Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (4 page)

And Martin would always ask, “How is Elena doing?” in his most professional, caring voice.

“She’s having some trouble with her schoolwork. She doesn’t sleep well. I’m a little worried.”

Martin gave Elena’s mother a list of grief support groups, run by the local hospice and area churches. He reminded her that there used to be “a year of mourning” and said that Elena’s feelings were probably “very normal” and that “time heals all wounds.”

“Yes,” said Elena’s mother. “It’s just so hard.”

She thanked Martin again for everything and said she hoped he’d understand if she said she hoped she wouldn’t be seeing him again.

Martin smiled and nodded and said he understood completely.

THE NEXT
June, Martin read in the local paper how Elena had been captain of the debate team that went to the regional finals in Ann Arbor, and the year after that she had gone to Italy on a Rotary Exchange Scholarship, and in her senior year she was pictured on the front page smiling in her prom dress beside the son of the man who owned the Lincoln Mercury dealership in town, over a caption that read
A Night to Remember
, and Martin remembered how very happy she looked, how very pretty. After that he pretty much lost track of her.

“
AFTER HER
father died,” Elena’s mother told Martin when she came in to pick out a casket and arrange the funeral, “she seemed a little lost.”

Martin listened and nodded as Elena’s mother, looking so much older now, outlined the details of her dead daughter’s
life. She’d finished school, applied to college, spent the summer after graduation waitressing in a bar-restaurant in western Michigan, to get out on her own and earn a little money.

“She met him there. At the Northwoods Inn.”

He worked for the county road commission and came in weeknights after work and weekends after fishing or hunting. He was handsome and chatty. He had a trailer in the woods. He gave her compliments and brought her flowers and bought her beer and cheeseburgers. And when it came time to go to university, to get the education her father had saved for, she called her mother and told her that she was moving in with this man.

“I didn’t approve but what could I do, Martin? Her father would never have allowed it. But what could I do?”

Martin shook his head and nodded.

“I told her she was throwing her life away on a summer fling, but she said she loved him. She loved him and he killed her, shot her like a damn dog, Martin.”

Elena’s mother’s sobs grew heavy. Martin poured her a glass of water, moved the box of Kleenex nearer to her.

“Thank you, Martin,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“In no time she was pregnant and he said he wanted to ‘do right’ by her. I told her he would always feel trapped, or always feel like he had done her a big favor, always feel like he was such a big man and she was just nothing without him, but she said she loved him and maybe it was all meant to happen like this and what could I do, Martin? What could I do? Her father would have gone up there and brought her home, but I had no one, no one.”

They were married in the county offices in a civil ceremony,
Elena wearing her prom dress and her new husband wearing a cowboy hat and a blue jean jacket and a string tie.

Elena’s mother took the wedding snapshot out of her purse and told Martin to “cut him off of there and use that picture for the paper and the holy cards. She was so happy then.”

Elena miscarried in her third month and took a job working dispatch for the Sheriff’s Office.

By the following midsummer things were getting bad. Her husband’s appetite for Budweiser and bloodsport hadn’t abated.

“She’d call home crying, Martin. He still went to the bar weeknights. He’d come home boozy and, well, unpredictable. And he spent the weekends tramping through the woods shooting small game, which he’d bring home for her to clean and cook.”

He’d go out at night and snag spawning salmon and bring them back to freeze and smoke and put up in jars.

“Her letters home got so sad, Martin—‘He doesn’t bathe enough,’ she wrote me once, ‘he seems so angry.’”

She had taken from her purse a packet of pink envelopes and was holding them and rocking a little in the chair across the desk from Martin.

“She had such beautiful handwriting.”

Martin nodded, smiled, understood.

“She called me crying horribly once and I asked her if he’d hit her but she said no, no. He had killed a fawn, right outside their trailer. It had come with its mother to feed at the pile of carrots he baited them with. They were in bed. Sunday morning. He sat up, walked to the window, went to the door where he kept his rifle. It was months before the legal season. He shot it right from the door. The fawn, Martin. The little fawn.”

She was shaking now again, sobbing and rocking in the chair.

“Do you know what he told her, when she yelled at him for shooting the fawn?”

Martin shook his head.

“He told her it couldn’t live without its mother anyway.”

Now she was sobbing and shaking fitfully and Martin reached across the desk to take hold of her hands, in which she held the packet of her daughter’s letters.

