Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (12 page)

She had color photographs of all this, too, and when I saw them I thought how Cal truly did look like a pagan prince, a shaman and not a man who had been born in Dimebox, Texas, fifty-two years before.

—

And so I missed the cremation. They drove in a little caravan to Lewiston, Cal’s casket inside Jorge’s old pickup truck, a big blue tarp covering it and a Tibetan silk painting like a flag draped across the tarp. During that weekend I continued to speak to Tina several times a day. I finally saw her the day after the cremation.

“I missed you so much, Carrie,” she said. She was dressed all in black, black linen tunic and loose black trousers, a star-spangled black scarf around her neck. “I wished you’d been there, it felt so wrong you weren’t there.”

“I know,” I said, and held her for a long time. She looked exhausted but beautiful, her gaunt face even more striking now that her head was shaved. “I’m sorry, I—”

“But I have something I’d like for you to do. I have Cal’s ashes and I’d like to sift through them with you.”

“Sure,” I said. I had wondered about this. Mr. Brusher had asked me whether the widow would like the remains crushed.

“Most people do,” he said. “But it takes a few extra hours, and we need to schedule that time in. Can you let me know?”

This was one command decision I was not prepared to make. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Tina, but now I learned that she had not opted to do what most people would have done.

“Sure,” I told her. Of course. It would be an honor.

“Okay.” She turned and picked up a little book from the coffee table. There was a largish cardboard carton there as well, sealed with tape and with Cal’s name and address written on it in magic marker.
Someone had drawn swirly moons and stars on the box in red and
gold glitter ink. Tina ignored the box and opened the little book, flipping quickly through it. “Next Tuesday, nothing will be in retrograde, after—hmm, let’s see, twelve forty-seven p.m. Can you come then?”

“Sure. I’ll take you to lunch first, how’s that?”

So our date was set, as though we were going to Belfast to have a manicure from the woman who used only non-toxic, vegetable-based nail products. That night, when I told Robert about what I was going to do, he frowned and shook his head.

“This sounds a bit dangerous to me. Psychologically risky, I mean.”

“For Tina, you mean?”

“Well, yes. And you. There’s no cultural safety net for this sort of thing, Carrie.”

I nodded again but said nothing. But I thought, it was like everything else Cal and Tina and their friends did, part of their crazy-beautiful patchwork of belief. Magic mushrooms, shamans giving medical advice, moonrise and silver temple bells at dawn. Seat-of-the-pants religion: but who was I, a non-believer, to say it was wrong? I went into another room and put on the radio. Yet another DJ on the little local station was doing a tribute show for Cal, a scratchy vinyl recording of an old old song, a woman’s husky vibrato and in the background noisy echoing feedback—

—

But Magic is no instrument

Magic is the end.

—

The following Tuesday I picked up Tina, and we went to have an early lunch in town. We both ordered the same thing, Japanese somen noodles with fresh ginger and garlic. We spoke about how she and Cal had first met, about all the e-mails she’d received from friends all over the world, all the letters. Afterwards we drove around for a little while, to give Tina a chance to talk more, I thought. But then I glanced at the clock on the dashboard of the old Saab and remembered that nothing would be in retrograde until close to one o’clock. At twelve forty-five we were driving back down the dirt road to Tina’s house, dodging frost heaves and patches of black ice, listening to Cab Calloway on the radio.

“Well,” she said when we finally pulled into the driveway. “Here we are.”

Inside, I boiled water for tea, while Tina prepared a space in the living room. First she laid a white sheet on the floor atop the old kilim rug. Then she set down four candles in star-shaped glass holders, one at each corner of the sheet. In the middle she set the cardboard carton and a pair of scissors. At the edge of the sheet were dozens of containers—cookie tins, beautiful blown-glass decanters, tiny glass and metal vials, antique silver urns from Nepal, carved wooden boxes, terracotta pots with lids. There were also several boxes of Ziploc bags in varying sizes.

“I’m going to bury some of his ashes in the backyard,” said Tina. “Along with whatever else we find.”

