Alice Bliss (33 page)

They take the scenic route to Locust Lawn, avoiding the highway and winding along Plank Road and then out on Blossom. It’s a beautiful day, which is what everyone keeps saying in order to have something to say. But it’s true. It’s a perfect spring day, a perfect baseball day, a perfect garden day. Uncle Eddie rolls the windows down even though Angie and Gram complain about their hair. They’re only going a stately fifteen miles per hour, how wrecked can your hair get? And Eddie is right to roll the windows down; the air is soft and sweet and it buoys them all, at least for a moment.

“Would you look at that?” Uncle Eddie says.

Dozens of cars line their route all the way to the cemetery, pulled over on the side of the road, their hazard lights flashing. Some people stand by their cars, their hands on their hearts; others sit quietly, their heads bowed.

On the last hill up to the cemetery, two Boy Scout troops stand at attention, holding flags.

The honor guard is already in place when they arrive. They have arranged Matt’s helmet, rifle, boots, and dog tags next to the grave.

Allison Mahoney and her father and both brothers are everywhere at once, escorting old people from their cars, seating people, signaling the priest to begin. These people should plan weddings or maybe warfare. They’ve got it all down.

The honor guard, just like the detail that escorted Matt’s body home, lives in another dimension, a world of precision and perfectibility. It is almost soothing to watch their smooth exact unison motions. Until they present arms and start shooting off their damn guns.

Then it’s the priest again. Again?! And the sign of the cross and something about silver cords and broken bowls and the spirit returning to the earth. Okay, Alice gets that part. That’s okay.

The soldiers take the flag from the coffin and fold it tightly, timing each fold, each move, the number of steps toward each other, the number of steps to hand the flag to Angie, the number of steps away.

In unison, they execute a slow ceremonial salute.

Angie holds the flag and Alice and Ellie hold each other and Gram as one soldier plays taps and they lower the coffin into the earth.

Normally playing taps would undo her. Alice can hear people quietly crying all around them, followed by all the unsuccessful attempts to discreetly blow noses. But the super quiet winch lowering the coffin into the grave and the fake grass hiding the raw earth and the way everything stops at this point is so jarring that Alice can’t even imagine crying. Like it’s all done, it’s all finished. But it’s not. She doesn’t get it. They are here to bury her father, not leave him alone in a gaping hole. What is going on? Do they think it’s too real to see broken sod and turned earth; too real to actually fill in the grave? As if the family somehow needs to be protected from these gory details? There is no detail worse than the plain fact of Matt’s death. The rest of it should be simple and honest and handmade. Not this stage set.

Some people have brought flowers, which they throw into the grave. Alice doesn’t like that; she thinks it looks like litter. She manages to stay focused on her anger until Uncle Eddie’s surprise makes his appearance: a bagpiper standing on the green grass rise above them. Oh, no, she thinks, there is nothing more mournful than bagpipes. But what he plays is not mournful. It is a rollicking march; it is joyful and raucous and fast and alive. You could follow this song into battle or through the gates of hell.

As Alice listens to the piper she knows that she wants real dirt and real shovels; as real as this music, as real as the coffin that contains what is left of her father.

In the silence that follows, there’s a kind of rush to get out of the cemetery, with friends and relatives leading the way to the cars. Mrs. Grover and Mrs. Piantowski and Mrs. Minty are already back at the house with Sally and Ginny from The Bird Sisters, putting together the collation. The night before, Uncle Eddie and Mr. Grover and Henry supervised the gathering of all the neighborhood picnic tables and folding chairs. Food has been pouring in for days.

The promise of that food, and maybe even a good stiff drink, or simply getting away from the land of the dead and back to the land of the living, has put a spring in the step of most everyone who turns away from the grave to head to their cars.

The piper has left the rise and is walking through the woods that border the graveyard. Now he is playing a dirge, now he is playing an ending, not a beginning, gathering their tears and their sorrow into song.

 

Alice wants to stay until they fill in the grave, but there is not a shovel in sight. Angie is preoccupied with some family friends who can’t come back to the house and are saying their good-byes now. Alice scans the graveyard looking for the actual tools of the trade or even a pair of gravediggers. Instead, she finally spots a small backhoe tucked discreetly out of sight behind some trees and an older man in overalls patiently smoking a cigarette, waiting for them to leave so he can finish his job.

That’s when she sees him: a young man in uniform standing too far away to have heard the service, but focused intently on her father’s grave. He somehow manages to look ramrod straight and broken at the same time. Before she even has time to think, to formulate words, she is running toward him.

He backs away from her, holding his hands out in front of him to keep her from coming closer.

“Are you Travis Boyd?”

He looks at Alice for a long, uncomfortable moment. Alice is taking in the circles under his eyes, the way his dress uniform hangs too loosely on his frame, the tremor in his hands as he tries to figure out what to do with them.

“You are, aren’t you?”

He looks at the ground.

“You knew my dad, didn’t you? You were in his unit.”

He nods, not lifting his head.

“You were with him when—”

He begins to back away from her, still looking down.

“Wait. Don’t go.”

He turns and begins to limp up the slope toward the drive where his rental car is parked. Alice runs to catch up with him. He keeps her at bay with a sharp gesture. She stops as he continues toward the car.

“Please. You were the last person to—”

He stops. She can hear that he is struggling for breath from this quick walk and realizes that he is probably in pain.

