B000FCJYE6 EBOK (10 page)

“Roses?” I ventured, sitting up straighter, wanting to be part of the arrangements.

“You know, and I have gotten so
sick
of the lilies,” she announced. “At Easter, with the lilies, and then again they sell the lilies for the young people’s mission, and then more lilies at Christmas and Epiphany, all year the lilies.” She motioned with her pen. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say the lilies.”

“‘Consider the lilies,’” Opa said. He was sitting with his back to us at the dining-room table, reading the paper.

“‘Consider the lilies,’” Oma conceded, after a pause.

“No carnations,” Opa said, taking advantage of his opening.

“Why not?”

“Hated ’em.”

“No.”

“Yes he did. The man hated carnations.”

Both Oma and I stared at his back.

“Swore he was never going to one more baptism, wedding, confirmation, graduation, or funeral if it meant he’d have to wear another damned carnation in his buttonhole.” Opa set down his paper and turned in his chair. “No carnation in his buttonhole, neither.”

He looked at Oma until he was pretty sure she wouldn’t go and stick one there when he wasn’t looking. Then he turned back and picked the paper up, shook it out, and started reading again.

“You knew this? Your husband hated carnations?” Oma asked me. I shook my head no.

“Well, what in the Pete’s sake are we going to do, then? We’ll ask Dot, she’ll know. But then, I don’t want her doing all showy and flashy. What colors. Maybe some nice blue? He liked a good blue suit.”

“Name me a blue flower, Oma,” Opa said.

“Iris.”

“Which one’s that?”

“Looks like a—” She stopped, scribbled, and ripped off a paper. “Show him,” she said to me, and I took him the drawing. He studied it.

“Hmph,” he said. “Besides that.”

“Hydrangea,” she said proudly, already waiting to hand me the next sheet of paper.

“Looks like a damn fluffy bowling ball. Okay, blue. Blue, fine.”

“What about some roses?” I asked. “For some—extra color?”

It was very important right then that I be allowed to have some roses.

Oma was making a list of blue flowers.

Opa read his paper.

Finally he turned his page. “No roses,” he said. “Can’t do roses.”

“People would talk,” Oma added.

Opa closed his paper and stood. “Making a little coffee, I think,” he said, and went out of the room.

Oma looked up at me brightly. “Now!” she said. “The casket.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling dizzy. “The casket.”

That night, after we had made the arrangements and were sitting all together in the living room watching the news, a shot went off on TV.

I screamed and covered my mouth. Oma patted my arm. Opa got me a brandy.

Kate, who was sitting on her knees two inches from the screen, did not move or appear to blink, either when the shot went off or when I screamed.

Opa turned off the television. Oma went to fetch our lists, so we could review the arrangements, so I could get to sleep.

Pioter Gustofson ran the funeral home. “A good man, he is,” Oma said from the passenger seat in front of me as we drove toward Staples. She wore her good blue coat and gripped her black leather pocketbook in her lap. Kate gazed out the window, craning her neck to look at a herd of cattle that stood knee deep in snow.

She turned to me. “Do their feet get cold?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

We drove. She gave up on me, leaned forward, and patted Opa on the shoulder. “Opa, why not?”

“Why not what, snickerdoodle?”

“Why don’t cows’ feet get cold?”

“They ain’t got toes.”

“They don’t?”

“Nope. No toes. Can’t get cold feet without toes.”

She settled back to think this one over for a while.

“Pioter Gustofson has been very good to us, hasn’t he.” Oma looked out into the blowing snow that went skidding across the county highway.

“Yes, he has.” Opa put his hand on Oma’s gloved hands and squeezed.

Kate tipped over and put her head on my leg.

“What else doesn’t got toes?” she asked.

“Snakes,” said her grandfather. “Spiders. Creepy crawlers.” Kate giggled and wiped her nose on my knee.

I looked down at her. My snotty little beast. I picked her up and settled her into my lap and she put her arms around my neck. She smelled of milk. She gazed out the rear window and I counted the tiny white bones of her spine that showed above the collar of her dress, each an imperfect pearl pressing up through her thin skin.

