'd attended in jail: “a teaspoon of pain, a cup of pain, it's all the same”. Losing three children or more equalled, to me, a cup of pain. Losing one child, in comparison, a teaspoonful. But that teaspoon could be as full or as empty as the world.

There's this to think about: if I hadn't had Angel, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over. What if We Never Wanted Anything Enough to Hurt Over? I'd written this in big letters — to remind myself in case I ever started to forget — and stuck it on the wall in front of the table in my cell where I used to sit everyday to write letters. Rainy asked me what the words said and when I told her she asked if she could use those words for her twins, who shared the same grave, an unmarked one. Her excuse was she had never been able to think of anything important enough to have carved in stone and even if she could have thought of something, she wouldn't have been able to afford it.

I told her to quit her snivelling, she wasn't the first poor person on earth to bury her kids. That sounds cruel, the way I talk about it now, but I had just got to the part in
Beloved
where Seth selects a gravestone for her baby. She wants her baby's name chiselled on it; the engraver says “you give me ten minutes, I'll do it for free.”

All she gets for ten minutes is “Beloved”. If she could have stood it for longer, up against the dawn-coloured stones sprinkled with chips of stars, the engraver's young son looking on; if she could have given him ten minutes more she would have earned the two words she so desperately desired for her child, “Dearly Beloved”.

Rainy thought “Dearly Beloved” sounded lame, and not how she felt. She liked “What if We Never Wanted Anything Enough to Hurt Over?” She just hoped she had enough cash so she wouldn't have to double up on the engraver and his crew to pay for that many words. She said this the night before she was executed.

The most heartbreaking tomb, the one that Vernal found me kneeling beside, was built like a granite bunk bed, with an angel-baby surrounded by carved animals who looked as if they had turned to stone the moment his eyelids closed for the last time. A stuffed teddy bear held a handful of red and yellow balloons that hung limply puckered from their strings. I tried to remember, as I knelt in the sweet, uncut grass at the edge of the bed — the stone sheets had been tucked in so tight there would have been no escape from that final sleep — how capable of emotion I, too, had been once.

I've heard that, when a limb dies and is amputated, a person can still feel pain in the body part they've lost. When you lose your child that phantom limb is the whole world trying to reach out and wrap you in its grief. You do not want to outlive your children. This is the only thing I am sure of, the one thing I know.

That night Angel appeared in my room, sitting at the foot of my bed, the heaviness of his presence tugging me from a troubled dream. He looked hungry, and he sucked his thumb as if he could draw sustenance from it. While I watched he began pulling out his eyelashes, too, the way he'd done in my dreams ever since I lost him. He would dip the eyelashes into something sweet — honey or molasses — then suck the sweetness from them while I watched, helplessly: the dream always ended before I could reach him to feed him.
Sorrow is nourishment forever.

In the jungle town where I'd taken Angel to the
curandero
, the women believed that when a child dies his soul becomes a drop of dew in a hummingbird's eye, one that wells up, like a tear, then wanders the world looking for a woman who has lost a baby and wants to have another of her own. The
curandero
advised expectant mothers to drink water that had been boiled with gold jewelry in it and wear
perfume chuparrosa
— hummingbird perfume — to drive men wild and cause them to remain faithful.

I sat up in bed and whispered my baby's name. My quilt slipped to the floor and a moment later Angel was gone. On my dresser that looked sepulchral in the dreamy light, the water jug and the vase had turned into two severed heads — Rainy, her hair matted with blood, and Frenchy with her eyes rolled upward. And then, as quietly as they had come, they vanished into a wall drenched with moisture, and the air filled with the mist of their leaving. The heads became a jug and a vase again, and I was left with no one.

I lay for the longest time, then got out of bed, wrapped myself in a blanket, and hobbled to the window. I always slept with the window open but now, again, it had been closed. I rubbed a spot in the dampness — even my windows were weeping — and for a moment the clouds parted, and the silver face of the moon swam out, casting a pallid glow off my dripping walls.

