it was very cold, and the air was crisp and silent. Behind the graveyard rose the foothills of the Gallatin range, the peaks in the distance muted, as if painted on glass. Two side-by-side plots had been prepared. There were about fifteen people on hand to witness the burial. Davids was there, and someone who appeared to be his assistant. Mary stood close to me, white hair strictly pulled back in a bun, her lined face battered smooth with the cold. A couple of the others I thought I vaguely recognized.
More words were said by the priest, comforting lies in which to swaddle these events. Possibly they made a difference to some of the mourners. I could barely hear them, concentrating as I was on stopping my head from exploding. Then a couple of men – whose job it was, who did this kind of thing every week – efficiently lowered the coffins into the ground. Ropes were gently fed through their hands, and the coffins came to measured rest six feet below the flat plain on which the living still stood. A few more sentences of balm were offered, but muttered quickly now – as if the church recognized that the time to make its pitch was running out. You can’t put people in wooden boxes under the ground without the audience realizing that something very amiss is afoot.
A final quiet pronouncement, and that was that. It was done. Nothing would ever happen to Donald and Beth Hopkins again. Nothing that bore thinking about, at least.
Some of the mourners lingered for a moment, aimless now. Then I was alone. I stood there as two people. One whose throat was locked into fiery stone, and who could not imagine ever moving again; another who was aware of his iconic stature beside the graves, and also that, a little distance away, people were driving past in cars and listening to the Dixie Chicks and worrying vaguely about money. Both sides of me found the other ridiculous.
I knew that I couldn’t stand there for ever. They wouldn’t expect me to. It would make no sense, would change nothing, and it really was very cold. When I finally looked up I saw Mary was also still present, standing only a few feet away. Her eyes were dry, harsh with a knowledge that such a fate would be hers before very long and that it was neither a laughing nor a crying matter. I pursed my lips, and she reached out and laid her hand on my arm. Neither of us said anything for a while.
When she’d called me, three days before, I had been sitting on the deck of a nice, small hotel on De la Vina in Santa Barbara. I was temporarily unemployed, or unemployed again, and using my scant savings on an undeserved vacation. I was sitting with a good bottle of local merlot in front of me, and efficiently making it go away. It wasn’t the first of the evening, and so when my cellular rang I was inclined to let the message service pick it up. But when I glanced at the phone I saw who the caller was.
I hit the TALK button. ‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Ward,’ she replied. And then nothing.
Finally I heard a sound down the line. The noise was soft, glutinous. ‘Mary?’ I asked quickly. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh, Ward,’ she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer was going to fall.
‘What is it?’
‘Ward, you’d better come here.’
In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.
I’d known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn’t involved both of them then it wouldn’t be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn’t gotten round to it. I hadn’t expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn’t hear me.
Abruptly I realized that I didn’t want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.
‘I put out the trash this morning,’ she said, ‘and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don’t want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.’
I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn’t have any of my own. No need. They’d been in, on the few occasions I’d visited. I realized that this was the first time I’d ever seen Mary somewhere other than my parents’ kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way round. They tended to form a centre. Had tended to.
‘They spoke of you, you know. Often.’
I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn’t even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who’d once grown up and lived with them in a different state. It wasn’t that we hadn’t loved each other. We had, in our ways. I just hadn’t given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make parents prone to brag to friends and neighbours. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.
‘How long will you stay?’ she asked.
‘It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.’
‘You know where I am,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be a stranger, just because.’
‘I won’t,’ I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.
She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.
‘Goodbye, Ward,’ she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that I didn’t know.
I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and efficient, to tidy loose ends.
I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.
Davids had brought most of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don’t know whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historical downtown Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie’s Pantry. The interior had been slavishly designed to resemble a multi-level log cabin, the furniture hand-hewn by elves. The menu offered a chilling variety of organic soups and home-made breads, accompanied by salads largely predicated upon bean sprouts. I know I’m out of step, but I don’t regard bean sprouts as food. They don’t even look edible. They look like pallid, mutant grubs. The only worse thing is cous cous, of which there was also plenty on offer. I don’t know of any aunt on this planet who eats that kind of shit, but both staff and patrons seemed about as happy as could be. Almost maniacally so.
After a brief and somewhat stilted wait we scored a seat by the front window. This annoyed a spruce young family behind us, who’d had their eye on the table and didn’t understand how being first in line entitled you to certain benefits. The woman outlined her dissatisfaction to the waitress, loudly observing that the table had space for four people
