Gravedigger's Cottage (2 page)

And, back then, there were the two Mrs. McLuckies, within four years of each other. And then there were none.

There hasn’t been another one since. Not even close.

I don’t know that I would even want another one, myself. And I definitely don’t know if I would want one if I were Dad. How hard must that have been, to lose so much so early? And then again, so soon?

I don’t know, really. It’s easier for a baby to lose something. It has to be. But what about a man? A husband, a dad? What about that?

I wouldn’t know because, like I said, we don’t talk a great deal about the two Mrs. McLuckies. About the missing Mrs. McLuckies. I never specifically heard my dad talk about how it felt to lose them both. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, is what the saying says. But I doubt if whoever said it had ever loved and lost so much so quickly.

I think you might choose not loving at all.

But while there is no Mrs. McLuckie III, you could not say there is no love. My dad can love stuff.

He loves, like I said, socks and chairs. Apples. Everything related to the seaside, while not necessarily the open sea. Privacy. He loves wind and rain but not snow. Food. One-star movie reviews. He enjoys those nasty reviews about as much as most people enjoy four-star movies. And he loves nearly empty old movie theaters when it’s a matinee and they’re playing a one-star movie. Tea he loves, both the normal Earl Grey kind and the herbal tea that doesn’t even taste like anything.

And us. Me and Walter. He loves us just about as much as it is possible. I wonder sometimes if he has so much stored up in his tank for my brother and me because he was never allowed to spend much of it on our mothers. I wonder that.

I
KNOW THINGS DIE.

“You make them die.”

“Shut up, Walter.”

“Dad doesn’t like you telling me to shut up, Sylvia.”

“Well, he doesn’t like you making me feel like a ghoul either.”

“Well, you do make things die, Vee. You just do.”

“Shut
up.
I don’t
make
them die. They just die. Things die, Walter. Everything dies.”

“But you speed things up a little.”

He’s being quite unfair.

“Yah? Who killed the hamster then, Walter?”

“Don’t.”

“Remember the hamster, Walter? Remember Vladimir?”

“Stop it, Sylvia. That was different.”

“Yah, it was different because it was murder, and mine were all accidents.”

“It was not murder! It was love. I
loved
Vladimir to death, and you know it. I didn’t know any better. I was only little. I thought he was like any other stuffed animal.”

“Remember his eyes? Remember when you squeezed so hard his eyes—”

“Dad!”

He did. He squeezed that poor hamster into the next world like toothpaste out of a tube, and I know he didn’t know what he was doing, but is that enough to get you off the hook? Does that make it any more okay, because he didn’t know what he was doing? I think most stuff happens because people don’t know what they are doing—to animals or to themselves or to other people—but does that mean that the same stuff hasn’t happened, once it has happened? Stuff is always happening, but I never notice it un-happening, and hardly anybody seems to know what they’re doing.

Walter is right; I’ve buried a lot of pets.

“It’s why we had to move.”

“It is not why we had to move. We moved for Dad’s work.”

“We had to move because there was no more land left where we were before. Your pet cemetery surrounding our house was finally all filled up, every inch. They said we were a health hazard with all the rotting animals in our yard. Everybody was afraid the ground was going to come bubbling up with the bodies of all these dogs and turtles and birds and everything, like a scene from a pet zombie horror movie. The people of the town came to our door late one night, with torches—”

This did not happen. Walter is a boy, and he’s ten, and so he says things like that. He’s programmed to be a jerk.

“Dad doesn’t like it when you call me names.”

“Dad isn’t listening. Perhaps you should do likewise.”

You want to know all about my mom, probably.

I’d like to know that myself.

I lied. I wouldn’t like to know. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I swear. She is not here because she has never been here, and that’s just all right. All right with me. She was gone almost when I first woke up, you know, woke up to the world; and like anything that’s not there when you first wake up you can’t very well miss it. Same goes for Walter’s mom, my second mom. I was still wiping my eyes practically, waking up and calming down at the same time from what happened the first time, and there it happened again. Poor Walter never even knew what hit him. Poor Walter. Poor, lucky Walter. Can’t miss what you never knew, can you?

