Winter Loon(16)

And Ruby replied, “Because God doesn’t give a shit about us, that’s why.”

“You think God let her die?” I asked.

“God wasn’t there, Wes.” She said it without looking away from the television. She twisted her head to me for the length of two short words. “You were.”

The reporter moved to the next story.



MY MOTHER WAS THIRTY-THREE YEARS old when they put her in a box and put the box in the back of a long black car that we followed to the cemetery.

I’d asked my grandparents if they could get a hold of my father, if they had a number or anything to let him know his wife, my mother, was being buried that day. They shook me off, said they hadn’t heard a thing. I scanned the paltry crowd anyway, knowing he would show, knowing he could not let me go through this alone. But the funeral home sat out only three chairs for family. A few other folks were at the graveside, mostly people who worked with Gip down at the feedlot or drank with him when he tended bar at the taproom. There were ladies from the Catholic church who Ruby told me later went to every funeral. I wasn’t surprised somehow to see Kathryn there with her father and a woman I guessed must be her mother. Burt Rook stood tall, his arms behind his back. Kathryn’s mother’s blond hair was shellacked with hairspray that glittered in the sun. They looked shiny and new, polished, clean. Their presence felt like charity. Kathryn smiled weakly and waved at me. I closed my eyes, hoping she and her family and everyone else would disappear. I wanted to put the months into reverse, to reel them in like a bad cast.

Gip nudged me. “Open your eyes, goddamn it,” he hissed. He was fidgety in his ill-fitting brown suit, too short in the legs so that when he sat, I could see his ankles and calves, strangely blue, hairless, and smooth. That morning I had seen him near naked, hollering at Ruby to help him find a shirt to wear with the suit. His big belly protruded over his threadbare shorts. His whole gut was blanketed in gray curls save for the long scar along his side, where I guessed his appendix had been removed. In the end, he dressed himself and Ruby had complained about his scuffed white shoes, but he’d said it was all he had. She wore a shapeless black dress, thick as a horse blanket, droopy black stockings, and shoes so big she looked like a girl playing dress up.

I sat between them in a borrowed suit, my hands tucked between my legs, while the preacher talked about evil valleys, ashes, and dust. It hit me there like a single thunderclap. It was not a nightmare. It was all true. I had buried my mother once in ice and I was burying her again, this time in dirt. She would not come back. Then the preacher started in about the resurrection and the life, and at that moment, I wished the ground wasn’t quite so soft because what was in those pictures was in that box, and I was afraid it would come back out and pull me in with it. I rose with my grandparents as the gravediggers, solemn but bored, uncinched the straps that held the box in place. I closed my eyes tight and apologized to God then for not pulling her out, for letting her drown while I got away, for not wanting her dead body back.

I’d been trying hard not to cry, not to speak, but what everyone there at the grave heard were the words I bleated to God: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The preacher put his arm around me. He said, “God told Job: Brace yourself like a man.” He pulled me tight to him, the way a father would, as they lowered my mother into the ground.

The gatherers fell away with brief nods. Kathryn came up to me, hugged me, kissed my blotched cheek. She gave her condolences like a mockingbird, saying what she’d seen on television maybe or read in a book. “I wish I’d known her,” she added. What I would have given to punch her in the mouth right then, to make her hurt because I was hurt. I saw through her act. People like the Rooks didn’t know grief. Watching Burt Rook take my grandfather’s hand, give a proper nod to my grandmother, seeing two perfectly matched pathetic mother-daughter smiles, the falseness of it all, made it seem like I was the butt of a long, cruel con. The fresh soil said otherwise.

Gip wandered off and ended up on a bench near the road, childless, looking older by a generation. I stayed next to the mounding dirt, next to Ruby, who hadn’t budged. I wondered if we might stay the whole day, if the sun might sink on us there. “You think we ought to go?” I tried to whisper, to be reverent, not knowing whether I could use my regular voice.

“My God,” said Ruby. “My God.”

“It’s okay. We can stay. I don’t mind.”

“Don’t you be nice to me. I can’t take it,” she said, shaking her head slowly, keeping time to a sad song only she could hear.



THE CHURCH LADIES CAME BY with a ham after Gip had changed and left for the feed store. I sat down on the sofa, still wearing my good pants. Ruby kept on her black dress but switched into pink house scuffs. She turned on the television, but instead of sinking into her recliner, she came and sat next to me, so close I could smell must from her dress and scalp. “I’m watching my programs now,” she said. And we sat there, the two of us, watching television until Gip came home. Then we all ate the ham.





CHAPTER 6

WITHOUT FAIL, WHEN Gip was out at night, he came home drunk. If Ruby had fallen asleep watching Johnny Carson, she would yell at him over the white noise of the television station signed off for the night. Other times, I’d wake to stumbling grunts in the darkness, urine hitting toilet water, odious sighs as his bladder relieved and his prostate unburdened. On the worst nights, I stood my pillow on its side and sunk in, hoping to muffle the limp rutting that seeped through the walls from their bedroom to mine.