Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (65 page)

After my housekeeper was installed, I went to thank Milo and pay the bill. The invoices detailed the number of loads, the washers and the dryers, detergent, bleaches, fabric softeners. I think the total came to sixty dollars. When I asked Milo what the charges were for pickup and delivery, for stacking and folding and sorting by size, for saving my life and the lives of my children, for keeping us in clean clothes and towels and bed linen, “Never mind that” is what Milo said. “One hand washes the other.”

I place Milo’s right hand over his left hand, then try the other way. Then back again. Then I decide that it doesn’t matter. One hand washes the other either way.

The embalming takes me about two hours.

It is daylight by the time I am done.

Every Monday morning, Ernest Fuller comes to my office. He was damaged in some profound way in Korea. The details of his damage are unknown to the locals. Ernest Fuller has no limp or anything missing so everyone thinks it was something he saw in Korea that left him a little simple, occasionally perplexed, the type to draw rein abruptly in his daylong walks, to consider the meaning of litter, pausing over bottle caps and gum wrappers. Ernest Fuller has a nervous smile and a dead-fish handshake. He wears a baseball cap and thick eyeglasses. Every Sunday night Ernest goes to the supermarket and buys up the tabloids at the checkout stands with headlines that usually involve Siamese twins or movie stars or UFOs. Ernest is a speed reader and a math whiz but because of his damage, he has never held a job and never applied for one. Every Monday morning, Ernest brings me clippings of stories under headlines like: 601
LB MAN FALLS THRU COFFIN — A GRAVE SITUATION
or
EMBALMER FOR THE STARS SAYS ELVIS IS FOREVER.
The Monday morning Milo Hornsby died, Ernest’s clipping had to do with an urn full of ashes, somewhere in East Anglia, that made grunting and groaning noises, that whistled sometimes, and that was expected to begin talking. Certain scientists in England could make no sense of it. They had run several tests. The ashes’ widow, however, left with nine children and no estate, is convinced that her dearly beloved and greatly reduced husband is trying to give her winning numbers for the lottery. “Jacky would never leave us with out good prospects,” she says. “He loved his family more than anything.” There is a picture of the two of them, the widow and the urn, the living and the dead, flesh and bronze, the Victrola and the Victrola’s dog. She has her ear cocked, waiting.

We are always waiting. Waiting for some good word or the winning numbers. Waiting for a sign or wonder, some signal from our dear dead that the dead still care. We are gladdened when they do outstanding things, when they arise from their graves or fall through their caskets or speak to us in our waking dreams. It pleases us no end, as if the dead still cared, had agendas, were yet alive.

But the sad and well-known fact of the matter is that most of us will stay in our caskets and be dead a long time, and that our urns and graves will never make a sound. Our reason and requiems, our headstones or High Masses, will neither get us in nor keep us out of heaven. The meaning of our lives, and the memories of them, belong to the living, just as our funerals do. Whatever being the dead have now, they have by the living’s faith alone.

We heat graves here for winter burials, as a kind of foreplay before digging in, to loosen the frost’s hold on the ground before the sexton and his backhoe do the opening. We buried Milo in the ground on Wednesday. The mercy is that what we buried there, in an oak casket, just under the frost line, had ceased to be Milo. Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow’s loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other.

Lee Martin

 

LEE MARTIN
is the author of the novels
The Bright Forever
, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and
Quakertown
; two memoirs,
From Our House
and
Turning Bones
; and a short story collection,
The Least You Need to Know
. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
Harper’s
,
Ms.
,
Creative Nonfiction
,
The Georgia Review
,
Story
,
DoubleTake
,
The Kenyon Review
,
Fourth Genre
,
River Teeth
,
The Southern Review
, and
Glimmer Train
. He is a winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, as well as the 2006 Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is professor of English and director of creative writing for the MFA Program at Ohio State University.

 

When I was a boy on our farm in southern Illinois, a family named Jent lived to our north. There were three brothers — David, Donnie, and Dan, in descending order — and a sister my age named Katrina. I was an only child of older parents, so all my cousins were young adults by the time I came along. Katrina was the first girl ever to come into my life, and she fascinated me. Sometimes she and Dan walked across our fields and we spent the afternoon at play. On occasion, I made the trip to their house, although I didn’t like walking across the fields alone. There were barbed-wire fences to climb over or crawl through, and I was always afraid I would snag myself on one of the sharp barbs. I preferred to let Katrina come for me and then accompany me through the fields, holding the barbed wire apart so I could make my way safely to the other side.

I was like my mother, timid and not meant for the rough ways of farm life. There was so much that frightened me: the barbed wire, the water moccasins at the Jents’ pond, the bulls in their pasture, the bees that hovered over the clover blossoms. Everything seemed dangerous. I was particularly afraid of the Jents’ dog, a terrier that growled at me and nipped at my ankles. Whenever I came to visit, Katrina locked the dog in the shed, and no matter how much Dan protested, she insisted that the dog stay there so I wouldn’t be afraid.

In my own home, my father whipped me at the least provocation. He used his belt, and sometimes a yardstick or a persimmon switch. When I was barely a year old, he lost both his hands when a corn picker mangled them beyond repair. He wore prosthetic hooks, their steel as cold and as hard as the regret that shadowed his life. There was so much to disappoint him. He had lost his hands because of his own carelessness; he had tried to clear the picker’s shucking box with out first shutting down the tractor’s power takeoff, the device that sent the shucking box’s rollers spinning, the rollers that pulled in his hands. Only a year before, I had come into his life abruptly, a surprise, when he was forty-two and my mother was forty-five. Obviously they hadn’t planned on having children, and when they did, I turned out to be the sort of son I’m sure my father wouldn’t have chosen. I was afraid of the dark, of the sparrows that sometimes got into our house, of the snakes that slithered through our yard. My father’s response to my fainthearted nature was one of anger. Sometimes when he whipped me, I tried to run away, and he chased me about our farmyard, the air filling with our shouts.

