HITCHHICKING THE OTHER WAY
It was the first day I could leave the brownstone after a second nor’easter had shit another foot and half of snow all over Massachusetts. There was an uptick in the temperature in the days between the storms, so the first batch of static whiteness had achieved a polished glaze just before the sequel hit. I’d been stuck in the house all week—missed a meeting with my editor down in New York and had to reschedule two workshops at Emerson. I was lacing up my boots to head for groceries when my phone announced a call from an Indiana area code. My father’d been dead since I was fifteen, so there was only one possibility.
“When’d she go?” I answered.
My estranged mother had passed away at Bartholomew General at 8:07am. Complications from pneumonia. Impossibly, I was listed as her emergency contact. I booked a flight, packed a bag, and called a taxi.
In the winter, the drive from Indianapolis to Heartland is an hour on the ugliest stretch of I-65, mile after mile of a glacier-flattened grey wasteland, punctuated by green roadsigns heralding the state’s racist past, like the exit for Whitestown and Brownsburg. The last time I was on this highway was hitchhiking the other way—seventeen with my thumb in the air and my head up my ass, as my father was wont to say.
I hadn’t known where I was going, only that I couldn’t stay where I was. My dad had been six feet deep for two years and my mother had turned to stone, a smoking statue hunkered over the kitchen table while the refuse of life piled up around her. She didn’t talk and her flat, glassy eyes never looked my way. I was fine with it, or told myself I was. She’d been driving the night Dad died. If she wanted to drink down all the blame, I’d not deny her that poison.
My solace during that time was Alice. We met in French class our freshman year. It wasn’t anything as cliché as love-at-first-sight, but her mother had died giving birth to her little sister, so when my dad died, she was there, and though we never talked about it—not directly—that was the invisible lasso that held us tight. We imagined ourselves sophisticated intellectuals plucked from some French existentialist film and plunked down in this podunk town of local yokels. Things we liked were le shit and things we hated were le fuck. We shaved the sides of each other’s heads and dyed our hair black. We’d hitchhike to Indianapolis for punk and grunge shows, to buy pot, and get books the Heartland library wouldn’t carry. We took turns reading aloud from Bukowski’s Love is a Dog From Hell in the back of a pickup full of migrant workers on their way back from Georgia’s peach-picking season.
*
Heartland had changed as much as I had. Still there was the bar on the corner run by Agatha—she’d looked like an old sea captain, so we’d called it Hagatha’s—but its gravel parking lot was now paved. The black walnut trees in the town square that had seemed ancient and immutable giants when I was a boy had devolved into a thin line of young silver maples. The general store with the oldtime candy counter had been cleared away, replaced by a shiny, bright Sunoco. What hadn’t changed, and I hadn’t even thought about, was Heartland’s lack of hotel. But there was still a payphone in front of the faded brick post office across the highway from the bar.
Punchdrunk on nostalgia, I looked Alice up in the phone book, flipping through the pages as my fingers grew cold and breath frosted my week-old grey stubble. Either she’d never married or kept her last name when she did. I dialed most of the number before hanging up. Twice. First, I realized the time—well after one. The second, I can’t say. Or won’t. The third time, I dialed the whole thing and it rang.
A long pause between the click of the receiver and a breathy voice clogged with sleep, “Jesus, Jesse, I told you to stop calling late. If you’re too drunk to drive, you can walk.”
“It’s—it’s Philip. Phil. Le Phil.”
A snow plow slushed by and three guys came out of Hagatha’s and lit cigarettes, carrying their bar voices into the night.
There was a quick sniff of breath, like she’d fallen back to sleep and rewoke. And then, a drowsy, “You ain’t real.”
“I can quite assure you that I am real, freezing my real ass off, in front of the real Heartland fucking post office—”
“Shut up, Phil. You’re Santa Claus. I stopped believing in you when I grew up.”
One of the smokers made a joke and whoops of laughter rolled in.
“Go home to your momma, Phil.” Click, silence, dialtone, numb fingers, red ears, hot breath condensing on a black plastic receiver.
