Given (20 page)

I stood in the parking lot, watching Vernal's plane take off and slip behind scumbled clouds, then drove back to the farm. I was on my way upstairs to tell Rainy and Frenchy about Vernal's fall when I heard the phone ring.

She sounded out of breath, as if she had sprinted in from outside.

“Mother?” I wanted to tell her what had happened to Vernal, that I was coming to the mainland to stay at the Walled Off, but out of the silence I heard her cough, and then put the phone down to light a cigarette. I had an image of her from my childhood, sitting in the summer garden late at night, lighting each gasper from the butt of her last, flicking the glowing end into the dark. “It's not the coughin' that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in,” my father would say whenever she lit up.

I heard her inhale, then let out a deep breath, as if expelling the last remnants of the person she'd been. I knew what she would say back to my father, too. “I love the feeling of smoke filling my lungs. There's nothing quite like it.”

I began picking at the skin around my fingernails that had had time to heal since our last communication. I wanted to go upstairs, crawl into bed and rock myself, gently, to still my heart and my mind and everything deep inside me racing away in darkness. I wanted to hang up the phone and walk outside into the severely sunny evening and lie down in the long grass and listen to nothing more than the sound of the worms turning in the earth. I tried not to sigh, but it came out that way. I curled my hand into a fist, to stop myself from picking, and when she refused to speak to me, hung up and went upstairs.

A couple being interviewed on
God Listens
claimed they'd found Jesus while selecting cold cuts at the Winn Dixie Superstore in Miami Beach, that His light shone down on them over the shaved ham.

I seen the light once. It hurt my eyes,
Frenchy said, as I pulled my duffel bag out from under the bed so I could start packing. Rainy asked where I was going and I told them about Vernal's accident, that I would be going to the mainland to clean out my mother's house, but first I was going up to take a trip up to Old Mystic on Thursday evening.

I saw horror twisting at Rainy's eyes in their oozing sockets, and then she started sniffling.
You not plannin on takin us widju?

I shook my head.
You always bouncin,
Rainy said, in an accusatory tone, and turned her back on me, the sour smell of her filling the room. I could feel the cold coming from her body.
How you gon keep us here? You gon shut us in a box and nail down the lid?

She pursed her lips at the HE, lying on his back in his coffin, going
glock-glock-glock
and stroking his rat. The Twin Terrorists sat in their Chrysalis, on the other side of the room, fantasizing — the way some women spent hours poring over bridal magazines for the right train — about their wedding with eternity. I hadn't given any thought to what would become of my friends without me at the farm. I felt the shock coming from Frenchy's eyes, even from behind the blacked-out lenses of my Eternals.

“You have each other,” I said. “You can keep each other company.”

Frenchy insisted the house was haunted, there were too many ghosts. Rainy cried and pleaded with me not to leave them alone. She'd thought death would be a cure for loneliness, but it had only made her feel worse.

We come back to chill widju. What you think, you just walk away?
Frenchy said, looking at my eyes, not into them.

Jello salad tilt both ways, girl,
Rainy said; she seized my duffel bag, opened it, climbed in and stood in it by the door. The sight of her wiping away parts of her face, loosened by the deluge of her tears, wore me down. I told my friends if they promised to stay at the farm while I went to Old Mystic tomorrow evening they could come with me to the mainland.

PART FIVE

You can grieve your heart out and in the end you are
still what you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing.
— Charles Frazier,
Cold Mountain

B
EFORE
I
LEFT THE FARM
I
CALLED
the hospital in Vancouver. When I finally got through to Vernal, he sounded sober. He had a private room, with a phone and a TV. The only thing missing, he said, was a mini-bar.

I drove to Old Mystic, worrying about Vernal; everywhere I looked I was reminded of the trip we'd made to the north end of the island together. And when, on the outskirts of the village I saw a black pig rooting in a field of dead goldenrod, I heard Rainy in my ear, reciting nursery rhymes:

Dis here little pig jet ta market,

Dis here little pig be layin bac in da cut . . .

Passing a pink tricycle that had been left, twisted out of shape, by the side of the road, I thought of Frenchy, after her father had cut off her finger. She had wrapped it in a paper towel and stolen a tricycle from a neighbour's yard to ride to the hospital, where they wouldn't let her in.

I parked in front of the Uncle's house and sat for a while, watching great cloud-wagons being pulled out to sea by the wind. Hope complicates your life; this much, I knew, and nothing could make me start desiring my husband again, the same way I couldn't stop thinking about Hooker Moon.

I got out and walked up the crushed shell path to the front door. After I had knocked three or four times and had turned to leave, a tiny woman with a crumpled face opened the door. In the half-light of the hallway, her body looked like a boulder shaped by a century of storms.

“Come in
,
come in,
”
she said, ushering my inside. “I thought it was a
koko-stick
the way you knocked.
Ha ha ha to hell with you.
That's how it sounded:
ha ha ha to hell with all of you.
” Her voice was clear and quick, but sad underneath. “A
koko-stick
,” she repeated, seeing my questioning look. “That's what we call the woodpecker in our language.”

I guessed she must be Agnes. She knew without asking who I was looking for, and said her nephew was up at his cabin, but insisted I come in and meet her brother. The way he was carrying on since their sister had passed, she said, I might not get another chance.

The Uncle lay in bed, attached to a respirator, drinking from a Tweety Bird cup, holding a paper bag in his other hand, a Sears Christmas catalogue open on his lap. A poorly recorded tape of drumming and chanting issued from a tape deck surrounded by an array of pills and empty Drambuie bottles on top of the TV. The Uncle bore a resemblance to both Agnes and Hooker, though his black hair was specked with silver, braided and tied together by a shoelace. He reached for my hand and pulled me down on the bed. He was, I could tell, a handsome man under all the wreckage.