When I heard the radio come on, I didn't turn around, but stood staring out at the darkness. “Women in Paradise are so beautiful that a man will be able to see the very marrow of their bones through the flesh on their legs,” I heard a voice say, words that conjured up Rainy, so thin her bones looked like they would cut right through her baby doll pyjamas, to break free of her skin. Rainy with her no-colour eyes, because she'd cried all the colour out of them the day she was born. “The women in Paradise have neither buttocks nor anus created as these parts were for the elimination of faeces — and there's nothing of that nature in Paradise.” I thought of Frenchy, with her one missing finger (“nine fingers gets me a discount at the manicurist's”) and the birthmark on her cheek, white and heart-shaped, like a beauty mark in reverse.

I went back to bed, turned off the radio, and fell asleep as it began to get light. I dreamed of a dark blue sea with babies rolling in the waves, being tossed ashore, weightless, into my arms that could neither hold them, nor let them go.

It was the rattling of a peacock's tail that woke me. I felt an old uneasiness coming over me, settling on my chest and then pressing deeper. Vernal had carried the two willow coffins upstairs for me; I climbed out of bed and arranged them along the adjoining bare walls, then put my new clothes away. I dressed and, after opening the window again to let the room air, went downstairs.

We drank our coffee, fierce and black, then Vernal found a half-smoked joint in his pocket, lit it, and took a toke. He opened the fridge, and brought out the fillet of sole he had thawed for our lunch. Vernal had learned how to make a piece of fish go further by poaching it in a can of Campbell's alphabet soup, a dish that had made him famous in legal circles when a group of friends, including a judge, petitioned that he be tried for crimes against humanity.

“Add in some spices, get this dish up on its feet,” he said. I wanted to add
and running out the door;
short of lowering one's naked foot into the bottom of a slimy pond I found it hard to imagine a more depressing experience.

I sipped my coffee, making little canyons in the sugar bowl with a spoon.

“I worry about you sometimes,” Vernal said. I often caught him these days looking at me sideways as if he suddenly realized he knew nothing about me at all. I wanted to say to him what I knew to be true: we are all unknowable, aren't we? But now — his eyes touched, for a moment, with an old kindness — he confessed he had been worrying about going back to work, too, about leaving me alone at the farm. He'd been racking his brain, he said, trying to think who he could ask to come and stay with me, so I wouldn't have to fend for myself.

I said I liked the idea of spending time alone, after thirteen years of not having had a moment to myself. He finished the joint and looked at me again, closely. “I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I've got an ulterior motive.”

I said, “How do you know what I think.”

He said, “How do you know what I know?”

I took my coffee to the sink and poured it down the drain, then went back upstairs feeling that vague uneasiness coming over me again, as if I'd caught a fragment of a shadow lurking just beyond the edges of my sight.

My room was now filled with a musty, humus-like scent intermingled with Bounce. I heard Kurt Cobain singing “Jesus Don't Want Me For a Sunbeam” even though I had left the radio off. There were flies everywhere. The window I had opened wide had been shut, and a wind had infiltrated my room like a malevolent spirit, upsetting the vase. I picked Angel's photograph out of the spilled water, and dried it off on my sleeve.

Aged Orange sat upright on my bed like a cartoon cat, his head rotating as he watched a fly circumnavigate the room. I drew the curtains and opened the window to get rid of the cloying smell that reminded me of Frenchy when she came back to the range after they failed to kill her the first two times, from the firing squad, then the gallows. The morning of your “date” you were given a change of clothing, a clean orange jumpsuit. Even though our keepers insisted it had been “freshly laundered”, it was bound to retain traces of the last girl who'd worn it to her execution. The smell of Bounce hung around for as long as a week afterwards.

My copy of
Beloved
lay on the floor beside my bed. I only had one chapter, that last chapter, left to read and I had been savouring it: every time I had picked up the book I'd put it down again, as if I could postpone the bitter-sweet pang of disappointment that came with endings of any kind. I used the book to squash a fly the size of a blackberry that had landed on Angel's photograph, then went back downstairs for a fly swatter or an aerosol can of Raid.