*
Small town bars are the Hadron colliders of their community. Everyone is a subatomic particle, spitfired from their homes, from their jobs, from their church, and it’s in the bar that those particles collide, shatter into their constituent elements near lightspeed, replicating the undifferentiated chaos of the early universe. All the energy pent up in those particles is released and we find out what people are made of.
Which is how I’d fictionalized Hagatha’s in my first novel. I called it something like The Woodshed, a place you’d get taken out behind and beaten. Which is what happened to a character in that book. I never really knew what happened in Hagatha’s before I’d left Heartland. Our gradeschool bus stop was the bar’s parking lot. Every morning, we’d examine the evidence left in the gravel from the night before—cigar stubs and cigarette butts. We’d collect beer tabs like war trophies, the ones with the metal tongue worth the most. We’d see broken autoglass or a bloodstain on the wooden porch, but the actions behind the evidence were speculation. We knew they served Rocky Mountain Oysters, which were deep fried sheep balls, and that if one of us caught a big enough turtle, we could bring it in for stewmeat and Hagatha’d pay us three dollars, a prepubescent fortune. Everything else was rumor or hearsay stolen from whispered parents’ stories during hungover morning coffee or through the fallout of the occasional divorce that came rolling through town.
I needed a drink and the flask in my jacket was long empty. Inside, the men who’d been smoking when I was on the phone were emptying a pitcher and a couple of twenty-somethings were throwing darts in the back. Two old Hemingways in Monsanto caps mumbled at the dull bar. I sidled up a seat and asked for a rye, Bulleit, neat. “Make it a double.”
The bartender was a thin-scalped flannel scarecrow about my own age. He said, “Yeah, sure,” and grabbed the bottle. “It’s last c-call, you know.”
“Better double the double then.”
He poured, filling the tumbler. “What accent-cent is that, f-friend?”
I drank until it burned. “Never thought about it.”
He cocked his head and I could tell he could tell. “Well, I’ll b-be an uncle fucker. Phil-fucking-Milton.”
It took me a moment longer, but the stutter clicked it for me. Cody . . . something. For a while, we rode the bus to the county school together, but he was a year or two ahead of me. Story was he wasn’t born with a stutter, but he saw his friend Joe blow himself up with a homemade grenade when he was eight or nine. He didn’t talk at all for almost a year, and after that, the stutter.
“Guilty as charged,” I said.
Cody came around the bar and gave me one of those half-handshake-half-hugs and asked how I was. He said he knew about my career—hell, the whole town knew about it. And weren’t too happy either. “I don’t give a f-fuck. You were right to write about this p-place like you did. I know you called it something different, but we all knew. Ain’t most p-people read em, but you know.”
“Like the Bible,” I said.
“Huh?” The dart players filed out, hooting, and winter galloped in behind them.
“Nobody’s read it but they all think they know what’s in it.”
Cody said he’d heard about my mom, about the pneumonia. If the state hadn’t sent people over to seize the house, she’d’ve died alone in there. She hadn’t had fuel oil at the house since last winter and water’d been leaking through the roof into the walls. The county sent workers to mow her lawn in the summers because she wouldn’t do it and the weeds had grown up close to four feet and everyone said it brought the rats. They billed her for the yardwork, tacked it onto unpaid property taxes. People tried to help, but she didn’t answer the door and the occasions when she did, she answered it spitting and swearing.
“C-crazy as a shithouse rat,” Cody said. “Kids call it the W-witch’s House and dare-dared each other to go to the door, that ki-kind of thing.”
“Ding, dong, the Witch is dead,” I deadpanned and drained the tumbler.
He stepped back. “One for the r-road?”
I nodded. He poured. I went home to my mother.
*
It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in a car in the winter. Although it was a crispy Indiana summer with knives of dry yellow grass stabbing into kids’ bare feet when I left Heartland, it was quickly winter. And though loading engine parts onto the line at an industrial painting factory in Cincinnati earned enough to buy a Ford as old as I was, it wasn’t enough for an apartment. By the time Pantech Coating figured out I wasn’t eighteen, I’d already moved on to Syracuse where I landed a job as an apprentice butcher. I’d never made enough money to get by before, but butchers are paid well. And I was good at it. It wasn’t easy, standing in a refrigerator for eight hours a day wearing chainmail gloves, severing flesh from bone—not haphazard, but precise. One needs finesse with a twelve-inch chef’s knife, finesse with a cleaver, finesse with a boning knife. Hell, finesse with a hacksaw on those rare occasions when the slaughterhouse hadn’t cut all the way through a thick bone. The secret’s in the natural seams in the animal’s musculature. Butchering is really the wrong word for it. When done right, the animal should fall apart, effortless.
