Thank You for All Things (44 page)

“This feels just like when you’re waiting for a child to
be born,” Oma says quietly. “Rebirth feels the same. I’m glad it feels like this.”

I reach twenty one thousand before he starts another breath.

I look up at Oma, who is staring at Grandpa Sam with sadness. “He told me to tell you all something,” I say to her. She looks at me. “I heard him say it, but not with my ears. I was—”

But I stop, because Oma stops listening. She leans over Grandpa Sam’s bed, alert, because he’s stopped breathing again, this time in mid-breath.

Oma grips my arm, and I know it’s because she sees what I see. That last handprint-size patch of life leaving, gushing out in one swoosh. And although I don’t actually see a vapor, I sense that it leaves through the top of his head.

He’s dying! And in a rush of panic—because I’d forgotten to say it back—I shout, “I love you too, Grandpa Sam!”

In a whoosh, he takes another half breath, and he comes right back into his body. He turns his head and his eyes are scanning until they find their place, locked right with mine.

And then, in a split second, he’s gone again.

This time, for good.

“Did you see that, Lucy? Did you see that?” Oma says, elated, even though she’s crying. “He came right back into his body when you said those words. He came back, as if to gather that love right up to take with him to the other side.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Marie says. We turn and look at her, and she adds, “I heard his breathing and knew he was going, so I came back.”

Oma leaves the bed and hurries to the window, cracking it open. “So his spirit can leave,” she says. She folds her
hands below her belly, her head down. Standing respectfully still, like a spectator on the street during a veterans’ parade.

Only after she believes his spirit is gone does Oma come back to the bed and close the eyelids on the body Grandpa Sam just left. “I’ll go tell them he’s gone,” Marie says.

They all come in Grandpa Sam’s room once it’s over. Mom, Uncle Clay, Aunt Jeana, Mitzy, and Marie. Only they don’t come all the way in. They crowd at the door, except for Aunt Jeana, who comes to the bed and pats Grandpa Sam’s hand as though she’s saying, “There, there, it’s all right.” She’s crying but without making a sound.

We stand for a few moments in silence, staring at the still mound on the sheets, and then Marie comes to stand at the foot of the bed. She starts singing a song that sounds like a prayer, in the language of her people. Her prayer song reaches down deep in me and strokes the sad part sitting there, and I can’t do a thing but put my head on Grandpa Sam’s still-warm but empty chest and sob.

P
ETER COMES
just minutes after Grandpa Sam dies, and, as I knew he would, he knows what to do. He shakes hands with Uncle Clay, then holds Mom and opens his arms so I can fit into their hug too. “You okay?” he whispers to me as we hug, and I nod my head. Peter’s presence itself works like an antianxiety pill on Mom. At least for a time.

Aunt Jeana is sitting at the table, the phone book open. “I need to call Hartwig’s,” she says, her finger making little zigzags down the short list of funeral homes. She pulls her hand away and brings it to the side of her tear-dampened face. “Oh, I can hardly think,” she says.

“Would you like me to call them?” Peter asks, and Aunt
Jeana nods. He takes the phone book and finds the number quickly. The funeral home tells Peter that it will be a while, because they’re out on another call. Aunt Jeana looks alarmed. “So we just let him lay? Oh, my Lord,” she says. “It feels wrong. Just wrong.”

Maybe Oma feels the same, because without saying a word she goes to the sink and fills a small basin of water, then she gets her soft essential-oils bag, the one with a moon and stars on it, and slips into the bathroom. She comes out with a couple of towels.

“What’s she doing?” Mom asks no one in particular.

“Washing his body,” Oma says as she shimmies as carefully as she can around the kitchen table, a few drops of water sloshing over Aunt Jeana’s head.

Clay snorts, then he leans over to Mom and says quietly, “Jesus … who does she think he is—
Jesus
?” Aunt Jeana doesn’t seem to hear him, but she hears Mom’s nervous snicker, and she scowls. I give Mom and Clay a dirty look, because all I want right now is for us to get along like a nice family.

E
VERYONE IS
still huddled in the kitchen, Aunt Jeana on the phone, when Oma comes out with the basin of dirty water, the damp towels draped over her arm. Mom scuttles away from the sink, as if skin cells from a dead dad are even more repulsive than those from a dreadlocked waitress.

Aunt Jeana hangs up the phone and moves around the kitchen like a nervous bird, her hand pecking in the drawers. “Does Sam have a decent suit to wear?” she asks.

“I found one last week. I’ll air it out on the line and wash the shirt,” Oma says, then adds, “What are you looking for, Jeana?”

“Paper and a pencil. I’ve got to write Sam’s obituary for the paper and find a church that will bury him. I just found out that the pastor of the Methodist church is in the hospital with pneumonia, and their lay pastor was called away for a death in his own family. I don’t know what we’re going to do now. I know that church would have buried him, because I’m a member. Any of you a member of a church?” she asks. When no one answers, she says, “Well, I’m not surprised. Now we’ve got a problem on our hands. Sam didn’t go to church. No church is going to bury someone who has no connection to them.”

“How very Christian of them,” Mom says.

“We shouldn’t have dismissed hospice,” Oma says. “They would have helped us with these plans. With all of it.”

“Nonsense,” Aunt Jeana says. “We don’t need outsiders in our business.”