Except you can, of course. You can miss. You can and you do miss, and if I lied you would know, so I will try not to lie to you.

But I told the truth at the same time as lying…

Both at the same time. I don’t miss my mom, exactly, because I didn’t know her. Much. I’m sure she was lovely. I mean, I have seen pictures, of course, and she was lovely. Very, very lovely to look at.

And I have no doubt she was also lovely on the inside. I am sure she could hold a kid on her knee and clean scrapes without making them hurt worse. I am sure she could sing. I am sure she smelled like strawberry or patchouli or Oil of Olay, if that is an actual smell. I’m sure she read out loud at bedtime and had a purse full of lipstick and Kleenex and butterscotch candies and Wash ’n Dri moist towelettes for emergencies. I’m sure she could cook. I’m sure she could sing. I know I already said that, but just then I was thinking that she would be singing while she was cooking, and so I said it again because it occurred to me again. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t think you do. I bet she was a very careful driver, and courteous. I bet she was a good swimmer. I bet she would go into the pool and swim with us, no matter that a lot of parents don’t go into the pools and I think it is because they are self-conscious about their flabby parental bodies. Although I know she had a lovely figure. I saw it in a picture. I bet her taste in clothes was excellent.

So, you see. Those are the things I think. There are more, of course, but you get the picture, and I don’t want to try and give any more of that picture. The point just being, I would miss my mom if I knew all that about her firsthand, from memory. I would miss her, and all the things about her—the inside, outside, everything of her. I would miss them every day, forever.

Maybe it hurts less then, if you are done the small favor of losing somebody too soon. Before you get to know too much. Maybe. Maybe it hurts less then. Maybe. Maybe that’s why I don’t miss my mom too specifically.

Generally, though, there’s a different story. That mom space with nothing in it? That hurts probably as much as a hundred real moms could ever hurt you. But, like I said, that’s another story, and that’s not the story I was meaning to tell.

The story I was meaning to tell was the story of one of the last things that happened at the old house before we moved to the Gravedigger’s Cottage. And, yes, of course it is about a dying, like most stories eventually are, and a burying in the crowded patch of land around that sorry old place.

Loose Lucy got hit by a car. We buried her in the northeast corner of the yard in the shade of a triangle of hedge but underneath a bright streetlight that shines right down on her once the sun sets. Walter joked that she can’t tell day from night now because of that, and Dad said she was only barely able to tell day from night before, which was partly how she wound up in the ground after all.

She was a love. But he is right. She was far more heart than head. Loose—as in, her bolts were never really tightened up all the way.

It seems to me like everybody in the world has one of those stories, one of those hit-by-car stories about their dogs, or former dogs or cats or whatever. I didn’t used to think about it. I think about it all the time now, because I see it now, like I didn’t before, and I feel it now. Everybody was always so okay when they told these stories: Rusty got run over, Sheeba got run over, Alf got run over. They were so awfully
okay
about it when they said it. Right—they were all sad enough, all a little embarrassed and guilty and all. But they were intact. They were not wrecked. They got on with things and told the tale, as if having a flu shot or having a tooth pulled was pretty much the same hurt as watching two tons of truck flatten thirty pounds of best friend.

It is
not
the same feeling. It feels horrible. I mean, horrible. How can people talk about it like it’s anything else?

Because if you’ve seen it and heard it—god, if you’ve heard it—it would get you forever.

The tires screeched. Exactly the same pitch as Loose Lucy screeched once she caught on to what was happening to her. It was as if she were matching a pitch pipe, starting out with a bark-yelp-yowl-howl, all of it swooshing together until she got both lungs into it and screamed. Screamed. Like a
person,
she screamed like a
person,
finally, when they are
dying,
and they just then learn to tell you what is inside them, and then they are gone. Ah, Lucy. My Lucy.

The truck was jamming its brakes; the driver was shifting through the gears, down, trying to slow it and stop it and reverse it. I was wishing, like the driver was certainly wishing, that he could reverse this whole thing. Loose Lucy surely would have been wishing we could reverse, if she could imagine reverse. If she could imagine wishing.