But I’ve written about all of this before. Different jobs in different books. Different Heartland in different books. Different Alice in different books. Different Mom, Dad, everybody. This fucking house in different books.
I rose with the sun, started the rental and cranked the heat. The heater blew tiny crystals of snow for a moment and then it was warm. The yard was an untouched halffoot of cake frosting glistening in the pinkblue light of dawn. Dad’s truck, front end still smashed in, passenger-side door still jaws-of-lifed open, sat way back in the lawn next to the corrugated sheetmetal shed. There were fresh tiretracks and footprints in the gravel—presumably from police and paramedics. Someone had closed the door on their way out.
I could have gone in the house after I’d left Hagatha’s. I could have and I didn’t. It had become the nightmare version of my childhood home, a serial killer’s house in a slasher film—too obvious by half. And though someone had left a light on, a single solitary bulb somewhere deep in the house, I couldn’t go in.
It’s not hyperbole to say the house was a corpse. It was mausoleum quiet when I took that first step through the one-hinged porch door and the winter wind rang our old rusted dinner bell. The clapboards had gone paintless and the windows that weren’t cracked were missing, patched with duct-tape and cardboard. The wood panelling in the living room had warped and buckled with water damage. Pink insulation like too-hot cotton candy oozed between the slats baring the bones of the house.
A thin path snaked from the front door through the kitchen and toward the back door, but everything else was ceiling to floor junk. The staircase led to an upper landing filled with stacks of boxes and jars and bags. The fireplace was hidden behind stacks of books, and the wall above it was soot-stained several feet above the mantle. The walls were more fracture than plaster and I ground the crumbs into warped floorboards. The stove was left open and the kitchen table had been overturned, its contents avalanched onto the linoleum below.
My grandfather had built this house, brought it forth like a newborn, fresh and pink and loved. He’d listened to it cry out in the night and wet its bed and was—God bless its heart—more trouble than it was worth. It had lived a long life; there had been births and deaths, like my uncle Jim who broke his neck falling down the basement stairs long before I was born, or Mamaw Kate, always calling me “You asshole!” with a throat full of laughter who’d slipped away while digging in the garden. These rooms had been filled with late-night arguments, Thanksgivings, and drunken Christmas Eve gropings in the dark under mistletoe, and however many hours lost into the fragments of television scattered like buckshot on the decayed living room floor.
And then I understood why we bury our dead.
*
The rest of the day was spent making arrangements. The water wasn’t running, so I went to the truckstop on the highway to take a shower, ate breakfast at the waffle house. I went to the funeral home to pick out the casket and all the trimmings. I called Bartholomew General to have the body sent over, but the funeral home had presciently done it. I made an appointment with a probate lawyer to discuss Mom’s will, the house, the property, the unpaid taxes. Around noon a waste management company from Columbus dropped off a twenty-yard dumpster.
We know the most about past civilizations not by what they left in their huts and caves, but by what they left in the refuse piles behind their homes. Broken pottery, swatches of fabric, the bones of animals. We can tell what season they hunted by the ages of their prey. Young deer in the spring, old deer in the fall, shells and fish in the summer, the seeds of gourds in the winter. And in this way, I excavated my mother’s civilization.
Closest to the door was the mail; I could set a timeline by depth like an icecore from the arctic. A few feet down, where the mail had gotten wet, repeatedly, it had fused into puply layers of filo. I worked my way through the house, filling wheelbarrows with twenty years of refuse. Most of the bagged garbage was in one place—the pantry by the back door was filled with it. Much of the clutter was unopened boxes, knickknacks and kitchen doodads ordered from latenight infomercials. The bathroom and the linen closet was filled with unused bottles of shampoo and exfoliators and youth-sustaining supplements and lotions she’d bought in bulk but never used.