“We don’t have to do this now,” Martin told her.

But she wanted to go on, to get it out, to get this part behind her.

AFTER HE
killed the baby deer, Elena applied to the state university in Mount Pleasant using the return address at the Sheriff’s Office. When the letter came from the admissions department, beginning
Dear Ms. Delano: Congratulations!
she made a copy and mailed it home with a note asking her mother if there was still money left for her education.

“‘Of course,’ is what I told her,” Elena’s mother told Martin. “I wanted her to get her education before she settled down. After she lost the baby, she had no reason to stay with him. And he was drinking and depressed. He worked and drank and grew more distant. She could see she had made a big mistake. I could tell she wasn’t happy.”

Elena told her mother how she gave her husband back his leather coat and the tiny diamond ring and said she would always care about him but that she had been too young and she felt she owed it to her father to return to school and get her life on track and she would always treasure their time together but
she really had to go. She thought it would be the best thing for them both. She was sure he wasn’t happy either.

The night before she had planned to leave, she did her hair and polished her nails and cooked him pheasant and they ate by candlelight—“for old times’ sake,” she had told her mother when she called to say she’d be home tomorrow. She really wanted no hard feelings. It had been her mistake and she was sorry to have involved him in it. Surely they would always be friends.

“He’s okay with it. He doesn’t like it but he’s okay with it,” is what she told her mother when her mother asked her how he was taking it.

And, near as the coroner and the sheriff could piece it together, it was after everything she owned had been loaded in the car, the trunk full of books and photo albums, the backseat packed with her stereo and a rack of hanging clothes and the front passenger seat with the one suitcase full of toiletries and socks and underwear; maybe she was turning to wave goodbye before going, or maybe he’d been drinking Budweiser all night, or maybe he’d helped her and then went berserk, but whatever happened, whether it was passion or calculation, before she sat into the driver’s seat, he got the rifle from wherever he kept it, near as they could figure by the angle of the wound, he stood on the front porch, aimed, and fired, then walked over to where she lay in the leaf-fall beside the car and shot her again, in the breast.

This was the part that Martin could never imagine—the calculation of shooting her in the leg, then slowly, deliberately walking over and pressing the barrel against her left breast and pulling the trigger. Wouldn’t such madness in a man give
signs before? Wouldn’t the first gunshot wake him from the dream?

Elena’s mother was rocking in the chair across from Martin, sobbing quietly, clutching the letters, staring at the snapshot of her daughter on the desk standing next to the man who had just killed her.

“You pick out the casket, Martin. I can’t do it. Something like her father’s. Please, Martin. You do it.”

He used the cherry casket with the moss pink velvet interior, and though it was considerably more costly than what Elena’s father was buried in, he charged the same and thought it was the least he could do.

AND NOW
, twenty years since, nearing fifty, he could still not shake the sense of shame, that the men in her life had let her down badly. The father who died too young, the husband who murdered her, even the embalmer who could only treat her viscera with cavity fluid, inject her arms and legs and head, stitch the horrible incisions of the postmortem—from left shoulder to breastbone, breastbone to right shoulder, then breastbone to pubic bone—the little bulge in her tummy where the bag full of organs made her look almost expectant, then cover the stitches with cotton and adhesive. And then put a little blush on her cheeks, brush her lipstick on, curl and comb her hair. He had dressed her in the sweater and jeans her mother brought in and lifted her into the casket, put her First Communion rosary in her hand, a crucifix in the head panel of the casket, and put an arm around her mother when she came to look.

“Oh no, no, no,” she sobbed, her shoulders rising and fall
ing, her head shaking, her body buckling at the sight of her daughter’s dead body. Martin held her at the elbows, whispering, “Let it go, I’m so sorry,” because he never could think of the right thing to say.

Over time Martin learned to live with the helplessness and the sadness and the shame. He quit trying to figure the right thing to say. He listened. He stayed.

Still, all these years since, whenever the right shade of red turned up, he could see the fat old pathologist and his cigar and stupid tutorial manner there in the morgue with its cold smell of disaster and formalin, and the hearse that he drove up to get her that October. And the way they lay in coolers in the corner of the room, the two bodies in trays beside one another—Elena and the son-of-a-bitch that shot her.