She shifted and sang under her breath, “Snakes, spiders, creepy crawlers, creepy crawlers, snakes and spiders, snakes and spiders.” She took a deep breath, and sighed.

Out in the middle of nowhere, a green sign said
WELCOME TO NIMROD
—
POP
. 561.

The circular drive in front of the funeral parlor and the wide steps up to the double doors were shoveled with precision. The two-story sandstone building sat with a sort of modest grandeur at a corner in the center of town, as if presiding over the redbrick town hall, the library, and the steepled Methodist church, none of whose walks were shoveled nearly as well.

We were expected.

Pioter Gustofson met us at the door and ushered us into the dark, silent, heavily carpeted foyer. The smell of lilies was overwhelming.

“Madge,” he said, holding Oma’s elbows and looking at her intently. She bowed her head as if she were being blessed. “And Elton.” He gripped Opa’s shoulder. Opa shook his head slowly and made a sound, as if to say, Damned if I know.

“And you’re Mrs. Schiller,” he said, reaching for my hand, which he clasped with both of his. “I am very, very sorry for your loss.”

“My dad died,” Kate announced loudly.

We all looked at her. She stared at him suspiciously. She didn’t like men she didn’t know. “Kate,” I said, “This is Mr. Gustofson.”

“Hello, Kate.”

“Hello.”

“How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“She isn’t,” I said to him, startled.

“Yes I am. I want to go now,” she said, and turned for the door.

“Kleine,”
Oma said very gently. Kate turned around and hid behind Opa’s leg.

“Let’s go down to my office, shall we?” Mr. Gustofson said.

I sat in a chair by the window with Kate around my neck like a monkey. She was heavy, seemed to be making herself heavy on purpose. She needed a nap. I squinted. The glare off the snow through the leaded-glass windows made it impossible to tell where Nimrod left off and the sky began. All flat white. The dingy clapboard Methodist church seemed suspended in midair, a black iron cross above the black iron bell dangling somewhere against sky or snow.

“Cardinal,” Kate said into my ear. “Two cardinals.”

I took the cup of coffee Gustofson offered me. Oma and Opa sat very straight in their chairs, and Gustofson sat down at his desk. He shuffled papers for a moment, then pushed them aside and leaned back.

“Well, damnation,” he said.

“Darn right,” Opa concurred.

Oma and I sipped our coffee.

“Known you folks, what, forty-odd years?”

“’Bout that.”

“Tough times, these are.”

“Hard times.”

Gustofson studied the silver pen in his hand, his mouth turned down at the corners in concentration.

“Good man, Arnold,” he said.

Opa nodded slowly, stretched his fingers out in front of him, studied his nails. “That he was. That he was.”

“Loved his family.”

“Yes he did.”

Kate shifted in my lap. “Can I take my shoes off?” she whispered. I pulled her Mary Janes off her feet, and she curled up completely, her head against my chest.

“How’s the little girl, then?” Gustofson asked, nodding toward Kate. “Not so good, I don’t think. Taking it pretty hard,” Opa said. “She’ll be all right,” Oma said. “Of course she will,” Gustofson assured her. “Give her a little time, of course she’ll be just fine. This young, may not even remember it.”

Oma nodded. “Maybe not.”

I stared out the window and went over it again to be sure. I heard a sound: It was the shot. I ran. I caught Kate running down the hall, her arms lifted up. I doubled over, tucked her into my rib cage. I pushed her skull into my right shoulder as I turned. She did not see. Her skull fit perfectly into the palm of my hand.

“Blue jay,” she said, and I turned to look. She giggled. “Silly. There’s no blue jays yet.”

I was fairly sure she did not see.

A small figure in a black coat walked out of the Methodist church, pulled its collar around its neck, and tucked its nose into its scarf. Slowly, with a cane, it made its way down the steps and out of view.

Arrangements were made. My coffee cup was filled. The flowers would be white and blue. There would be no lilies (the scent of them was making me dizzy even now), and there would be no carnations. The senior pastor at Grace Lutheran would speak, not the strange new one from out east, but the old one who knew them.

“Baptized Arnold, he did,” Opa said.

“‘Ashes to ashes,’” Oma said, nodding in agreement. “It’s fitting.”

“Yes it is,” Gustofson said.

