Love Letters of the Angels of Death (10 page)

Twelve

You've got nothing but hard, narrow eyes for the funeral director when the time comes to go east again, to New Brunswick, to bury Grampy's wife. She's your last grandmother, the one you all called “Nanny.” The funeral director's feelings don't mean much to me but still I hope he doesn't hear you calling him the “rented funeral man.” In the Butcher Hill Cemetery, you poke me with your elbow to make sure I notice that his black suit is all glassy in the sun – like he left the iron sitting for too long on that polyester blend. You're right – the thing's half melted. But I won't agree with you when you try to tell me how he must save his better suits for better families.

Thousands of miles from home, we've stepped out of the car (which really is rented) and into a cemetery where there are hardly any graves that aren't connected to your family in some way. It's funny, for once, to be somewhere I'm the stranger and you're the not-quite-unfamiliar face in a huge, old clan.

Here in the cemetery, near the crest of Butcher Hill, there's no rain, no ice, and we can see the blue shingled roof of the house in the valley where your Grampy and Nanny used to live. I'm just about to make sure you notice the view when I find you're all agitated again, huffing about how the rented funeral man has thrown down a mat of plastic turf-junk right over your Grampy's headstone. It's too bad. Who did he think would already be buried in the plot adjacent to the one where we're making Nanny's grave today? Thanks to my mother, you've planned a funeral before, and you won't be cowed by the officiousness of it all – not anymore. You step right up to the edge of the plastic turf.

“He's right here. Look, I'll show you,” you say to me.

But you aren't quite bold enough to keep from glancing behind yourself to see if the rented funeral man is watching. You're tugging upward on the frayed edge of the turf, folding the green plastic garbage-carpet off the bones of your ancestors. There it is, just like you said it would be: your Grampy's headstone, planted there over the grave your father watched filling up with ice water, years and years ago. I wonder if it ever thawed out and drained away. Maybe your grandfather is sealed up in a dirty brown ice cube in the ground beneath our feet, like a cave man caught in a glacier. Maybe he's a natural cryogenic wonder, frozen in the earth just as perfect as the day he fell off the blue roof and into the snow.

“I love how his headstone is so elegant and simple,” you say, defying the prejudices of no one in particular. “Remember that when you're ordering one for me, Brigs. I don't want anything too fussy – no statues of angels or lambs.”

“I thought gravestone lambs were just for dead babies.”

You're turning away from me, waving one hand. “Everyone's the same age in heaven.”

Now you want me to tell you if the rented funeral man looked our way while you were bent over. I don't know so you give me your elbow again and tell me to watch him next time. You know he sees you. You're hard to miss, standing with the wind blowing all your long hair straight up over your head like a stringy, yellow torch.

“Oh, come on,” I say when you complain about what the wind's done to your hair. “What's a funeral on Butcher Hill without a good hurricane blowing?”

You laugh – because this is an airy, churchy funeral, after all, and laughing is just fine. “Is it wind,” you ask, “or is it more like suction? Like someone left the door cracked between here and the Spirit World, and it's all we can do not to get siphoned right inside.”

Whatever it is, your Nanny's coffin sure looks rickety out here in all this wind. The box isn't exactly the top of the line model. Your Mom's older sisters, the ladies you call “the Aunties” told us how mad Nanny was about the prices of the coffins in the showroom the day she picked this one out. They say she took one of the fancy, folded price tags – written in calligraphy like a place card at a posh banquet – snatched it right off the pillow inside a coffin, and threw it down on the floor where she could stomp on it.

“For heck's sake, it's a casket, not a coffin,” the Aunties correct each other. “Coffins are for vampires. And she was no vampire.”

But the word leaves you wincing. “I just hate the sound of it – ‘casket.' Something about it makes me think of shucking corn or – the dry insect egg casings you find in the dust when you wash out the light fixtures in the fall.”

The Aunties roll their eyes at you. “This one was always Nanny's pet.”

I think all of them – your grandmother and the Aunties following her around the casket showroom with the funeral pre-planning worksheet tacked to a clipboard – must have found something to enjoy in the ugly little scene. Nanny got to rage, rage right up against the dying of the light. And all her quiet, furious objections about how expensive everything was going to be in the end just seemed kind of cute to her daughters.

“None of it's negotiable, Mom. There's no point getting your shirt in a knot over it.”

At one point, the legend says, Nanny told the Aunties just to bury her in one of the rough alder wood crates the caskets are packed into before they're shipped out of the factory. Everyone laughed, even though they knew she wasn't joking.

So this wind-whipped casket standing out here on Butcher Hill is the bargain-basement model, just like she wanted. The Aunties say, when the family's not around, the funeral people will refer to her casket as “the Pink Pauper” model. I don't know about that, but the casket is pink, all right. The fibreboard it's made out of is covered with a rough salmon-coloured brocade fabric – like it's meant to look like a battered old skin, I guess. The funeral people trade in shame. Maybe they want us to think about how burial in a bargain casket is just a hair's breadth better than getting thrown into the ground bare naked.

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.