Unremarried Widow (13 page)

“You okay, honey?” she said.

I nodded.

We stood and I circulated through the room to speak to the soldiers I knew. One squeezed me close before stepping back to hold me at arm's length.

“I'm glad to see you,” he said.

I could feel the heat that radiated from him and I wanted to step away, but I did not know how. Instead I let him hold my hands and stroke my hair, conscious that I had become porous and malleable, easily breached.

The morning of John's funeral
was already soaked with rain by the time I arrived at the chapel. The space inside the cathedral was viscous
with humidity as I found a seat in a pew near the back. I took shallow breaths of air that smelled of damp cloth and incense while I half-listened to the service. Mostly I was bracing myself. I knew the Mass was only a prelude to the real event, the interment, the part where the earth would open up and swallow John whole. My body stiffened with the weight of my anxiety, and when the service ended I moved with the current that flowed out of the chapel, pulling in mourners like branches beside a swollen river. We swept behind John's coffin and spilled into the parking lot, then drove through the rain to a plot of fresh earth in Section 60 where the combatants of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. There are female soldiers there, though the majority are men, husbands and fathers and brothers and sons, each laid to rest in that crowded field, their lives come down to a plot not much bigger than a man. I realized that somewhere—elsewhere—there were lovers and wives and children whose minds were thick with those men as Teresa's mind was thick with John and as my mind was thick with Miles. The memories of those men existed even though their bodies lay beneath the autumn fog, and it occurred to me that one day when the details have faded, when I can no longer recall if it rained the day we buried John or what shoes I wore or the color of my coat, Miles's memory will still be in me, fresh and alive and fully formed. I thought of my mother, to whom I had imagined my father was forgotten, and I knew in a way I had never known that she must still carry his memory tucked inside her, just beneath the skin, beating with the rhythms of her own heart.

They buried John with full military honors. The sound of rain pinged off the white tent stretched over our heads, and I shook as the guns fired the final salute. Teresa stood by the coffin, her arms around her daughters, and I watched closely so that I might know how to behave when my turn came.

The first time I flew
into the Amarillo airport, the smell of manure hit me at the gate. I followed Miles to the baggage claim, trying to breathe through my mouth.

“What is that smell?” I asked his aunt on the way to the car.

“That,” she said, “is the smell of money.”

It was there again when I arrived for the funeral—the smell of money: fresh and green and processed through the gut of a cow. I met my mother, Heather, and Annabelle in Dallas, and when we reached Amarillo Miles's mother hugged all of us. She hugged me last and longest, as if we were two unlikely members of the same team. I was silent on the drive away from the airport and up the Texas Panhandle, too stunned by my sorrow to speak. In the distance I saw the lights from oil rigs that pump all night. They flashed on and off, signaling in the dark, as we followed the route Miles's casket had taken earlier in the week, carried in the back of the Hendersons' pickup. People had lined the highway along the route, waiting in the cold autumn night for the coffin to pass so that they might welcome their Texas son home.

The day before the funeral
a neighbor who rode in the rodeo circuit brought horses to the Hendersons' ranch to take us riding. He hoisted Heather into the saddle first.

“I hope I don't fall off this thing,” she said.

He gave Annabelle a boost and then heaved me up. When we all sat squarely in our saddles, he led us through the pasture and across the far hills. I surprised myself at the easy way I sat in the saddle. I had always been a nervous rider; I clung tightly to the saddle horn and jerked the reins. I kept my legs stiff and my back too straight.

“Just relax,” Miles told me the first time we rode together. “Show the
horse where you want to go. Here”—he kicked back with his heels—“and here.” He gently tugged the reins.

But that day before the funeral I was fearless. I worked the reins deftly. When the horse beneath me wanted to gallop, I let him open up. The ground pounded under his feet and I tipped my head back and tilted my face to the sky. I felt Miles everywhere, in the wind that streamed past, in the grass that bent below the hooves. He was there in the alfalfa smell of the horses and the smooth leather of the reins. He was in the open land and the wide expanse of the sky. I turned and faced into him like a wildflower following the sun.