The pastor would speak of hope, and would not speak of sin or Hell, which would cause talk. In lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to the Shriners’ Children’s Hospital, which also seemed fitting. The reception would be held at Oma’s house directly following. The obituary would say he was a good man who loved his family and lived in the faith of Christ. It would not mention that he would be missed, which would seem to belabor a point. He was preceded in death by his sister, Rosalina Schiller, and survived by his mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Elton Schiller, his loving wife, Claire Jacobs Schiller, and his two children, Esau age twelve and Kate age six.

An open casket would not do.

Readings with references to death would not do.

Roses would not do.

They were looking at me expectantly. I looked back at them.

“Dear, what do you think about music? ‘Amazing Grace’?” Oma asked.

“No,” I said, louder than I meant to.

Kate petted my ear. “Mom-mom-mom-mom,” she sang softly.

“He was fond,” I said, trying to look friendly and sane, “of Mozart.”

They looked at me sadly, worried. “Anything else?”

Suddenly I saw him, just a few years younger, leaned back in his La-Z-Boy, his undershirt torn and sweaty from work in the garage, a beer on the TV table to his left. Leaned back like that, eyes closed, conducting an invisible orchestra to the rising swell of Mozart’s
Requiem.

Hearing my skirt shirr. Opening his eyes midphrase, smiling at me. Glancing around for the kids, reaching out his arms. Wrapping his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, looking up at me and whispering,
“Listen! Listen!”
He closed his eyes again and pointed to a place I couldn’t see.

That terrifying rapture.

Mozart would not do.

Oma, making dinner, leaned her hands on the counter next to the stove, bent her head, and said, as if startled, “Oh.”

Kate, who was helping, stood on the footstool. She paused in her stirring of cake batter in kind, as if to wait for Oma. A raw roast sat in the roasting rack amid a naked-looking pile of peeled carrots and potatoes, quartered onions. Kosher salt and pepper, rosemary, red wine.

Oma slapped her hand on the counter once, as if to try the gesture on for size. She did it again, harder. She straightened, placed her hands over her face, and did not move.

Kate set her mixing bowl carefully on the counter and looked steadily into it, licking batter off the wooden spoon in small catlike licks.

Now he was definitely dead.

Now the arrangements were made, and the funeral would be on Friday, and tomorrow the casseroles and pies and bars and salads would begin to arrive, because due time had passed. Tomorrow the women would descend, and say very little, and not mention death, and tape notes to the plastic wrap and aluminum foil that would read, in perfect, identical handwriting, “Heat 20 min. at 325. Freezes well 4 wks.” Now Oma would have to reheat everything, and serve it on Friday, at the reception, so the women would see that it didn’t go to waste, like her son, and that she appreciated, even in her grief, a kindess done, and Oma would have to bake all day as soon as they arrived, to make something to return in the handmade towels in which the women would wrap and knot their pies and cakes and casseroles and bars, the hand-stitched heirloom towels passed down through generations, given at weddings for brides to use when they went to another woman’s house, whether for a meal or for a death, fragile towels that never broke with the weight of what they carried, no matter how heavy the gift.

Kate dipped into the bowl again and ate a whole spoonful of batter.

Opa’s chair broke the silence as he stood and led Oma down the hall.

Kate looked at me. “Can we still have cake?”

“Did you butter the pan?”

She nodded and held it up.

“Is the oven on?”

She pointed at it. We poured the batter into two pans and put them in. I got her a glass of milk. The roast sat exposed on the counter. I stood, covered it, and put it in the fridge.

I loved watching Kate drink milk.

She set down her glass and gasped. “I miss Esau,” she said, milk at the corners of her mouth.

“Me too.”

“Can we go on Sunday?”

I nodded, wondering how I would tell my son that his father was dead.

Kate stared at the oven with amazing concentration, as if willing the cake to be done. I studied the side of her face. She looked horrible. She started counting down the minutes. “Seven.” Pause. “Six.” Pause. She sat down cross-legged in front of the oven and stared in at the cake. “Five. It’s rising.”

The buzzer went off and I jumped, choked on my drink. She looked at me, got up, and turned the buzzer off. “It’s done,” she said.

She stood there, head level with the stove top.