Blasted (13 page)

The stupidest thing anyone said to me at my parents' funeral was, “Don't mourn. It can't be helped.” Yes, you stupid fucker, I know it can't be helped. That's why I'm mourning. If it could be helped, don't you think I'd be out there, doing something? Helping? Don't you think I'd be out on the Arterial Overpass, leaning against the wind, flagging down their car? No: if it could have been helped, I'd have gone one better than that – I would have stopped them from even getting in the car in the first place. Don't go out tonight, Mom and Dad, not this night. Stay home, stay home with me.

Actually, the only thing I'd ever wanted was to have been in the car with them. I'd never pictured myself stopping it from happening. I just wanted to be with them. I just wanted to be in the car with them that Hallowe'en night.

I heard the arrival: a high-pitched descending whine approaching the house along the empty road and pulling up in front with squealing brakes. People were coming. I didn't want them. I didn't want a houseful of people between me and the solitude of ghosts.

But then Grandpa came into the kitchen, yawning and ruffling his hair. I pulled my face back into something that I hoped resembled a person.

“That'll be Queenie,” he said, and went outside. I heard her voice, “John!” and his, “Take your time up the stairs, now, girl.” The gravel path crunching under feet, murmured voices, silence. More words: “Well.” “Oh, my.” Then Grandpa led Aunt Queenie through the linny and into the kitchen. She bore two whole roast chickens, three loaves of what looked suspiciously like homemade bread, and two bottles of whiskey. She placed these on the counter, wiped a tear from her eye and sniffed a bit. Then she turned and took in the kitchen. The furniture, the floor, the shabby wallpaper, all seemed of absorbing interest to her; there was sadness on her aging glamour-girl face. But when she looked at me, her eyes lit up. “Ruby, dear.” She leaned over and lipstick-kissed me again; I grimaced and waved my scotch bottle at her and Grandpa.

“Like a drink?”

“Ruby!” Scandalized by my bottle-swigging, Grandpa got down three glasses from the cupboard. Aunt Queenie poured generous measures and handed the glasses around. Something about her gestures had a ritualistic quality; I stood up. “To family,” Queenie said. Grandpa coughed.

“To family,” he repeated, his voice strange. We all knocked back the shot, Grandpa wiped his eyes, and we stood there, looking at each other.

“Welcome home,” he said.

It didn't take long for Queenie to take us in hand and get the place ready for the descending hordes. She set Grandpa to laying out his liquor stocks and glasses on the countertop, then surged to the back of the coalscellar door where Gramma's cleaning supplies were kept. “A clean sweep is better than a dirty scrub,” she said, handing me a broom, and I started on the kitchen floor. She opened up a drawer in the sideboard and shook out a snowy linen tablecloth that I'd never even seen before, covering the shabby kitchen table with a flourish. She glanced at me where I attacked the far regions of the room like I was struggling for the puck in a hockey game: “A new broom sweeps cleaner, but it takes an old broom for the corners,” she said. I wondered faintly if she would punctuate the entire evening with proverbs. She seemed to know where things were kept in the kitchen, which I found strange – she hadn't darkened its doors since before I was born. I wondered why my grandmother had barred her sister-in-law from the house, wondered if I would ever find out. I finished sweeping and began to gather the rather frightening number of empties Grandpa and I had managed to accumulate, stacking them in the linny. I tracked down Gramma's ashtrays from all around the house, hardening my heart to empty them, and placed them around so the mourners could smoke their heads off. By the time I had finished, Queenie had set the table with serviettes, small plates, and various serving implements, and put out one of the chickens on a platter with slices off; she had the kettle on and every teapot in the house warming with hot water. I pictured the procession that would arrive: endless streams of tuna casseroles with crunched-up cornflakes on top, macaroni salads, sandwiches, maybe even a Jello-mold or two. At least I wouldn't have to shop or cook for a few days.

People started arriving around six. Three tuna casseroles, trays of sandwiches, oh, yes,
and
Jello. The house went from empty to full in a split second. Kettles were boiled, drinks were drunk, chicken consumed.