“Goodness,” my mother said once. “The Jents will think there’s murder going on.”

It shamed me to think that Katrina might be outside listening to the ugly shouts and screams and curses coming from our farm. What would she think of me? That I was, as my father often claimed, a heathen? I feared that the next time I saw her she would turn away from me in disgust. But she didn’t. If she knew my trouble, she never mentioned it.

We were kids, only six years old, and we lived on farms separated by wide expanses of fields and pastures. I used to stand outside my house and gaze across those flat fields, hoping to catch some sign of Katrina in her farmyard that rested atop a hill — a flash of a red jacket, perhaps, the sparkle of the gold barrettes that she wore in her curled black hair — and then I would hope that she might walk across those fields to me. She was the sister I never had, the one I looked for as an adult in every new place I lived. She was a kind and merciful presence at the time of my father’s rage, and for that, I loved her.

Because my father had no hands, he sometimes hired men to help him on our farm. My mother was as much help as she could be — driving grain trucks, greasing machinery, doctoring cattle and hogs — and my father could do many of the tasks that he had been able to perform before his accident. He could drive our International H tractor, plowing and disking and harrowing our fields. He could drive a combine and a corn picker at harvesttime. But still there was work that neither he nor my mother could manage — baling hay, making certain repairs to machinery — and, when that was the case, my father paid someone to do the chore. I remember a succession of such men, hay hands and mechanics — jacks-of-all-trades — men who weren’t prosperous and had to scrabble from odd job to odd job. I never knew whom to feel more sorry for, the men who had to hire themselves out or my father, a handicap, who had to rely on their skills.

He always treated the hired men well, paid them whatever they asked, and insisted that they stay for a meal. Before they sat at our table, they washed their faces and hands at our basin and left my mother’s towels streaked with oil and grease and grime. They rolled up their sleeves until the white flesh of their biceps showed. They took off their caps, and their foreheads were pale. These men were timid as my father encouraged them to eat more chicken, more potatoes, more bread. “You worked a ton,” he said. “You need to get your belly full.”

I was always surprised at how shy the hired men were at our table, how humble, how hesitant, despite my father’s urging, to help themselves to seconds and thirds. These men, who had wrestled hay bales, yanked on wrenches, cursed stubborn nuts and bolts, were like children at our table, and my father, who was often so angry with me, was genuinely pleased to have them gathered there. I was happy, too, because as long as the men were there, I felt protected from my father. In their presence, his temper lay dormant the way thistles and horseweed and wild garlic died back at frost. On the days when the hired men came into our house, I wished that my father could always be as relaxed, as jolly as he was then.

But eventually the men would leave, drive up our lane in rattletrap cars or trucks, and sooner or later, I would do something to irritate my father, and he would pull off his belt and use it to lash me. I would wish that I had some skill like those men, something that my father couldn’t do with out, something that would make him treat me more kindly.

I wonder now whether he enjoyed hosting the hired men only because he was grateful and wanted to show them how much he appreciated all they had done — our barn’s loft stacked with bales of clover hay, hydraulic leaks repaired on our tractor — or whether it also satisfied him to make a display of his charity, to tap his hook against a meat platter and tell someone, “Dig in. Don’t be bashful. If you go away hungry, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”

How desperately he must have wanted to be one of them, a whole man, free from those hooks and the stumps of his arms that he slipped into the hooks’ hard plastic holsters. Each day, he must have wished to be rid of the harness of canvas straps, the cable wires, the thick bands made of rubber, the ache in his shoulders where he contracted his muscles to tug at the wires, stretch the bands, and open the hooks. I wonder whether he ever dreamed himself whole again, his hands agile and strong, and whether, in those dreams, he touched me with tenderness. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had he been able to do that. I knew only the cold steel of his hooks, the prickly cable wires, the snap of those pincers as they sprang shut.

During recess at school, we often played red rover. Two lines of children, human chains formed by spacing ourselves just far apart enough so we could grasp the hand of the classmates to our left and right, faced each other some twenty feet apart on the playground. One line called out to the other, “Red Rover, Red Rover. Send Bobby right over.” The person called ran toward the opposite chain and tried to break through. I always hoped that Katrina and I would be on the same team. When we were, I tried to arrange it so we were next to each other. I loved the feel of her hand in mine. If an opponent dashed toward our link in the chain, I held her hand as tightly as I could, determined not to feel it slip from my grasp.

In those days, I was starved for tactile sensations, and Katrina, with whom I shared a double desk in our classroom, was the source of so much that pleased me: the warmth of her hand, the soft fuzz of her angora sweater, the airy billow of her empress sleeves. Sometimes, when we were at her house, we rode her horse, Lightning. I sat in the saddle behind Katrina, my arms wrapped around her waist. I was often secretly frightened by Lightning’s gallop, but delighted, too, because I was holding onto Katrina. I was determined not to let her know that I was afraid.

Once, on a rainy afternoon, she and Dan and I were in their basement playing a game of Sorry. Dan and I were sitting cross-legged on the cool cement floor; Katrina was lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows. I felt cozy there in the dry basement, looking up from time to time at the rain-blurred windows above us. It was raining, as my father would have said, “like pouring piss out of a boot.” I could hear the rainwater gushing from the downspouts and puddling in the dirt. The thunderclaps were muffled and sounded far away because we were underground, insulated and dry, protected from the storm. We rolled our dice and moved our pieces over the game board, and the easy rhythm we fell into — the dice clicking, the tokens thumping — pleased me.