Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(25)

More recent grave stones are substantial, stolid. Death appears to be weightier now. Words, dates are decipherable. Dearest Mother. Beloved Husband. Dearest Daughter 1 Week Old.

Each day in the late afternoon the widow visits the husband’s grave which is still the most recent, the freshest of graves in the cemetery.

The grave stone the widow purchased for the husband is made of beautiful smooth-faced granite of the hue of ice, with a roughened edge. Not very large, for James would not have wished anything conspicuous or showy or unnecessarily expensive.

In the earth, in a surprisingly heavy urn, the (deceased) husband’s ashes.

No grass has (yet) appeared in the grave-soil though the widow has scattered grass seed there.

(Are birds eating the seeds? She thinks so!)

It is consoling to the widow that so little seems to change in the cemetery from day to day, week to week. The tall grasses are mowed haphazardly. Most other visitors come earlier than she does and are gone by late afternoon. If there is any activity in the church it is limited to mornings. Rarely does the widow encounter another mourner and so she has (naively) come to feel safe here in this quiet place where no one knows her . . .

“Excuse me, lady. What the hell are you doing?”

Today there has appeared in this usually deserted place a woman with a truculent pug-face. Like a cartoon character this scowling person even stands with her hands on her hips.

Claudia is astonished! Her face flushes with embarrassment.

In the cemetery at the gravesite of a stranger buried near her husband she has been discovered on her knees energetically trimming weeds.

“That’s my husband’s grave, ma’am.”

The voice is rude and jarring and the staring eyes suggest no amusement at Claudia’s expense, no merriment. There is a subtle, just-perceptible emphasis on my.

Guiltily Claudia stammers that she comes often to the cemetery and thought she might just “pull a few weeds” where she saw them . . . It is not possible to explain to this unfriendly person that untidiness makes her nervous and that she has become obsessed with a compulsion to do good, be good.

It is her life as a widow, wayward and adrift and yet compulsive, fated. After James’s abrupt death it was suggested to her by the headmistress of her school that she take a leave of absence from teaching, and so she’d agreed while doubting that it was a good idea.

A five-month leave of absence it was. Seeming to the widow at the outset something like a death sentence.

She has busied herself bringing fresh flowers to James’s grave, and clearing away old flowers. She has kept the grasses trimmed neatly by James’s grave though (she knows) it is an empty ritual, a gesture of futility, observed by no one except herself.

There is not much to tend at James’s neat, new grave. Out of a dread of doing nothing, as well as a wish to do something the widow has begun clearing away debris and weeds from adjoining graves.

Why do you need to keep busy, Claudia? All our busyness comes to the same end.

She knows! The widow knows this.

All the more reason to keep busy.

In the neglected cemetery the widow has been feeling sorry for those individuals, strangers to her and James, who have been buried here and (seemingly) forgotten by their families. James’s nearest neighbor is Beloved Husband and Father Todd A. Abernathy 1966–2011 whose pebbled stone marker is surrounded by unsightly tall grasses, thistles and dandelions.

Scattered in the grass are broken clay pots, desiccated geraniums and pansies. Even the artificial sunflowers are frayed and faded as mere trash.

Claudia has begun bringing small gardening tools and gloves to the cemetery. She has not consciously decided to do good, it seems to have happened without her volition.

The only sincere way of doing good is to be anonymous. She has thought.

But now she has been discovered. Her behavior, reflected in a stranger’s scowling face, does not seem so good after all.

Quickly she rises to her feet, brushes at her knees. She is feeling unpleasantly warm inside her dark tasteful clothes.

She hears her voice faltering and unconvincing: “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to surprise or upset you. I just like—I guess—to use my hands . . . I come to the cemetery so often . . .”

“Well. That’s real kind of you.”

Just barely the woman relents. Though the woman doesn’t seem to be speaking ironically or meanly it is clear that she doesn’t think much of Claudia’s charity, that has cast an unflattering reflection upon her as a slipshod caretaker of the Abernathy grave.

Unlike Claudia who is always well-dressed—(she is too insecure to dress otherwise)—the scowling woman wears rumpled clothing, soiled jeans and flip-flops on her pudgy feet. Her streaked-blond hair looks uncombed, her face is doughy-pale. She too is a widow whose loss has made her resentful and resigned like one standing out in the rain without an umbrella.

Claudia hears herself say impulsively that her husband is buried here also.

“He just—it was back in April—died . . .”

It is unlike the widow so speak so openly. In fact it is unlike the widow to speak of her personal life at all to a stranger.

Claudia has no idea what she is saying or why she feels compelled to speak to this stranger who is not encouraging her, whose expression has turned sour. Her brain is flooded as with a barrage of lights. How have you continued to live as a widow? How did you forgive yourself? Why will you not smile at me? Why will you not even look at me?