An hour, two, passed. Aunt Queenie was gracious and lovely; I hid in the corner by the fridge. Grandpa was ornery with everyone and his mood was accepted with sympathetic grace, which made him even madder. “Goddamn it, Jo,” he snapped at a blue-haired lady from up the road, “
I'm
not dead yet. Get those gimlet eyes off of me! You just can't wait until I'm laid out.” She smiled and patted his hand. He made an inarticulate strangling noise and stalked off.

“Grief,” the lady said, shaking her head at me in an understanding sort of way. I helped myself to another beer. Some people in the corner were singing; an old man was going through the drawers in the sideboard; the Great-Aunts had formed a circle with their arms around each other and were swaying and keening softly. I wished Juanita had come. I wished anyone I knew had come. My beer was empty; I got another.

There are places out on the barrens, shaky-bogs – the surface looks firm, beautiful even, until you try to walk over it. Then you feel the wrongness beneath you. You might suddenly sink to your knees in muck. Or you might tear through into something deep and get sucked down to your death. You can fling yourself full length on the pudding-ground and feel it quivering – pray that you won't go through, face pressed into sweet bracken – water oozing slowly into your clothes, slowly, from the morass below, ears full of the thousand small noises of tiny roots ripping, tearing, giving way. You can forge ahead – it might be only a small stretch of bog. Or turn your back, retrace, try to find a way around. Yes, I suppose you could do that.

Breaking away from the crowd in the kitchen, I went out the door and through the linny. I sat down on the back step, the noise of conversation cutting out behind me as the door swung closed. The light was almost gone, a flat, uniform grey fading out. From where I was sitting the Hill was a steep, short slope, sky above it, only a little hill after all. But I could sense the bulk of stone looming up and up, above and behind what was visible. There were lots of small trees, mostly birches. Their leaves were green flame in the twilight, flickering over the surface of the deep, cold rock. How did they grow in that pitiful layer of soil? There'd been only a few trees when I was a kid; the rest had been grass and naked scree. Now there was a veritable grove. The big birch I used to climb as a kid still stood, tall and white, dead centre from where I was sitting… No, slightly to the left. I remembered. The big birch had blown over, maybe seven years ago, its roots torn completely out of the ground in a heavy autumn gale – Grandpa had told me about it over the phone. This tree I was looking at must have been one of its seeded saplings, grown large in its stead. I felt a strange shift in my interior map, a sort of falling.

I heard the door open and close. Someone came through the linny and stood behind me, breathing in the air. “Oh, look at those stars. High up there.” It was Queenie. I looked up at the faint speckling of evening stars above us. They were beautiful, beautiful. “Just like celestial bees,” Queenie said. She surprised me by drawing her skirt around her knees and lowering herself onto the step. She glanced at me sidelong, then back up at the sky.

“You do look so much like my mother,” she said.

“I never saw her.”

“There aren't a lot of pictures,” she agreed. “She hated having her picture taken. One never thinks of one's parents as young – but I think she must have looked like you when she was twenty – twenty-five, oh, around the time I was born. She was a skinny thing, like me, like you, everyone always said she'd have trouble having children but she never did. Eight of us, seven girls and a boy. I was number seven. As was she. Seventh daughter of a seventh daughter – that's why I can see. I have the sight, always have, and I can read the cards, I have the trick of it, the gift.” She paused, and I felt a chill settle on me. “Not always pleasant,” she finished. We sat a moment longer, then without speaking arose and went back inside.

It was almost midnight by the time the last guest had staggered out the door, and I was doing dishes. Grandpa dried while Queenie put everything away. I saw again how she instinctively knew where things belonged. It finally dawned on me that Queenie had grown up in this house – it had been her childhood home. I tried to picture it, Grandpa here with seven older sisters, and failed.

“Where did you all sleep?”

Grandpa paused in his drying. “What are you on about now?”

“You, Queenie, and the others. How did you all fit?”

Queenie held a glass up to the light, then gracefully deposited it back into the sink for me to wash again, and I didn't even feel offended. “Mom and Dad had the small room upstairs,” she said.

“Where you are now,” Grandpa added.

