Northern Borders (37 page)

I was in a daze. The full impact of my grandmother's death had not hit me yet. I still couldn't seem to accept the fact that she was gone. Teary-eyed and out of touch with my surroundings, I wandered here and there around the Farm. Everywhere I went I was aware of both her absence and her strong lingering presence. Several times a desperate intimation of ultimate finality swept over me, a certainty that my life and the lives of the rest of the family had come to a kind of close along with my grandmother's. Each time the desolation passed and again I'd just feel detached from the morning and the Farm and myself. My wrist still tingled from my grandmother's grip, or at least I imagined that it did. I was only vaguely aware of my grandfather's screaming log saw.

Dad arrived about seven o'clock. He glanced toward the sawmill, where my grandfather was now operating the higher-pitched ripsaw, and looked at me questioningly. I shrugged.

Little Aunt Freddi was most helpful to me. While Dad called Lawyer Zack Barrows, in accordance with some private instructions Gram had evidently given him, I confided to Freddi my sense that Gram was still here, yet not here. Freddi listened sympathetically and said that I would always have that sense, and I always have, though along with the death of my mother, the loss of my grandmother when I was seventeen years old remains to this day the most difficult memory of my youth.

About ten o'clock Lawyer Barrows appeared in the shiny bottle-green suit jacket he'd worn to court the day my grandmother hauled my grandfather up in front of Judge Allen to prevent him from flooding her orchard. With Zack was his crony Sheriff Mason White, who was also the local undertaker. They drove up in Mason's hearse.

Dad and Freddi and my Great-Aunt Helen watched from the kitchen as the old lawyer and the sheriff solemnly approached the house, not without a few wary looks over their shoulder in the direction of my grandfather's sawmill. Zack was carrying a large briefcase.

“No doubt Mom's laughing up her sleeve at all this,” Freddi said, “wherever she is.”

“Wherever she is, Mom is not laughing,” Klee called in from the dining room, where she was still working on the stenciling. “The dead, you know, always act entirely in character.”

“We're terribly sorry about your loss, folks,” Zack said after shaking hands all around. “Terribly sorry.”

“Yes,” Mason White said in his most unctuous undertaker's tones. He put a comforting hand on Freddi's shoulder. “We want to express our deepest condolences.”

Freddi pulled away from the undertaker's hand. “We know very well why you're here, Mason. There's no need for you at all. Mom wants to be buried here at home in the family plot.”

Mason gave a sad and knowing little smile, as though well-accustomed to the vagaries of the suddenly bereaved.

“How's Mr. Kittredge taking it?” Lawyer Barrows said.

“Fine,” Dad said. “Can't you hear him?” He jerked his head toward the mill, where my grandfather was hard at it with the rip saw.

Zack cleared his throat. “I'm afraid,” he said, “that he's going to have to be here for this.”

“I'll get him,” Freddi said.

Aunt Helen looked at me, but today I was in no frame of mind for our usual conspiratorial glances. I simply could not accept the fact that a person as fiercely alive as my grandmother, a person whose guidance and good opinion I had depended on daily for eleven years, could be dead.

Zack Barrows sat down at the kitchen table and began rummaging through his briefcase. At last he produced a long, official-looking, buff-colored envelope containing a typed document. He cleared his throat. “Now, folks,” the lawyer said in his most pompous courtroom manner, “usually, as I'm sure you're well aware, the reading of the last will and testament comes after the funeral service. In this case, since the will stipulates certain conditions for that service—”

The door opened and Freddi reappeared, followed immediately by my grandfather.

“Austen,” Zack said, half-rising.

Mason held out his hand toward my grandfather. “We want to express our—”

“Get on with your business,” my grandfather said to Zack. “I don't have all morning.”

He ignored Mason's hand entirely. The last time he and Mason had officially met was up at Labrador some years ago, when my grandfather had tossed him a stick of lighted dynamite.

