Yesterday we drove in the rain down the main street of a one horse town. The highway has bypassed it but there’s a business district with a grade school, cafe, a couple of trading posts, shops where nothing is very expensive, and the little tendrils of insurance giants. Toward the end of the main drag there’s the nicest restaurant in the valley. It has been closed down for years so it’s just a vacant place with windows opening onto a view to the north, and San Francisco Peaks. It used to have a bar with a band and a steakhouse.
We drove alongside the ghost of a good time, past small houses, to a mortuary which, dad said, had been fixed up and looked really good since the new owners took over. The mortuary director was named Ben, and he was big enough to be half a defensive line all by himself. He was showing us caskets, headstones, and packages. He had just come from church, he said, and he provided his family bona fides in Camp Verde.
There really isn’t much you can do when somebody dies, other than handle it yourself, and bury the person within the time limit for non embalmed bodies, I think 24 hours, or turn it over to a funeral director. Once it’s being handled by a funeral director it’s just a matter of choosing times and products and services: working out the details so the director can make it work smoothly for you.
For example, Bueler showed dad the kind of stone, or brass, the Veteran’s Administration will provide for his grave, which he is quick to point out he’s in no hurry to get into. “You see here where you can put the rank you achieved …” He was showing how mom’s stone could be matched to it, and what would go in that space.
“I didn’t achieve much rank; I was in the guardhouse too much,” dad said.
“He was in the war,” one of my sisters offered.”
“A machine gunner,” I said, poking dad in the leg. “A cleaner.”
The other sister said my name aloud, as if I needed to be called back from where I had ventured. The moment passed. But after we left and went to the local cafe for lunch, for the first time I heard him say out loud what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story.” He’d mentioned pieces of it. Japanese troops put ashore at the wrong place. Somebody made a mistake about where the Japanese line was. And they were all blissfully unaware, on the beach, in the gunsights. And they were all mowed down by machine gun fire, until the beach was a sea of corpses. Now dad finally stepped into the scene as an actor and not an observer, describing how they had just started at the outer edges and worked inward.
It was something new for him to own what scared him so much when he was still worried about heaven and hell. I think he’s past that now. He’s showing emotion openly, there in the space where Ruby is missing. It is a space which produces surprises. For example, my older sister irritates the hell out of me with some of her lame jokes. But as we were driving away from the mortuary I mentioned how big Ben Bueler is. “Nobody’s gonna give him any grief,” she said. It was brilliant. What in the hell was going on? Dad finally owning what had always weighed so heavily on his mind, and — even more astonishing — Pat making a joke I found brilliant?
Back at the house, I pulled out my guitar and began to play and sing a song without being self-conscious about it. A black cloak slipped off my shoulders and onto the floor. There it writhed around animated by whatever dark lord it calls master, then formed itself into a small black dog which went to the front door, sat down, and looked back as if waiting to be let out.