But Loose Lucy, poor simple Lucy, couldn’t imagine something as complicated as wishing, and none of us could imagine reversing time and awfulness. And so she was dead. Good and dead.

Why do people say that? Good and dead. That’s just stupid.

Bad and dead.

She got all bent up, poor Lucy. Her back legs twisted up one way while the front were aiming another, as if this were two different parts of different dogs just passing each other on their way to two whole different places.

“Sorry, sorry, Lucy,” I kept saying, because it was my fault. She was never supposed to be out off the leash for just this reason. I only wanted to let her run, just for a minute, just for then. I did it before, just for a minute, and it worked out all right. And if you ever saw her, saw how excited she was, running, you would see why I would want to do that for her. You would want to do that for her, I know you would.

“Sorry, sorry, I am so sorry, Luce,” I said, as I held her head and she stared off past my right shoulder, as if I were up there, my head up there high above my right shoulder rather than tightly attached to my neck where I usually keep it.

There was a little blood puddled up in the middle of Lucy’s tongue, in the middle of her strange white gums. It wasn’t a lot of blood. There was a little more from a three-inch slash on her leg, but that wasn’t much either. Should have been more, but it was almost as if someone had run the tap of Loose Lucy’s blood and then snapped it shut again just as quick. Her belly was swelling.

She tried to get up. Half of her tried. The front half tried, but it was a weak try. I guided her head back down to the ground where she lay, and she didn’t fight me. She looked grateful to be there, lying down on the ground again, as if she never would have thought of that if I hadn’t pointed it out. That was very Lucy of her, I thought, and I was grateful that she was being very Lucy for me.

And then she did it—went and died. She closed her little eyes, and she stopped the short whispery pant she was doing; she let her tongue just flop there, touching the pavement with the very tip, like you would do if you were testing something out, soup or something, if you were afraid it was going to be too hot yet.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, as soon as he was sure Lucy had left. We were the only two people there yet, me and the truck driver. There would be lots others soon enough, but for this, it was just us. “I am very sorry,” he said again, and he didn’t try to explain anything away even though it was not his fault. “I am so sorry,” he said again, shaking his head, looking at Lucy, shaking his head. I felt so sorry for him, seeing his face, seeing this big guy, this big nine-foot-tall truck driver guy, seeing him go all crackly faced, and it just got worse when he leaned over past me and put his plaid shirt down over Lucy, as if we could still keep her warm, keep her wrapped, keep any more of her from seeping out and away.

“I’m sorry, mister,” I said, looking up at him, but staying crouched low to stroke Lucy. “I’m not supposed to let her off the leash, ever…I’m sorry…”

That was when I started to cry. And then that was when the truck driver started doing not so well himself, and I got a whole lot worse when I saw him, not crying exactly, but coming I guess as close as one of these big nine-foot men probably comes.

I turned away from the bright glassy eyes on that man, bright glassy shiny eyes where I could swear for a flash I was sure I saw us reflected. The picture of me and Lucy on the ground, her helpless, me useless. I turned from him and buried myself, laid my whole face right down into the neck part of my Lucy, just below her folded velvet ear, where she used to let you nuzzle for hours, and I nuzzled her for maybe hours, at least until I felt my dad’s hands squeezing my shoulders, warming me and comforting me and making me start to wail harder than ever.

She was already all stiff when we put her down in the corner of the yard a few hours later. I couldn’t believe it. Already. Already going and gone and taken away. Rigid, like she was already not our Lucy who would fetch oranges across this same yard, but a stuffed museum version of our Lucy. Her closed eyes were kind of pulling in, like she was squinting them, holding them tight against seeing what was going on and maybe then keeping it from going on.

Nice try, Luce. Hold ’em closed tight and maybe see something better.

Dad scooted up next to me at the foot of Loose Lucy’s grave. He had an arm draped over my shoulder. His fingernails were packed with the rich clay dirt of the digging, and his shirt was moist with sweat. The smell of him made me feel comfortable and right in a very sad way. This was the smell, to me, of saying good-bye.