He had shot himself, after killing her. He walked back in the house, sat on the edge of the bed, and taking the muzzle of the rifle in his teeth, pulled the trigger with his thumb, dividing his face at the septum in the process.

“Isn’t that always the way?” the old pathologist had said, yanking the tray out with Elena’s body on it. “It’s lovesickness. A man kills his wife, then kills himself. A woman kills her man, then does her nails.”

Martin hated those sentences and couldn’t forget them. That they rang true sometimes and false at others had never been a comfort.

EVENTUALLY, AFTER
the wake and Mass, her body was buried beside her father’s, leaving another grave on the other side for her mother. It was all Martin could do—to get her where she was supposed to be. Her mother had a stone cut that read
Beloved Daughter
with a rose between her dates and another with her own name on it and her year of birth and a dash and had it placed over the open grave beside her husband. She moved away some few years after that. Martin never heard from her again.

S
OME DAYS
on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it. Often as not the consolidation of these topics was seamless and the names and particulars would race through his brain like a litany in code that only he could decipher.
Elizabeth, goldfinch, Primrose Maple, hemlock, Helen, Mandarin Bronze, osprey, glacier, 18-gauge Perma-Seal, Autumn Oak, chickadee, trillium, Joan.
The list always ended with Joan, his third wife, whom he’d buried last April in a Clarksville Princess Mahogany with a tufted dusty rose velvet interior, in Mullett Lake Cemetery between two blue spruce saplings he’d planted there. The naming gave him a sense of mastery, as if he’d had some say in all of it.

When she had died in early January her body was kept in the cemetery’s stone winter vault, waiting for the frost’s hold
on the ground to give way in the spring and the grave to be opened.

“We don’t dig much after the deer season opens,” is what Harley Flick, the local sexton, told him, when the graves were arranged for last November, when Harold knew the end was near.

When the racing of names got out of hand Harold would stare intently at the path in front of him, count the cadence of his footfall or breathing and pray for his mind to go blank and hush. Then he could hear the air in the leaves, the lapping of water, the brisk movement of wildlife in the undergrowth. He could imagine the larval stages of next year’s hatch of dragonflies and hexagenia, caddis and stoneflies, the imperceptible growth of antlers and turtle shells, the long pilgrimage of hatchling and fingerling, the return of the grayling and wolverine. He would try and sense his body’s oneness with the pace and nature of the world around him. Better not to think too much, he often thought.

He thought it unlikely he’d ever marry again.

HE DID
three or four miles a day, along the abandoned railroad bed through the woods, between his place on the southwest corner of the lake and the village to the north; or south along the west edge of the river mouth, circling the wetlands, where carp spawned in late May and early June, under the interstate and up to the highway, then back again. Some days he’d do more if the weather was fine and his knees didn’t ache, or the sciatica hadn’t hobbled him, and he was glad for the time out of the house where he found the days, though shortening now, impossibly long. On the best of days he could imagine
himself walking all the way to Cheboygan, on out the Straits Highway at the north end of town, along the edge of the big water to Mackinaw City, over the bridge to the Upper Peninsula and into whatever oblivion God had in mind for him. Maybe to Munising or Seney or Manistique—he loved the sound of northern names. And the names of tribes that had named those places: Algonquin and Huron and Chippewa. Or walking south all the way down the mitten of Michigan along the old railway lines through Gaylord and Grayling, Saginaw and Bay City, all the way to Rochester where the tracks passed alongside the house he’d lived in years ago with his first wife before the names of things made much difference to him.

Time occupied for him a kind of geography, the north of which he thought of as the future and the south of which he thought of as the past and where he was at any given moment was the immediate present tense of his personal history, the known point on the map of what he’d call his life and times. It kept him from feeling entirely lost. Some days the future was west and the past east and the moment was shooting craps out in Vegas or some other fantasy, but it always suited him best to think of the whole miserable business as linear. The prospect of time bringing him back around to the point he set forth from was a crueler joke than he could imagine, though the faces of clocks, the evidence of the sun and moon, the repetition of themes in his own life were, of course, disquieting.
Today is a gift
, the sign outside the Topinabee Church read this morning when he’d gone for his oats at the Noka Café.
That’s why they call it the present!
Better than last week’s bromide, Harold thought:
Fresh spirits have no expiration date!

