A Gate at the Stairs (39 page)

This story had nothing more to it, and my dad just stood there, as if searching for another one that might be more engaging to the crowd, something more revealing and entertaining, as even at funerals people shamelessly hoped just for a moment here and there to be amused. But I could see that this one story summed up everything for him. I stayed seated with my mother, who was not doing well. She was wearing the black hat with the feather sticking straight up. She drew the dangling sash of it across her quivering lips. I was wearing my hair pulled back in a black barrette fashioned in the shape of a crow. “What can a man say about losing his boy?” my father cried out, finally. He had raised his voice as if he were calling. “His only son? Well! I miss him more than any words can remotely convey. He was not just a good son, a good person. He was the very best kind.” That was all he said before his face clenched and purpled and he had to turn and come back down. My mother had given him a handkerchief, which he did not use to dab at his eyes but instead pressed completely over his face, like a barber’s hot towel. When my father walked back toward us from the pulpit, he took my mother’s hand and led her outside, leaving me behind. Organ music started up and everyone began to leave, to go out into that September sunshine to comfort my parents. I simply sat there. Soon the organist, too, got up and left, giving me a smiling nod as she did.

Alone in the church, I did not move for a long time. Then I craned my head around and couldn’t see anyone at all, and so I slid out of the pew and went up to the coffin, which was on a gurney draped with a heavy velvet blanket. On top of it was the cognac-colored casket, a large varnished thing, a shiny parlor piano with a flag draped over. I petted the lid of it. A yellow jacket, the kind you see trolling the trash cans at picnic spots, was walking on the edge. I took off my shoe and smacked it. Then in wiping it off with the folded program that had Robert’s photo on the front and the list of biblical readings inside and on the back the stunningly absurd numbers 1984–2002—what could they truly mean, especially with a bee’s guts now yellowing the second two?—it occurred to me that the coffin might be unlocked. I jabbed my fingers into the corner crack. One could open it—so I did. When I lifted the lid, the flag slid to the floor. It was not one of those fitted flag casket coverings they later made plenty of.

Within, as if placed in a quilted quitar case, lay a smashed guitar: a uniform of green, part pine, part portabella, part parsley, with parts of a man inside. I put my shoe back on and my program in my purse. “Hey there, Robert,” I said, but was afraid I might cry. I knew there were superstitions about touching dead people. But one belief had it that if you touched one you would never be lonely again. I climbed atop the gurney, up into the coffin, and fitted myself inside to nestle next to him. I was thin from all my weeks as a hawk in the salad fields, and I curled in against him, even with my purse, panting shallowly, as I hardly dared to breathe, dreading some stench or other. But one had to breathe. His smell at first seemed a chemical one, like the field fertilizer used by the agribiz farms. Field fertilizer! You could not make up stuff like that! Though the interior of the casket was quilted white, like a beautiful suitcase, what I could see of my brother looked like garbage tossed inside. He had no legs, it seemed, so there was room for mine. Beneath his uniform he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt put on backwards so that the hood could be pulled up over his face. I carefully pulled it down to see. Beneath the hood someone had stretched a clear plastic shower cap over his features. Beneath the shower cap, which I didn’t dare touch, I could see his nose and jaw were gone but there was still his full lower lip I knew so well, now lavender, and blistered, and the upper one, with its smattering of gingery freckles beneath the whisker stubble that still seemed fresh and black as pepper. His skin, what little I could see, had the jaundiced look of bad weather that had come and not left. His stammerless stillness seemed the loneliest and most dumbfounding thing.

“Robert,” I whispered. “It’s me.” We would be kids again, lying in the woods somewhere, except the smell was starting to seem horrible, and I was curled against him in such a way that I realized he’d been stuffed with things, styrofoam or something, as so many parts of him were missing. One sleeve was filled with stuffed newsprint, a paper sausage, which crunched when I lay my head on it. The hand protruding from the uniform cuff was a mannequin’s hand, knuckleless as a fish. I could see that death had settled him, flattened him, the way that a salad—of, say, three-season spring greens—flattened and settled after initially being fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl. How he had once been fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl!

