Shaking out the Dead (38 page)

It was not a suicide.

Geneva pursed her lips. She pushed the torn out page farther from the Book. They didn't belong together. Maybe that's what Tatum knew. It seemed to Geneva, however, that Tatum had crumpled the wrong item. The Book of Rachaels reminded her of Ralph's ashes. Something dead in need of a letting go. Geneva considered burying it just as she had buried Ralph's ashes the night before.

She left the torn-out page on the counter. She took the Book and made her way to the yard. Tatum had given her power of attorney. She entrusted her to pull the plug or not, if the time came. This Book wasn't even a life support system. It was a death support system. The time to pull the plug seemed to be now.

Geneva stepped outside. The sun didn't look well. It looked red, stepped on, and smeared behind a milky cataract. She held the Book against her chest and looked around to see if a spot jumped out at her. She would leave it to the gods, she decided, just as she had with Ralph. If the right spot spoke to her, into the dirt it would go. If not, well, then its number wasn't quite up.

Her eye caught the gas grill. Another option. Death by fire?

“Geneva.”

Her head whipped around.

Ron's head rose above the fading carragana bushes. His gray, thinning hair was as disheveled as usual.

“Saw a patrol car outside your house this morning,” he said. “You all right?”

Geneva walked to the hedge.

“Tatum was killed last night,” she said. “Shot at the Deluxe.” It was the third telling in hours.

Ron closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Paris was working,” Geneva said. “It's all too awful.” She told him what she knew. “Rachael will be coming out with her father at the end of the week.”

Ron's blue eyes were soft beneath his gray and wiry brows.

“You've had a rough couple of months, haven't you?” he said.

Geneva considered it. Rough? No. They'd been amazing. In a shack outside of town, her body had come as alive as her mind. The questions that had plagued her — did she love, could she love? — existed not behind her in time but elsewhere in space. They remained unanswered, but it didn't matter because they were no longer hers.

Rough? No. It had been a time of a slow letting go. Learning how to do it as she went along.

Ron misread Geneva's watering eyes. It wasn't grief. It was gratitude.

Geneva held the Book upright before her chest.

“I'm going to burn this,” she said to Ron.

Ron's sympathy turned to confusion. He raised his chin and squinted.

“It was Tatum's,” Geneva said. “It's a family history of sorts. It caused her nothing but grief.”

Ron scratched at his beard.

“As a librarian,” he said, “I can't condone this.”

“I hate to contribute to this smoke, though,” Geneva said, looking up.

“Book burning,” Ron said seriously, shaking his head. “It's not a legacy I'd want to be a part of.”

“This has nothing to do with legacy,” Geneva said, pronouncing
legacy
with a hint of disgust. “Quite the opposite.” Ron extended his hand, and Geneva handed him the Book over the top of the hedge. “Rachael's seen it,” Geneva said as Ron flipped through. “Burning it just keeps it from being rammed down her throat. Family-wise, this stuff has become some sort of gospel. Burning it isn't about what it says. It's about what its very existence means.”

“So, you're burning the gospel?” Ron said, without looking up.

“Bad book burners burn books because they're afraid of new ideas,” Geneva said. “I'm a good book burner. I'm burning this book because I believe in new ideas.” She reached across the hedge for the Book.

Ron surrendered it but wasn't buying her reasoning.

“Gotta do what I gotta do.” Geneva sighed. She shrugged and turned away. She crossed the yard, returning to the patio where she opened the grill She picked up the long cylinder of matches.

“Stop,” Ron called from the hedge. “Don't do this. Not in a gas grill. Come over here,” he said. “Give it the dignity of burning in a Weber.”

Geneva paused. A Weber. More cauldron-esque. Yes. She turned.

“All right,” she said, and she returned to the hedge. She squeezed through where it was least dense. Ron had gone ahead. He stood on his patio where the squat, black Weber sat between a picnic table and several potted tomato plants.

Ron shook his head.

“Destroying knowledge,” he said.

“It's not knowledge,” Geneva said. “It's information.”

“Information that might hold the key to answers that little girl goes looking for someday.”

Geneva opened her mouth to speak, but Ron kept going.

“What came before helps us understand what's happening now.”

“But who needs a map to where they're standing?” Geneva said.

“Geneva,” Ron said, his eyes softening, “history's not the enemy. Knowing how you got to where you are shows you that the way things are is not that way by divine edict. There were reasons. Hows. Causes and effects. Maybe even lies. ‘To understand something is to be delivered of it,'” he quoted. “Spinoza.” Then Ron looked at the ground and rubbed his beard. “You're probably wanting to get on with your life, I suppose, losing Ralph and all,” he said, “but where we've been, where we've come from — important stuff. Let Rachael have that.”

