Grave Concern (25 page)

“Well, we're not actually even
roommates
. Kate and I were friends, y'know, back in school.”

“Yeah, yeah. So what.”

“The thing is, Nevvy, I'm actually kind of …
married
. For a couple years now.”

“And
he's
responsible for this! And you've moved out and you're living at Kate's? Where is the son of a bitch? I'll sue him for every penny he's got.”

“No, Neville, it's not like that. Ron's fine. A little, uh,
frugal
, at times.”

Startled from her stupor by Hille's unusual articulation, Kate hastened to throw in her support. “Not a suing offence, I understand.”

“Yeah, like she says,” said Hille, and turned back to Neville. “It's just that, Nevvy, I'm
happily
married.”

“And living with Kate?”

“
Nooo
,” whined Hille. “Don't you get it, Nevvy? I gave you Kate's address because I was afraid. You know. Of what you said.”

“What I said?”

“You know, our deal. About my …
you
know.”

“Ohhhh!” Neville said. It was obvious to Kate that, with an audience, he would offer up no more on that subject. Gently plucking Hille's bandaged, bloodied limbs from their nest on her stomach, he said, “So, I repeat, what's
this
all about?”

Hille threw a desperate look first at Kate and then at Mary, who had quietly drawn her medical mask up over her face. Hille gave a little shrug of resignation, and with the razor-sharp manicured nails of her right hand, began to work the bandage on her left. She began slowly, stabbing playfully at it with a carmine fore-nail, then, with more seriousness, methodically sawing at the gauze. As the ripping and tearing continued, growing ever more energetic — Hille used teeth where nails failed — the esteemed Drs. Lyon and O'Beirne backed as one toward the swinging doors.

Steeped in moral indecision, Kate remained rooted, briefly, where she stood. Feeling Hille's pain more deeply than ever, Kate clung for a full minute to the shreds of her conscience when, deeming the damage beyond repair, she exited with the others. Neville, whose look of concern had — at the sight of gauzy bits flying from Hille's wrists — morphed into a grimace of horror, now collapsed in a dead faint.

Damp spring gave way to hot summer. After the ferment of the party and Hille's exhausting suicide attempt, Kate could hardly wait to get back to work in the relative peace of the cemetery. The days, now dawning warm as a prelude to sticky, overheated afternoons, urged Kate to reverse her schedule to accommodate. Rather than do deskwork in the mornings, Kate saved it for the later hours, when the cool, partial order of the Grave Concern office would bring relief from the merciless heat. Then she would sit very still in her seventies chair with the dried-out foam stuffing, eschewing artificial for natural light from the window and coaxing the utmost from her parents' prehistoric electric fan. Mornings, she headed straight to the graveyard, where the pines lay long transcendent shadows, like Plato's ideal forms, across the imperfection of the world.

It hadn't escaped Kate's notice, as she walked the rows this morning, that a number of the graves were garlanded to a greater degree than usual, some — a bittersweet pill — for the first time. Krebs and Krebs Funeral Home, recently re-named “Krebs Life Passage Services” was moving in on her territory, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do. So far, there had been no actual overlap, but it would be only a matter of time, Kate surmised, until her annual email-out requesting permission to renew services would reap its first “Decline.”

Would Krebs Life Passage Services see parallel losses to Kate's side? Likely not. Kate's simple ministrations of cut flowers and modest wreaths, weeded, trimmed grass, and elbow grease could hardly compete with Krebs's high-end gestures: battery-powered, ever-looping digital slide images of the deceased (while still alive, thank God) set into the stone itself; stereophonic audio renditions of the deceased's favourite song triggered by underground sensors. Kate sighed, envisioning a time when graveyards would resemble the singing greeting card aisle at Fossey's Drug Mart.

Granted, these over-the-top treatments were the exception. In the more popular mid-range, a quick cruise of Krebs's website told Kate that their significantly lower price was achieved mainly through bulk purchase of overwrought wreaths (made in China). At the low end of things, it was easy to see how Grave Concern was being undercut. At this bargain price point, Krebs's offering consisted of little more than a sprig of baby's breath, a couple of carnations, and some fern fronds crabbed together in a “faux-ceramic” vase. As for general maintenance, Kate saw little evidence on Krebs's plots. No grass clipping or stone polishing. Indeed, in a couple of notable cases, some unsightly bird business had been left exactly where it dropped on a stone's head — an insulting retraction, to Kate's mind, of the floral offering at its foot.

Kate traversed the grass pathways to a client's stone near her parents' plot. As she bent to her work, her father's voice was as clear in her head as the time he'd chortled over the phone: “They're digging in our row now, Kate. They're digging in our row.” And her mother coming on the extension, a bit unsettled: “You know your dad and his geriatric jokes. I swear I don't know where he gets them all. Don't listen to him, Kate, we're just fine.”

They were, and weren't, Kate knew. Her father was having heart trouble, but spoke little of it, protecting her still.

“So what about your heart?” Kate asked.

“My heart? Oh, fine. Healthy as a horse. Speaking of which, did I tell you the statistic I heard the other day? So this guy at coffee-klatsch said that, over the average lifespan, an elephant has exactly the same number of heartbeats as a mouse. And you know, of course, that a mouse lives only a couple of years, whereas an elephant lives on forever. So here's what I've been thinking. I've only got a certain number of heartbeats. Don't want to speed them up!”

