Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (11 page)

When Sandra learned about her father's stroke, Tom encouraged her to go take care of him, insisting so emphatically she felt he was pushing her away, as if he were asking her to go out with another man.

“If you don't go, you'll be sorry the rest of your life,” he said. “You have to go work it out with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You blamed him for what he did to your mom.”

“She had a kidney disease. She didn't catch it from him.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“He never told me how serious it was,” she said. “He didn't let me visit her in the hospital. I didn't know she would die.”

“So now you won't trust any man.”

“Don't I trust you?”

“No, you don't,” he said. “If you did, then you could say you love me. You never say you love me.”

Late that winter, Tom set out early one morning, running the dogs on some trails toward Nenana. He did not return until after the sun had come and gone. She was worried, even though she knew Tom had clear rules about the cold. He carried sled-repair equipment, ice creepers, camping gear, even a sewing kit and extra plastic booties for the dogs. As the dark deepened and she shoved more wood in the stove, she thought she heard a dog yelp, but it was only the wind. At last, in the moonlight, she saw the dogs coming, their shadows cavorting on the snow. Tom, still exhilarated by the run, went about routinely warming dog food on the stove. His cheeks were flaming, and ice crystals matted his beard. Looking outside at the dogs, still frisking, she felt foolish. She wondered if her anxiety was only cabin fever, her desire to be on the trail to somewhere else. The next morning, fresh snow had obliterated the doghouses. The dogs used the snow for a blanket. They burrowed, breathing through little blow-holes.

When she left for Kentucky at the end of May, Tom drove her to the airport. On the way, they saw a ski team racing down the highway on short, wheeled skis. In town, when the summer light came, the children snaked through the streets on skateboards. Tom used a three-wheeler to run his dogs in the summer. Before Sandra boarded the plane, she told him, “I don't know when I'll be back.” She knew he thought she wouldn't be back at all. Yet she didn't know how long she could bear to stay at home.

In Alaska, she had seen a dog that looked amazingly like her old pet—the same facial markings and coloring, the same shy, agreeable expression. He was in a pen in a small settlement where most yards were littered with the tattered remains of frontier living—oil barrels, rusted refrigerators, snowmobile carcasses. The tiny post office was having a rummage sale on its porch. She thought of trying to buy him, but she decided it would be a great mistake to get a new dog so much like the original. It would be unfair.

On the balcony, as they sat together in the evenings, she tried to tell her father about her life in Alaska, nervously straining for words to describe the height of the mountains, the glaring brightness of the snow, the brilliant colors of the wildflowers, the size of the mosquitoes. She realized she was exaggerating everything. There seemed to be no realistic way of describing the mosquitoes—the size of dragonflies, she said, almost as big as those remote-controlled toy planes she had heard when she was biking past a field outside Cork. She had automatically looked up for a bush plane and had momentarily visualized herself sitting at the Riverside having a beer while floatplanes landed on the Chena and the mosquitoes buzzed like friendly visitors around her head. Now she realized she was exaggerating to her father partly because she couldn't remember; there wasn't a clear line drawn between the ordinary and the fantastic in her mind.

One night she tried to describe the northern lights to her father. The night was humid and sheet lightning flared in the distance. “The aurora is like neon signs, and it works on the same principle,” she said. Words failed. She thought of the pulsating colors and showers of brilliant light, sometimes described as a Chinese dragon undulating through the sky. She said, “The Tlingit Indians say the lights are spirits of the dead dancing—happy spirits. Some others believe the spirits are playing kickball with a walrus skull.”

“I wish I could have seen that,” he said softly. “I never got to go many places, holding down two businesses.”

It made Sandra angry that he talked as if his life were nearly over. She said, “You could still go to Alaska. You're not even old. You've just been around death for so long it's rubbed off on you.” She waited for a motorcycle to pass. “You could come and see me,” she said.

