"If she was a Viking ship,” he announced, "we’d have to bury her with horses and food and gold plates.”
He wore his backpack and seemed anxious to get going. I stood beside him with my suitcase, staring at the shrouded corpse. Even in death, her body odor was potent. "Anything you want to say?”
I shrugged. "I don’t know. She’s like a mummy.”
He sighed.
"Well, I’ve pretty much said what I wanted when she was alive, so no point wasting time.”
He dug his Bic lighter from a pocket, clicked on the flame, and attempted to ignite the mattress. But it wouldn’t catch, so eventually he gave up, saying, "Bad idea anyways. It might burn the whole building and everyone else."
And as we hurried from the bedroom, I paused to take a final glance at my mother, imagining her congested breathing while dying. Her pulmonary arteries had become clogged with blood, forcing the fluid through the capillaries and into the lungs. In the violent throes near the end, she kicked her chubby legs wildly, shaking the bedsprings to the limit.
"Come on,” my father said. He was waiting at the end of the hallway. "Don’t stare, it’s bad luck.”
"Mom’s dead all right,” I said, turning to face him.
Gripping my suitcase, I thought, Poor Queen Gunhild -- drowning in a bog like that.
5
It was still night when the mystery train appeared. The whistle entered my dreams, manifesting itself as a doorbell buzzing.
Waking on the kitchen floor, I listened while the freight cars flurried alongside Grandmother’s property, picturing the school bus shaking in the pasture. Soon the whistle grew fainter until the only sound came from the portable radio, a female DJ reading the news: "A mixed message from the White House, conflicting with earlier statements-”
I rubbed my eyes and yawned. Then I sat up, squinting around the kitchen.
The jug was on the counter without its cap. Cracker crumbs dotted the floor. The gown remained damp in spots from my reckless guzzling. But my throat was dry, and while licking at the sore lip, I tasted peanut butter instead of blood.
"A miracle,” I whispered, sensing the creamy substance coursing in my veins. And if I hadn’t felt so suddenly alone, I would’ve laughed at the thought of being a Peanut Butter Girl, just flesh and bone and crushed edible seeds.
Climbing from the floor, I called out, "Daddy-? I’m in the kitchen!”
The gown hem lagged under my feet, so I pretended it was the soles of satin slippers and shuffled to the stove. Then taking the radio in hand, I shuffled out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room.
"Daddy-? I was in the kitchen. Daddy-?”
As if roused by a rooster’s crow, I was hoping my father would be awakened by my voice. The vacuousness of his face, head, and posture would vanish. He would quickly rise from the chair. But standing before him with the radio, I noticed only a small difference in his appearance. In the dreary light of the living room, his lips had grown purple, his breathing had ceased. Lifting the big sunglasses, I was met with an icy stare- two pupils reduced to almost nothing -- so I lowered the sunglasses back over his eyes.
"I brought you this," I told him, putting the radio in his lap. Then I crouched before his boots, bending my legs inside the gown, and gazed up the expanse of his stiff body.
"Three are dead in a college motor coach crash,” the DJ reported. "The motor coach, packed with college cheerleaders from the University of Texas in Austin, flipped over near Georgetown yesterday, killing the coach and two cheerleaders. Seven others were injured, four critically. The accident is under investigation."
Just then I recalled my father on the Greyhound, holding the radio against an ear, listening to similar news broadcasts. "They’ll be searching for me,” he told me. "I need to monitor the information as it develops." But during our trip, there was no mention made of him or my mother’s corpse, a fact which somehow disappointed him. "Seems I don’t matter much anymore, Jeliza-Rose,” he later said. "Not worth a lousy headline.”
And squatting there by his boots, I wanted to tell him how much he mattered to me-how it was good being at What Rocks with just him, even if it wasn’t really Denmark. Then tears welled uncontrollably under my tired, heavy eyelids.
"It’s not your fault she’s dead,” I said. "She wasn’t very nice anyways.”
"Now don’t get all weepy,” I pictured him saying. "Everything’s fine."
But it wasn’t fine, and I told him that.
"It’s awful!”
I crumpled across his boots, my chest heaving.
"It’s all right," he’d tell me. "You’re safe as houses."
I imagined his hands stroking my neckline, soothing. Exhausted again, I began to drift off. And before sleep overtook me, I conjured the Bog Man in his bed of peat. His bones gnashing as he dug himself from the earth. But on my first night in the back country, the idea of him was no longer so frightening.
"He survived thousands of years," my father once said. "He just lay there waiting to come back to life."
"Please, come back to life,” I pled, dimly aware of the radio wavering on my father’s lap, the batteries loosing power as my eyes closed. "Please-"
The wind was now blowing around What Rocks, sweeping along the porch, clanking the hoist rope against the metal flagpole. The old place shuddered. In the pasture, the school bus rocked gently, the high Johnsongrass wavered. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But inside I slept once more, the wind droning in my dream like a horn -- and somewhere the mystery train whistled for no one as it chugged through barren and forbidding terrain, weaving further and further away from us.
6
I yawned with the feeling that dawn was just beginning, but the sunbeams descending through the windows, slanting crosswise on the floorboards, told me otherwise. The living room was warm, full of radiance and shadow. Rays had already fallen across the lower half of my gown, where my toes fidgeted in the dusty light. "Morning, morning," I muttered to myself, lifting my head from the boot tips, an uncomfortable pillow.
Then I stood quickly, pivoting on bare heels to my father.
"Good-morning.”
Skin that had grown pale was now completely pallid. But his earlobes, chin, forearms, and fingertips were discolored with a reddish-purple stain. It seemed that overnight the stiffness had left his body. The rigor around his lips and nose had vanished, giving him a sagging, almost benign expression. In the daylight, he was limp, his muscles no longer controlled anything. For a moment I held his hand, cautiously peering at his sunglasses. He wasn't cold. In fact, his temperature was equal to the warmth of the room. And a stubble had begun growing on his cheeks.
But I wasn’t too worried. He’d done this before: back at the apartment, he’d sometimes sit in front of the TV for days, statuelike, or he’d curl up on the couch and sleep and sleep and sleep. Then he’d suddenly stir. He’d climb from the couch, make himself coffee and something to eat, and be all smiles again. So once I asked, "Were you dead?”
And he replied, "Sugar, nothing can kill me. Daddy was only on vacation. That’s what I do, your momma too. We’re playin’ possum, you know?"
Playing possum for days, while I waited with my toys and watched TV and wondered when they’d return. And they always did. Except now Mom was really dead; I knew that for certain. But not my father -- he was playing possum again, vacationing in Denmark or somewhere else. Anyway, people didn’t just sit down and die. They rolled around sweating and screaming and dying. Like on TV, they gasped a lot while bleeding, or they fell to the ground in pain. They held their sides and kept their eyes open until, at last, they were gone. On TV, I’d seen people die a million times, and they never just sat down and stopped. They didn’t play possum or go on vacation. They died -- like Mom.