Funerals for Horses (3 page)

The moon shows it all.

Thank god the moon is on my side. I’ll need a piece of that, a piece of Sarah, all of myself and all of Simon. Even then, this may be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

In the morning I am running on my generator.

Unlike some people, I function beautifully on no sleep, but a sort of auxiliary power kicks in, different from the natural one. It feels sharp-edged and cold. It tends to make people avoid me, even those who would be inclined to spend time around me to begin with.

Sarah does not avoid me.

She makes me a pot of coffee and a bacon omelet, and cries as she watches me eat.

She holds me at the door, as if she’s on to me and knows what I need. She slips me more warm strength than I would think she could spare.

I walk across the street to my old pickup, like a hike across flat terrain to the edge of the earth.

THEN:

If the drums had worked, I might still have a sister. The drums did not work. It was a piece of clever thinking on DeeDee’s part, though. I will grant her that. By now, with Simon fifteen, DeeDee eleven, me nine, the age I accepted god’s noninvolvement policy, my mother responded to almost nothing. Only one thing could rouse her out of bed: Grandma Ginsberg’s heated complaints. Who would have thought such a thing could have a purpose?

DeeDee traded her bike for a set of drums, and, as a courtesy to the family, played them only in the garage. This broken-down structure, far too stacked and littered with yellowing sports sections to house the car, faced out onto the back yard, six feet from Grandma Ginsberg’s window.

DeeDee never took lessons on the drums; she just pounded. Grandma Ginsberg screamed until her old throat faltered and her voice cracked into a hoarse whisper.

My mother did not get up.

Finally I asked Simon, who knew everything, why my mother would respond to nonsense from the old lady while ignoring a real problem.

“But that’s just it,” he said. “Don’t you see?”

I wasn’t sure I did, but I hated to appear ignorant in front of my brother.

In a few months the drums stood silent in the corner of the garage, near the spot where DeeDee took to setting fires. They were only little fires at first, but I sensed a personal game of chicken involved, as if she challenged herself to set a blaze which would tease the borderline of control.

When the big one came, Simon said it just got away from her by mistake. I’m sure he knew better, but he liked to think the best about people if they met him halfway.

The big one came at night, with DeeDee running through our room to Simon’s room, yelling fire at the top of her lungs, as though this was news, her face blackened with smoke.

As my bare feet hit the cold boards of the bedroom floor, the room lit up like a night thunderstorm, only with lightning that stayed. I ran to the window to watch the flames engulf the garage roof. I heard Grandma Ginsberg come apart. DeeDee climbed under my bed as Simon grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Call the fire department,” he said.

I wished at that moment that I was Simon. Then I wouldn’t have to ask a stupid question.

“Uh. What’s their number again?”

“Just dial the operator. Tell her you need the fire department.”

His blue eyes bored into me, full of fear, but a fear that wouldn’t slow him down or trip him up.

As I told the fire department our address, I watched the trees rain, and the windows streak and flow with water. I ran outside to find Simon hosing down the roof.

Then it all happened at once, all the light, all the sound. The sirens blended with the popping wood, the cracking roof supports. The red flashing lights blended with the eerie flicker of the engulfed structure. Fire hoses overpowered Simon’s little garden hose.

The neighborhood watched in robes and bare feet.

A fireman cornered my brother Simon. “Where are your parents, son?”

“My father’s gone,” I heard him say.

“Where’s your mother?”

Simon only shrugged in that spooky glow. “I dunno. Sleeping, I guess.”

That’s when it occurred to me that Grandma Ginsberg had fallen silent.

My mother was carried out of the house, against her will by the look of it. Simon informed the chief that DeeDee could be found under a bed.

The fire was quickly contained, though with no garage left to speak of; except for the scorched roof, the house sustained no real damage.

Grandma Ginsberg was carried out on a stretcher, her face covered with a sheet, already dead, I would learn later, of a heart attack.

I knew I would have my work cut out for me, wondering whether I needed to feel bad or not.