In the evening, the sun turned the house from mottled browns to inky blacks and the few bulbs in the house did little to erase the shadows. I was dumping the last wheelbarrow of pots of long dead plants when a late 60s Impala pulled up behind the dumpster. In the dark, I could barely make out her features; in silhouette Alice hadn’t changed at all, still hiding in long skirts and drapey layers over her too-thin frame. As early as middle school, her mother had accused her of various eating disorders, which made her a very public eater. “See, Mom, fried chicken!” she’d say, cartoonishly gnawing on KFC. The boys called her Skeletor and the girls in our class whined it wasn’t fair, that thinness and that appetite in one person and Alice ended up just as self-conscious had she fallen on the other end of the spectrum of acceptable bodies.
She was carrying a dish, shivering in the December dusk. “Phil, I just heard about your momma this afternoon. About last night—”
“No,” I said, “don’t apologize.”
“But that crack about your going home to your momma—I didn’t know.”
“Really, it’s fine.” Sweating like a sinner, I swiped my forehead with the arm of my coat. Lights came on in the house across the street. I nodded toward it. “Mrs. Truitt?”
“No,” she said, “her son—remember Billy?—he came back after Perdue with a wife. They own it now. He’s a pharmacist. Bought the drug store.”
“Yeah, I remember. Him and his sister were riding double on this banana-seat bike and they ran that stop sign and Dad bumped them with the truck. Nothing serious. Billy got a couple stitches in his knee, if I remember.”
“Remember” lingered in the air like an echo between us and I had to fill the void in its wake so I said “Remember*”* again and asked about other people we’d known. About the couple that used to yell at us when we went past their house into the woods by the graveyard at the bottom of Campus Hill, about old Principal Brost at the high school who always looked stoned and claimed his red eyes were allergies, about our friend Jolene, who’d gotten pregnant our junior year and moved to Wisconsin.
Alice didn’t answer my questions. She handed over the dish in her shivering hands. “I reckoned you’d be hungry. It’s chili and cornbread.”
“And you,” I stumbled, “how are you?”
She smiled. “There you go. I knew you’d get there.”
“Sorry, I’m just—”
“Everybody said your nose got so high you’d drown in a rainstorm.”
“Ain’t drown yet.”
Our breath condensed in thick clouds. “You almost done in there?”
“Not even. Still got the bedrooms yet. It’s like she was a warehouse for twenty thrift stores. Wanna see?”
“No, no. I got to get back.”
“Family?”
“No, bakery. Opened it a couple years ago. Gotta prep for the morning.”
“Any good?”
Alice nodded toward the dish in my hand. “Cornbread’s le shit.” She got back in the Impala, honked twice, and drove off.
*
Hagatha’s was two blocks from the house, so I walked over, Alice’s chili warming my hands. The bar was busier than the night before. Bustling even. A young crowd in tight clothes drank in a pack around a banging bluegrass band. I must have been too old because it was too loud. It took three shouts to the girl bartending with Cody to understand my order. I ate at the bar and learned to order drinks between songs. I called the bartender Fitz and she asked, every time, if I hadn’t had enough to drink. I put a fifty and my flask on the bar and said just fill the thing. During intermission the crowd clamored around, jostling for the bartenders’ attention. A surge from behind dropped my tumbler onto the side of the chili bowl, spilling both across the bar. There was yelling, recriminations, apologies, drinks bought, messes cleaned.
“Oh, yeah, of course. We’ve read your books. Right?” someone said.
“Of course,” said someone else.
“Yes, yes, we loved them,” said someone either very slowly or very sarcastic.
“I’m Jesse,” voice number one said, “and this is Daryl and Carl and Shawn. And that’s Charlene over there—that’s Shawn’s old lady.”
But she was no old lady; they were all younger than me and it was too hazyredmoving to make them out clearly. They could have been my students. Hell, Jesse could have been my own son. But we cavorted like a night with my grad students, shouting over the music in a garrulous way, conversation shifting in starts and stops stabbed in between with twists of laughter.
“Come for a drive with us,” they said with a wink and I said I would.
