Elizabeth and After

The West Gull Cemetery announces itself with a twenty-foot-high stone archway of quarried limestone. Its gates are black wrought iron with silver tips and fittings, and the matching fence stretches hundreds of yards along the highway. Located on a high and windswept plateau, it offers a unique and flattering perspective on Long Gull Lake, the town of West Gull itself and the rich surrounding farmland. Even a stranger would be impressed
.

Once Elizabeth McKelvey was such a stranger. On a certain spring day that marked the end of a long winter, both real and metaphorical, she passed through the archway, drifted a palm along the silky-slick surface of the limestone, stepped gingerly onto the moist dense grass. The sky was blue, the light a sparkle of sun and budding leaves. Soon she could hardly see the car in which she had arrived, and the man who brought her had receded to a shadow. As she lost herself in this new world, the idea that she might one day be buried there seemed almost natural
.

But when that time actually arrived the word everyone used was not “natural” but “unexpected.”
Unexpected.
Like the woman herself, like the accident that killed her
.

On the day of the funeral Long Gull Lake was a distant stretch of snow dotted with fishing huts merging into the grey sky. The town, so picturesque in summer, was just a jumble of metal and asphalt roofs, columns of smoke rising straight into the still air. The fertile farmland was a barren waste with a few clusters of houses and barns
.

Halfway through the ceremony, the sun surprised everyone by coming out. By that time Elizabeth, encased in her chrome-trimmed oak coffin, had been placed in the hole all eyes were trying to avoid. The sun melted the frost in the top layer of the mounded dirt beside the grave and tiny rivulets of water began to form. Gerald Boyce, who had dug the grave and whose head was still ringing with the brain-jarring experience of sitting on the front-end loader while its bucket smashed into the half-frozen ground, reached out in wonder to squeeze this suddenly pliant and beautifully glistening soil
.

“Elizabeth McKelvey. An extraordinarily generous woman with an uncanny ability to touch and shape the lives of those who knew her—her students, her family, her friends. For all of us, Elizabeth passed through our lives like a dazzling shooting star. And in the way the light from a shooting star stays visible long after that chunk of rock has disappeared into its own nothingness…” And so on and so forth until Dr. Albert Knight’s eulogy to his friend and patient ended in a heartfelt burst of tears. But despite the fact that he’d compared Elizabeth to a chunk of rock, not exactly flattering the deceased, many residents of West Gull felt he’d hit the nail on the head with the bit about the light: a rich and haunting green-blue glimmer had emanated not only from Elizabeth’s eyes but seemingly from her entire being. “Like an electric shroud you would be afraid to touch,” alleged one of the spiritually minded Ladies of the Lnner Circle old enough to have witnessed her testimony
.

According to the coroner’s report, at the time of her death Elizabeth McKelvey was 51 years old, a white female 66 inches tall and weighing 128 pounds, the possessor of chestnut hair and 27 teeth
.

The cause of death was deemed to be “shock and massive hemorrhaging due to multiple fractures of the skull.” This event was accompanied by tears in the skin, including one over the right ear where a section of scalp was actually stripped from the bone, fractures of the nose and both cheekbones, internal injuries un-enumerated since an autopsy was not deemed necessary, and other outrages to what had been a healthy living body before it took an unplanned trip through a suddenly stationary windshield attached to a car that had accordioned into a large oak tree
.

Nothing was said about the blood in the snow but there was a lot—more than you would think a body could hold. In some places it had clotted into frozen puddles, in others it was scattered in long splotched whips like scarlet maple taffy. Perhaps in deference to those who had seen it, and to ease the suffering of relatives and friends, the report added that “death was almost certainly instantaneous.”

At the funeral, following her father’s eloquent eulogy, Maureen Knight remarked that “my father was always one to exaggerate.” This statement was left to hover uncontradicted while those who had heard quickly whispered it to those who hadn’t
.

A
S
W
ILLIAM
M
C
K
ELVEY LAY TWISTED
in his bed, grizzled barrel chest barely moving, each drawn-in breath rattled like a truckful of gravel being poured through a giant tin culvert. There followed a brief moment during which the echo grew as hollow as a horror-movie tomb, then the gushing exhalation began: a long moist flushing out of spongy lungs clogged by decades of tobacco and woodsmoke.

Asleep, as awake, William McKelvey made a large ungainly lump. But in his dream McKelvey was all air and fire, a sheet-wrapped ghost drifting through West Gull, a small farming centre and tourist town that for almost two centuries had been clinging to the shore of Long Gull Lake, an elongated granite-shored dip on the southern edge of the Precambrian Shield. The sky was black and moonless, the street lamps off. But in the residential area where William McKelvey slept, the tended streets with the expensive homes between the highway and the lake, most of the doors had amber-lit brass coach
lamps showing the way for horses that would never come, and through the windows of their glassed-in solariums could be seen the glowing numbers of VCRs and digital clocks and sometimes the trembling green and red lights of fax and answering machines.

The main street brought more lights—the white fluorescent glow of the big glass-doored refrigerators in which the convenience store kept its milk and juice, the tricoloured neon pop sign that burned day and night over the counter of the Timberpost Restaurant and the light Luke Richardson kept on at the Richardson Real Estate office. Luke Richardson. There was a man who could turn a dream into a nightmare. These days he liked to come up to McKelvey and stand too close, his lank black hair shining with grease. “Hey, Bill,” he would start, his jaw dropping to reveal the dark poison hole of his mouth. “How’s my man? Where you been hiding?” William McKelvey, convinced eight years ago by Luke Richardson to sell his house and farm to the West Gull Rest & Retirement Villa in return for the privilege of resting and retiring there until he died or became a vegetable, would turn and walk away.

The dream-ghost of William McKelvey was looking for fresh brownies in the bakeshop when the radio woke him up.

“Five a.m. at
TWANG FM
,” rhymed the all-night DJ, his tinny voice emerging discreetly from the clock radio William McKelvey kept under his pillow.

He rolled onto his back and began to massage his bad knee. It was late June. The sweet smell of clover and fresh-cut hay lay across the township and filtered through McKelvey’s screened window, along with the beginning ripples of bird-song and the restless trembling of the poplars that stood in the yard of the R&R, originally the home of Luke Richardson’s great-great-grandfather and now the penultimate residence
of two dozen officially ambulatory souls whose bodies, like the slowly collapsing barns that dotted the landscape, now gave only the most provisional shelter to anyone trapped inside.

McKelvey pushed away the covers and silently dressed in the clothes he had laid out. Soon he was padding downstairs, shoes in hand.

Once in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door and helped himself to a package of sliced salami and a square of cheese, both of which he stuffed into his fishing vest, a beige labyrinth of pockets and zippers sent to him by his son on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. From one of the pockets within a pocket, he withdrew a key he’d confiscated the afternoon before and used it to unbolt the deadlocked kitchen door.

By now there was just enough light to make silhouettes of the surrounding trees and nearby houses. Even in the few minutes it had taken him to dress and get outside, the birdsounds had grown more complicated, new calls and songs crowding into the pre-dawn sky. He crossed the grass to the sidewalk. A few steps took him to the delivery lane that emerged on Main Street. There, standing beside the real-estate office, the same one his dream-ghost had passed, he peered across the street to Richardson’s New & Used. Beside the garage, parked where it had been for the last week, was the white Pontiac.