Our father who art a heathen
Hollow be thigh name.
Thigh king is dumb
Thigh will is dun
on earth as it is
at birth.
I had nothing against prayer. Those who felt it was wishful muttering perhaps had less to wish for. Religion, I could now see, without a single college course helping me out, was designed for those enduring the death of their sweet children. And when children grew stronger and died less, and were in fact less sweet, religion faded away. When children began to sweeten and die again, it returned.
But sitting there, I began to realize that part of me didn’t believe Robert was dead. Part of me thought perhaps the whole thing was a prank. Like everyone, Robert would have loved to have attended his own funeral. Of course, one did always attend one’s own funeral. But usually one was so deep in the role of the dead person that one didn’t get to pay attention to the nice things people were standing up and saying about you.
The minister continued calling for others to come forth, to step up and speak, and a few more did: one teary girl and a geometry teacher. “I loved Gunny,” they both said. The girl read a poem called “Gunny Finally Got His Gun,” which was unbearable.
At the end my father stood up and shambled to the front. He clutched the lectern and looked out at all the gathered and just stared. It was not an especially uncomfortable silence as the whole occasion was so uncomfortable that his silent staring didn’t really add anything additional. Yet he did bear a look that to me seemed to say, How have your own repellent and ridiculous sons remained alive when mine has not?
He began with a story. “When Robert was little he liked secretly to swing on the ropes in the haymow. Both my kids seemed always to love the feeling of flying, and so sometimes I looked the other way. Perhaps this was bad of me. Knowing when to look the other way and when to jump in has never been my strong suit. Once when he was about six he fell from the rope, down off the mow, and hit his chin against a rusty old bucket. He came to me holding the metal pail and said, ‘Daddy, don’t yelclass="underline" I know I’ll need stitches and a shot, but it was awesome.’ ”
This story had nothing more to it, and my dad just stood there, as if searching for another one that might be more engaging to the crowd, something more revealing and entertaining, as even at funerals people shamelessly hoped just for a moment here and there to be amused. But I could see that this one story summed up everything for him. I stayed seated with my mother, who was not doing well. She was wearing the black hat with the feather sticking straight up. She drew the dangling sash of it across her quivering lips. I was wearing my hair pulled back in a black barrette fashioned in the shape of a crow. “What can a man say about losing his boy?” my father cried out, finally. He had raised his voice as if he were calling. “His only son? Well! I miss him more than any words can remotely convey. He was not just a good son, a good person. He was the very best kind.” That was all he said before his face clenched and purpled and he had to turn and come back down. My mother had given him a handkerchief, which he did not use to dab at his eyes but instead pressed completely over his face, like a barber’s hot towel. When my father walked back toward us from the pulpit, he took my mother’s hand and led her outside, leaving me behind. Organ music started up and everyone began to leave, to go out into that September sunshine to comfort my parents. I simply sat there. Soon the organist, too, got up and left, giving me a smiling nod as she did.
Alone in the church, I did not move for a long time. Then I craned my head around and couldn’t see anyone at all, and so I slid out of the pew and went up to the coffin, which was on a gurney draped with a heavy velvet blanket. On top of it was the cognac-colored casket, a large varnished thing, a shiny parlor piano with a flag draped over. I petted the lid of it. A yellow jacket, the kind you see trolling the trash cans at picnic spots, was walking on the edge. I took off my shoe and smacked it. Then in wiping it off with the folded program that had Robert’s photo on the front and the list of biblical readings inside and on the back the stunningly absurd numbers 1984–2002—what could they truly mean, especially with a bee’s guts now yellowing the second two? — it occurred to me that the coffin might be unlocked. I jabbed my fingers into the corner crack. One could open it — so I did. When I lifted the lid, the flag slid to the floor. It was not one of those fitted flag casket coverings they later made plenty of.
Within, as if placed in a quilted quitar case, lay a smashed guitar: a uniform of green, part pine, part portabella, part parsley, with parts of a man inside. I put my shoe back on and my program in my purse. “Hey there, Robert,” I said, but was afraid I might cry. I knew there were superstitions about touching dead people. But one belief had it that if you touched one you would never be lonely again. I climbed atop the gurney, up into the coffin, and fitted myself inside to nestle next to him. I was thin from all my weeks as a hawk in the salad fields, and I curled in against him, even with my purse, panting shallowly, as I hardly dared to breathe, dreading some stench or other. But one had to breathe. His smell at first seemed a chemical one, like the field fertilizer used by the agribiz farms. Field fertilizer! You could not make up stuff like that! Though the interior of the casket was quilted white, like a beautiful suitcase, what I could see of my brother looked like garbage tossed inside. He had no legs, it seemed, so there was room for mine. Beneath his uniform he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt put on backwards so that the hood could be pulled up over his face. I carefully pulled it down to see. Beneath the hood someone had stretched a clear plastic shower cap over his features. Beneath the shower cap, which I didn’t dare touch, I could see his nose and jaw were gone but there was still his full lower lip I knew so well, now lavender, and blistered, and the upper one, with its smattering of gingery freckles beneath the whisker stubble that still seemed fresh and black as pepper. His skin, what little I could see, had the jaundiced look of bad weather that had come and not left. His stammerless stillness seemed the loneliest and most dumbfounding thing.
“Robert,” I whispered. “It’s me.” We would be kids again, lying in the woods somewhere, except the smell was starting to seem horrible, and I was curled against him in such a way that I realized he’d been stuffed with things, styrofoam or something, as so many parts of him were missing. One sleeve was filled with stuffed newsprint, a paper sausage, which crunched when I lay my head on it. The hand protruding from the uniform cuff was a mannequin’s hand, knuckleless as a fish. I could see that death had settled him, flattened him, the way that a salad — of, say, three-season spring greens — flattened and settled after initially being fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl. How he had once been fresh and buoyant and high in the bowl!
In case I started to cry, I pulled the lid down back over us, a sateen ceiling, and it became very dark inside, although the hinge side of the lid, I could see, was not flush with the rest and there was a line of daylight there I could make disappear by closing my eyes. The space grew hot and cramped.
I could hear Robert’s friends come back into the church. Suddenly they became pallbearers again. “Hey, the flag slipped off,” said one, and they put it back on. “Bad luck,” said another. “Shut the fuck up,” said a third, and soon we were being trundled out of the church to the hearse. I listened for my father’s voice but didn’t hear it. We were lifted up and slid into the vehicle and then I did hear my father’s voice. “Where’s Tassie?” and then my mother’s: “I don’t know. I think maybe she went on ahead to the cemetery with some friends.”