Rafael’s parents were buried across from mine. Weeds also lurked there under the icy surface. A small Christian cross was etched on the gray stone marker, as tradition and superstition, rather than piety, dictated in La Esperanza. Genoveva had demanded it and Ezequiel had acquiesced, “with some repugnance,” he confessed to me at my grandmother’s wake. A day after I purchased our plot, they had gotten their own on an installment plan, and ordered a marker. I had to battle with the stonemason to keep the wretched cross off our own pink marker. My mother was too shrewd not to have noticed its absence, and too beholden to La Esperanza not to lament it. After a lifetime in Elmira, her arbiter in all matters of custom, morality, and aesthetics remained La Esperanza, somewhat softened by distance and changing times, but still clad in its imperious certainty.
I searched the cemetery looking for Glorita’s grave. I wanted to find her there. Dead at nineteen, the last age I saw her, or not long thereafter. Forever young and wicked, my enchanting Glorita, font of all yumminess, begetter of Bebe and all other scrumptious, crazymaking girls. Glorita, whose subterranean genealogical links with Mrs. Crandall and McCabe I sensed but did not yet understand. I wanted to find Glorita’s grave to immortalize her divine girlishness, protect her honeyed pussy, coddle her tiny velvet ears, keep her alive forever, even give her new life: bring her back from that valley of death where vultures pick at the bones of the young grown old. A skinny black dog with red, mangy patches on its back watched me from behind a tree, then followed me at a distance, as I moved from one row to the next.
Dusk washed out the inscriptions on the tombstones. I had to get close to read them, often aided by my fingers. Each smelled different from the other, even when they were the same type of stone and from the same year. Polished granite, impermeable, had the faintest smell, but its deeply etched inscriptions released unique scents produced by the particular mix of animal, vegetable and mineral debris caught in them. In gray stone I detected the earthy, smoky, or mineral aromas of mushroom, iron, and, unexpectedly, red wine aged in oak barrels, none of which were physically present. I also caught a whiff of late menstrual blood, dark red and richly clotted.
On my last station of the Glorita cross, when I had almost given up hope, I found the grave of her godmother, Altagracia. Hers was the only name on the tombstone and on the gaily-colored plastic wreath. Oh, how I wished my Glorita had been there. I would have kissed the soil, I would have talked to her, I would have sung to her. Disappearance without physical death is the worst torment. In time, like Glorita’s. Or in space, like McCabe’s. Sitting by Altagracia’s grave, I understood that killing McCabe would be the reverse of death. Had I known back then what I knew now, I would have killed Glorita thirty years ago. But we thought we were eternal and eternally young. I did not any longer wish for Glorita to be in Altagracia’s grave. As much as her loss without death anguished me, I did not want her here. “Forgive me, sweet Glori, for I failed to kill you,” I said.
I had never given a thought to what would happen to McCabe’s body after I killed her. My mission began and ended with the act itself, followed by my ecstatic liberation. I had envisioned Firecop harassment—and was prepared for it—but not McCabe’s funeral, burial, or memorial. I stood up holding on to Altagracia’s monument, embarrassed by my egotistical blindness, shaken like someone who had taken one step into the abyss and then retreated. I thanked Glorita for setting me straight. I thanked Altagracia, my parents, my grandmother, Ezequiel Cohen and Genoveva, and all the lonely and forgotten dead in this cemetery. The thicket of brambles and thistles that hid them from Shangri-La showed how much they were wanted. They were not tricked by any Day of the Dead tomfoolery. I swore with the dead as my witnesses, and my shining Glorita as my patroness, that I would not allow McCabe to be treated like a piece of dead meat. I would place McCabe on an altar, honorably preserved in full blood, gore, piss, shit, and saliva, before rigor mortis set in and secretions were congealed. I would burn her with my own hands, and spread her ashes over the Little Ohio.
McCabe came back to me at that moment. Vividly. Helped by the dead, I had finally emptied my body of Mrs. Crandall. I heard McCabe’s voice describing the Biloxi marshes and the migrating birds. I saw her listening to the third movement of Franck’s Symphony with her eyes closed; crouching by the rosebush holding the Judge’s secateurs in her right hand, and in her left, a diseased stem which she was about to prune; silhouetted against the noon sky, standing at the edge of the ravine.
Once while she was removing the bandages from my feet, I asked her why she stood there. My head was turned toward the window as she had instructed, so that I would not see the soiled underside of the bandages and the oozing lumps of raw meat that my feet had become. She was surprised that I even asked. Wasn’t that view the reason the Judge’s house had been built here? I agreed that it was a fine view, though far from spectacular. I myself used to stand there before the accident (to cover my tracks, I had begun using her tactful word for what had happened to my feet), but never as long, or as often, as she did. It was as natural for her to look at the ravine as it had been for me, she said, even if, unlike me, she had no memories attached to it. Perhaps that is why she lingered there, she said. A stone was a stone for her, and a tree was a tree. Nature was the same everywhere.
“You can look now,” she said. The fresh, white bandages gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the window. McCabe drew the gauze curtains and was gone before I realized it. Moments later I saw her splitting logs by the garden shed. Next to her was a woodpile on a pallet, half covered with the usual blue tarp. She split wood for the rest of the week, until the woodpile was gone, along with the pallet and the offensive blue tarp. I grew up with those blue tarps. They were my playpen, poncho, camping tent, and picnic blanket. Our emergency roof weighted with bricks over leaky spots by my poor, inept, beleaguered father, who bared his teeth in an obsequious grin before pushing open the service door of the “whites only” hardware store.
At the cemetery, McCabe first came back to me in snapshots seen through a gauzy curtain. Then with sound, volume, depth, motion, and emotion. She moved me, McCabe—she tore my guts out and I still did not know why. She came back as a perfect hologram, more real than real. Smell, touch, and taste were missing, but not missed. That was Mrs. Crandall’s fiefdom. I had never touched or tasted McCabe. Her smell must have been too subtle to penetrate the ample space that always separated us. The closest we had been was when she had cleaned my feet, her face about sixty inches away from mine.