“The old goat,” Agnes sniffed. “If he steals a kiss, count your teeth afterwards.”

She made as if to tuck in the sheets at the bottom of her brother's bed. He wouldn't let go of my hand and fixed me with watery eyes, as if trying to fathom who I was. I looked around the room at the wallpaper with dimple-cheeked cherubs pressing their chubby bottoms up against one another — and down at the Christmas Wish Book, opened at a page of women in white underwear.

The Uncle made a dismissive gesture, as if he could guess my thoughts. His voice was faltering, weak; he said he was too old to be reading the kinds of girly magazines that showed you everything girls had to offer but nothing of what they felt.

I shifted my body as he continued to grip my hand, tried pulling me close again, and leaned into my ear to speak. Then he began coughing, as if the effort of speech was too much for him.

He let go of me, closed his eyes, and let the paper bag slip from his hands. “When's that Agnes going to bring my lunch?” he said, as if she wasn't there. I rescued the bag and set it on top of the television, upsetting the bottles of pills.

“They're all empty anyway,” said Agnes. “He doesn't remember, but he already ate two hours ago.”

I backed out of the Uncle's room and he opened his eyes again. “Bend over and touch your toes and I'll show you where the wild goose goes,” he said, starting a coughing fit at the same time.

“The old wolf,” Agnes said, shaking her head and closing the door behind us. She laughed as I pretended to count my teeth, and showed me into the cluttered kitchen where she was pickling sea lion flippers, next to three loaves of bread on the counter, rising in pans. Agnes had covered the softly swollen loaves with a dishtowel to keep them warm as they rose.

She gave me directions to Hooker's cabin: north through the village all the way to the end of Dead End Road. She said I could park where the sign said not to, and take the well-marked trail around the graveyard, or I could cut through the graveyard and save myself some wear and tear. She told me to watch out for
lumaloos
, and that once I made it through the graveyard it would be easy enough to find the path that led to her nephew's place.

I set off through the village, saw a wisp of cloud spiralling into the sky over the dome of the Catholic church, as if a spirit were taking leave of a body. I passed Matt's Yaka-Way, and swung left onto Dead End Road. When the road ran out I parked and took the shortcut through the graveyard that was nothing but sucking mud and wound under the twisted apple trees — ghostly presences in a place that lacked all colour other than gradations of gloom.

The trees, though leafless, still had small, golden apples hanging on to the branches that were weighed down by grey hanks of moss. I stopped before a mound of black earth — a new grave piled high with fresh, wet flowers — in a part of the graveyard inhabited by Moons: William Moon, 1937–1985 (there was an empty Bombay gin bottle on his grave labelled “Wholey Water Do Not Consume” next to his wife, Violet) and a string of relations. Lawlor Moon lay side by side with his drowned daughter. Her grave looked like the floor of a hastily abandoned playroom — a headless doll, a scattering of faded Magic Markers. The markers appeared to have been, once upon a time, stuck into the earth, describing a circle around her plot, as if she were being admonished — the way children are told not to colour outside the lines — not to stray from the confines of her final resting place.

At the base of one gnarled apple tree, as close as you could get without disturbing its roots, I spied a small, untended grave. I felt as if my heart had rounded a corner and bumped into a lost part of myself. I kneeled, brushed aside the rotting-apple scented grass, and read the words I'd spent the last twelve years of my life praying I would never have to see:

Baby: Born and Died.

An angel lost his wing

Crooked he did fly.

I fled, stumbling between rows of older graves, with their almost rubbed-out names, until I reached the far side of the orchard. I wept as I ran, seeing Angel with only one wing flying up from me, flying crooked out of my heart. In the dim light under a thick canopy of hemlocks, I found the path.

The trees — pushy, spiky, ill-tempered spruce with needles that felt as friendly as barbed wire — made the forest seem more forbidding. A single small fern caught my eye, undulating playfully even though there was no breeze. Having risen from the walking-dead I had believed I could walk away from my past. Instead I had come full circle, as if the loneliness from which I'd fled was the only place I had left to go.

In the House of the Dead at the Clínica Desaguadero I remembered the many candles burning, a strong chemical smell, and a cloying scent of flowers. An Italian oil painting — a saint having his intestines slowly unwound from his body on a reel — hung, crookedly, as if no one had looked at it long enough to take the time to right it, below an old Spanish proverb meticulously penned in italic script: “God Does Not Send Anything We Can't Bear”.

The
curandero
had taken my arm, trying to keep me on my feet, as he led me down the hall into a spacious high-ceilinged room with rows of marble tables in the centre of it. A nauseating wave of cold air hit my face; I recognized now the chemical smell of the embalming fluid.

Angel lay on his back in an open coffin made of some endangered wood the
curandero's
assistant said they reserved for
los angelitos
. I looked down at him, in that final room, with orchid blades cutting shadows across the grim slabs, his quiet face, and the cotton wool in his nostrils like puffs of breath. I remember closing my eyes for a long time, and opening them, and turning my head to one side to see a wreath of crucifix orchids in the middle of which a pair of baby boots sprouted miniature wings. Clipped to one of the wings in metal lettering, the one word: Angel.

My teeth started to rattle, my body shook, my legs crumpled from under me and I collapsed onto the floor. I fought to control the spinning sensation in my body; I fought to breathe. With each small breath I took I felt as if my own intestines were being unwound on a reel, the tears icing over in my eyes before they had time to drop, like pebbles of frozen rain, into my hair and face.

The last thing I remember was asking the
curandero
for a blanket — a thin sheet wasn't good enough — to keep my
angelito
warm. As if he were still alive. Because if ever I allowed myself to believe Angel was dead, I knew there'd be nothing more that could happen to me.