“And we girls bedded down in the bigger room…”

“All seven of you?” I squeaked.

“…and John lay in solitary splendour in the parlour,” she finished.

“How the hell did you fit?”

Grandpa dug his elbow into my ribs. “Language.”

“Three beds and a pull-out cot. But really, Theresa'd left home by the time I was too old for the cot. She married Robert in, oh, what year was that, John?”

“I was seven.”

“So, 1937 that was…”

They chatted about what-happened-when for a while, as I finished the dishes and let the greasy water drain out of the sink, swirling clockwise with a muffled sucking sound. Grandpa was setting chairs around the table; he put three out, hesitated, carefully added a fourth. He was arguing with Queenie about what dress she'd been wearing at the wedding of her eldest sister – “No, dear, I didn't wear red to that one. I was only twelve years old. I hadn't yet developed my signature look.” She put a hand on her bony hip, posed like a model, and giggled.

“What did Great-Grandma wear?” I asked suddenly.

“What did she wear? Oh, I don't remember. Something black. She always dressed in black, didn't she, John?”

“She always did,” he agreed.

“Like me,” I said.

“Yes, indeed, Miss Mary Mack.” Grandpa sat at the table and poured himself another drink from an almost-empty whiskey bottle.

Queenie joined him, looking questioningly at me before upending the rest of the bottle into her glass. I fetched myself a beer and sat with them.

“It suited her… position here, on the Southside,” Queenie searched for the words. “She used to lay out the dead, for those families that would let her. Some were suspicious, her being Catholic and all. But most trusted her. She could lay out a body like nobody's business.”

“My great grandmother was
Catholic
?” I squawked.

“Sure, girl. A Malone,” Grandpa said.

“From Patrick Street,” Queenie added.

I was floored. “But… but…”

“That's why some held up their noses about her laying out the dead. But for most it was no issue. She'd get word that someone had died, and over to their house she'd go. Wash the body, lay it out in their front room. We didn't have funeral parlours in those days, just Mom and the way she'd lay the body out, dressed. And she'd wash all the sheets and quilts, everything from the death bed.”

“Oh, yes, the whole place would smell of Jeyes' Fluid.” Grandpa wrinkled his nose. “I always thought that's what death smelled like. Jeyes' Fluid and flowers.”

“Lilies. Mom would sit with the body through the night, with whatever family was around,” Queenie continued. “You had to sit with the body, you see, to keep evil spirits from taking it. People'd bring wreaths of fresh flowers. The men would take the body to the grave, then get drunk.”

“A grand excuse, a funeral,” Grandpa said, raising his glass. He stopped, frozen, and I knew that he had just remembered what today was, what had just happened to him. I wanted to take his hand, something, anything; I didn't know what to do.

“She didn't do that any more after she went off,” Queenie was saying. Grandpa's head snapped around and he slammed his drink on the table, but she didn't notice. “She had the sight, our mother,” and her voice was soft and sad, remote. “That's why she could prepare the dead, look after them.

But after she went off, she wasn't herself any more. No one would've wanted her to look after their dead ones, even if she'd offered.”

“What are you talking about?” Grandpa's voice shook.

Queenie came back to herself. “Nothing. Nothing, dear.”

“She never went off!” he yelled. Queenie just looked at him. “She was nuts, that's all. Crazy! And so are you if you believe…” He stood up, words strangling in his throat, and old as he was, his tall figure looming over me made me cower in my seat. Not Queenie, though; she sat there sad, but calm as a cat on your pillow.

“Sit down, John,” she said.

In answer he turned and gave a mighty kick at the open back door, sending it crashing closed. Oh, God, no, I thought – not one of Grandpa's rages, not now, please. He aimed another kick at the closed door, then at the cupboards, chipping the patchy paint. And with an inarticulate yell, he kicked over the fourth kitchen chair. I threw up my arm in fear. But as suddenly as it had come, his rage shrank back into itself. He stood looking down at the chair. None of us moved. Almost tenderly he bent to pick it up, placing it upright, open, a little, to the room as if inviting someone to sit in it. He turned and half-staggered out to the hall and up the stairs.