“You've invited me here under false pretenses, haven't you?” Geneva said.

Ron cocked his head and lifted his bushy brows.

“Forward is forward,” Geneva said. “Know where you want to go and go. Looking back just slows you down.”

“But if you don't know your history,” Ron said, “you're bound to repeat it. It may be a cliché, but clichés earn their status.”

“Nah-ah,” Geneva said. “History repeats itself because we keep thinking about it and keep talking about it. How can anything new happen?”

Ron frowned.

“Matches,” Geneva said.

Ron pursed the lips tucked in his whiskers. He sighed and moved toward his back door. But Geneva had taken in his argument more than she had let on. She was questioning herself and her plans. Did the adage “Know Thyself” really require knowing a couple of generations' worth of knowing
thee
selves? Wasn't there something to be said for taking history out of the picture? Or was that impossible? She wasn't sure. She considered that maybe she should just pull out the pictures and destroy the text. Preserve content. Destroy context. Rachael did seem to like photographs. Or maybe she should save the Book, and someday they could examine it together, herself and Rachael, and talk about perspective and meaning.

But did it matter that the past could be seen from twenty angles? Wasn't it still just the past?

Ron emerged from his back door. Geneva wasn't sure what she was going to do.

“You can't change the course of history by burning a book,” he said, reaching the Weber.

Geneva looked at him and decided.

“That right there,” she said. “Just listen to what you're saying. The ‘course of history' like it's a road that's already laid out. ‘The course of history' like there's a
here
that necessarily leads to
there
. That there,” she said, “is exactly the problem.”

Geneva extended her hand for the matches.

Reluctantly, Ron handed them over. Defeated, he lifted the lid to the Weber.

Geneva opened the Book and ripped out several pages. Ron winced. She placed them on the grill. She tucked the Book beneath her arm and struck a match.

“This isn't history,” she said, touching the flame to the corners of the pages. “This is a tuning fork, and what it attunes to is something that doesn't even exist anymore. It's a ghost. It's a distraction. This book is the great oppressor,” she said.

“Viva la revolution,” Ron sighed as the pages curled with dark edges, smoking and giving off a chemical stench. The smoke floated up, joining the effluvium of the surrounding raging fires. Spirits came together in the sky. Trees and grasses and woodland victims. Vapor tendrils touched. They spread out over the valley, unable to escape.



Geneva suggested that she and Rachael go across the hall to look for things to decorate the spot where they would bury Tatum's ashes. Geneva thought it best to have a concrete reason for going over there so that Rachael could gravitate naturally toward whatever she might want or need as keepsakes. They stood together in the doorway of Tatum's apartment. Lee had dropped Rachael off at Geneva's the night before as planned while he stayed in a hotel downtown. Not counting burning a generations-old family genealogy, Geneva left Tatum's apartment just as she'd found it.

“Like what kind of stuff should I look for?” Rachael asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” Geneva said. “Jewelry. Anything pretty or something that makes you think of her.”

They took several steps into the living room. Rachael's head turned, taking it all in.

“She died before she got the message from your dad,” Geneva said. “She didn't know you were coming.”

Rachael stepped into the apartment where she had lived for seven months. Unlike her mother's house, it was a world already gone, changed to something else. She stepped with her arms at her sides, reached toward nothing, and seemed not quite to know where to go. Geneva purposely moved toward the counter so that Rachael might meet her there.

“You've got some stuff over here,” she said.

Rachael walked over and lifted her chin. Then she climbed onto a barstool and took a look at the cutouts. Geneva watched as Rachael stacked them into a pile, one on top of the other. She seemed to hesitate for just a moment over the cutout of Vincent. Geneva remembered Tatum telling her about the missing picture of him. Apparently, it had turned back up. But when? Before the ripped out page? After?

Once Rachael had the paper dolls in a tidy stack, she kneeled on the barstool and peeked into the box filled with old clothes, books, and barrettes. She looked them over without reaching in. Then she climbed back down.

“You okay?” Geneva said.

“Uh-huh.”

“That's all you want?” Geneva said, thinking about the Book she had burned.

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to check the bedrooms?”

“No, thank you.”

Geneva understood. She even thought Rachael wise. There were no souvenirs here. Tatum herself had decided that there was a clean break to be made. Who were they to question her? Geneva placed a hand on Rachael's back and led her across the hall.

