How to Mount a Casket
*See "How to Mount a Horse", Page 3
My mother was sitting cross-legged in a dust-filled room with cedar green paneling and thick, heavy drapes colored an equally heavy red that were opened more often to let the darkness out than to let the light in. The phone rang suddenly that morning in 1976 as it never did and startling her out of a wide-eyed, Price Is Right trance. As she rose from the itchy, ochre colored rocking chair, limping as her leg had betrayed her by napping, she made her way slowly carrying a half empty bowl of instant oatmeal and whole milk swimming just below the surface of a translucent yellow film of melted butter. It was the voice of a jaded nurse, as if there is any other kind, calling to say my father's mother had passed and they needed to know what to do with her body as there had been no instructions left.
My mother was the kind of woman who could be brought to tears with a clever card trick or at the news of a child’s unfinished homework 5 minutes before bedtime. Were it not for widespread availability of Valium, prescribed and likely invented for “hysterical” housewives, she might have been buried in a casket full of her own tears. She immediately called my father at the university where, much to the dismay of his students, he attempted to teach things. Not to say that he wasn’t terribly bright or adept at his discipline; he was. It was the conveying of such disciplines that left others confounded, not an optimal outcome for paying customers.
"Tell him it's a death message,” she stated matter-of-factly to the secretary.
Hours passed with no return call, so she called again. "Did you tell him it’s a death message," she repeated. The secretary assured her he'd received it.
My mother was born into the Great Depression, wore rubber bands around her shoes to hold them together, watched her 15 year old brother drown, was sleeping when her 19-year-old sister died of heart failure in the bathroom, and grew up in a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without a man being on the account. She and misery were not just acquaintances; they had pillow fights, talked about boys and braided each other’s hair. The dilemma of what ditch to dump the body of a despicable, gratuitously critical mother-in-law is admittedly unpleasant but not the complexity of roofing in July or bathing a cat. One might even approach it with party-planning enthusiasm, to each their own. Some see tribulations as opportunities, but most can only see tribulations.
At his usual arrival time, my father strolled in, met by my mother's frantic face. "Why didn't you call back? Didn't you know it was a death message?"
"Yes," he replied.
"Well then, why didn't you call back? The hospital has been calling..."
"Well, I knew it had to be my mother or one of the kids, and there wasn't anything I could do if they were already dead, so I finished my classes," he said, in a nonchalant fashion that belied the true nature of mind that processed calculous first and feelings dead last.
• • •
On the special day I, at the age of nearly 6, noticed that people were acting strangely, and why were we driving the old woman’s car that smelled like French fries and melted crayons had a baby? Where is Granny? My mother, in her ever-frazzled state of being, appeared to actually be melting while I, an unsophisticated child of country folks was elated just to be going somewhere. I cannot stress to you how infrequent trips were, in a car, on a road to absolutely anywhere.
My sister may or may not have been in the backseat as well. Despite her obscene overuse of the English language, she is surprisingly forgettable and often mistaken for an oversized container emitting white noise.
As my aunt drove in silence save the occasional you kids sit down back there, and my mother shuddered and shifted holding a tissue that was well overdue. My backseat script was well rehearsed, "Where are we going? How far is it? How long is it? Where are we going? Minnie Mouse’s little hand is on the. . . " My mother was too distraught to entertain babbling rhetoric, this much was clear but only this. Evidently our destination was a secret, so we must be going somewhere special.
The drive was long with nothing to do and no conversation as the only thing my sister did more frequently than eject spittle-drenched words of no value was to sleep, both protractedly and with dedication.
We arrived at a busy building with adults milling, standing, going in and out and speaking in hushed tones. The building, generic in style and taste, reminded me of my grammar school—linoleum tiles, wide hallways, and a small sitting area near the entryway with metal furniture and square vinyl cushions meant to look modern and even doubled down on modernism by sacrificing all comfort. The only person I recognized, aside from immediate family, was my aunt Lyla who had since acquired, and become one with, a wheelchair.
I could not tell where Lyla began and wheelchair ended. She was a strange bird, which may be over stating the obvious given that she was my father’s sister, and all aunts are a little kookie to be fair. No sense of humor, no stories, no gum from the bottom of her purse. Overweight with warts on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, and still sporting a 40's hairstyle in the 70’s complete with pin curls that had no clear purpose but to advertise her complete lack of self-awareness. What caught my attention was her leg, which wasn't a human leg. It was a metal pole that came down from her real knee to plastic foot incased in an orthpedic shoes. It seems the pin curls were not the only accessory with no clear purpose.
Unaware that I had a glaring and wide-eyed stare at the disharmony, she joyfully said, "That's my leg!" I reached out to touch the shiny pole, but a nearby stranger grabbed my hand. "Don't touch that, that's rude." That’s rude?
Scolded and goaded off in another direction, I took the hint and wandered into an adjacent room with terribly low light save one end of the room where a bright spotlight shown. There was a low hum of whispers as nebulous shadow people moved about in methodical patterns, almost like a dignified one-person square dance stirring quietly from one handshake to the next. No one noticed me as I made my way toward the light if only to see better, or at least something more than rippling layers of jacket tails and pant legs.
Still not knowing where I was or why, a large metallic, light blue box revealed itself through the waves of widows and black-party goers. The color was mesmerizing. The glittery shimmer gave the box a sense of majesty while its elevation concealed the mysterious contents from children of a certain age, perhaps by design.
As no one had taken notice of me still, instinctively I knew that forgiveness was easier granted than permission. There were shiny metal bars (someone must have had a sale on these) running the length of the box clearly intended to aid in mounting, and so I began to scale the casket with little effort. What other purpose could the bars be for, and how else was one meant to see inside?
The circle of life is never more present than on a farm, I'd seen quite a few dead things by kindergarten age. But I had not seen a dead person. I saw her long enough to know who it was, and at what stage, or the absence thereof. Finally, an otherwise self-absorbed onlooker took notice of my inappropriate behavior and firmly pulled my tiny hands from the brightly lit, pillowy white satin and the cold, steel bar beneath my feet.
I was shuffled out of the main ball room and returned to a grouping of family members sitting on and about the modern furniture, but I was not sad. I was baffled and irritated that no one told me where we were going or what was to be found, mourned or celebrated upon our arrival.
As I sat, I looked around. My mother was tearful, my brother was crying a little but likely faking it, and my sister’s third and perpetual state of consciousness other than talking or sleeping was crying, no News at 11. I realized that everyone was crying except me – and predictably my father – so I started crying. Although it garnered unwanted attention, it also seemed to put the group at ease and distracted them from my unsuccessful limbing expedition.
A woman I’d never seen before kneeled and began comforting me. My mother introduced her as a distant but random relative I cannot now recall and said straight away that she had horses. I stopped crying.
Now transfixed on the horse owner, I noticed she was very pretty, a shiny feathered brunette wearing the colors of the time. Browns, yellows and oranges deeply died into corduroy bell-bottoms made her look taller than she was, but the brown and yellow argyle sweater vest with large square glass frames sitting halfway down her nose brought her back down God-given height. She then sat across from me but leaned forward to keep me engaged. She spoke with the warmth and kindness of a genuinely concerned stranger.
Part of me believed I would get to ride horses, run and jump with reckless abandoned on this real, or possibly fabricated ranch, maybe even get my own sweater vest and corduroys. The other part of me knew I would never see her again.
As she comforted me with a soft, sweet southern voice that spoke of ranches and horses and sunny, happy days, I couldn’t help but notice that without any prompting, she told me exactly where we were going. And, why.
Word count: approximately 1,400 words