My mother stumbled back into the house on the all-clear signal, and fell asleep again, as Simon explained to the remaining firefighters that Grandma Ginsberg might have to be handled like a person with no relatives. Only Simon could explain a thing like that and cause grown men to nod their understanding.

Simon called Uncle Manny in the morning, and next thing we knew, our father was home, making all the arrangements.

Our mother did not attend the funeral. I felt sure her days were numbered now, or simply negated, so that even if they did drag on, they would go for nothing.

Our father asked Simon to say a few words to the bereaved.

“Just stand right up there, son, and say a few things you remember about your grandmother.”

Simon did a lovely job, I thought.

He told the story of Grandma Ginsberg chasing DeeDee and him around the apartment, back in her mobile days, shaking her finger at them, saying “You dasn’t do that” repeatedly over their laughter. He never explained their transgression, only the way they laughed at her later for her use of the word “dasn’t,” a word they could swear didn’t exist in the English language.

Then he told the story of the slamming door. The day he saw baby DeeDee go into Grandma Ginsberg’s bedroom and climb on the bed, and how he figured he could do it if she could. But then, when he tried, she called him goyim and held his hand in the bedroom door and slammed it on his hand to teach him better than to try such a thing again.

And then later he knew why, he explained, because he overheard her talking to our father, complaining that the Simon boy looked just like his shiksa wife.

As he explained this last little bit, Simon’s voice faded as our father ushered him off the podium, away from the microphone.

Poor Simon. Poor brave, honest Simon. Everybody acted like he had a disease. He meant no harm, of course. Nobody had warned him that he was supposed to act.

DeeDee brought Andy, her stuffed horse, to the funeral, and to the shiva. She grabbed little handfuls of matzo strips or a piece of gefilte fish from the buffet, then hid under the coffee table, pretending to feed Andy.

If anyone had noticed, they might have found it odd behavior for a girl of eleven, but we were all three mercifully invisible, even our voices drowned in the moans and sobs.

I sat on the rug beside the coffee table, as though she’d let me be close to her. I reached out to pet Andy, but she slapped my hand away.

He was a small horse, six or seven inches long, stiff legs inside his blue and green cover to stand up by himself. Andy had a windup key in his belly, which my sister now cranked obsessively, causing him to roll his head around on a geared neck and play “Brahms’ Lullaby.”

Thinking I was being kind, I told DeeDee that when she grew up, she might be able to own a real horse.

She flew out from under the table at me, like ghosts from a Halloween house, threw me and pinned me and seized my throat in her adrenaline-powered grasp.

“Don’t ever say Andy isn’t a real horse. Ever. Promise.”

I would have, if I could, if she had let go of my throat, or if Uncle Manny hadn’t disrupted the moment by pulling her off to the other side of the room.

He sat with DeeDee on his lap, one huge arm around her waist, restraining her as she wailed and thrashed. He must have thought she was on her way back to attack me, but I knew better. I retrieved Andy from under the coffee table, and carried him, as reverently as I knew she would, back to his rightful owner. She sat still then.

It was the best apology I could make, because words would not have come close.

DeeDee didn’t speak to me for a week. But she didn’t speak to anyone else either, so I didn’t take it too hard. Besides, she ended her silence in my presence, in our room just before sleep.

“If anything happens to me,” she whispered, “I want you and Simon to give Andy a proper burial. With a funeral service and everything.”

I wondered if we were to sit shiva for Andy, but I wasn’t sure what I could say to her and what I couldn’t.

“But Andy wouldn’t be dead. Would he?”

“Of course he would. Without me? Absolutely he would. What would he be without me? No, without me, the only thing left for Andy is a decent burial.”

I made my sister DeeDee a solemn promise.

When I woke the next day she was gone, to school I assumed, and Andy was a lump under the edge of my pillow.

Mom didn’t notice when DeeDee forgot to come home. Simon said she ran away, but he knew better, I think. He liked to think the best.

I told him about Andy, about the promise, and we found a flashlight and set out around bedtime, sorting a careful grid on the three-acre woodlot behind our house until we found her.

I was glad I couldn’t see Simon’s face as we stood beneath that tree, flashlight drooped in his hand, listening to the sickening creak of rope on tree limb as the breeze blew through.

