Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (33 page)

My mother opened the door.

I was sort of half-hidden on my way back to the toilet, watching my mother answer the door. Perhaps, I only thought I was hidden. I may have just been standing there without any attempt at camouflage.

It was the undertaker's wife.

She was surprised to see my mother standing there, looking so healthy.

"My daughter told me that you were sick," she said. "And I came over to ask if I could help out any."

"That's nice of you," my mother said. "But I'm not sick." I knew that my mother looked puzzled, though I could not see her face.

The undertaker's wife was looking directly at me, standing somewhere behind my mother, trying to be hidden. The expression on her face did not make me feel comfortable.

"My daughter told me that your son told her that you were sick, so I came right over. Obviously, you're not sick. I'm sorry to disturb you."

The undertaker's wife took a couple of steps backwards.

"I appreciate your coming over, but I'm not sick. Would you like some coffee?" my mother said.

"Oh, no," the undertaker's wife said. "I've got something on the stove."

Though suddenly I felt like a sinking ship, I still had enough curiosity to wonder what the undertaker's wife was cooking in the funeral parlor.

I had never really thought about them eating in there before, but of course they had to eat, and to eat you need to cook and she cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner in a place where dead people were briefly stored before something permanent was worked out for them.

I wondered how bacon and eggs tasted in a funeral parlor. I wondered how difficult it would be to eat ice cream in there. I didn't think there would be
a big problem with it melting, even if it were a hot day.

"Well, I'm sorry that you came over for nothing," my mother said. "I'll have to get to the bottom of this."

She did.

I was already there waiting for her.

All she had to do was turn around.

The next morning for my funeral-viewing pleasure, they held the funeral for a dead child. I was up bright and early and standing on my chair.

The funeral unfolded like the petals of a flower whose ultimate blossom was a small coffin coming out the door of the funeral parlor and on its way to the hearse and that final place where the hearse would take it and come back empty and the child wouldn't need its toys any more.

I of course had no idea that it was the funeral for a child until they brought the little coffin out; except for that one occasion I never knew who was being buried. I had no way of knowing if it was a man or a woman or a young person or an old person or just a person inbetween who had gotten unlucky.

The coffins were always closed and I did not know the specific nature of their contents. All I knew was that somebody dead was inside.

So I was stunned when the little coffin came out. It only needed two pallbearers. They carried the coffin as if it were a feather of death. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable because the coffin was my size. I didn't know if there was a dead little girl or a dead little boy inside. I know that this may sound horrible, but I half-wished that there was a dead little girl inside because a dead little boy was too close to home for me.

When the full impact of the child's funeral had modified itself into an unwholesome curiosity and interest in detail, I looked around for child mourners that were my age and the size of the coffin. There were none. There was not a single child.

That seemed very strange to me. Didn't the kid have any friends? God, what a poor kid, I thought, not a single friend. I could imagine the kid with no one to play with. I shuddered twice: once because the kid was dead and a second time because the kid was friendless.

There were about thirty people out there watching the small flower-bedecked coffin on its brief journey to the hearse which took care of the child ever having the possibility of a friend.

I was suddenly very sad because the child had never gotten to play hide-and-go-seek or kick-the-can or statues. The child had only played games that you play by yourself like playing with its dolls or the little boxed games that have animal heads you hold in your hands with two empty holes where the eyes should be and you roll two little silver balls around and around
until you think you're going to go crazy before you give the animal some eyes or perhaps the child went on solitary tricycle rides past other children playing together who would have nothing to do with this dead kid.

I didn't know what fate was back, then, but if I had known I would not have wanted that kid's fate, not for all the tea in China, which was something people said all the time in 1940, but you don't hear it very much in 1979.

If you were to say, "Not for all the tea in China," right now, it would attract a lifted eyebrow, but back then it meant something. You were communicating.

I was really disturbed by the total lack of child mourners. I made a vow that I would be nicer to people, especially kids. I would start off that very day dedicating my energy to the gathering of many new friends and the instant renewal and replenishing of old friendships.

Under no conditions did I want to end up like that poor hapless child with nobody but adults at its funeral. Today I would be as friendly as I could with the undertaker's daughter.

I would even ... I would even touch her hands. The worst thing in the world would be if I were to die and she wouldn't come to my funeral. That would be the final blow. Too bad it wasn't winter, so I could
wear mittens. No, I shouldn't think like that. I promised myself that I would somehow hold her hands, so that she would come to my funeral.

They put the little coffin in the back of the hearse and placed around it wreaths and bouquets of flowers that seemed to swallow it whole. If you were alive and playing hide-and-go-seek, the back of that hearse would be a good place to hide. No one could find you in all those flowers.

WHERE WAS THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER? suddenly hit my mind like the first whack of a spanking. She wasn't at the funeral, but then I thought she obviously hadn't been a friend of the dead kid or she would be out there in a tiny black dress, dabbing a moon-white handkerchief to her eyes.

After the hearse had driven off and all the mourners had followed in its shadow like the morbid tail of a black kite, I thought some more about the undertaker's daughter and the child just on its way now to the cemetery where it would stay after everybody else came back. I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew that it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.

I knew that forever was longer than 39 shopping days until Christmas.

Yesterday when I was playing with the undertaker's daughter and eventually fled the touching of her
hands, that dead child must have already been in the funeral parlor getting ready for today. While we were playing outside, they could have been taking the blood out of that child and replacing it with embalming fluid.