“We’ve been trying to reach you. My mother wanted to write to you. Or call you or—”

He straightens his shoulders and turns to face her. He is not crying. Nothing as simple as that. His eyes are hollow and his face is contracted in a grimace of suffering so intense Alice stumbles as she takes a quick step away from him.

“He was a good soldier. He looked after his men.”

He pauses. It is not clear he will continue. Alice waits.

“He was like a big brother. . .. That was the worst day for me. . . . Not being able to get Matt out . . . That was the worst day . . .”

“Was he—?” Alice begins.

The car door opens and another soldier emerges to hold open the rear passenger door for Travis Boyd.

“I have to go.”

“Would you like to come back to the house? We have so much food. My mother would like to meet you.”

“I just wanted to pay my respects.”

“I could show you my dad’s workshop.”

He tilts his head so he can look at her out of the corner of his eye.

“He talked about you.”

“And I could show you his garden.”

“I saw pictures of you. And your little sister.”

The soldier at the car calls out to him. And suddenly Alice realizes that he is a nurse or an orderly.

“Sergeant Boyd.”

He turns toward the voice and the car and his escape. And then, with a great effort, he turns to her again, pulls himself upright, stills his hands by pressing them against his thighs.

“I am so sorry for your loss.”

Alice waits while Travis Boyd is helped into the backseat of the car. He takes his hat off and leans his head back and closes his eyes. He turns his head to look at her as the car starts up and moves away. She holds his gaze for as long as she can and then watches the car disappear down the grassy drive headed for the main road.

She can’t begin to take this in, to process what kind of horror and trauma can destroy a young man like Travis Boyd. She suddenly knows, like a kick to the gut, that what happened to her father is even worse than she has imagined, worse than it is possible to imagine.

She turns back when she hears a new motor sound and heads down the hill in time to see the backhoe emerge from the copse of trees and approach her father’s grave. The fake grass has been rolled up, the winch taken away. Now there is a hole in the ground and a coffin and dirt.

She waves at the man driving the backhoe. He stops and cuts the engine.

“Do you have a couple of shovels?”

“That’s not how we do it anymore, miss. A lot of people, they have the wrong idea.”

“I’d just like to be the one to bury my father. If you don’t mind.”

“You’re not exactly dressed for the job.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be with the rest of them?” He indicates the cars pulling out of the cemetery.

“They’ll keep.”

He reaches behind him and pulls out a pair of shovels, climbs out of the backhoe and hands one to Alice. He turns back to grab a work shirt and a pair of rubber boots.

“That dress is too pretty to mess up.”

“Thank you.”

Alice buttons the shirt over her dress and steps into the rubber boots.

“My name is Caleb,” he offers.

“Alice Bliss,” she replies.

The sound of the clods of dirt hitting the wood of the coffin may be the most upsetting sound she has ever heard. But as they continue the sounds become muffled, dirt on dirt, and she can concentrate on the bend, lift, swing of her body and the shovel; the simplicity and rhythm and relief of real work.

She looks up to see Henry and his father walking toward them, carrying the folding snow shovels they keep in the trunk in case of an emergency. They have left their suit jackets in the car. They take a moment to roll up their sleeves and then, without a word, set to work alongside them.

“This is Caleb,” she tells them. “And this is my friend Henry and his father, Mr. Grover.”

The men nod to each other without breaking stride. Alice breathes in. It smells like the garden, but it’s not.

“It doesn’t take long,” Caleb offers.

“No.”

“You appreciate the machine on the other end of this job, I can tell you that.”

“I bet.”

“Or in bad weather.”

“My father worked with his hands.”

“Soldier, I thought.”

“Carpenter. Engineer.”

“Awful young.”

“Yes, he was.”

The earth is dry and fairly light and they make good progress.

“I have to rake it out now and then seed it.”

She hands Caleb her shovel. Mr. Grover takes out his handkerchief and mops his brow.

“You did the right thing, Alice Bliss,” Caleb says.

She tries to smile at him as she returns his shirt.

“Anybody tell you that you need to be extra careful these next few weeks?”

“No.”

“The body gets accident prone.”

“Really?”

“You ask people. Ask people who have lost someone whether they were in a little car crash or a little bike accident or took a fall.”

“You want to come back to the house, Caleb?”

“No, thank you, that wouldn’t be right, I didn’t know your father.”

“All right then. Thanks again.”

Alice heads up the rise to the dirt road leading out of the cemetery with Henry and his father. The digging has tired them all. Alice thinks it’s good to be tired in her body.

The Grovers’ ancient Honda is the only car still parked on the verge. It hadn’t occurred to Alice to be worried about a ride home. Now she realizes that Henry and his father were patiently waiting for her after everyone else had left.

Mr. Grover tosses their shovels into the trunk. Henry and his dad don’t interrogate her like her family would. Henry just opens the door to the front seat for her. But she surprises him and slips into the backseat, where she leans back and rests her head against the upholstery. Just like Travis Boyd, she thinks.

She closes her eyes for a moment before turning in her seat to look back at the road winding behind them, at the green bowl of this section of the graveyard, at the newly turned earth over her father’s grave, at Caleb, raking the ground, preparing it for seed. They keep leaving Matt behind, she thinks, in each of these places; they reenact leaving him, over and over until finally they will realize that he has left them and gone where they cannot follow.

 

There are cars parked in their driveway and all along the street. The backyard almost looks festive and the workshop, which Uncle Eddie set up as the bar, looks like they’re having a party. At least anyone old enough to drink is having a party.