The next day, Sandra drove her father's car to the library at the county seat and looked for pictures of the northern lights. She found a travel book that had a couple of photographs. The northern lights were nothing like she had described to her father. Although the pictures were not splendid, she realized that the lights were even more spectacular than she remembered—the sheer vastness of the space they covered, the implied shimmer and pulsation, the depth of the colors. They were more phenomenal than she could comprehend. She thought that sometimes sights and sounds were so unreal—like the news of someone's death—they could not be remembered or believed. She had exaggerated the mosquitoes but understated the aurora. She recalled what she had said to Tom when they saw the lights together the first time. She said they were like an orgasm. Later, during an orgasm, the curtains of color rippled through her mind. When she told Tom this the next day, he said, “It's like looking up a word in the dictionary and it gives you another word you don't know, and when you look up that one, it refers you back to the first word.”

She thought if she showed her father the pictures, he would not believe them; he would not believe his daughter could have experienced anything so magnificent. “You had to be there,” she would have to tell him.

As the days passed, her father grew stronger, and Sandra stayed on in Cork, uncertain what she wanted to do. She felt she was testing herself, revisiting old memories and fears—the creepiness of living above a funeral home. Now that its doors were closed, she could imagine all the ghosts of the dead trapped in there. In her sleep, they hammered and clawed and whistled from the cavern below her.

Clemmie came over every day, sometimes bringing videos from the grocery. She cooked for them—fried chicken and ham and strawberry cake. Sandra's father battled his way around, brandishing his cane like a sword and swearing at life. He seemed almost his old self.

“I don't know when I'll be back,” Sandra wrote to Tom. “Give my love to Brubeck, Coltrane, Satchmo, Thelonius, Dizzy, Billie, Mulligan, Miles, Fats. You may not believe this, but I love you.”

The day after she mailed her letter, she received one from Tom. He wrote news of the dogs, the weather, the moose that visited the stream in the backyard. He was working an extra construction job in the evenings during the summer light and barely had time to scrawl notes to her. He didn't have time to run the dogs now, and they were growing desperate—howling and breaking loose. He was thinking of giving them up. Sandra could feel the dogs escaping, racing away from her, running faster and faster.

Sandra and her father were eating lunch. She had been helping out in the furniture store and had come upstairs to make some tuna salad. Her father said, “When I'm gone, you and Kent can fight over the business.”

“Where are you going?”

“I think I'll close down the home for good. We never have more than two funerals a month anyway, and nowadays they want something fancier, or else they want to be cremated.” He speared a cherry tomato—as expertly as Tom speared a fish, Sandra thought. He went on, “I always tried to make it homey, so people wouldn't feel out of place. It wouldn't be hard to turn into apartments.”

“Who would want to live in it?” Sandra said.

“If you move out all the equipment and get rid of some of those morbid old carvings and lamps, you could have a pretty big apartment house here.”

To Sandra's surprise, her father sobbed—a short belch of emotion. Tentatively, she touched his shoulder. He straightened up and cleared his throat.

He said, “There's something I want you to have—that old furniture of your great-great-great-grandfather's.”

“Those old chairs in the sewing room?”

“There's more in the basement. I'll get it out when I'm able. I want you to have it when you know where you're going.” He pushed his plate forward.

“It used to be in the dining room when I was real little,” she said. “I haven't thought of it in years.”

“I stored it away when your mother got all Danish modern upstairs. Your great-great-great-grandfather made that furniture—Thomas McCain.”

“The one who started the business?” Sandra had only vague notions about such a distant past.

Her father nodded. “Thomas McCain was a carpenter, and in the old days, carpenters spent a lot of their time making coffins. So he's the one who started both businesses.”

“Where did he come from?” asked Sandra, suddenly curious.

“He came here from North Carolina in about 1850,” her father said as he reached for his cane. “He buried four wives and four children. He made their caskets, and it was such pretty work people started coming to him for their caskets.”

“People died young then,” Sandra said with a shudder.