The rest she was going to take with her on a months-long pilgrimage, first across the United States, then to Europe, India, and Nepal: all the places Cal had ever lived, all the places they had ever visited together, all the places they had planned to go. She would scatter his ashes everywhere, and bury some of whatever else we found in Dimebox, Chaco Canyon, on the road outside Katmandu.

“Well,” Tina said at last. She seemed edgy, anxious to start but
also uneasy: the first time in all the weeks of Cal’s dying that I
had seen her actually fearful about something. Outside the sun was shining; a sudden thaw had melted most of the snow over the last few days, and on the maple trees tiny red buds were swelling.
“I guess we should begin. Do you need to go to the bathroom or
anything?”

I said no. We walked into the living room, set down our tea mugs. Tina went back and got the cardboard box from the coffee table and carried it to the white sheet laid out on the floor. She put the box in its center, then performed the ritual of charging the circle, lighting each of the four candles in turn and making a little recitation as she rang the silvery Tibetan temple bells.

“Spirits of the West, of Fire and—no, wait. I think East is Fire—”

She began again, while I knelt and listened. I knew that once the circle was charged we were not supposed to leave it; only children and cats could pass through a charged circle without disrupting the force, or something. When Tina was finished she knelt opposite me, her glasses glinting in the candlelight.

“Well,” she said.

She took the scissors and slit open the heavy tape on the cardboard carton. Inside was a bag of heavy clear plastic, its sides opaque with grey dust. There was a twist tie at the top; Tina undid this and set it aside, then unfolded the plastic and smoothed it down over the sides of the box.

“Oh, wow,”
she breathed.
“Oh, wow.”

I gazed down and felt every hair on my body lift. I have never experienced anything like it. Tina’s hands hovered above the bag’s opening, then dipped down and into what the carton held. “Oh, oh, Little Wolf, my Little Wol
f
.
.
.
”

“Jesus,” I whispered; then slipped my hand inside.

It was not ashes, of course. Even ashes are not technically ashes, but a gritty substance more like kitty litter or medium-fine gravel.

What the box contained was not that at all, but bones. Most of them burned or broken up, but nearly all immediately recognizable. A forensic anthropologist would have been able to piece some of them together to form part of an arm, or hand; ribcage and spine and shoulder blade. Everything was covered with a fine layer of ash, pale-grey, almost white. I picked up a slender bone the length of my hand, hollow, like a bone flute, set it to one side and filled my palm with soft dust and shattered tibia, a lovely wing-shaped fragment of vertebra.

“Look,” murmured Tina. Her eyes were huge, transfixed; she held up the tiny intact figure of a dragon, its ruby eyes winking as she rubbed the ash from them.

“That’s amazing,” I said, shaking my head. “Look—”

I let the fine ash trickle through my fingers, then plucked a curved smooth shard of green glass from my palm. “The Coke bottle!”

Tina nodded. She rubbed at her glasses, leaving a smear of ash; then said, “I’m going to get some bandannas, so we don’t breathe this in—”

She stood, moving her hands back and forth above a candle as she recited the words that would let her leave the circle. She returned a few minutes later, closed the circle again and handed me a bright-red kerchief. I cleaned my glasses with it, then tied it over my mouth and bent back over the box. Very carefully, I began taking handfuls of what was inside and laying it on the sheet in front of me. Without discussing it, we began sorting everything in small heaps splayed in a long sweep across the white sheet. Larger bones here; glass there, melted blobs from the Coke bottle; here unidentifiable bits of charred and twisted metal.

What was extraordinary was not just how many things could be identified, but how many had not been destroyed by the incandescent heat of the furnace. We found Cal’s gold-rimmed spectacles, the frames bent but the glass intact. We found dozens of tiny animal figurines of bronze and silvery metal, and the twin circlets of steel which were part of his leather bag. There were shards of semi-precious stone, and the wire that had formed the rigging of the Viking ship. There were the runestones, some of them split in two; only those that Cal had painted himself, with tiny V-shaped symbols and letters, still retained their color and whatever arcane meaning he had charged them with. As the hours passed the piles in front of us grew larger, and Tina began to make another series of orderly heaps, objects that she would keep, ultimately placing them on the little corner shrine where incense and candles burned round the clock.