“There were times that week when you weren't there,” Annabelle said later. “Like that day we went riding. I looked over at you and thought, ‘She's not even here.' ”

I was nowhere. And everywhere. I was disappearing, becoming part of the landscape, blowing into the yucca and mesquite and sage. If I rode hard enough, I thought, if I just kept moving, I might vanish into the air.

But I never managed it.
I was never fast enough. Because the day ended and the night passed and the next day dawned, and I was still there. I rose early, showered, and brushed my hair. I dressed in front of the mirror, watching myself, and tried to memorize every moment of the day. Years later I would attend an art exhibit in New York where an entire room was dedicated to paintings of the artist's lover on her deathbed. I would immediately recognize the impulse—not to chronicle the grimness of the lover's death, as the exhibit implied, but to hold tight to her, not to let her go.

Though, in a way, I had already let Miles go. I had given the funeral home permission to cremate his remains before I arrived, and by the
time I made it to Texas he was gone. I told myself it was better that way, not to have to touch his coffin as I had touched John's, knowing what was inside.

On the morning of the
funeral, we followed the procession to a low spot beneath the trees on the Hendersons' property. I walked to my seat numbly and watched the sky blown clear of clouds as a pastor stood on a platform made of cypress wood and talked about God. I wanted none of it—none of his smooth words, his easy eulogies, the facile balm of his faith. When he finished, we stood and moved to an assembly of chairs facing a flagpole. The honor guard—young soldiers mostly, their faces like boys'—lowered the flag and folded it at right angles. They handed it to a colonel in white gloves who knelt at my feet. He presented the flag that had draped Miles's coffin all the way from Iraq and I took the folded fabric in my hands. My hurt welled in me and threatened to stain the cloth. I cradled the flag in my lap as a bugler played taps, the notes rising high and clear in the morning air. Someone behind me pressed steadying fingers into my shoulders; I didn't know who but I reached up and held on. From over the ridge a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” and Miles's old horse rode down to the trees, his master's boots backward in the stirrups.

“That's how we do a cowboy burial,” Miles's mother said when it was all over.

Afterward we gathered at the
Hendersons' home to eat brisket and drink lemonade, these strange rituals of death, and a woman with white hair and liver-spotted hands stopped me in the kitchen. She patted my arm as she spoke.

“Don't worry,” she said. “You'll get married again.”

I smiled at her the way I smiled at everyone then and I turned politely away so she would not see how her words had sliced me open, a fish knife to the belly. The woman's husband doddered in the kitchen, a paper plate clutched in his hand, and I knew she could not understand.

The Hendersons' casualty assistance officer took me aside.

“These are for you,” he said.

He pulled a black velvet pouch out of his pocket and placed it in my hand.

“What is it?”

“They're Miles's dog tags.”

When he had stepped away, I unknotted the black cord and poured them into my hand, rolling the disks over to feel the lightness of the thin metal. They were not burned. They were smooth, clean, polished. In a part of my mind I was not yet ready to acknowledge, I knew that the dog tags came by way of Miles's body. For me to hold them in my palm, they must have been lifted from around his neck. Someone would have had to clean them up before sending them home.

The day wore down and
peopled trickled out. Someone fixed me a plate of barbecue and beans. Miles's young cousin pointed to me and asked his mother why my face was so red.

“Sometimes when people are very sad,” she said, “they cry for a long time.”

In a quiet moment I escaped with Annabelle and Heather to Miles's old bedroom. A soldier who had known Miles at Fort Rucker followed us and we spread out across the room. We talked about Miles and flight school, and after a time the soldier told us the story of his own helicopter crash. He'd been in the back of a Black Hawk, he said, and there had
been fog. The pilot had pulled too far back on the cyclic and the nose of the helicopter rose. The Black Hawk dipped forward and rocked back, and the soldier knew they were going down. Often in Black Hawk crashes the transom, the middle part of the aircraft that supports the rotors, will fall and crush the crew in the back. The soldier knew this; he was sure he was going to die.

