Gravedigger's Cottage (16 page)

He was back inside by the time the commercials were over. She was back to weeding. She was wonderful.

I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I had this feeling in my stomach every time I saw her. The feeling you get when a secret surprise is making you want to burst, the feeling in your stomach when you are playing hide-and-seek and the person who’s it is three feet away and cannot find you, the feeling you get when the teacher reads out only one story because it is such a fine story and it is your story and she doesn’t tell your name so you get all of the thrill and none of the embarrassment.

I was feeling like that all the time, when I saw Daisy Chain, and while it might sound good and exciting it wasn’t. It was excruciating, and I decided I had to do something about it. After all, I was the person and she was the bunny and I was big and strong and she was little and had her head tipped over and it may have been a struggle at first but we would get over it and we both knew that I was the person in the world to make her happy and she was the rabbit in the world to make me happy. And so.

And so. I went to the yard in the morning after the night of my decision, and she was not there. I waited. I stood on the lawn, waiting. I sat on the lawn, waiting. I lay down on the lawn, waiting, with my head tipped over on its side in the grass.

Eventually, Walter came out and lay down with me, with his warm, round head resting against my back, and we waited forever for her to come back.

“W
E’RE HAVING A FUNERAL,
Dad,” I said to his back as he patched a hole in the living room wall that I knew for a fact had been caused by him and his putty knife in the first place, searching for a draft.

“What?” He sounded genuinely surprised, almost shocked. But he wouldn’t turn around.

“What are you doing there?” I asked. “Is that Spackle? Are you spackling again?”

“Yes, I’m spackling again.”

“Take a break. Come with us. We have a funeral to do.”

“Whose funeral?”

“The fish.”

“The fish. What fish?”

“Our fish, from our pond. The
rat’s
victims.”

He didn’t say anything right away. He did some extraloud scraping on the wall.

“Dad?”

“You didn’t even know those fish. Those fish were total strangers.”

“Dad. We are not just leaving them. They deserve better. Walter and I have decided to give their remains a burial at sea.”

“What remains? I didn’t think there were any remains.”

“Bits and pieces. Walter has been keeping them in his pockets.”

“Ugh. Maybe that’s what I’ve been smelling.”

“Come on with us to the beach, Dad.”

He long-paused me again, but it wasn’t for spackling.

“I thought,” he said quietly, thoughtfully, “we weren’t going to do this anymore, Sylvia. I thought we had left all that behind, when we left the old house.”

Though he couldn’t see me, I shrugged. I shrugged a long, slow shrug.

“I thought that, too,” I said. “But I was wrong. We were wrong. Fish need burying. Come on, Dad.”

I watched his back inflate, expand with the intake of breath. Then I watched it all collapse and shrink back down again as he let it out.

“No,” he said. “You guys go without me.”

And that was that. His voice was replaced with the scrape-scraping of the putty knife, while the back of his head remained the back of his head.

Walter emptied the gamey contents of his pockets into a brown paper lunch bag, and we took it to the waterfront. As we reached the beach, we came upon Carmine standing on one of the sand dunes.

“Whatcha got?” he asked.

“The dead fish,” Walter said. “We’re going to give them a burial at sea. You want to come?”

“No,” he said, shielding his eyes even from the bag. “Funeral stuff makes me cry.”

I liked him better already.

“You going to be at school on Monday?” he asked with more trepidation than you’d expect.

“We are,” I said definitively.

He almost gave himself a hug. Clasped his hands together instead. Altogether more dignified. “I’m sorry, about your fish,” he said, and backed away.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you at school,” he said, just checking to be sure.

“See you at school,” Walter said, to help him out.

We went to the water by ourselves.

“They were freshwater fish though,” Walter said with deep seriousness.

“I think they’ll be okay with this,” I said.

I handed him the bag to do the honors. He had a much better arm than me.

He nodded, held the bag up. I was supposed to say something.

I found myself shrugging again. I looked at the bag, I tilted my head sideways. I shook my head no, even though no was not quite what I meant.

