If only they knew, it was no beginning for her. It was an end she was walking to. What a day to come out. A rather beautiful day. Did she even see it? Walking hand in hand as she was with magnets and determination. Quick steps to the boy waiting on her. Was she even sure it was trees she was passing or just tall men? Did she look up at the sky, coming blue from the morning’s gray?
Pity the child in her path and who was not hers and who she pushed out of the way. Even kicked his ball into the middle of Main Lane. Pity the wasp who flew too close and who she swatted to a concussion. Pity the day she did not see, a day that had been waiting for twelve long years. A day that took but twelve minutes to walk.
The morgue was in the basement of the courthouse. The light dim and like a shedding of clay, dusty and browned. It was a place that smelled of rust and soil, of chemicals and clogged drains. Compared to the heat of every other place, it was cool. Basements are like that. Probably the coolest place I’d been all summer long.
When Dad saw Mom, the only words he could manage were, “What about the rain?”
She didn’t say anything, just threw her arms around him. It was like a cold burning between them. Their skeletons joined at soggy throbs. The space they filled before us, like twisted wire, embedding into itself. They were one grasp. One curve of flesh. One heart breaking in startled, flickering cracks.
When they finally separated, you couldn’t tell which tears belonged to her, and which belonged to him.
He tried to persuade her not to see the body. Said it was not a way for a mother to see her son. But she held up the magnets and said, “It is the way for a mother to see her son, if it is indeed the only way left.”
We stepped into the room with Grand, where he lay on a metal table with a white sheet beneath him. He looked the same as he had lain in the woods. Only the scenery had changed. It was as if no one knew what to do with the body of a god.
Mom approached the table with wary steps, as if she were walking across water and had to wait for the bridge to keep building. The tan nylon of her hosiery was dirtied and clung to by tiny gravels from the walk outside. Every time she lifted her foot, the nylons cased the strain of her toes as they pointed tensely in every step that took her to the table, where she circled his body, as fluid as the ripple around the dropped stone.
There was a wholeness to the silence that followed. A sort of totality that sucked in all sound, save for our breathing. I thought there would be noise. I thought she would sob uncontrollably. That was the mother I expected. The one who roared louder than the father in the woods. The one who banged her infinitesimal fists and screamed, Why? That was not the mother who circled her dead son in the morgue.
She ran her hand through his hair, the short strands going through her fingers in a rising and falling like the abstract summary of his short life. She smiled that slight smile all mothers give to the child who has always been their favorite.
Her apron pressed against the sheet as she leaned over him. I thought maybe she would hold the magnets down like he was a refrigerator and she was merely posting notes. A sort of up-and-down motion. Instead she slid the magnets across him, a different one for each part of his body. She believed each magnet only had enough strength in it to lift the metal from one body part, and after that, it was spent of its power.
When she got to his left arm, she paused at the wide wound stuffed with the gathered blood and leaves and dirt. She started to pick the leaves out, but Dad gently asked her to leave them. It was as if the leaves and dirt provided a foliage to the wound so he wouldn’t have to see the cut so naked and clear. She understood this, and merely moved the magnet around the wound, the drooping tip of one of the larger leaves gliding across the back of her passing hand.
I thought the wound would drop her to her knees in realization of his suicide, but she merely looked at it as if it were just your ordinary difference of no particular sin or exclusive death. She was in such denial, that the wound was just a moment his skin was not at its best.
She removed his shoes and socks and as she slid the magnets over his bare feet, her voice broke as she said, “I know how ticklish your feet are. I’ll scratch ’em good once I’m done.”
And she did too.
His face was last, and as she looked at the pile of used magnets, she lost that control she had so carefully held.
“There ain’t any left. I’ve used ’em all. I don’t have any to lift the metal from his face.” Her cries were like a coming of new death.
Sal went to her and held her hands as he asked her, “Don’t you know a mother’s got ten good magnets at the ends of her fingers? Not enough to take on a body, but a face, yes.”
She looked at her hands, bending her fingers as if testing their strength. As Sal gave her room, she returned to Grand, holding her hands high over his face, standing there for a few seconds as if she was unsure of how to begin. Then as if suddenly realizing exactly how to do it, her hands slowly lowered to his chin, where her fingers stroked back and forth.
I was almost hopeful, watching her hands lie next on his forehead as if they could bring him back. As if her fingers feeling softly down his cheeks were the way to resurrection. I thought this until I saw her face and all its hopelessness, and then I knew there wasn’t going to be a miracle.
I imagined a series of small falls in the world at that moment. Somewhere the petals of a lilac were falling off. Somewhere a moth was heading straight for the ground. Grains of sugar were rolling off the counter. A baseball was losing its soar. Small falls taking me down with them and to that low where no wings can be found and no rising is ever had.
“My baby,” she whispered. “My dear, sweet love of my life. Why did you leave me?”
She waited as if she believed he might rise long enough from the dead to tell her why. When he didn’t, it became a kick to the back of her knees. Dad caught her just in time, bringing them both down to the floor in a hold that made them look like one wound of the same deep stab.
I thought maybe she’d fainted, but she was still open in all the places that can be. She’d just lost her legs for a moment, she said. As Dad held her there, beneath the height of their dead son, I ran.
I ran from my brother’s body. From the town. From the terrible ripping apart. I could hear Sal behind me. I went faster. Between the trees, and up the high land to the edge of the cliff that gave way to the rock quarry below.
“Why’d you follow me, Sal?”
“Fielding—”
He didn’t get to finish what he was going to say because I tackled him to the ground and hit him even before my hands had formed their fists. When they did, boy did they ever mean it. I hated him that moment because I had to hate someone, and Ryker was somewhere too far.
“Why the fuck did you have to come?” I hit and hit until I couldn’t feel my knuckles anymore.
When his punch came, it struck me hard across the chin, knocking me back. He held his fists up as if I would charge him again and he was going to have to fight me off. But I just sat there, holding my jaw in my hand and staring at the long tears streaming down his cheeks.
“I’m so tired of being hit. Why is it always me to get it when the fists come out?” He lowered his own fists as he sat back in a great, exhausted sigh.
The ground seemed the safest place to look, so for the next few moments, we both looked there, struggling with what to do in the aftermath of a god’s death.
Only a squawking bird was heard for a while. And then his hushed voice, saying, “I tried, Fielding. To save him. I swear that to you.”
His tongue reached and tasted the blood from his nose.
“How’d you try to save ’im, Sal?”