“Later on, people started wanting to be embalmed and laid out in public. His son John McCain put out his shingle in 1889—Cabinetmaker and Undertaker.”

Sandra's father stopped to reflect, as if he could actually remember that far back. “Thomas McCain had fourteen children, and his first four wives died in childbirth. But he kept going—kept finding new young wives to tend to all those babies.” Her father laughed. “I always think about Thomas McCain when I take care of the dead. He's always in the background, giving me advice.”

Sandra started hanging around the furniture store. The place could use a few new ideas, she thought.

“God, Daddy, some of this furniture down here looks like furniture from hell!” she yelled at him from the sidewalk. He was on the balcony, reading an undertakers' journal. “Only Satanists would buy it.”

He hadn't said any more about the furniture he wanted her to have. She let the topic slide, not knowing what she would do with a collection of ratty old pieces. She didn't want to be responsible for them. Sandra rearranged the furniture in the store, making new combinations of tables and lamps and couches. She replaced the tacky dinette set in the window with plush love-seats. As a child, she had played with her dolls amid the clumsy pieces of furniture, and now she was playing there again. That was what she had always done with her life, she thought—play. In Alaska, Tom's log house was like a playhouse. She spent her time playing Scrabble with Tom, working jigsaw puzzles, making salmon quiche, building fires. She missed Alaska. In her memory it was warm.

Clemmie was sitting with them on the balcony, smocking a pinafore for a grandbaby. It wasn't quite dark. Teenagers on their way to the softball game passed below, jostling one another and screeching casual obscenities. Children on bicycles raced up the street, and barefoot kids tiptoed across the grass in front of the funeral side.

“Tomorrow is the longest day of the year,” Clemmie said.

“In Alaska the sun will shine all night long,” Sandra said.

Her father swatted at a bug. Sandra was annoyed that he and Clemmie had shown so little curiosity about Alaska. She felt twelve years old.

“In Alaska there's always something going on,” she said calmly. “Something incredible to see.”

Clemmie said, “The longest day of the year always comes sooner than I expect it to. I'm never ready for it.” She laughed. “It gets dark so late I don't get indoors in time to watch my television shows. But they're all reruns anyway.”

The telephone rang, and Sandra dashed inside to answer.

“I need to make some arrangements,” a woman said.

“I'm sorry, the funeral home is closed right now.”

“Well, Claude told me when my husband passed on he would make the arrangements. He had cancer, and he went about an hour ago.”

“I'm sorry,” Sandra said. “But my father's been sick. And the place is closed.”

“I know. Is Claude able to come to the phone? This is Mrs. Bud Johnson.”

Sandra recognized the name. Bud Johnson had been an old friend of her father's. She relayed the message. “What should I tell her?”

“Oh, mercy,” said Claude, struggling up from his chair. “Tell Daisy I'll have him brought over. I promised.”

“Dad, you're not able to do this.”

“Oh, I can do it. I've got plenty of help.” He nodded at her and Clemmie.

He grabbed the telephone and spoke soothingly to Mrs. Johnson. When he hung up, he stomped around the kitchen, punching the air with his cane. “Clemmie, get John over here to get the hearse out. It may need gas and oil.”

John was his assistant, an insurance man who had helped at the funeral home part-time for as long as Sandra could remember.

“Claude, are you sure you're up to this?” asked Clemmie.

“John and I can do it if you two can get the place ready,” he said, eyeing Sandra.

That night, she and her aunt opened the funeral side and aired it out. They plugged in large window fans and blew the stale air out—the stagnant sweet smell of powder and dead flowers and incense. Sandra had avoided the funeral parlor for years, but the smells were familiar. She shuddered and her lungs tightened. Clemmie hauled the industrial vacuum cleaner from the utility room.

As she turned on a chandelier, Clemmie said, “Now, Sandra, this won't be hard. We'll just clean up a little, and then tomorrow we'll take care of the details so your daddy won't have much to do at all.”

“Dad doesn't seem sad,” Sandra said. She realized her hands were trembling.