Love Letters of the Angels of Death (7 page)

Seven

Remembering the clatter and slam of the front screen door, you come back into your grandmother's house on the morning of your grandfather's funeral through the back entrance. Inside, you find your Uncle Ned, fully dressed except for his socks, leaning forward in a chair with his forehead pressed against the hard surface of the kitchen tabletop. He sits up at the clicking of the door clasp.

“You're back,” he says, rubbing at the red line in his forehead where he knows the edge of the table has left its imprint.

“Mom just dropped me off,” you say. “She's gone back to the hospital already.”

“Yeah, you got me in trouble with your Mom. Thanks a lot, kiddo. I wish you'd come to me for help last night.” Uncle Ned is smirking as he rises to his feet. He pours a glass of orange juice as he stands in front of the open door of the refrigerator. Even you know it's not one of those new, frost-free fridges, and he should shut the door before the glacier in the freezer compartment inches down any further.

“Sorry. Grammie never asked me to go get anyone else to help.”

Uncle Ned snorts. “No. No, I don't suppose she would have. So how is she doing, anyways?”

“Oh – um,” you stammer, your neck flushing red. “She'll be okay. But her arm's in a cast all the way to the elbow.” Your hand clasps your own elbow and you pause long enough to make Uncle Ned look up from his juice. He's still standing in the open refrigerator. “And – um – she did have a bit of a bad reaction to the – medication – they gave her for the pain.”

He chuckles and closes the refrigerator door. “A bad trip, eh? I suppose we should have seen that coming. Mom's definitely not what anyone would call ‘mellow.'”

You watch Uncle Ned standing on the linoleum in his bare feet. He's leaning on the edge of the kitchen sink. “I'd better get over to the hospital, I guess,” he says, tipping the remaining inch of his juice down the drain.

He leaves, the unfastened metal buckles of his sandals jingling away across the dewless back lawn. The gate closes with a dry clatter of wooden planks, and then his luxury pickup truck roars out of sight down the alleyway. As the engine noise fades, you hear something else in the old house – another voice, a woman. You crane your neck around the corner of the kitchen wall until you can see her, standing at the screen door at the front of the house.

A woman you've never seen before stands outside the screen. She's dressed in office clothes – high-heeled shoes and a cream-coloured suit that's badly creased across her hips. Her bone-thin hand holds a large floral wreath. Her face is cast in one of those automatic, professional office smiles as she talks through the wire mesh to Uncle Ned's daughter, your cousin Janae.

“So maybe I'm at the wrong house,” you hear the woman say through the screen. “I'm looking for – Ned?”

Janae doesn't say a word. You start to wonder if she's really awake – if she's sleepwalking, or something. But her stance in the doorway isn't loose and sleepy. It's taut and alert – almost convulsing.

The woman just keeps talking. “I'm a co-worker of Ned's. From his firm in Calgary.”

Janae makes no move to open the door. “I know who you are,” she says. Her voice scares you. It's not the voice of fourteen-year-old Janae, but her elemental voice – ageless.

Outside, the woman's face turns ashy around her lipstick and she coughs against the back of her free hand. “We all wanted to send some flowers with our respects but we weren't sure which funeral home the family's using. The obituary must not have run in the Calgary papers – ”

“No. Why would it?” Janae answers in the same voice as before. It's too much. You're stepping out of the kitchen – past your sleeping brothers in the living room – moving to jostle Janae out of whatever's got a hold of her.

As you advance, the woman extends the flowers toward the closed screen door – gladiolas, white carnations, and large, rigid lilies pocked at the bases of their petals with little bumps, like skin tags. The smell of the lilies stings at your nose with a scent like the pearly white antiseptic soap dripping from dispensers hung in the hospital bathrooms. You can tell from Janae's posture that her arms are folded over her flat middle. She will not open the door to receive the flowers. The woman can see that and stoops to lay the wreath on the concrete step outside.

“Please give Ned our best wishes,” she says, almost meekly, and she turns away, moving down the walkway.

You're not sure if Janae knows you're there, standing behind her, listening along with her to the soles of the high-heeled shoes scraping grit into the face of the concrete. Janae's head droops toward her chest, bringing the white wreath into her view. Its pricking sweetness seeps into the house like chemical warfare, borne on the small wind moving through the mesh of the metal screen.

A rush of air breaks on your face as the screen door rattles open under Janae's hands. She's got the wreath in her fingers and her bare feet are slapping up the walkway. Her hands claw the flowers free and hurl them away from the house in handfuls, her fingers stained yellow with all the pollen. She wants to be vicious but the petals just sail delicately through the air, landing on the street and the roof of the woman's car without a sound. Mouth gaping, the woman leans back – watching as Janae chases after her – stupefied in mid-motion with just one foot planted on the floor inside her car.

You can hear the gasping – the noise Janae makes as she fights for air, struggling like she's dreaming through a bout of sleep apnea – like she's you, grown up and dreaming of the bodies of the Incorrupt Saints. You step through the screen door and run to her. And as you touch her shoulder, her throat opens.

“Don't–you–come–here!” she chokes at the woman, hurling fern fronds and white petals onto the dusty hood of the car. “Don't–you–dare–come–here!”

The woman stands frozen for an instant longer, watching speechless as the girl finishes tearing the flowers and greenery out of the wreath and starts pulling apart the arrangement's foam core. It dissolves easily under the pressure of Janae's fingers. A chip of foam lands with a dull ring on the hood of the car. The sound seems to jar the stranger out of her stupor and frees her to duck inside the vehicle, closing and locking the doors. She drives away, watching both of you in her rear-view mirror as she goes. A cloud of shattered flowers blows off her car and on to the pavement, strewn all over the road like the battered, browning, trailing petals of a wedding procession.