Cody saw me leaving. He grabbed my arm and in my ear said, “Wait, d-don’t go. I called Alice. She’s on her w-way down.”
“Oh, now she wants to come,” I shouted. “You tell that bitch—”
“T-tell her wh-what?”
“Tell her . . . her cornbread ain’t half bad.”
*
We roadied up sloping hills, through back roads, and along dirt tracks between barren fields. I hadn’t smoked pot since before tenure and I’d grown unaccustomed to the cloudy, lurching, neologistic portmanteau of cratercake it made of consciousness. I took pulls off my flask as the joint made its rounds. This was no different than when I lived in Heartland, Alice and I and whoever else in her daddy’s car cruising these selfsame roads. Time folded in on itself as Jesse’s headlights knived through the countryside. Sharp stalks of harvested corn lined the fields like the business side of an iron maiden and as the car caromed around corners, I felt the maiden close up around me. “Stop, stop,” I said, “we need to stop.” And then we were stopped. I rolled out onto the icy ground, hands cold in grey snow and up came chili and liquor.
I rinsed my mouth with a handful of sandy snow, spitting slush and grains back to the ground. We were parked on the Crawfish River Bridge, a Depression-era CCC project that was more rust than steel. We’d fished under it when we were boys, bringing home buckets of catfish and crawdads. Jesse and his friends were hooting, kicking the iced-over snowbanks down into the Crawfish.
“The river’s not frozen?” I asked, leaning over the railing.
“Nah,” Jesse yelled back, chunking some ice with a boot. “Colder’n a witch’s tit now, but it’d been real nice up til.”
The sky was laced with a thick crystalline blanket of grey and I stared down into the black waters of the Crawfish. Usually it would be frozen this time of year and us boys would slide around on the ice, follow it for miles into the woods when the trails were too packed with snow. Once I fell through the ice down river from the monastery and had to walk home, soaked and frozen to the bone. It was only two miles, but it took hours because I was alone and had to hide behind trees and houses until I could kindle the illusion of enough warmth to make a run for the next windbreak while cursing the river that had tried to kill me.
Jesse stood next to me, looking where I was looking. “You know, I hated you for a real long time. Blamed you for my dad leaving us.”
“How is that my fault? If you think my books—”
“It’s not you’re fucking books, Phil. Christ.” He sighed and played the railing of the bridge like a piano.
I told myself I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Did they make you read that Owl Creek Bridge story?” I said.
“What?”
“This guy is on a bridge, about to be hung and when he goes over, the rope breaks and he falls into the river and swims to safety while soldiers shoot at him.”
“Nah, I never read that.”
“It was like fourth grade. This is the bridge I imagined when I read it.”
“This is that bridge?” he said absently.
“No, no. But it’s a mindfuck. He finally makes it all the way home to his wife. But he’s dead. The rope didn’t break. The whole thing is just his imagination stretched out in the seconds between the rope breaking his neck and his brain dying.”
“Fuck,” he said. There was a firm hand on my back.
“Deadman’s last hope of what might have been.”
Jesse said, “That’s some dark shit, Phil.” A hand on my shoulder. “The railing’s icy. Why don’t you step back, hey?”
So I took a step.
*
Jesse drove back to Heartland, dropping off his friends along the way. I zigzagged through consciousness and dreamed dreams and then it was morning. My head rattled like soggy maracas in time with the knocks on the front door.
“Hang on, hang on.” I was frozen solid, still in my coat, laying on a pile of blankets three feet deep in the corner of the laundry room. Standing, I stepped in a box full of Precious Moments figurines still in their bubble wrap. The knocking continued. My breath condensed around my head like thunderclouds as I made it to the front door where Alice was banging away on the one-hinged porch door.
“Half-bad? You asshole.” In the morning light her features were clear and though she’d aged, she hadn’t creased in the way I had, gone grey in the way I had. Her large eyes were hooded and framed with fresh crows feet and her hawkish nose had grown sharper. She scowled but her voice was betrayed by a warmth behind her words. She pushed a thermos of coffee into my chest and stepped past me, onto the porch stacked with old mattresses and engine parts.
“What are you doing here?”
