Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (11 page)

—

Things started happening even faster then. Or rather, things stopped happening. Cal’s periods of lucidity and consciousness became fewer and fewer. The hospice nurses told us it was only a matter of a day or two; but in fact it was nine days. Deirdre came again, and I listened as she and Tina discussed Cal’s silent journeying.

“I know he’ll come back, but will I know him?” One of the nurses had managed to get Tina to take some sleeping pills. She was sleeping as many as four hours a night now, and seemed less manic. “Do you think he might actually become a wolf? Or another person, do you think he might be a person? Maybe I could find him and we could do this all again? Will I recognize him? Will I
know
him?”

“No one knows.” Deirdre leaned against the kitchen counter, sipping green tea. “I think it’s partly a matter of luck and partly a matter of being in the right place at the right time. You just never know. But if you’re mindful, if you’re aware and consciously looking for him, you might find him sooner rather than later.”

“I hope so
,”
Tina said fervidly. “Oh god, I hope so.”

There was a constant stream of people in and out of the house. Some stayed all day, talking quietly, taking turns to sit at Cal’s side, stroking his head, chanting in low voices or kneeling with eyes closed and hands upturned. Praying, I guess, or looking for those seven gates, tapping into some secret stream of healing energy that evaded me. We stacked firewood, folded clothes, washed dishes, fed cats; unpacked groceries and heated the huge vats of chowder Lisa brought from next door.

I continued to drop by once and occasionally twice a day, if I wasn’t staying over. Pansy was often there, and I’d kneel beside her and Tina, the three of us gently stroking Cal’s face while Tina read from Lorca’s poems. I could hardly bear to touch Cal, I was so afraid I might hurt or wake him; but he seemed very far away now. He lay curled upon his side, shrunken, his arms held close to his chest; he looked like a praying mantis, with his eyes so deep set and his limbs withered. It was two weeks since he had eaten anything at all, and then only a few bites of applesauce. Always wiry, he now seemed insubstantial as one of the delicate papier-maché figures in the room around him, skeletons wearing crowns of roses, a steer’s skull ringed round with dried blossoms. I would close my eyes and try to find him, try to see the gates that Deirdre had described. I would picture Cal and Tina walking in a field of bluebonnets, their long hair streaming, or imagine mountains and Cal flying above them, not a wolf but an eagle.

Be there now
, I thought, trying to make it real, to scale my own stony disbelief and somehow give him peace.
Be there.

But still he would twitch and moan, so softly it was like a sigh. His skin was oily with sweat; Tina had washed and braided his hair, but reddish strands had come loose and stuck damply to his forehead. Each time I left I would kiss him, murmuring,
I love you, Cal, I love you
. It would be hours before the scent of his dying left my skin, the smell of candle wax and incense, marijuana, sweat, the heavy odor of farewell he exhaled.

We began to make plans for what happened next, what happened after. That was how we said it. Weeks before, Tina had asked me if I would make arrangements for cremation.

“Cal wants to be burned on a bonfire here in the woods,” she told me. “Can you see if we can do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went outside, huddled in my parka against heavy blowing snow, and in the middle of the dirt road hung out for a while with some of the other people caught between arriving and leaving.

“You’re taking care of the cremation?” asked Jorge. He was one of Cal’s oldest friends, lived just a few miles down Route 52. He stopped by every day, bringing carafes of coffee and fresh donuts from town, but he wouldn’t stay inside. His inside expression was distant, almost bored, as though he were listening to radio reports of bad news far away. But once outside again he grew animated and could give way to worry and, sometimes, anger. “Tina said she asked yo
u
.
.
.
?”

“Yeah. But I’m pretty sure the whole Darth Vader trip is totally illegal.”

Jorge laughed. “I figured. Larry and Paul want to build a coffin shaped like a boat, and then just push it into the harbor.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, too.”

—

Larry and Paul did end up making the coffin, a beautiful thing of dovetailed pine and maple and very old, hand-hammered nails. They painted it with runes and sacred symbols, Tibetan prayers and, on its sides, two enormous Argus eyes, like those on ancient Greek triremes. The coffin was immense, nearly seven feet long; but I’d made sure we’d gotten the correct dimensions from the crematorium, so that we’d be certain it would fit into the retort.