Again Zack cleared his throat. Then he read aloud in the farmhouse kitchen that I had never thought of, and never afterward would think of, as belonging to anyone but my grandmother, that Abiah Kittredge, being sound of mind—“
very
sound of mind,” Zack added—willed all her real estate and other property and assets to her husband, Austen Gleason Kittredge, with the exception of my college spending-money fund and her collection of Egyptian memorabilia. Along with her remains, her Egyptian artifacts were to be disposed of according to the stipulations in a private letter to her husband, to be found in the top drawer of her worktable in Egypt.

Everyone looked at my grandfather.

“Are you acquainted with the contents of the letter in question, Austen?” Zack asked.

Without answering, my grandfather took three or four long strides through the dining room hallway into Egypt, where Old Josie was still sitting next to my grandmother's bed, crying and fingering her rosary. The room was very dim; someone had drawn the curtains across the single window. At the appearance of my grandfather, Old Josie gave a gasp and rose from her chair, her rosary beads dripping out of her trembling hands.

Before anyone knew what he was going to do, my grandfather yanked open the curtains. In the flood of morning sunlight my grandmother lay on the daybed, where my aunts had arranged her in her best black dress. Lyle the Crocodile still reposed at her side.

My grandfather glanced at his deceased wife for a moment. “I can't say I detect any great change,” he said.

Someone gave a shocked gasp. At the same time I heard the kitchen door slam as Dad headed out of the house.

In the cheery sunshine, neither Egypt nor my grandmother struck me as particularly otherworldly. The picture of the extinct Sphinx looked like any other picture of a Sphinx. The carved wooden figure of Lord Ra looked downright ordinary. Everything had a mundane, homespun aspect, including the tiny body of my grandmother, her eyes closed, her hands folded across her still, dark-clad breast.

My grandfather jerked open the top drawer of the bedside table and got out an envelope. Inside were two sheets of instructions in my grandmother's close, neat hand. My grandfather took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and scanned the letter rapidly.

“What's it say?” Lawyer Barrows asked from the doorway. “Read it to us, Austen.”

“It says ‘Private, for My Husband Only' right here across the top. You read vis the will, Barrows. The will said a private letter.”

My grandfather put the letter back in the envelope, which he stuck in his rear pants pocket. Abruptly, he whipped the curtains closed and said, “Clear out of here now, all of you.”

“Don't you want me to transport Mrs. K's remains into the undertaking parlor, Austen?”

“No, Mason, I don't want you to transport Mrs. K's remains to the undertaking parlor. Or anywhere else. The service will be held here at this house, in Mrs. K's own parlor, tomorrow afternoon at one o'clock sharp. She'll be buried in the family plot according to her wishes. You and Zack clear out of here now. You've done what you came to do. I'll handle the rest.”

“But what about the casket? You can't just—”

Mason faltered as my grandfather continued to stare at him.

“I'll handle matters from here on,” my grandfather said. “You boys shove along.”

 

The cluster flies were nearly gone, with only a few hapless stragglers left to be swept up and disposed of. But the late-summer heat was as intense as ever. Plainly, it was essential to get my grandmother's body into the ground as soon as decently possible. Dad put some left-over blocks of ice from the icehouse in maple sugar pans and cream pans and set them on the daybed beside Gram. My grandfather had returned to the sawmill.

Around noon I went down to the mill to offer to help. “This is tamarack, Austen,” my grandfather said when he finished running a stack of freshly-cut boards through the shrieking planer. “Tamarack makes good durable stable flooring. It made very sound foundation posts for the old log-driving dams. It's quite the old bitch to work with, but it stands up well to the elements.”

My grandfather shook his head. “Even so I wish we had six months to let these boards season. I'll double-cleat them all around with square nails and that's the best I can do. If they warp, they warp. She'll have to take her chances.”

My grandfather allowed me to wait on him off and on for the rest of the day. I brought him a sandwich and kept his water bucket full of fresh cold drinking water from the river. Despite all of my grandparents' feuding, I felt much less cut off from my grandmother when I was near him. In the middle of the afternoon he told me to go up to the woods and cut a load of cedar and balsam brush. “Just small stuff,” he said. “Nothing bigger than what you'd put in a Christmas wreath.”

“You want some flowers too? Late-blooming roses?”

He shook his head. “Just the brush.”