She picked up a small cardboard box smeared with fingerprints of motor oil and shook it. “Nuts and bolts,” she said. I thumbed toward the dumpster outside. She tossed the box and it clanged when it hit.
We continued our excavation, sorting the junk from the salvageable. Closer to the floor and the surfaces of tables, we began to find artifacts infused with familiarity. My boyhood toybox was still in my bedroom closet, though the room had, evidence suggested, been temporarily used for sewing. The last layer of papers and food containers on the dining room table revealed an essay I’d written for a history class on Ginsberg’s “Howl” and its 1957 obscenity trial. I paged through it, admiring my anger, but embarrassed by my prodigious use of logical fallacies.
We began in silence but as the day warmed, our energies waned. We grew more talkative and punchy, and Alice filled me in on the intervening twenty years. Her younger sister had gone to IU, majored in communications, married a painter, and moved to NYC. They were doing well, living in Williamsburg, enjoying the “rise and fall of hipster gentrification,” she’d said in an email. Their daddy had passed only a few years ago from liver failure.
“Not drinking.” she defended. “It was all that aspirin he took for his arthritis.”
We used a dolly to wheel out the old washer and dryer after we’d bagged the piles of moldy clothes. I told her about college, about grad school at Syracuse, about my brownstone near Emerson, about teaching and publishing, about having my second novel optioned by HBO but dying in production hell.
Alice had stayed in Heartland to help her daddy raise her sister. Later, she took culinary and bakery classes over in Columbus, but dropped out when her daddy got sick. After he passed, she bought the Klaussen place and reopened the bakery. Somewhere in there she’d been married, a delinquent named Jed who drank hard and left her in the lurch when their boy, Jesse, was just a toddler. It wasn’t the story I’d have written for her.
I went outside. There was a case of old Coke bottles next to the front steps and I began hurling them into the dumpster, one by one, watching the glass shatter and slushy Coke spray. I felt Alice behind me.
“You waited, what, two years before you married somebody else,” I clenched, throwing another bottle. “How long did you date before that? How long did you wait for me?”
“You never came back. Did you forget?”
I turned. “Yeah and what if I did come back and I saw you walking your little happy baby stroller, what then?”
“Ain’t a damn body asked your fucking pot to boil. You left me. You left me here, Phil.”
“You should have come.”
“I should have abandoned my family when they needed me most? That’s the difference—”
I threw another bottle but it went wide and smashed on the road.
“You should have stayed.”
“And what?” I shouted, “Be a butcher? A baker—”
“You son of a bitch,” she said, shaking her head. “You done drown already.”
“—a candlestick maker?”
Alice pushed past me toward her car. “Knaves, all three,” she said, and was gone.
I flung myself through the nearly empty house looking for more things to smash. I reached for the fireplace poker and thought what a fucking cliché that would be, but I couldn’t stop moving, trapped in that dead emptiness.
Then I threw open the door at the end of the hall—we’d never cleaned out my parents’ room. Inside was much of the same: stacks of boxes, piles of clothes—most with the tags still on, overflowing garbage cans, a television with no knobs and a wire hanger for an antennae on top of the dresser, and a rats’ nest of blankets on the bed that she’d slept in, where the sheriff and the paramedics had found her hovering near death.
And there, on the nightstand was a stack of my books in trade paperback, dogeared and crackspined. I opened the top one, my latest—just out last year—and scanned the pages like a flipbook. I stopped to read the underlined passages. Each one was a scene where I’d railed against mothers—delinquent, drunk, missing, absconded, dead. Every marked passage excoriated these women, and there was a lot of red. Mom had lain there and what remained of her heart had been carved away. Fuck passive voice: I had butchered her long before the pneumonia had. But butchering is the wrong word for it. The secret’s in the natural seams of the musculature. Done right, she’d fallen apart, effortless.
I crawled into the divot in the blankets where she had lain, clutched a book to my chest like a doll and I cried. Of course she’d read them, I’d meant her to. When I was a kid, she’d been my rock, my protector, the center of my little universe. She should have come back to me—I’m sorry, I’m sorry—shocked from her catatonia by my words. But that’s not what happened. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I don’t know how long I laid there, but what little light that had fought its way through the thick amber curtains died away and only long after that did I sleep.