In case I started to cry, I pulled the lid down back over us, a sateen ceiling, and it became very dark inside, although the hinge side of the lid, I could see, was not flush with the rest and there was a line of daylight there I could make disappear by closing my eyes. The space grew hot and cramped.

I could hear Robert’s friends come back into the church. Suddenly they became pallbearers again. “Hey, the flag slipped off,” said one, and they put it back on. “Bad luck,” said another. “Shut the fuck up,” said a third, and soon we were being trundled out of the church to the hearse. I listened for my father’s voice but didn’t hear it. We were lifted up and slid into the vehicle and then I did hear my father’s voice. “Where’s Tassie?” and then my mother’s: “I don’t know. I think maybe she went on ahead to the cemetery with some friends.”

I would lie in there with my brother forever. I would rescue him from this heap of trash that was oblivion, perhaps our old mending mortar of gum and glue and sesame seeds would help; a good drink of water; a snack of cheese. We could send out for pizza and Coke. The hearse started and we rode off to the edge of town near the Dellacrosse Village Cemetery. A name that seemed to suggest that all who were buried there lived in a kind of village. Well, we would have a kind of brute picnic of things when we got there, perhaps; we’d snap the bones of the drummer’s drumsticks and see whose wish came true. I petted Robert and the crumbledness of him and the terrible smell—like moldering shit in a plastic pencil case—made me no longer feel I was close to him. I’d been closer to him in the lettuce field that night. This was not actually, truly, him in this fetid spot.

My nose began to bleed. I had thought I was crying but then I could taste the metal of it. I had little experience with nosebleeds, and my mouth filled with coagulated clots like small chunks of liver. I wiped my nose and could feel the clots amid the mucus and blood. Still I lay next to his remains—there was no more apt word for the cobbled-together form I was curled against—I would lie there and preserve him somehow with memories. I would reassemble him with chat. I would say
Good morning
in the morning. I would say
Good night
at night. Not to do so ever again was just unthinkable. I would lie there and tell him the story of every movie I’d ever seen. I would not be no guy’s sister. I would lie in there until—until I began to weigh my options.

When we arrived at the parking lot and the funeral men set up the gurney and the pallbearers again came to carry the body out of the hearse, I decided to make my presence known. It was getting out not exactly when the getting was good but at least before the smallest crowd. As Robert’s friends lifted the casket onto the gurney I pushed up on the lid, poked my head out, and made my presence known. I clambered out the rest of the way. The light of the world hurt my eyes.

“What the hey?” one of Robert’s friends exclaimed.

“It’s Gunny’s sister,” said another.

“What were you doing in there?”

And then my mother came running over, tears raining down her face, and she just brushed me off and held me and motioned to the boys to close the casket lid.

In the cemetery there were rifles fired in the air in salute. More guns for Gunny. I recall that. There was a concrete park of angelic gargoyles or beastly cherubs—who could tell one from the other? There were white crosses and covered pots of geraniums and perfectly coned yews. There was a drummer, as I had expected, though no one broke his sticks and made a wish. There was “Taps,” mournful and familiar:

Day is done,
Gone the son.
It will stun,
No more fun,
Have a bun
.

And then the bridge off which the bugler hurled his lungs:

Night is nigh.
Say good-bye.
People die
.

There was a large flag folded neatly, amazingly into a triangle, then given to my mother, who neither held it to her heart nor thanked the skilled folder. She hurriedly crammed the thing into her handbag. And then the driving home. There were casseroles people had brought with tinfoil over the top, and the kitchen table was piled high with them. It looked like someone had died. And since someone had, this look at least did not contribute to any lies. I went upstairs to my pink room and basically stayed there for a month.