I asked my brother Simon if we call the fire department for something like this.

I locate my approximate goal by landmark. The sun glares into my unblinking eyes, and I pull my hat brim down to shield them. I probably should think I’m standing someplace beautiful.

The hill slopes away beneath my feet, the grass winter green, the sky a perfect cloudless blue contrast. Everywhere I look I see trees. I have never been fond of trees. Well, not never, but not for a long time.

Now I see a small brown rabbit. He stares at me. I stare back. I take a step toward him, thinking he will run. He holds his ground, staring. He turns, lopes a few rabbit steps away, and looks over his shoulder at me.

I walk the other way.

It’s the hawk that turns me back again, away from the direction I think I should travel.

He spreads his great patterned wings and glides from tree to tree, and I trot along, afraid, as always, that life will happen too fast and I will be left behind.

I catch my foot and go sprawling.

I scrape my chin on a rock, and as it bleeds onto my shirt, I notice it’s a strip of wood that snagged me. Not a natural strip, as one might expect out here, but a carefully cut and milled piece of narrow lumber, sticking straight up out of the ground.

I stand, wipe my chin on my shoulder and stamp the grass down all around my find.

I walk a pattern, rolling out in ever-widening circles until I find another. I clear the grass aside to discover a knot of plastic tape still attached, as if the remainder had been carelessly torn away, with a little tail flapping in the breeze.

The tail contains bits of faded words: DO NOT CR

Within minutes I’ve paced off the four corners of the site. The fourth stick also contains a strip of police tape. It says: LINE DO N

I remember the first time I ever saw my brother Simon cry. We stood under a scrub oak, something like the one above me now, holding the little board box Simon had made for Andy. We were affording Andy his promised proper burial, the day after the police tape disappeared from around that tree.

“How do you cry, Simon?”

I was so in awe of him, the things he could do that seemed like foreign currency to me. Shoot baskets. Bench press seventy pounds. Cry.

“I don’t know,” he said, wiping his eyes and nose on his sleeve. “You just do.”

I bend now to touch the sun-bleached scrap of tape, afraid to walk into the rectangle of my brother’s misfortune.

How do you cry, Ella? You just do. But my stomach is tight, my head tingly, my eyes dry, and I just don’t.

I step inside, to the center of the area, now clean of my brother’s clothes, long since entered into evidence when a scruffy rider of the rails found himself in custody for attempting to pass Simon’s checks.

I sit down hard to ease my dizziness. The hawk screams at me.

I feel a sense of lightness, which is very much what I feared. I feel a release, an end to worldly tension, to remorse. I feel a letting go. I suppose this could mean two things. Simon has left this world. Or, wherever he is, Simon is happy.

If Simon has left this world, I will walk off the edge soon enough myself.

I hear DeeDee’s voice in my head, as I have often since Simon’s disappearance, as if she must speak louder with only one sibling to listen.

She says, but you wouldn’t be dead. Would you? Of course I would. Without Simon? Absolutely I would. What would I be without Simon?

I decide that, wherever Simon is now, he is happy.

THEN:

Our mother attended the funeral only because our father dressed and dragged her. He stood in the middle of her bedroom, supported her around the waist with one arm and slipped a black dress over her head with his free hand.

We only peeked in for brief moments at a time, skittering back and forth from living room to bedroom, wondering which was the worse spot to light.

In the living room was our father’s lady friend, and both halves of that term only loosely applied to Sheila, transfixed by the task of polishing her nails. She wore her hair piled on her head like an exotic dancer or a waitress, her skirt too short. Long after our father had loaded Mom into the passenger seat of his new car, Simon and I respectfully silent in the back seat, I pictured Sheila, long legs crossed, extending one hand with spread fingers, blowing on the wet polish.

“Isn’t this a lovely day for a wedding, Gabe?” our mother chirped as he pulled away from the curb.

“We’re not going to a wedding, Betty, we’re going to our daughter’s funeral.”

She turned her face to him, showing us her warm smile in profile. “This will be just like old times for us, won’t it, Gabe?”