Previously, my only knowledge of cremation came from having watched
Jules and Jim
numerous times, taking especial note of those scenes at the end showing the lovers’ coffins disappearing into the furnace. But that week I got to be on a first-name basis with the crematorium staff. Tina wanted to keep Cal’s body at home for forty-eight hours after he died, and then arrange for our own transportation to the crematory facility in Lewiston, more than three hours away. To do this involved a draconian process of obtaining death certificates and medical examiner’s reports, notarized forms from doctors, county clerks, the hospice. A Burial Transport Permit was needed, and a permit for the Disposition of Human Remains. Certain lines of the forms could only be handwritten in black ink. While being transported, the body could never be in public view. I spent hours and hours on the telephone sorting all this out and discussing
the more salient aspects of cremation with Mr. Brusher, the cre
matorium director.

Mr. Brusher was polite, patient, and professionally dubious about the prospect of the bereaved, non-professionals all, performing the pagan duty of driving a corpse in an old red International pickup truck to his crematorium. He had a pleasantly oleaginous voice and seemed to enjoy discussing his work. After he had spent six or seven hours advising me on how best to obtain the proper papers, his tone became one of furtive and confiding amusement.

“The most
efficient
thing to do, Miss Waverley, would be to contact us as soon as possible, after the death has occurred. That way we can make certain we schedule you for the appropriate time.

“Between you and me,” he added, giving a soft apologetic snort of laughter, “this has been a very
high volume
week. Mmm. You understand. And you see, we need time in between to thoroughly clean out the retort.
Some
people—”

He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “—
some
people, when they bring the casket in, can be quite distressed when they first see the interior of the retort. Because
occasionally
there is something left over, we do our best to clean it
thoroughly
but
sometimes
there might be a little piece of bone, or metal. Teeth. And this can be upsetting.”

I knew he was trying to talk me out of doing any of this ourselves. I was not afraid of bones, although I was worried about Tina. Apart from any visceral shock or fear, there probably was some pagan proscription against somebody else’s Judeo-Christian bones being included with your loved one’s.

So I spared her the more graphic details provided by Mr. Brusher. I wished I could spare her all of them. Still, she would not be dissuaded; she had a kind of moral strength that was almost nunlike in its purity and the unwavering belief that she was doing the one true right thing.

Which, of course, she was. I could only watch, my chest aching as she braided and rebraided her husband’s hair, dampened his cracked lips with a washcloth or her own mouth, kissed his forehead and hands and the staved-in curve of his shoulder blades
.
And I did what I could to prepare for Death, to lay down a paper trail, or at least provide a sort of map that would indicate where the paper trail would be. I was very, very organized.

But when I was in my own home, I would wake in the middle of
the night and lie there for hours in a cold sweat. What terrified me
was something so banal I was ashamed to even speak it aloud: I could not bear the thought of Cal’s body being burned; of all that beauty, his long red hair and Viking jewelry, his gorgeous clothes and long slender fingers heavy with rings—of all that being consigned to the air.

And that was how I thought of it, not of smoke or ash or flame but of air and nothingness, an eternal blue sweep of sky and Cal nowhere to be seen. I had studied archaeology in college and always loved bones, fragments of stone and crushed beads, the patterns of livelihood and ritual that you could discern within a cubic yard of rich humus and potsherds, tibia and skulls and broken glass. I had no belief in resurrection beyond this.

But when I thought of that beautiful casket, painstakingly made and carved by men who loved their friend, and of my friend within it with all his treasure laid upon his breast—when I thought of that, I imagined Cal as a prince of the earth, one who might be found
a thousand years hence, buried in a rocky northern graveyard. And
when he was discovered, by archaeologists to whom he would be as remote as Scythian horselords were to me—why then he would live again! Cal would be a mystery, but he would be known. He would be alive, and not forgotten, even if no one knew his name; even if no one understood the meaning of the tattoos upon his wrists or the runestones he carried in a leather bag at his side.

But if all of that were consigned to the air there would be nothing that remained of my friend; nothing at all.

—

Cal died early on Thursday evening, during a snowstorm. I wasn’t there; I would be snowed in with my children for the next forty-eight hours, and so I missed everything I had tried to plan for so diligently. Tina was there, of course, in the next room, talking to Leenamarie, the Wiccan priestess who would oversee the death rites. Later, Tina told me about everything.

“I walked back into the room and without even looking at him, I knew he was gone. I just knew. I walked over and looked at him. Then I went into the kitchen. I picked up a bowl, that heavy blue glass bowl? And I smashed it into the sink. I was screaming at the top of my lungs.