My parents arranged for a medical leave from school for me and I was told I should rest until I felt better. Our house had become a kind of
krankes Haus
. The local newspapers were brought to my room and I tried to read them. In our county, I learned, all the loons were stuck: I would just be one of them. But in fact it was widely reported that all the county’s loons were flightless, had caught a kind of botulism—from the fish they ate that had drunk bad water. Was this tainted water from clinic runoff or the natural occurrence of toxins in a lily pad? Who knew? There were some arguments on each side. But the birds’ wings had frozen in place, so the birds not only couldn’t fly but drowned right there in the water. Other articles told of ducks, deranged by mercury, who were reputedly wandering off from their nests and then making new ones, forgetting to go back to the first. I lay in bed, sick and not eating, storky beneath the sheets, my thoughts landing arbitrarily on this or that, like light moving past a window. The fulfillingness of my life’s every day had not just faltered but completely stopped.

The weather cooled; Japanese ladybugs, brought years before as pest control for the soy, had taken over the farmhouses, ours included. They formed shiny orange coverings on our windows and doors, and if you brushed at one it bit you. At night the ones that had made their way inside spent their time whacking themselves against the lampshades.

Songbirds, drunk on fermented mulberries, and leaving purple fecal puddles on branches and railings, once again got themselves confused and failed to get going south, lingering instead in the bare trees.

On Hoopen Road three cows were electrocuted in a storm.

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. I was reliving my old homework from Mythology for Freshmen. The work of grief, where only unsteady progress could be made, seemed at first Herculean. Then Sisyphean. Then Persean. Then Echovian. Then one was turned finally and prematurely into a flower or a tree, with a flower’s curvature and a tree’s yearning reach. Paralyzed. But with shoes. And dinner. And chores. I did
improve
, to use a medical verb, without actually feeling better, and as the autumn weeks went by more and more I left my room and began to help my father with the harvest and sometimes even rode with him, taking the small roads, among the drumlins and moraines to Chicago, delivering potatoes and our three-season spring mix to some restaurants, as well as occasionally setting up at the farmers’ markets there. My father wore my brother’s dog tags wherever we went. Certain moments the whole earth seemed a grave. Other times, more hopefully, a garden.

We would start off bright and early into the rising sun, the ground billowing up its dew in such heavy, magical vapors that when one was in the troughs of the highway one couldn’t see a foot ahead and the fields looked as if they were on smoky fire, preparing for the visitation of ascending or descending gods. Which could it be? Perhaps it was true what people used to say about our county: outer space was interested. But then the air would clear and the day would be awash in light. I studied the third-cutting hay rolled into tight coils on the fields and placed at perfect distances from one another, as if by an art department.

One had to get on with life, out of good manners if nothing else. My dad and I would strike up random conversation. “Seahorses give birth,” I would begin. “But they’re male. Why do we even call them male, if they give birth?”

And my dad would be silent, driving, considering. Then he would speak. “Because they insist on it. They don’t want what happened to ladybugs to happen to them. These ladybugs have masculinity issues to beat the band!”

I tried to laugh. I appreciated his trying to acknowledge me, be with me, though it had become difficult for him. Ahead of us ballooning clouds floated there absurdly, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Groups of geese crawled through the sky, their metallic honks declaring their departure south.

We would stop somewhere to eat and do just and only that: stop and eat. We got BLTs and soup and then would continue on our way. The brilliant gold leaves and grasses, the drying roadside timothy and bluestem, all looked on a nice day like a hymn to sunlight, when in fact, if one actually thought seriously about the situation, the mechanism of their dialogue with the sun had been shed entirely. The honey locusts had gone first, raining shimmering trails of seedlings into the gutters of the streets in town. Then the yam-and ham-hued maples. A papery caramel of leaves or a trail of maize or both lined every road we were on. How like the end of love to leave a beautiful corpse. When they weren’t gold against blue, like something royal, the oaks bore the flat blackish red of a blood orange, and my father and I would drive along staring out at them through the windshield, each of us thinking our own thoughts. One evening migrating songbirds, oriented toward the moon, mistook a red-lit cell phone tower for their destination and we watched as they all shredded themselves in the tower’s steel supports. More disastrous love performed in symbols. As we passed, my father slowed down, then sped up again. Silence was not the worst thing, though it still contained sorrow and making-do. Here and there a rabbit scurried across our path.