Harold stood on his porch, stretching both arms to reach the ceiling, then he dropped his sweatpants and pissed in the
general direction of the neighbors’ place. Everyone was gone this time of year, back to their jobs and schools and schedules. There were some color tourists and weekenders, but mostly he had the place to himself. He spread his legs, bent at the waist, touched his palms to the ground, feeling the back of his thighs stretch, having to bend his knees ever so slightly now. Then he stood up straight and stretched his arms up over his head again, easing the standing pain in his lower back and right buttock. Then he hitched up his pants, did a couple of slow squats to loosen his knees and side-to-sides to ease the tightness in his groin, and stepped off the porch, pursing his lips to suck in the air. The decadent smell of leaf-fall, the crunch of his footfall in the road’s top gravel, the sparkling light of the advancing afternoon, the sweet crispness in the cooling air, the sore pads of his feet, the ringing in his ears—these were all familiar.

If he was hungry after his walk, he told himself, he’d drive into Topinabee for a slab of whitefish or a burger at the Noka. That might kill the time left until nightfall. Once it was dark he could fall asleep watching some cable news or old reruns. Always good to have a plan.

He could hear the dog barking in the distance—Larry Ordway’s bat-faced mongrel bitch—frenzied and barking at God knows what. Harold looked along the roadside for a proper stick.

IF HE’D
remained married to Elizabeth, today would be their anniversary. Was it forty years yet? He’d lost count. October 29—the day the stock market crashed and the Great Depression got under way. The day, he’d heard on the radio this morning, the National Organization for Women was founded, the
day he was married for the first time, that late October during Vietnam. That figures, he thought, thinking how Elizabeth had left him broke, depressed, vanquished, and confused about women, suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress.

She had left him for a woman.

It all seemed a bit of a blur to him now, and feeling the nerve ends in his right leg warm to the pace he was keeping up Grace Beach Road, he was glad for nature’s forgetfulness, how the pain in his ass could be dulled some and the numbness in his legs could be walked out. The afternoon light angling through the woods, the blue sky, the bird noise in the trees, the air rushing in and out of him: life as he knew it, here in the moment, in the gift of the present such as it was, was nothing but a walk in the woods of northern lower Michigan, in mid-autumn.

They’d had a ranch house on three acres in one of the best suburbs north of Detroit. He was a sales rep for Clarksville Casket. All of Michigan—over four hundred funeral homes—was his territory. They had a daughter, Angela, a dog, Maggie, a rosy future. And even if he’d married Elizabeth because he thought marriage was sensible and inevitable, and because he figured as well her as any other; even if he found her, while very attractive, not entirely admirable, even if she had married him to get out of her crazy mother’s house, even if they both woke some mornings wondering if they each might have done better for themselves, they had assembled a life. If he had not loved her completely, utterly, irretrievably, he thought then and he thought now, coming to the intersection of Grace Beach and Grandview Beach Roads, he had loved her sufficiently.

Larry Ordway’s dog was in full fury now, the sharp blasts of its barking amplified by the general silence in the rest of the world through which Harold’s approaching footfall in the
gravel was all the more discernible. Harold’s grip on the stick tightened in anticipation of the dog’s charge down the driveway in real or feigned attack. One never knew what to expect of the bitch. He wanted to be ready for all contingencies. From half a mile off, the dog’s distemper sounded menacing. Maybe a raccoon trapped, or skunk or deer, or some late-season cottager going by on a bike or on foot. The dog was a pest—another in a line of disagreeable mixed breeds that had guarded Ordway’s empire over the years. It was an empire of sheds and outbuildings, scrap vehicles and rusting implements surrounding his double-wide in the woods at the side of the abandoned railroad easement. The current mutt kept sentry at the top of a long drive that gave on to the road where it curved to cross the tracks. It would come snarling and barking down the drive, chasing off everything that came into its view.

ANGELA, THEIR
daughter, was lovely and bright; their lives seemed full of possibilities. They had a manageable mortgage, good credit, good friends, made love twice a week, belonged to the local Congregational church where Elizabeth sang in the choir and was known for a casserole she brought to funeral luncheons and potlucks. Harold ushered for Sunday services. They were the happy young couple with the pretty child.

When Elizabeth turned thirty she went back to school to finish the degree she’d abandoned when she got pregnant. Angela went to day care. Elizabeth commuted to the university and took classes in English and Women’s Studies.