I just didn’t have anything. I was tapped out on animal funerals.

“We are very sorry, fish,” I said. “Sorry you swam into the path of the McLuckies. If there is an afterlife, I hope you have better luck next time. I’m sure you will.”

We stood a couple more seconds. It was a weak, outgoing tide so the beating of the waves was only a minor background accompaniment, and the job of sending Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria out to sea wouldn’t be too difficult.

“Throw it,” I said.

Walter pulled back, heaved ho, and the three unfortunate fish in their brown paper bag were out there, bobbing on the surface of a rolling gray ocean. Drifting.

“How’s Lloyd doing?” Walter asked then.

“He’s good. I think. You can’t see him most of the time, you know? So…I haven’t seen him for a few days actually. But he’s fine. I know he is. I’m sure he is…He’s very shy. He’s cautious, always hiding. He’s doing fine though, I’m certain.”

“Mmm,” Walter said. “Okay.”

“You really believe it was a rat?” I said as we stood watching.

Drifting.

“Could have been,” Walter answered unconvincingly.

Drifting.

“Could have been. But you think it
was?”

Drifting.

“No,” he said. That was my boy.

“Well, maybe it was,” I said.

This caused him to stop watching the last few bobs of the fish bag and turn to me.

“What? Sylvia, what? After all this time, after all the things you said about the rat, about the
not
rat. Now you tell me there is maybe a rat? I hate this. I’m all confused, and I hate it. I never thought I’d say this, but I cannot wait to get back to school.”

I made sure I watched the bag still, watched the last bit, before it was out of view.

Drifting.

“I can’t wait either,” I said. “But before we do, we have to have one more funeral.”

Gone.

W
HEN MY SECOND MOM
died, Walter’s first mom died. There’s nothing much to remember because we were not invited to any of the stuff, and I wouldn’t have gone if I had been.

I could have imagined how it all went anyway if I wanted to. I chose not to imagine one minute of it.

So I stayed home. I stayed with Walter. There was probably a baby-sitter of some kind involved.

But I was with Walter. He was my Walter then, and that was that. He didn’t know what was going on, not when Mom died, not when Dad left the house in his black suit and his gray face, and not when he squeezed us so hard we were very lucky not to be dead, the whole bunch of us.

Maybe that was his plan. If it were his plan, I would not have objected then.

But instead, I had Walter, and he had me, and that was the way it always would be.

He had a head like an orange. He had a normal-size baby body and a big round head covered with a carpet of yellow velvet. He was at the point where he walked everywhere, but he still usually fell down along the way. He made a click-click sound with his tongue whenever he was busy doing something like playing with his toys or throwing stuff down the toilet. If you played certain songs on the stereo, he would do a dance where he pointed with the index fingers of both hands in unison, left, right, up, down, then at himself.

I played all of those songs, very loudly, all day long. When he danced, I had to go over and grab him and pick him up until he shrieked and kicked and squirmed away.

When he fell asleep that day for each of his two daily naps, morning and afternoon, I went to his crib and sat there. I had my own little orange molded-plastic chair that I favored for TV and for mothering my dolls and I brought it over by his crib and I sat there for the entire hour and a half of each nap, and I didn’t care no matter what any baby-sitter had to offer or suggest. I was where I needed and wanted to be, and I never for a second got bored sitting by the side of my Walter’s crib.

Walter always woke up a grouch from his naps and even in winter he woke up with a big sweaty head and you did not want to disturb him before it was time. So I sat quietly each time as he emerged back into the world we lived in, back into the world that was missing something so wrong to be missing that he couldn’t even imagine it. I sat and watched as he flopped himself over and lay still, blinking and blinking and staring up out his window readjusting, and refiguring, and just staring.

Finally, after just enough time, he turned in my direction, he looked at me, and he said, “Vee.”

Because that was me. He gave me that name, my Walter did.

