Pamela Morsi (18 page)

393.4 Death Customs

D.J.
had wanted to turn Scott down when he said he would accompany her to the Porters’ home. But as she walked up to the front porch, she found herself surprisingly grateful to have him by her side. And not simply because he carried the watermelon salad. Her hands trembled and her throat ached. She felt as if she might burst into tears. She could definitely not do that. She absolutely could not, would not, cry in front of strangers and over the death of a man that she’d never met.

The foursquare clapboard house was surrounded by beautifully tended flowerbeds. While everything looked to be in good shape, there was a lived-in feeling about the place. This was somebody’s home. Where a family lived and loved each other and made memories together. Today’s memories were going to be very sad. But they would not be the only ones to recall.

The door was open and D.J. saw a familiar face through the screen. Suzy invited them in.

“Good to see you, good to see you,” she said, hugging them both as if they were old friends.

D.J. replied the same, surprising herself by the truth of that statement.

“You’re part of the family?” she asked.

“My father-in-law is a Porter on his mother’s side,” Suzy explained. “The joke is, of course, that makes him an actual Dutch Uncle.”

It wasn’t much of a joke, D.J. thought.

Once inside the door, Suzy directed them to the dining table, which was spread with a wide variety of food. Much more than D.J. remembered from her parents’ funeral. But then, there were a lot more people to feed here. She found a place for her bowl. Scott inched over the surrounding dishes so that she could fit it in.

That chore accomplished, D.J. would have been happy to leave. But instead she was pulled into a round of greeting people and making appropriate comments.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

From her own experience, she knew that sound and tone was all they might be hearing.

She would have thought that a stranger in their midst at such a time might not be that welcome. She recalled being exhausted by the new faces surrounding her in her parents’ home. But surprisingly everyone seemed eager to be introduced. And Scott obliged with the honors. Polite inquiries about her life, her accommodations, her plans for the future fueled the conversation.

She began to realize that as the new person, she was giving them an excuse to talk about something else. Think about something else. She let them do that. Grief and loss had to be experienced. It was unavoidable. But that did not mean that distraction wasn’t allowed. She was honored to provide one. It was, in its own way, more of a gift than the watermelon salad.

Slowly, person by person, she made her way through the house. Sometimes Scott was right at her elbow. And at others he was half a room away. But she was very aware of him. Aware of how respectfully he treated everyone. Aware of how genuinely sympathetic he could be without fawning. Aware of how his eyes followed her every time she glanced in his direction.

In the front parlor she spotted her dog. Dew sat on an overstuffed chintz couch, wedged between Viv on his right and the deceased’s widow on his left. Mrs. Porter was absently patting the top of Dew’s head. It was not the way that Dew liked it. Even as a puppy he’s always preferred having her dig her fingernails into the thick fur behind his ears. If D.J. had been petting him that way, he would have shaken her hand off. But stoically the little dog sat, chin up, his focus on the hollow-eyed woman. He offered one quick glance in D.J.’s direction as if to acknowledge,
I know that you’re here, but I am too busy for you right now.

Also sitting on the couch, Viv looked a million miles away.

D.J. felt a hand on the small of her back. Scott had come up beside her and was urging her forward.

The women looked up at her.

“Mrs. Porter,” he said. “This is Dorothy Jarrow, she’s our new librarian.”

“Oh, hello.”

D.J. clasped the cold, bony hand that she offered. “So sorry for your loss.”

“This is your dog, right?”

Mrs. Porter glanced toward Viv for verification. She nodded.

“Yes,” D.J. concurred.

“He’s such a sweet little creature,” she said, continuing to pat him. “He’s not caused one bit of trouble.”

“I’m so glad,” D.J. said. She looked over at Viv. “I can take him home now, if you like.”

Viv shook her head. “I’ll bring him later.”

D.J. gave one last look at Mrs. Porter, petting Dew before moving away.

Scott stayed at her side and leaned down slightly to whisper, “Are you ready to get out of here?”

D.J. nodded.