Harold was gone a part of most weeks working his way up and around the state, calling on northern and western accounts. Other times he worked Detroit and the suburbs.
He’d go as far west as Lansing, as far north as Saginaw, and still be home in time for dinner. He’d check the death notices in the Sunday papers to try to get a sense of who’d be in their offices and when. He’d try to see his best accounts every other month, others once a season, others twice a year, some just at convention and some he’d call or send a card to now and then. Some bought better over lunch, others after a few drinks, some over coffee in their offices. Harold had learned to cultivate his relationships with the primary buyers—most often the owner or the owner’s son. He’d listen to whatever he had to listen to—their theories on why one unit sold and another didn’t, their bad-mouthing of the competition, worries over the cremation trend, stories of the latest strange cases: double suicides, remarkably obese cases, multiple fatalities at industrial sites or on the interstates, anything. One week he’d work the city among the ethnic firms—Poles and Romanians, blacks and Jews—then the cushy suburbs of Grosse Point and Bloomfield Hills, up through Pontiac to Flint. Another week he’d work the firms in tri-cities and all the small farm towns in between, spending as much time with the Woolevers in Midland and Cases in Saginaw and Penziens and Stapishes in Bay City with their multiple rooftops and hundreds of calls as the Struthers firm in Reese who did forty funerals a year, but all of them copper or bronze or premium hardwood, paid for in cash by old German farmers. Then he’d take a run out through Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor and Jackson along I-94 to Kalamazoo and Muskegon, then up to Grand Rapids and up the west side of the state through the rich resort towns, Traverse City and Charlevoix, Petoskey and Harbor Springs. Once in the spring and once in the fall he’d try to make it through the UP. He’d buy drinks for his accounts at their district meetings and their
yearly golf outings and pop for lunches and dinners with his best accounts. He loved the long hours alone in the car and the vacant landscape and the open roads. He’d been through the CB radio craze—his handle was “Boxman”—and car phones and cell phones, all the gadgets. The drive along Route 2 to the west, then north to Seney, then up to Munising, then west to Marquette was a favorite drive. His accounts up there ordered caskets by the truckload and were accustomed to infrequent deliveries. They’d back up their best units in basements and garages and keep six months’ worth of inventory on hand and borrow from their colleagues in the next county if they ran short of a particular unit. And the drive along the east side up the Lake Huron shore from Pinconning and Standish where he’d always lunch at Wheelers for the way it hadn’t changed over the years, still serving malted milkshakes in big silver tins and burgers with fried onions and real French fries. Then through Au Gres and Oscoda, Greenbush and Harrisville, all the way up to Alpena and Rogers City along the long blue edge of the state. He’d listen to radio preachers or farm stations that gave the price of sugar beets and alfalfa. Or Paul Harvey or Rush Limbaugh or public radio—it hardly mattered. He called on every firm in every town, promising each to keep their “line” of Clarksvilles “exclusive” to prevent comparison shopping between competing firms. If one bought a Tuscany 20-gauge, with lilac crepe for little old ladies, he’d sell the other firm a Silver Rose with pink velvet. If one took the Pietà or Last Supper, the other was pitched the Praying Hands or Old Rugged Cross. He kept sales charts on them all and pushed them to beat last year’s averages, convincing them that the more they spent on caskets, the greater return they’d eventually realize on their “investments.” He left stacks of notepads, pens, and pack
ets of breath mints, each with Clarksville’s logo and his contact particulars imprinted. He gave his best accounts custom-made coffee mugs and playing cards with their firm’s name embossed next to
Clarksville & Keehn—A Winning Team!

Elizabeth hadn’t exactly left him. She’d put him out. She kept the house, their daughter, the newer of their two cars, and showed him the door.

“You’re welcome to stay if you want to,” she told him, “but I’m sleeping from now on with Eleanor.”

It happened so fast it was a blur to him now. He’d gone from the more or less happy paterfamilias to a man living at loose ends. They’d been married twelve years and it was over in months. Or maybe he was only the last one to know. Either way, he found himself paying the mortgage on a house he no longer lived in, payments on a car he no longer drove, and support for a daughter, now ten years old, he saw all too rarely. That he was paying alimony to a woman with whom he no longer slept vexed him especially at the time. His consortium had been replaced by Dr. Eleanor Dillingham, who taught a course in American Women Poets at the community college.