it to someone, or remembered she was about to offer it to someone, her mind suspended between thoughts, neither here nor there. I could tell she didn’t know what to do, to be a host or not to be, to continue, and how to continue.
Over time she would be better.
When there was a lull in the conversation among the eaters at the kitchen table, she said, “Ahora tengo que valer por mi misma.” Now I have to believe in and fight for myself.
What an odd thing to say, I thought. She was so old, she wasn’t a child or young adult anymore. Shouldn’t you be doing that your entire life? Shouldn’t you be doing that when there was still time for you? Both my parents had possessed timid personalities, my father having been thrown out by his father, my mother having endured her often violent mother. Sometimes I imagined them as “old children,” still fighting wars that had ended decades before, frightened children-adults who had discovered each other amid the rubble.
But together they had not been timid parents, together they had accomplished more than most in this poor neighborhood. Together they had found—what?—something stronger than this godforsaken earth?
The funeral home’s chapel is empty. I walk to the casket, and my father is there. Yes, it’s him all right. Thinner, but it’s him. I can’t see his green eyes, but I know it’s him. I’m alone with him for the first time in a long time. Strangely, I don’t have any fear of death. That’s one thing he has given to me. I look around at the empty pews. I am for sure alone with him. Is he self-contained? Maybe that’s not exactly the right word. It’s more like, what he is now is not who he was. That’s over. What’s left is this ceremony for us.
My father did what he wanted to do in his life. He married the love of his life, and he stayed with her despite their troubles and disasters. He was often different, even antagonistic, to who I was and who I would become. There were many times when we didn’t understand each other, when we couldn’t. The times that shaped us were also poles apart. Now, together again, with this strange result: I don’t have any fear of death, now that I see it in front of me, now that I see my father. I do not fear that only this fragile armor of meat surrounds this self. I think Shakespeare was wrong, at least for some of us. Yes, I think, for some the undiscovered country is not death but life.
The little metal cube still hums and emits an orange scent underneath my father’s casket. I take the stupid red carnation out of his hands. They are surprisingly stiff. I put the flower back inside the arrangement on the half-closed casket. I leave the rosary beads wrapped around his fingers because that’s how he and my mother would have wanted him in eternity. I search the nearest pocket in his blue suit, and find Adriana’s slip of paper. It is indeed a goddamn Jehovah prayer. I crumple it into my own suit pocket. I step back. Before I settle into my stance to guard him, a sort of privilege I now think, I hear the double-doors open behind me. I think I hear Adán’s voice, and others, but I don’t turn around for them. I face only my father and who I am.
NEW ENGLANDER
David smashed the sledgehammer onto the logs from his woodpile. The logs fell like small torsos on the black asphalt of his driveway. Each blow split a log in half, or jammed the heavy black iron wedge deeper into the oak with a groaning crack. His body and mind seemed to sing as he worked. His hands trembled. Even in the autumn chill of early November, sweat dripped behind his ears and released little shivers up his neck. His heart thumped inside his chest. Mid-swing, David sometimes imagined a bobcat lunging at his throat or a black bear rearing on its hind legs behind him. The trunk of a dead maple not far from his backyard was deeply scratched by a bear. Those scratches were at least three years old. In the forest, he and Jean spotted the “bear maple” the first month after they bought the nine-acre property in Kent, Connecticut.
This was David’s first house, thousands of miles from his birthplace in the American Southwest.
Two hours before, Jean had driven to the Costco in Danbury to get ready for Thanksgiving. The boys would be coming back from college, for the first time with their girlfriends. The plan was to go hiking at Mt. Tom’s State Park. Fifty-five-year-old David liked to hike even steep climbs. He was in good shape for an old guy. He promised himself he would be a good sport and allow his sons to stay in their rooms with their girlfriends and give them privacy. Last week, he had bought new Bemis toilet seats at Home Depot and threw out the cheap soft vinyl ones at the Kent Transfer Station.
As he split more logs, David remembered and was astonished that he had been only a year older than his youngest son when he and Jean met junior year at Harvard. After a few dates, David was shocked when Jean so casually invited him to her room. That startling impression never left him: the easy relationship with her body, that hopeful smile she flashed at him, her big blue eyes asking but not asking. David was a poor Mexican-American kid with a Torquemada Mexican mother from Chihuahua and a father who embraced a mixture of socialism and Catholicism. David shuddered to think what his parents would have done to him if they had discovered him with a girl in his room at home in dusty Ysleta. For many years he felt weird and defective in the Northeast.
It was Jean who helped him believe in himself. It took years of Jean loving him—this still svelte and gracious woman—for David to abandon his self-hate. After graduate school, Jean pursuing him and knowing exactly what she wanted, they married in Massachusetts. When Jean was diagnosed with breast cancer, the children toddlers, they fought together to survive. David bestowed upon her the toughness she loved in him. She in turn gave him enough love to make him whole, despite his in-laws, who feared he would whisk Jean of Concord back to El Paso. But why would that thought ever cross his mind, to go backward in his life, instead of forward, to leave this forest that woke every sense in his body? Connecticut was where he belonged now.
A scholarship boy at Harvard, David leaped beyond his father’s construction projects on the Mexican-American border to become a professor at Rutgers just outside of New York City. After decades in a co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, David and Jean leaped again, beyond the City, escaping to an early retirement in Kent, to gardening and chopping wood and occasionally visiting friends after a night at Lincoln Center. David Calderon, a North Face jacket over a flannel shirt, lugging the cut logs into his four-bedroom Colonial, was now a New Englander. An avid reader of Emerson as well as Borges. A weekend craftsman who could just as easily fumigate his basement as affix a bright new American flag to the frame above his forest green front door. David had traveled a long road to Kent. Still, there was so much to do, so many more books to read, and so many more days and nights with Jean.
David picked up the last load of logs from the driveway. Panting puffs of little clouds around his head, he half-stumbled into the garage to place the logs in the black metal firewood rack Jean had bought for him from L.L. Bean. As he bent down to pick up the metal wedge and sledgehammer, he noticed a lone figure walking up his long driveway, a small gravel road just less than a fifth of a mile off Route 341. That was a feature of this house David loved: it was hidden from the main road amidst the trees, and nestled deeply in a valley of hundreds of acres of gently sloping hills. But during heavy winter snowstorms, he did not like paying $80 each time his Brazilian landscaper plowed his driveway. And Jean did not like the occasional feeling of isolation.
In Kent, Jean’s visits to the True Value Hardware store for milorganite, the Davis IGA for groceries, and the small town library—all of this reminded her of growing up in Concord. A top-notch Belgium chocolatier at the town center turned this small New England town into a jewel.
David marched quickly into the garage to place the wedge on a work shelf and the sledgehammer in the corner where he kept his growing stockpile of tools, the chipper/shredder from his in-laws, a Husqvarna chainsaw, a new weed-wacker. He walked out to meet the stranger coming up the driveway, but the man was already waiting for him on the black asphalt in front of the garage.
“Get