“What do you think these are?” I asked, holding up a small, smooth cylinder. It was grey-white, the same color as the ashes. I had quite a little pile of them.

“Bones?”

“No. I think they’re his pastels.”

“That’s it!
”
Tina picked one up and turned it to the light. “The color got all burned awa
y
.
.
.
”

We found the metal ferrules from his paintbrushes, scores of beads and other remnants of jewelry. Tina was dismayed and surprised that none of his heavy bracelets or torques had survived, save for a tiny bit of silvery filigree, melted and charred like burned lace. Amazingly, we did find several small pieces of cloth that had somehow come through unscathed, dark wool soft and worn as felt, a shred of leather. And there was his wolf coffee mug, in three pieces, and a triangular piece of scorched paper, the corner of a page from one of the paperbacks.

He set out on his,
it read.

Hours passed. I felt as though I had slipped through a crack in time,
my back bent as I sifted and sorted and held fragments of bone before the candle-flame, enacting some nameless ritual that women had performed for a thousand thousand years, before ritual had a name; before women did. The world smelled of ash—it would take more than a faded red bandanna to keep that from me—of scorched metal and bone. My fingers felt as though they were gloved in something at once soft and slightly abrasive, the inside of an animal skin perhaps, or feathers. The sun had gone down, the room around us was growing almost too dark for us to see what we were doing; but we were almost done. In front of me was the pile of bones. Tina had a long line of smaller heaps beside her, jewelry and runestones and metal and tiny figurines. The only bones she had put aside were those of Cal’s skull, which were larger than most of the others. There was a surprising number of these; I think you could probably have pieced his entire skull back together, like one of those ancient figures in a barrow, their skeletons dusted with ochre and pollen.

But at last, nothing remained in the box but very fine white ash. Tina looked around, dazed, at everything that surrounded us, bones and charred metal, a soft sifting of grey veiling her face.

“Carrie
.
You
must want something. What
would
you
like
to
have?”

I sat back on my heels, gazing at her and then at the orderly
piles that surrounded us. “You choose for me,” I said. “I will take this—”

I picked up the slender hollow bone I had first seen, cupped it in my hand. “And some of his pastels.”

“Okay.
”
Tina frowned studiously, then reached over and plucked
the two metal rings that had come from Cal’s leather bag. “And here—”

She placed them in my hand. They felt warm, as though they still held some of the retort’s heat and flame. I put them, along with the bone and the pastels, into the leather bag Cal had made for me years before. “Thank you, Tina,” I said, and leaned across the grey-streaked sheet to embrace her.

“I guess I better start putting this into the containers.” She smiled weakly as she withdrew from me. She pushed at the kerchief covering her shaven skull, and I saw where dark ashy fingerprints covered her forehead. “God, I had no idea there would be so much. I hope I have enough to hold everything
.
.
.
”

As it turned out, she didn’t
.
After she had filled as many containers as she could, sorting them out as to what would go to Texas, what would remain here in the woods behind the house, what would go to England, to India, to Nepal; after all that, enough remained that I filled several large Ziploc bags with the smallest fragments of bone, and several more with ashes.

“Well,” Tina said at last. She looked exhausted, more in the grips of some intense hallucinogen than grief; and I imagined I must look exactly the same. “I guess we’d better stop.”

I stood, my back aching, as she walked around the perimeter of the white sheet, reciting the words that would open the circle to us once more. Against one wall was the cardboard box, filled now with sealed Ziploc bags, and the dozens of containers that held Cal’s remains. When Tina was finished, I picked up the white sheet and folded it, then walked out onto the back porch. The wind tugged at the sheet as I opened it and shook it out, and at that moment I felt how strange all this was, how I might have been shaking out a white tablecloth but instead was consigning the last of my friend to the cold night air.