“And you know what I thought of in those last seconds?” he said. “I thought of my wife.”

The fields had gone brown
with drought and the dry grass crunched under our feet as our small group made our way across the pasture the next morning. The wind turned our cheeks red and carried the whinny of horses from across the corral. We headed for a low space of land where cottonwoods grew, and when we reached the trees we stopped.

“Here, do you think?” Terry asked.

I had ridden there with Miles the first time I visited the ranch; the last time he rode with his family he brought them to the same place. Miles had snapped a few photos. They would come home with his things from Iraq.

“This is right,” I said.

The dry edges of the cottonwood leaves rubbed together in the breeze and sunlight filtered through the branches. Miles's father took a few steps away from the group with the bag containing the ashes and placed himself downwind. He opened the bag and I closed my eyes. The ashes made a whooshing sound of sand being poured from a bucket and I looked back in time to see the lighter bits catch in a current of air. They blew like dust across the high grass and it was easy to imagine Miles had simply disappeared into the wind.

The military has a term
for everything that comes after a traumatic incident:
right of the boom
, the boom being the moment of the incident itself—an IED blast, a sniper shot, a helicopter crash. This is how I began to think of my life—right of the boom—as all the parts of military protocol fell into place.

My casualty assistance officer called in early December.

“I got the shipment in,” he said. “Your husband's things from Iraq. I'm going to need to bring these over to you.”

He pulled into my garage on a windy afternoon with the two tough bins loaded into his car. He lifted the smaller of the two bins from his trunk and set it on the concrete floor. He needed my help with the second, and together we maneuvered the plastic container out of the backseat.

“Where do you want these?” he said.

“Over here.”

I pointed to an empty space by the stairs and we dragged the containers across the floor, their rough bottoms grinding against the
concrete, and pushed them against the base of the stairs, where they sat untouched for weeks. They collected dust and bits of beach sand while I refused to acknowledge them. I knew what they contained, proof that Miles was gone. If I opened them, if I looked inside, then I would have to admit he was never coming home.

But I worked up my courage late in the month and on a Friday afternoon I left work early, pulled into the garage, and before I could lose my nerve I moved a chair beside the larger of the two bins. One of my mother's cats sniffed the edge of the box and rubbed his whiskered face against one corner. I lowered a hand to his back and he raised his tail in greeting. The light had an unsteady quality that put me in mind of grain alcohol. I wished I were drunk on it. But I was sober as I stared down at the latched boxes, sober as I snapped open the first clasp, sober as I lifted the lid and ran my eyes over the contents. There was everything Miles had taken when he deployed, neatly stacked and covered with a fine dusting of Iraqi sand. I quickly realized there would be no surprises in the tough bins, just a perfect ordinariness—Miles's folded undershirts, his socks rolled into balls, his uniforms arranged in ordered stacks. I pulled a T-shirt from the top of the pile and pressed the fabric to my face, but when I breathed deeply the scent was all wrong. They had laundered his clothes before sending them home. I saw that some of the items had come back in black velvet pouches: a pair of sunglasses, a yellow rubber bracelet, the mechanical pencils he used to mark flight charts, his metal nail clippers, a flat-head screwdriver, a key wrench. I pulled open the black drawstrings on each bag and let the items slip into my hand. I held them and felt Miles in every piece. I thought of him using them and wearing them. He kept the pencils tucked into a pocket on the sleeve of his uniform. He stashed the tools in a different Velcroed compartment. He kept the nail clippers in his right front pocket. I looked over the pieces and ran through Miles's routine, and I realized that these were the items taken from his body. These were the possessions he had on him at the time of the crash. I cradled the
sunglasses in my hand. They were unharmed. I thought of Miles, bruised and broken, and his sunglasses coming through without a scratch. The world is without reason.