*
The morning of the funeral I was bleary-eyed and tomato-faced and the wrinkles had never relaxed out of my suit after the flight. The frizzy-headed funeral director had said I shouldn’t expect too many people, that Mom hadn’t been to church since they’d shuttered the old one, that she’d shunned her friends, and was close to no one at all. But the director was wrong, and the Heartland community couldn’t resist seeing the Witch. Children of eight or nine poked their heads in the door, then lurched forward as if shoved, then scattered back.
But that was wrong too. The funeral wasn’t only an exhibition of the Witch. I recognized friends of my parents in their wizened husks; Mr. Killian, the kindergarten teacher who’d scared me half to death when he shaved his beard over Christmas break; the woman we called Crickett who ran the post office; even Cody was there, hanging his wife’s coat on the rack with the others. It was like a high school reunion. There were so many of my classmates there with pot bellies and wrinkles and hands long used and thick with callouses. Someone pressed a styrofoam cup of black coffee into my hand, patted me on the back, said words I heard but didn’t understand. I was still cold in my core from two nights without heat and the coffee couldn’t cross that thermocline.
Toward the front, the coffin was closed but people still lined up, stood over it for a moment, murmuring. I waded through silent stares and whispered speculations. I found myself momentarily outraged at the brochure stands advertising the funeral home’s services, at the kitschy bon mots about grief sketched on chalkboards with driftwood frames, at the strange painting of a young boy and girl burying a dead rabbit next to their house hanging on the wall behind an easel of old family photos of Mom and Dad—one on their wedding day, one of Mom at the waterfalls when I got the leech on my leg, another much later in front of Dad’s pickup the day he brought it home, shiny and proud, one of them holding infant me at Bartholomew General, and I wondered who the funeral home got the photographs from.
The pastor went to the podium next to the casket as people filed into their seats. I welcome you, solemn occasion, moment of silence, greater plans, full life, God, God, God. Something about a shepherd, something about sheep. Throw in a dove and a better place and we’re back to God and the seats next to Him and then the pastor’s hands outstretched, palms up presenting invisible pies to the congregated. God-death funeral pies. Eat it up, eat it up, because in the moment you need them most, they have the least to offer, and they know it.
When the preacher asked if anyone would like to speak, to share stories or thoughts about her, the crowd stirred, shifted. There were hands on my shoulders then warm lips skimmed my ear and Alice’s whisper said, “You don’t have do this,” because she thought it would be more of the same, the evisceration so on display in my books. I touched her hand and looked in those slate eyes and asked her to trust me.
Everyone’s eyes were on me as I took to the podium and the preacher retreated. I stood before Heartland and my mother’s story, the real story, the half I’d never told in my books readied itself whole and perfect in its potentiality. A little girl, christened Kathleen, born on the winter solstice, in the darkest moment of the shortest day of the year, who’d skipped her way to and from kindergarten, who’d saved an injured collie from a combine thresher, who’d been princess of her prom and valedictorian of her class, who’d saved her father from alcoholism with an unrelenting assault on every hidden whiskey bottle, who’d married a seventh-generation dairy farmer who’d imagined himself a Jeffersonian country gentleman, who single-handedly ran a bookmobile in Heartland and raised funds to open its first library, who raised a colicky and jaundiced infant through endless screaming nights—but Mom’s story reeled away from me, taking my breath along with it. Suddenly I was too warm, then too hot—stifling—peeling off my jacket, sweating and shuddering toward the door, and hands—all those hands reached out, touching pressing healing pushing feeling holding molding guiding my way out into the white ice where I fell on my back in the bank of snow outside the parlor and everything was bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine.
And there I lay, relieved of my fever, and thought I might fall asleep in the melting snow when there was a flutter of garments; Alice, poking her head out the door, fresh and cool and sweet. “Get back in here, you asshole. Jolene’s mom is telling the story about the time the county tried to fire your mom over the so-called ‘pornographic’ pictures in the childbirth books.”
So I went back inside and stood with Alice and listened as Heartland told their stories of my mother.