“Remember that man in the coffee shop?” Geneva said, back in her apartment. “The one who wrote something on your homework?”

“Kind of,” Rachael said.

“Well, we've become good friends,” Geneva said, heading for the kitchen. “He has lots of land. I told your father we can put your Aunt Tatum's ashes out there.”

“And we'll leave it out there?” she said.

“We'll bury the ashes,” Geneva said. “I buried Ralph out there too.” She pulled a box of Ziploc bags from a drawer. She extended her hand for the paper dolls.

“Is it like a graveyard?” Rachael said, handing them over.

“It's a wonderful place,” Geneva said. “A nice, quiet place.”

Geneva slipped the cutouts into a plastic bag for safekeeping and handed them back to Rachael. Then they headed for the living room. Geneva sat in the wingback with the old deerskin throw. Rachael sat across from her on the sofa. She fingered the plastic bag in her lap.

“Remember when you told me I should get a more interesting sofa?” Geneva said. “I think you were right. Maybe we can do that while you're here.”

“I also said you should get a TV.” Rachael looked out from under her brow.

Geneva wagged a finger at her. She was glad to see that part of Rachael's spirit was intact. But then Rachael's face went solemn.

“Where's Paris?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“Did he move out because of Vincent?”

“I'm not sure why he moved out,” Geneva said.

“But he knows.”

“He knows,” Geneva said. “Remember? He was there.”

“Was he upset?”

“He was very upset,” Geneva said. “He loved her.”

“Maybe he needed some time to be alone.”

Just like Rachael's father said he did, Geneva thought.

Rachael rubbed the plastic bag between her fingers, fanning out the paper dolls within.

“What about Vincent?” she said. “Does he know?”

“He does.”

“Is he going to talk at the funeral?”

“I asked him not to come,” Geneva said. “I thought it would be nice to keep it intimate. I thought Paris would be here.”

Rachael looked up from the bag.

“And he wouldn't want to be with Vincent.”

“I had that feeling.”

“At first, when you said she died,” Rachael said, “I thought she killed herself.”

“She didn't,” Geneva said.

Rachael looked off to the side. Her legs dangled from the edge of the sofa.

“We might move,” she said.

Geneva cocked her head.

“Who?”

“Me and my dad. He thinks it would help us.”

“Help you what?”

“Be happy.”

Geneva wanted to say it right then and there: come live with me. Protocol be damned and parental permission too. But she knew she had to wait. She intended to make Rachael the offer no matter what, no matter what Lee thought of it. He could put the kibosh on it, certainly, but Rachael was going to know it was out there. A place for her. With Geneva. And a place in Montana that was hers, solid and permanent.

That part had been John's doing. Geneva had been nervous to tell him of her intention to invite Rachael to live with her. God knows, she hadn't been excited at first at the prospect of a child in her life, and in that case, the child was just living across the hall. But she had to do what she had to do. Open her hand and let fall what may. Stand in love and see who stood with her.

She and John had been in bed listening to the night sounds, the owls and crickets. Geneva had taken a deep breath and then told him her plans. By the time she was done, both had their heads propped up on an elbow facing each other.

“I have to do this,” Geneva said, “for whatever it turns out to be.”

John puckered his lips. Then he rolled onto his back. He made a face like his neck was bothering him just a bit. Geneva continued to look at him. His eyes were closed. Then she nestled into the sheets too.

“Clans happen,” he said.

Geneva took his hand beneath the covers.

The following morning, Geneva had opened her eyes to find John already awake, arm behind his head and gazing at the exposed beams above.

“We ought to give Rachael a couple of acres,” he said. “That way, no matter what her father says, she knows she has something here that's hers.”

Geneva eased herself into a sitting position, leaning back on her arms.

“We?” she said.

“Why not?”

Geneva stared at him. She adored his face. The strong jaw. The clear, blue eyes. She reached out and touched the morning stubble on his cheeks.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she said.

John rolled his head in her direction, and she laughed. At herself.

Of course he was sure.

Geneva looked at Rachael where she sat on the sofa.
She has a place here
, she thought. She was excited to tell her.

“Being happy sounds like a good plan,” she said.



The sky was solid, black and gray. Was it smoke or clouds above him? Lee couldn't tell. But because there seemed to be a pressure inside of it, an intent to fall rather than rise, Lee suspected rain, or even hail.