‘You bastard, you sonofabitch, I spent the last two months never leaving you and now you go?
Now
you go?
’

“I don’t know what Leenamarie thought
.
Then I looked down at my hand. I hadn’t felt anything when I smashed the bowl, but I was bleeding, like, a lot
.
And I thought, Hmmm. I bette
r
get a grip on this.”

Within a few hours, the tribe had gathered around her. Tina and Leenamarie and Luna washed Cal’s body and anointed it; Tina braided his hair, snipping a single long plait and putting it on the altar, to keep. They dressed him in his nineteenth-century naval captain’s uniform, the one he had worn when he was Captain Ahab one Hallowe’en, and laid him out on a makeshift table made from planks and sawhorses, in the keeping room out back. It was so cold there that your fingers and nose grew numb within minutes, but everyone took turns keeping a vigil by his body. The men prepared a huge bonfire in the field behind the woods, and as the snow fell Leenamarie led a mooncircle out there, with dozens of friends chanting, singing, howling like wolves as the storm subsided and the full moon rose above the trees. Inside, Tina sat on a stool in the kitchen while her friend Doreen shaved her head. Doreen worked
as a veterinary assistant; she used sheep shears on Tina, and then a
series of disposable razors until her skull was smooth and yellow as a monk’s. Afterward, Tina showed me a series of pictures, the women seeming never to change position, save their eyes and mouths, which were twisted between hysterical laughter and ravaged
weeping. It was like some weird time-lapse film that recorded
emotion and not movement.

“He looked so beautiful, Carrie.” There were photographs of Cal, too; Tina made a little album of them. “He lost that old-man look and he looked the way he used to, the way he did when we first met. He was so beautiful, I couldn’t stop touching him. I just kept going back into the back room and touching his face.

“But then, after about thirty-six hours, he changed. It happened really suddenly. And I went back into the house and said, ‘Dead Body! Get him out of here!’”

—

The night that Cal died, I had a dream about him. In my dream I was calling Tina on the phone, but Cal answered, his voice as strong and full of laughter as it had been once, three months gone by, oh so long ago. That was my only knowledge of his presence, his voice, and it filled me with an overwhelming mix of confusion and joy—had there, after all, been a mistake?

But no: even in my dream I couldn’t let go of the facts.

“Cal,” I said. “Aren’t you—”

I stopped. I didn’t want to embarrass him by pointing out he was a ghost.

“No, Carrie.” He sounded amused, slightly annoyed, the way he’d sounded when we’d argued about politics during the Gul
f
War. “No, Carrie. I’m still here. I’m right here, Carrie. I’m here.”

I woke, feeling not frightened but bemused and oddly exhilarated, which I guess was the closest I ever came to experiencing some kind of faith.

—

Early Friday morning I had called Mr. Brusher and informed him of the time of Cal’s death, and told him when to expect the little procession of pickups and old four-wheel-drive Subarus and Saabs.

“The widow is aware that, after forty-eight hours, the body will start to—decay?

“Yes, she is.” I had been warned about this by the hospice nurses, too; one of them advised me that we should all put Noxzema around and inside our nostrils. “They’ll be there Saturday afternoon.”

Saturday morning they put Cal into his coffin. They laid him upon a bed of marijuana, tucking it around his thin shoulders and wasted legs, and then filled his pockets with semi-precious stones, agates and Maine tourmaline, jade from Nepal and Indian cinnabar. Tina slipped coins into his pockets, and hand-rolled cigarettes, a six-ounce green glass bottle of Coca-Cola, a Defenders of
Wildlife coffee mug with wolves on it. In one hand she put the last of the Owsley acid he’d hung onto since his days of dealing it thirty years before. His paints went into the casket, and his pastels; his shakuhachi flute and the new hand-beaded moccasins that were a Christmas present he’d never been able to wear. He wore most of his jewelry, save a few pieces that Tina had decided to keep; and so the casket was made that much heavier by golden rings and thick silver bracelets embossed with dragons and waves, his ivory torque, the yards and yards of
Tibetan necklaces strung with little brass and bronze and copper and silver and jade dragons. Tina placed one of his painted and embroidered leather bags beside him. Inside were his well-worn tarot deck and favorite books—Howard Pyle’s
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
, the Rockwell Kent
Moby Dick
, paperbacks of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Another leather bag held his runestones. Last of all, on his breast there was an exquisite wooden model of a Viking ship under full sail.