I wondered if the undertaker's daughter had seen the dead child when it came in, and if the dead child had been a girl, she'd thought:
Well, here's somebody I'll never play dolls with
or she already knew that the child had no friends and so she didn't think about playing with her at all.

That's an awful thought, isn't it? but that's what I thought about while still standing on my chair perch staring at the sudden emptiness that had once been the funeral of a child.

I wondered why the undertaker's daughter wasn't afraid of dead people and then I thought somebody who prefers
Grand Central Station
to
Inner Sanctum
was capable of anything.

When I heard somebody stirring in the house a little later on, I got off my chair and pulled the window shade down. I put the chair back where it belonged. I didn't want anybody today criticizing my interest in funerals.

I was going back to bed and think all over again what I had seen today, but when I thought about that dead child lying in a coffin hidden by flowers and on
its way to the cemetery, going back to bed did not seem like a good idea at all. I decided to spend as much time as possible the rest of the day standing on my feet, just to keep in practice.

A few months later, we moved and I never saw the undertaker's daughter again. She probably grew up, went to college and got married, then kids, etc. Maybe her hands even got warm.

I should probably think about her more often than I do. Actually, this is one of the few times that I have thought about her in years, maybe even longer.

The whole time that I lived beside the funeral parlor and watched the funerals like garden parties where I was always the uninvited guest seems to me now like a dream.

The undertaker's daughter has become a character in that dream. Did I really stand on a chair in my pajamas and watch funerals for pleasure? Did we really live in an apartment that had once been an active part of a mortuary? Did I dream the undertaker's daughter and her hands which were like white daisies growing on top of Mount Everest? Did I really hide from them until one day I saw the funeral of a dead child who had no friends and, not wanting to end up that way, courted her hands as if they had the desirability of warm mittens on a freezing winter day?

Yes, and I remember:

 

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust

 

Finished with the undertaker's daughter and still carrying my sack of beer bottles, I'm halfway to the pond now where the people will arrive soon and start taking their furniture off the truck and setting up their highly original house beside the pond.

Childhood thoughts of early death continue to unravel in my mind, perhaps unpeel is a better and more accurate way of looking at it, like peeling an onion into a smaller and smaller circle with tears growing in my eyes until the onion is no more, all peeled away and I stop crying.

About five years after I left the dream-like address of an apartment beside a funeral parlor, I was living someplace else. World War II wasn't quite over. It was hanging on by the skin of its teeth, but you could feel that the end was very near.

For all practical purposes the War was over except that people were still getting killed every day and they would continue to get killed every day until the War was actually over.

The days were running out for the Japanese Empire as the days of my childhood were running out, and every step I took was a step that brought me nearer to that February 17th, 1948, orchard where my
childhood would fall apart just like some old Roman ruins of a childhood, so we just sat around: the Japanese Empire and my childhood listening to each other breathing away the end.

The new place where I was living was two addresses away from, and approaching, the pond. The next address would take me a hundred miles to live in a dingy yellow apartment where the most important and expensive tube in the radio burnt out and we were too poor to afford another one, so at night our little Welfare family just sat around and looked at one another until it was time to go to bed.

There are no words to describe how important a radio was in those days.

The next address after the radioless apartment would be the auto court and out the front door of the cabin on the way to my beloved pond and its fishing furniture.

Meanwhile: Let's go back the two addresses and I'll tell a story of dead toys and silence. The new someplace I was living looked like an old house that rented for twenty-five dollars a month. Thank you, Welfare! We lived there long enough for the seasons to come and go once.

There were walnut trees in the front yard. There were apple and cherry trees in the back yard, which also contained a large building that was part garage, storage place and woodshed.

We didn't need the garage because we were too poor to own a car, but we were rich enough to use the woodshed. My mother cooked on a wood stove and we used wood to heat the house.

I always hated to chop wood.

The place also had a lot of lawn that needed to be mowed and I always hated to do that, too. In the spring we put in a garden, which I worked at with great hesitation. I was inbetween stepfathers at the time, so my mother did most of the work in the garden.

Let's face it: I was a kid who didn't like to do his chores. I tried to keep as much space between me and work as I could. I don't think I was lazy because I did a lot of other things, but they were always the things that I wanted to do, and I tried not to compromise my values.

I always liked old people, so I spent as much time with them as I could. They fascinated me like spiders, which I had a great deal of affection toward also. I could spend an hour with a spider web and be quite contented, but show me some weeds that needed pulling from the garden and I would exit a long large sigh like a billboard of desperation.

Late in the spring of 1945, a new kid moved into the house next door to "ours." He was older than me and really a good kid. He was the kind of kid other kids looked up to and wanted to be friends with.

I think he was twelve and he was a boy scout and
shortly after moving in next door, he got a paper route because he had a bicycle and was ambitious. He was preparing himself for a positive life of accomplishment.

The bicycle looked brand-new even though it was prewar because he took such good care of it. I was not to have a bicycle until a couple of years later and my bicycle always looked shitty because I didn't care about its appearance. My bicycle started off by being blue but afterwhile it was so dirty that you couldn't tell what color it was and most people probably didn't care to begin with. The color of a kid's bicycle would not rank very high if you were to make a list of things people are interested in.

The boy next door always kept his clothes neat. With my clothes, half-the-time you didn't know if I was putting them on or taking them off. They were somewhere in the middle of coming and going simultaneously.

His parents really loved him.

I could tell by the way they talked to him.