All afternoon, as the news of my grandmother's death spread through the county, cars and farm trucks came up the Hollow road and parked in the dooryard and barnyard and people stopped by to deliver food and pay their respects. A few visitors ventured down to the mill but did not stay long. On my grandfather worked, straight through the supper hour into the evening. Old Josie kept an unbroken vigil over my grandmother's body. Freddi and Dad and Aunt Helen congregated in the kitchen, now overflowing with baked beans and homemade bread and rolls and casseroles and soups and ten different kinds of pies and cakes, and Klee finished her stenciling.

As the night wore on, the heat was too oppressive to talk much. Every two or three hours Dad emptied the meltwater out of the
pans on the daybed and replenished them with fresh blocks of ice. We were all worried about the heat.

Sometime around midnight I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer and had to go to bed. To my surprise, I fell asleep immediately and didn't wake up until after eight the next morning.

Evidently my grandmother's remains had been moved to the parlor, because the door to Egypt was open and Old Josie was bustling around in the kitchen, trying to make a pot of coffee and getting in everyone's way. Aunt Helen shot me a glance and mouthed the words “No housekeeper.” What on earth would become of Josie now, I wondered. What would become of my grandfather and me?

This morning the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours finally seemed to have caught up with me. I'd be fine for a few minutes, until I thought of something my grandmother and I had done together, or some simple chore I'd done for her and now had to do alone, and that would set me off teary-eyed all over again. For a seventeen-year-old, I wasn't handling this well at all.

Soon after my grandmother's clocks struck eleven, my grandfather appeared from the parlor. For the first time I could ever remember, he needed a shave. His short white hair was flecked with sawdust and his pale eyes looked haggard. “You people can go in and see her now if you want,” he said.

I was exceedingly nervous about what might greet us in the parlor. I held my breath in apprehension as we trooped in.

What we beheld there remains to this day one of the strangest sights of my life. On two sawhorses sat a large coffin. No. Not a coffin. A sarcophagus. A wooden sarcophagus, in the unmistakable shape of a mummified Egyptian figure. It was painted antique green and blue with the stenciling paint Little Aunt Klee had used for the dining room fleur-de-lys pattern; and inside, on a bed of woven cedar and balsam fir boughs that filled the room with a woodsy fragrance, lay my minuscule grandmother.

Stenciled in bright gold lettering on the side of the sarcophagus was the word “Egypt.” But there was more, much more. The sarcophagus itself was commodious enough for a large man, and inside it, propped on the fragrant evergreen boughs all around my grandmother, were her most treasured Egyptian artifacts. There for everyone to view were the hawk-headed carved wooden figure of Lord Ra, the framed picture of the extinct Sphinx, Lyle the Pink Crocodile, her stereopticon and Egyptian slides, and her treasured old copies of
Life
and the
National Geographic
, open to the articles on the discovery of King Tut's tomb; and my grandmother was covered from her folded hands downward with the quilt of the Four Colorful Ramses guarding the Temple of Abu Simbel.

At her feet, crouching in the interwoven cedar and balsam boughs, were the mummified remains of the rat-fighting cat Lynx Kittredge, whom my grandmother had renamed Pharaoh, its fierce yellow eyes staring out over the room as though defying us to so much as smile. Which, of course, no one dreamed of doing. Even my Great-Aunt Helen was awe-stricken by my grandfather's handiwork. This, we all realized, was exactly the way my grandmother should be laid to rest. Here, indeed, was Egypt.

 

At the service that afternoon, while my grandfather finished digging the grave in the family cemetery above Maiden Rose's place, our ancient lay-preacher cousin, John Wesleyan Kittredge, read my grandmother's favorite passages from the Bible: Joseph's run-in with Potiphar's wife; the discovery of the infant Moses in the bullrushes by Pharaoh's daughter; the great plagues and afflictions visited on the venerable and undeserving population of Egypt, no doubt as a result of some sort of black magic practiced by that same meddling Israelite. Otherwise, the service was conventional enough, as my grandmother's own firm religious convictions were conventional enough apart from all matters in the Bible touching upon her unimpeachable Egyptians.