Calmly, without any appearance of haste, Scott got them across the room. Suzy was manning the door again.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

You’re welcome
seemed like a weird response, so D.J. simply smiled.

“I can’t wait to get back to work,” Suzy told her. “Driving these nasty old trucks sure makes me miss my bookmobile.”

“Good. Sometimes it does take comparison to make us recognize what we’ve got.”

“True,” Suzy agreed and then leaned forward to speak more privately. “And if you look around at all the potbellied snoozers in this room, you’d realize that you’re on the arm of the hunkiest hayseed in town.”

D.J. gave her a stern shake of the head. “It’s not a date, it’s a condolence call.”

Suzy looked unconvinced. “It’s never a date with you, is it?”

D.J. had no comment.

Finally outside in the open air, she felt as if she could breathe again. She felt such a jittery sense of being constrained, of needing to break out. She didn’t quite comprehend her restlessness, but it was real. Beside her, Scott said nothing. When they reached the van, he opened the door and she got inside. He walked around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel.

Instead of turning around and heading into town, he drove farther out into the countryside. It occurred to D.J. to question their destination. But the silence between them seemed strangely comfortable. As if somehow they had transcended the need to make shallow conversation.

On both sides of the narrow dirt road wheat grew tall and hearty. He made a couple of right turns and then a switchback left before pulling off toward the side and turning off the engine.

“Come on,” he said as he opened his door.

Why he wanted to stop in the middle of nowhere, she wasn’t sure. But D.J. got out of the van and followed him as he simply walked into the waist-high wheat of the field.

She stopped at the edge of the crop, unsure. He didn’t even glance back. After a moment’s hesitation and with some trepidation, she stepped into the field. Her shoes were not the best for agri-tramping. And it was not that easy to walk among the tall blond stalks. Mostly she kept her eyes on where she was putting her feet. Scott stopped up ahead of her and she had hopes of catching up with him, asking what they were doing. But when she looked up again he had disappeared. She hurried faster to where she had last seen him, but there was no one there. She looked all around, but in every direction there was nothing but wheat, wheat and more wheat. The sense of aloneness was almost overwhelming.

“Scott?” she called out.

“I’m here,” he answered, not far from where she stood. “Duck down. Have a seat.”

D.J. lowered herself to the ground. It was a strange sensation to have the world close in so tightly around her, but without any sense of claustrophobia. Above her was the purple sky of a sunset evening and all around her the welcoming embrace of tall grass.

“Amazing, huh,” she heard him say.

“Yeah. Why do I think this was some game you played as a kid?” she asked.

“If you’re thinking hide-and-seek, I did do some of that, but not out here. The wheat fields were never as much a playground as a getaway. Someplace where I could be on my own.”

D.J. nodded to herself. She understood that. “I used to fantasize about building a tree house.”

He laughed lightly. “Not a lot of tree houses in this part of the world,” he pointed out. “In a landscape as open as Kansas, sometimes you need a place to hide.”

As she sat there, D.J. began to appreciate her own bit of isolation even more. And having him far enough away that she was on her own, but close enough that he could talk to her, seemed just about perfect.

“It’s about perspective, I think. This must be what it feels like to be a rabbit or a field mouse,” he said. “Safe in every direction, except one. And I comfort myself that it’s always good for the soul to look up.”

“Yes,” D.J. agreed.

They remained there. Separate but together as the light began to fade.

“It was hard being at the Porters’,” he said.

D.J. murmured an agreement.

“I know that I’m there to be a comfort to them in their loss,” he said. “But my own grief keeps raring up at me. Most of the time, I’m okay. When something like this happens, it’s like all that hurt is fresh again.”

“Yes,” D.J. agreed. “It was like that for me, too. At least you have the excuse of time. Your family is still in mourning. My parents died ten years ago.”

“But to lose both. I can’t even imagine it. I don’t want to imagine it,” he said. “I worry so much about my mom. I don’t think that I expected that. I thought that when Dad died, our relationship would continue as it always had. But there is this urgency about protecting her. Keeping her healthy and safe.”