We all slept in my dad’s bed that night. Just the three of us. Dad was very tired, the tiredest person I ever saw. He couldn’t talk, and I didn’t even want to. Only Walter talked, and that was just fantastic nonsense. He talked and talked fantastic nonsense until everyone fell asleep, clutching each other like a scared family of possums.

H
E BEAT ME TO
it. Or he thought exactly what I thought exactly when I thought it.

When we pushed through the gate by the garage at the back of our yard, we saw what we had not expected to see.

Dad, outside.

But just like when I had left him earlier, I was greeted by the sight of his back.

He was down on his hands and knees, underneath the cherry tree. Patting the ground down over a small, freshly dug mound of sandy earth.

When he heard the gate latch snap, he rolled around, sitting down on the ground.

“What’s going on, Dad?” I asked, walking right up and standing over him. Walter and I were standing over Dad.

“I know what I said,” he said, “but I was wrong. I know I said this was all behind us…you think you can put it all behind you…you want to think that, people want to think that…but…” He sat there shaking his head. Shaking his head at himself, with force, not like he was confused. “You can’t do that. You, Sylvia, were right. You can’t do that. I should always know to listen to you.”

I was peering around him, at the mound and at what else he had behind him, when I said, “Yes, you should.”

“I wished I had gone with you to the beach,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t wasted the end of our summer on home repairs. I wish I hadn’t wasted the first weeks of our new life in our new house…on home repairs.”

He shook his head vigorously at himself.

“I hate
doing
stuff,” he said.

At that moment, he bore a delightful resemblance to my dad. I could only hope.

“So,” Walter said suspiciously, “what are you doing?”

Dad got to his feet, revealing behind him the unmistakable-to-this-family sight of an animal grave. An animal grave, in the new yard that was never supposed to see one of those ever. And right next to it lay Walter’s gun.

“The rat is gone,” Dad said. “The rat is gone, dead, and he won’t be a problem for us again. I promise.”

Walter was suitably impressed. Not to mention relieved.

“No fooling, Dad? That is so good. That is so good, it’s great.” Walter picked up the rat gun off the ground. He was starry-eyed as he turned the thing over and over again in his hands. It was long, thin, and black, cold looking and scary. Looked like it could hurt you just as bad if you were poked with it as if you were shot with it.

“I was afraid I wasn’t old enough to get one of these,” Walter said.

“You’re not,” Dad said.

“Come on, it is just an air gun,” Walter protested.

“So, it’s just for shooting air, is it?” I said.

“No,” Dad said grimly. “It’s not just for shooting air. That’s why I had a change of heart. I’m sorry, son. I owe you a new present. We need to go out anyway. We need to go places and buy things. We have to buy clothes and food and things. And we need to go out to a nice restaurant…before summer is over and it’s too late. Or even a not-so-good restaurant if necessary. And I’ll buy you something to make it up to you.” He grabbed Walter in a jarring neck lock as he said it, causing him to drop the gun. “And I’ll buy you something,” he said, grabbing me in the same way but much, much gentler.

He led us into the house, wrapped in two headlocks the whole way. Once inside, Walter ran right upstairs to get ready.

“So, you going to work?” I asked Dad.

He shrugged. “I have new shoes.”

“This is true,” I said.

“If you have new shoes and no rats, you have to at least try.”

“You do,” I said. “You have to try. You can’t not try.”

“So we’ll try,” he said.

“What will you do, though, if the rat comes back, Dad?”

He grinned a cheeky grin. He liked it when I was challenging. He always liked that.

“If he comes back,” he said, “I’ll just have to kill him again.”

I nodded. I eased past Dad as I headed up to get ready. The back of his hand brushed lightly against the back of mine, and I felt in there—in the touch, in the heat, and texture of that hand—my dad.

“You know,” Walter said, coming down the stairs as I was going up, “I checked all over, and no Lloyd anywhere. Aren’t you worried?”

“No,” I said. “Lloyd is fine. He is doing fine. He’s here, you just can’t see him. I know he’s fine. I am certain.”

Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.