Kate laughed, as always when her dad told her this story, and said, “So I've got a good excuse not to jog?”

And her dad, as always, said, “Damn right.”

And her mom, as always, said, “Dean! Language!” as though Kate were still a child.

“So tell me, what's new out there on the Great North American Plain? Think we should come for a visit? Drop down a coulee — isn't that what they call them? Pet a coy-o-tee? Climb a mountain or ski down a glacier?”

What Kate and perhaps her dad knew too was that mountain climbing was not just out of reach, but a wild impossibility these days. Through successive calls, Kate had descried that her father's heart was in a delicate state, a pacemaker in the works, and his once active life forever changed. Far from planning canoe trips on the Upper Pine River, or forging through the Big River Hills on snowshoes as he once did, her dad's grip on even everyday tasks was slipping, causing her mother increasing worry.

Kate set her tools down and placed a hand on her lower back. Intermittent reminders of middle age just a year ago had now become tenacious nags. Kate placed her other hand beside the first, the warmth utter bliss. She stretched gently forward, then reversed the movement, arching back slowly, face to sky. Ahhhhhhh. Relief.

As she stood up straight again, her hands flew to her throat. Just behind the gravestone … something was …
alive
.

Oh. Black tail feathers. Okay, then, just a crow. But the crazed flapping in Kate's chest would not be stilled. A flush of blood pumped crazily in her ears.

“Little devil!” she scolded. “Scared me half to death!”

The bird hopped out from behind the stone. The little devil was not so little. In fact, not little at all. Not even a crow. It was a monstrous blue-black raven with a beak like a number one drill. Kate had some experience of ravens out West, where this fellow's inky relations were a dependable source of awe and amusement. When driving a death-still white road at thirty degrees below, for instance, one would startle at the dark, diabolical forms, hoary with frost, gaily dining on entrail-of-roadkill. One time, waiting at a trailhead parking lot, Kate watched one of these fellows dance a sideways gavotte toward a truck, hop up on the windshield, and methodically strip the rubber blades from the wipers. With the resulting mess in its beak, it then swooped around the lot once or twice before dropping its hilarious gift on the hood of Kate's car, whence the joker flew into a tree, cackling.

The raven stopped pecking the ground and tilted one black eye up at Kate.

“Whoa,” Kate said, clutching her muddy trowel a little tighter. “Okay, boy, I take back the bit about the devil. Hey, you come here often?”

Unimpressed by Kate's conversational efforts, the raven went back to pecking. Kate watched, mesmerized. Slowly, she put down the trowel and picked up her grass shears. “So, Mr. Raven, you realize I've got to trim around this stone.”

“Gronk,” said the raven.

“So what's it going to be, fight or truce?”

“Gronk.”

“Whatever you say,” said Kate, kneeling back down to her work. “Let the best one win.”

Kate continued to trim the grass on her side of the stone while the raven, on his side, continued to hop and peck. “So,” said Kate finally, bringing the shears together with a snap, “All done here, fella. I'm coming over, now.”

“Gronk,” said the raven, hopping a few centimetres sideways and fluffing its wings.

“Okay, here I come!”

More flapping and flirting. “Gronk.”

Kate didn't really move much but began clipping around the side of the grave. “It's a beautiful day, eh Gronk? Is that your name? Gronk?”

“Gronk.”

“Good,” said Kate, “I thought so.” Kate poked the shears into a new spot, then moved up to meet them. By patient repetition of this sequence, she progressed in stages around the stone. At each advance, the raven would hop a little further, but generally seemed unfazed. Kate clipped and polished, Gronk hopped and pecked, and around them the day heated up. When her ribs began to lecture her severely, Kate wiped the sweat from her upper lip and pronounced the job done. She tidied up the clippings, bagged the weeds, put her tools and polishing cloths back in the duffel, and stood up. Into Kate's head popped a memory of Olive, their widowed neighbour, who came for dinner every Sunday night. On taking her leave, Olive would invariably push her cat's-eye glasses up her nose before saying, as she said every Sunday:
Well, Molly — it's been grand, but I really must get on.

Kate said it now to her feathered friend. “Well, Gronk — it's been grand, but I really must get on.”

“Grand,” said Gronk.

Kate stuck a testing finger in her ear — too long since it had been cleaned. She'd heard
Grand
when she should have heard
Gronk
, but Q-tips and a little oil should take care of that.

Monday morning after the party, the talk at Tim Horton's was all of the party brawl — rumours of lawsuits, pending assault charges, dry-cleaning bills. Notably absent from this chatter were the principals involved. Some were back on the job, others nursing bruised bodies and/or egos at home — but all were lying low, flying under the radar. This, at any rate, was the word from Hank Dixon, whose party-night experience had had the opposite effect. That is, shy Hank had been apparently catapulted past some mental threshold and out upon the world, which effectively meant the Timmy's crowd. As happy as Kate was for Hank's newfound sociability, the discussion
content
Hank reported was worrying. Kate came to believe it would not be long before she was legally implicated — for serving the wrong drinks, or too much drink, or not keeping a handle on things. She made a mental note not to burn any bridges with Neville Freeland, whose legal skills could come in handy.