It isn't much later in the same day when you stand in front of the enormous mirror bolted to the dark wooden dresser in your grandmother's spare bedroom. Janae is standing beside you, dressed for the chapel, curling her glossy brown hair with a hot metal barrel. Even though you're on your feet, you're stunned and exhausted past the point of sleepiness. You're connected to wakefulness by the smell in the room – deep and organic – of the human oils and proteins superheated and denatured along the shafts of Janae's limp funeral ringlets.

You hold the palm of your right hand up to the mirror and look at its lines reflected in the glass. You're halfway through your teen years, and you've never had your future read from your palm – not counting the time you borrowed that book on palmistry from the town library. Remember that book – the one with the blue satin binding and the crusty smear of yellowed glue where a plastic gem used to be attached to the cover? I think they had a copy of the same book in the young adult section of the library in my town – complete with nothing but dried glue left where the jewel should have been. Of course, neither of us believes in any of that goofy occult stuff. But we each independently read
The Young Diviner's Guide to Palmistry
anyway. At the time, it just felt like something we should know.

You've forgotten which one of the cracks in your palm is called a life line. It must be the long one, you hope, as you trace your finger along its curve around the mound at the base of your thumb. Another one of the deepest lines, you remember, is supposed to be for love. That's me – there in the mirror with you, even then. But you don't know anything about me yet so you just close your hand.

At fifteen, your skin runs smooth and tight over your skull without any lines at all. Before last night in the hospital with Grammie, your unlined face would have been perfectly matched to the fact that nothing much has ever really happened to you. How come we never hear about fortune tellers who read the lines in faces instead of hands? Maybe it's because we're born with lines in our palms but the lines in our faces only come with time. Faces must only be good for reading the past.

Beside you in the mirror, Janae has heard all she can stand of nothing but the clicking of her curling iron. You've waited all day, but she hasn't said anything about the lady at the door this morning. It's getting harder and harder to remember that crisis at all. It's being eclipsed by the day's next crisis – the crisis of your grandfather's dead body. You will be faced with it in a little over an hour at a service the adults in the family are calling “the viewing.”

Janae has her mind ground into the same morbid rut. “It won't look hardly anything like him,” she says, all at once. She knows because she went to a funeral on her mother's side of the family when she was eleven years old. “You'll think you're at the wrong person's funeral when you first see it.”

“Maybe we shouldn't be calling Granddad's body an ‘it,'” you suggest, even though the two of you have tacitly agreed Janae is the expert on funerals – the Niagara Falls mummies notwithstanding, I guess.

She shrugs into the mirror. Her parents' separation, her great-aunt's funeral, attacking her father's mistress with flower petals, a handful of other disappointments you couldn't possibly know about – they've all hardened her. She's all bravado and bad manners. She's arguing. “Why not call an ‘it' an ‘it?' I mean, it's not like Granddad's body is all that human anymore – no spirit, no blood, weird make-up all over him. Why do they drain all the blood out of dead bodies anyway? Like, what's the harm in keeping it? And what do they even do with it all once it's out? Just wash it down the sink into the water supply, or whatever? As if that's sanitary.”

An hour later, sleepless and sad, you stand beside the open coffin, exhaling in deep, slow breaths, looking over the waxy yellowness they say is the body of your first grandfather to die. Maybe Janae was right. The pronoun “it” doesn't quite describe what you see – but neither does “him.” Despite the empty, pinched look of the nose, you decide death's harshest marks fall on the hands. The embalmers have heaped them together over the body's middle, where they rest against the white fabric of the grave clothes. The skin hangs downward from the hands like loose, leather mitts. But maybe, in his seventies, Granddad's hands already looked like that before he died. You can't remember.

And you can't see the lower half of the body at all. The coffin lid is split in two, and the lower portion is already closed and covered with a pile of white roses and carnations. You heard your mother call the flowers a “spray” as if it was flung up out of the ocean, from a thousand miles away, all by itself. Actually, you're not wondering how the flowers got there at all. You don't know yet – not like we do now – that nothing at a funeral appears all on its own. Someone has to sit down and make up his mind and draw it out of somewhere – choice after choice after bloody choice.

When the time allotted for everyone to “view” the body is over, the funeral director steps forward to close the lid of the coffin.

“Excuse me,” he says as he reaches past you. But then, even though you're a kid, he remembers himself and straightens up. “I'm sorry. Are you finished?”

You nod, and he presses the lid into place. Maybe he's specially trained to close it without a sound. Or maybe it's one of those options the bereaved get to choose while they're sitting in the family consultation room with their chequebooks open. “Mark this box for audible casket closure.”

After the lid is shut, and the sight of the body is hidden, the whispers in the room grow a little louder. In a moment, there will be a prayer, and then you'll all follow the coffin on its bier down the long church hallway to the vaulted chapel for the memorial service.

You glance behind yourself to where your family sits. Your grandmother is there, of course, perched in a chair with her ankles crossed, her feet not quite touching the blue carpet on the floor, her arm in its cast laid across her lap. You still haven't spoken to her since you left her at the hospital.

Her older grandsons – your brothers and cousins – will be among the pall bearers today. Little red rose appliqués are pinned to the lapels of their cheap starter suits so the funeral directors will be able to keep track of them all. One of your brothers slipped past your parents wearing a novelty necktie printed to look like it's made from yellow police tape strung around a crime scene. There's nothing anyone can do about it now.

The grandsons' full names are written in columns inside the keepsake funeral program. Someone said there's a black limousine waiting in the church parking lot to ferry them all to the cemetery just outside the town – the cemetery sitting on the side of a hill in view of a custom cattle feed lot. The grandsons are funerary rock stars – the pall-boys standing in a misshapen circle, their long bangs hanging over their eyes, their bony shoulders slouching away from the stiff, moulded forms of their suits.