“Maybe you’re trying to pick up where your father left off,” D.J. suggested.

“Yeah, that could be it,” he said. “Or it could be the fearfulness of ‘who will I matter to’ once she’s gone. Mainly no one.”

“You’ll always matter to people,” D.J. assured him. “To friends and the people of the community.”

“But will what I do matter?” he asked. “So much of my life I’ve spent trying to make my parents proud of me. Wanting to prove to them that I learned the lessons they taught me. If they’re not here, then who do I do it for?”

“For yourself,” she answered.

“Yeah, I guess it has to be that way,” he said. “Was it like that for you? Did you protect your remaining parent when the first one was gone?”

“No,” she said. “They died together. Car accident.”

“God. That’s crap,” he said. “At least with my dad’s illness we could see what was happening. I had a chance to say goodbye.”

“No goodbyes for me,” D.J. said.

“And I’m the one whining,” Scott said. “Sorry. Nothing like getting all wimpy in the wheat field.”

“No, I...I think you have a right to whine. I do, too, but not in the same way. You had a real relationship with your father and you miss that. I had, well, basically no relationship with my parents and now I know that I never will,” she said.

“So you didn’t get along?”

“We got along fine,” she answered. “They didn’t get along with each other very well, but they both seemed okay with me. They just weren’t that interested.”

“Maybe it seemed that way.”

“No, it was that way,” she told him with complete certainty. “Neither of them bonded with me, somehow. I used to speculate about it a lot. They were both in their mid-forties when I was born and I thought, maybe they couldn’t make the transition between being a childless couple to being parents.”

“I guess that could happen,” Scott said.

“Other times I thought there was no room for me in the relationship that they had,” she said. “My parents argued all the time. Among other people they could be smart and witty and interesting, but together they were always in battle, always looking for a weakness to exploit, always raising the level of insult and one-upmanship just a little bit higher.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“For me,” D.J. said. “But for them? They must have loved it, because they stayed in it. I used to daydream about them getting a divorce. No such luck.”

D.J. couldn’t believe that she was sharing this. She couldn’t believe that she was sharing it with him. She hadn’t spoken of it. Not to her friends at school, not to her priest, not to anyone. But somehow in the anonymity of this wheat field, she couldn’t stop.

“I guess my favorite rationalization is that maybe they didn’t know how to be a family. Never once did I ever meet or even hear about any relatives. All those cousins and uncles and in-laws at the Porter house, at my parents’ funeral there was one family member. Me.”

She sighed heavily, gazing up from within the safety and concealment of the wheat all around her.

“That’s your
favorite
excuse?” Scott asked. “I hate to hear the one you like the least.”

She hesitated only an instant before she replied, surprising them both with her candor.

“That I am unlovable,” she answered. “That there is something lacking in me that kept them at arm’s length.”

There was the sound of tramping through the wheat and then he was sitting there beside her. He wasn’t too close. He didn’t intrude upon her space. But he was there. Inches away. As if near enough to catch a fall. And far enough to allow standing on her own.

The darkness of the field, the towering height of the wheat created a space with only the two of them. It was intimate. No longer solitary. But they had forgotten that they needed that.

“I’m guessing your dad didn’t have a lot of great advice for you.”

“No, beyond ‘do well in school,’ I don’t recall anything.”

“Okay, so let me share what I think was the wisest words my father ever told me.”

“Okay.”

“Not every bad thing that happens to you is your fault.”

“No, of course not,” she agreed easily.

“Wait, don’t just accept that truth. Own it. I think that’s the key,” Scott said. “Once you own it, then you’re free to let the doubts go.”

They sat staring at each other across the enclosed space for a long moment.

“That’s pretty wise,” she said.

“My father was a wise man,” he said. “I hope to be one someday, too.”

“That’s an admirable goal. Do you think you’ll get there?”

Scott shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t say that I’m much of a prodigy.”

D.J. found his easy self-deprecation to be charming. There was no sense of false humility. There was an honesty and uncritical acceptance that was somehow winning. He was as easy to laugh with as he was to confide in.