He bumped along the gravel road in his rental car, following Geneva's directions. The urn was in a box on the floor of the passenger's side and safe against the jostling. It held Margaret and Tatum both. He had shipped Margaret to the mortuary in Montana and had the two packed together. It seemed an elegant solution as to what to do with Margaret's ashes. Lee fully expected to get the job in Denver. Scattering Margaret here in Montana together with her sister would keep her closer. Since Geneva and Rachael seemed to have a relationship, Lee figured Rachael would be back. Her mother would not be far. Rachael could visit her, even if she didn't know it.

Lee looked out at the flat prairie and distant shrouded mountains. It was strange, he thought, how things turn out. It was as though all this was the reason he had not known what to do with Margaret's ashes, and the reason, too, that Rachael had gone to Montana with her aunt. Maybe his mistakes were not mistakes at all.

Lee pressed the brake as he passed a small hovel of a building. He looked into the rearview. He saw Geneva and a large, older man sitting in folding chairs on the western exposure. He backed up and pulled through the gate.

Geneva rose from her lawn chair and began her approach before Lee got the engine shut down. He lifted the urn out from the box on the floor and opened the car door.

“Rachael's collecting rocks,” Geneva said, “to mark the site.”

It seemed an abrupt greeting to Lee. The previous night, he had spent only fifteen minutes with her dropping off the half-asleep Rachael. The woman seemed different than when he had met her on his last trip. At that time she had sat behind big, black sunglasses and was flanked by Indians. She'd seemed remote, of another world. On the phone after Tatum had been killed, she was helpful. But when he looked at her now, standing with the shack and the man behind her, he sensed something different. He instinctively stiffened, slightly on the defense.

“I'd like to talk to you real quick,” Geneva said, “if you don't mind. I'd also like to be frank. Rachael is welcome here anytime,” Geneva said. “Long term. Short term. The door's open. I wasn't going to say anything until you got back from Denver but then thought that maybe having a few days to chew on it would be helpful.”

Lee shifted the urn into the elbow of his right arm. He had chosen it over the phone. It seemed overly shiny juxtaposed to the surroundings, the shack and the dust.

“But,” Geneva said, bringing her palms together as though in prayer and pressing her index fingers to her chin. “I'm not sure how to say this so I'm just going to say it. I wouldn't want her shuffled here against her will.”

Lee's feelings of defensiveness reinforced themselves. The good feeling he had in the car seemed to form into one large drop that was slowly escaping him.

“I don't mean I'd be unwilling to help out when you needed someone to step in,” Geneva went on. “I just meant, if she were to stay with me long term, it would have to be because she wanted it.”

Lee looked beyond Geneva's shoulder toward the shack and the large man sitting there looking out at the land. Lee had an impulse to drop the urn into the dust, get back in the car, and hit the road out. To hell with all of them. He'd brought his daughter home, given her everything she could want, brought her to Montana for her aunt's funeral, and made sure her mother's ashes would be as nearby as possible. What was the great crime he had committed?

“Have I asked you for something?” he said coldly.

Geneva shook her head.

“No, you haven't,” she said. “I'm sorry. But I know it didn't work out for you before, and that's why she was living with her aunt. I just wanted you to know that if it didn't work out again,” she paused and sighed. “Actually,” she said, “it doesn't matter to me if it's your choice or hers. She's welcome here.”

“We're doing fine,” Lee said crisply, his exterior remaining cool. He stepped around Geneva and shook his head as he walked. It was happening again. The judgment. It was an insult wrapped in an offer of help.

Rachael then appeared coming around the side of the shack carrying rocks in her folded up shirttail. Lee noticed her eyes flit from one adult face to the other. She gathered the rocks in her shirt closer to her belly and hurried toward him.

“I got some rocks . . . ” she started, but her eyes got tangled on the urn tucked in his arm.

The large man stepped up behind Rachael, extending his hand to Lee over her head.

“I'm John,” he said. “Good to meet you. Thanks for coming. We figured we'd have the service first, and then I'll make us all some supper, and we could sit with the evening for a while.”

The man had broken the tension of the moment. Rachael slipped off to drop her rocks into a bucket and then went to Geneva's car to retrieve her Ziploc bag of paper dolls. She rejoined the group, and they started off — Rachael with her plastic bag, John carrying Rachael's bucket of rocks, and Lee carrying the urn. The sky above had a strange weight, loaded at once with smoke and moisture. John sidled up to Lee as the small group crossed the prairie. He told Lee of the work it took to put in a well and of his plans to build a permanent structure on the distant slab.