Aunt Jeana barks at me to get out the phone book. “The big one. The one that includes the surrounding towns,” she says. “If need be, we’ll take him over to Larksville or Trent.”

“Or we can just have it at the funeral home,” Mom says. “Why does it have to be held in a church, anyway?”

“Well, who will preside over the service?” Aunt Jeana snaps, her head cocking toward Mom.

“I don’t know. The funeral director … one of us.”

“He needs a proper ceremony!”

“My people on the reservation would do his ceremony,” Marie volunteers, and Oma says, “Oh, that would be lovely.”

Aunt Jeana goes ballistic then, which makes Chico go ballistic too. “Are you crazy? Drums, and all that chanting? It’s heathen!”

Uncle Clay laughs. “Heathen would be fitting, actually,” he says, and Mom grins.

Aunt Jeana’s face bunches up and deepens almost to the color of Chico’s collar. “Is that how it’s going to be with you two? Both of you making snide remarks about your dead father?”

“Jeana,” Oma says. “They’re just releasing stress.”

Jeana stands up, clutching a still-twitching Chico. “Why do you defend them? They’re being rude and disrespectful. But then, you’ve always defended them, no matter how out of control they got. Is it any wonder that Sam was the way he was? Someone had to crack down on those two.”

Uncle Clay stops laughing. “Don’t you fucking defend the old man in front of me.”

Aunt Jeana gasps. “Your language, young man!”

I sigh because, just as I predicted, it’s happening.

Snap!

Snap!

Snap!

“Oh, please,” Oma begs. “Let’s not argue at a time like this. Everyone, please, just take a nice cleansing breath, and—”

“And just what?” Mom snaps. “Sit here and pretend he was a saint just because he’s dead now? Isn’t it bad enough that over the next three days we’re going to have to listen to what a wonderful, kind, caring man he was? Can’t we at least keep it honest among ourselves? He was a bastard. A bastard! And frankly, I don’t give a shit who does his funeral or where he’s buried.” Mitzy fiddles with her coffee cup, and Peter bites his lip and stares at the table.

“Are you going to let your children talk about their dead father that way?” Aunt Jeana says, moving so close to Oma that Chico has to turn his head or face being crushed by Oma’s boobs. He claws at Aunt Jeana’s sweater, and she moves him up to her shoulder and pats his ridged backbone.

Oma is holding some sort of talisman, her fingers stroking it anxiously. “They have a right to feel how they feel, Jeana.”

“I’d expect something like that out of you,” Aunt Jeana says.

“Jeana?” Clay says, no doubt omitting the “Aunt” from her name on purpose. “You don’t know a damn thing about what went on in this house. You came to visit once every few years and spent the whole time patting the ass of one of your little rats. When he called Ma a bitch, and worse, in front of you, you just turned away like you hadn’t heard.”

“I know what happened here, young man! Your dad practically broke his back trying to save money so he could buy that lumber mill he wanted so badly, to give his family a good life. And your mother, she spent every dime he saved so he never got his sawmill. That’s what happened here! She used his money to buy you kids more things than you deserved, and she drank up the rest.”

Uncle Clay snorts. “Yeah, right. He spent his money on his whores. That’s where his money went. And he wasn’t trying to give his family a good life. He was trying to be a somebody.”

“I don’t know what Sam did with other women, Clay, and frankly, I don’t care. He had to find some warmth somewhere, I suppose, because he certainly wasn’t going to get any at home.”

“Oh, please!” Mom groans.

Aunt Jeana goes up to Mom. “Talk that way about him now, missy, but your father was good enough to come home to when you needed a place to hide from that lunatic you got yourself in trouble with, now, wasn’t he?”

Mom looks horrified. “Go up to your room, Lucy,” she says.

Jeana doesn’t wait for me to leave—though I’m not going to, anyway.

“He took a bullet for you, young lady. A bullet! Now, if that isn’t a father sacrificing himself for his family, I don’t know what is!”

Peter and Mitzy move to stand alongside Mom. One on each side, like pillars.

“Go to your room, Lucy. Now!” Mom shouts. But I don’t. I step back to stand under the living-room archway, where I can see and watch and hear, but where I’m not directly in Mom’s line of vision. And I struggle to figure out if Aunt Jeana is speaking metaphorically about that bullet or if she means it literally.

“How many fathers would have done that, for a daughter who sent the cops after him, saying he’d beaten his wife when she’d only whacked her head from falling down in a drunken stupor? Not many, I can tell you. My father certainly wouldn’t have! He would have let my lover shoot me.

She means a bullet in the literal sense!
My stomach feels more than crampy right now, as I fill in the blanks of the story Maude Tuttle told me, and I know that my dad came to Timber Falls with a gun. And that means that he not only beat Mom, Milo, and me, but he wanted to kill us too. The realization of something that ugly makes my body go as cold as Grandpa’s.

Snap!

“Most fathers would have thrown you out on your rump for getting yourself in that predicament in the first place, much less after you told such horrid lies.” Aunt Jeana
nudges herself so close to Mom that Mom must be smelling the hamburger on both her
and
Chico’s breath. “My brother risked his life for you, missy, and you can’t give him even an ounce of gratitude, to say nothing of respect?”

Mom looks at Oma, silently pleading with her to get me out of the room. Oma, intuitive or not, is fingering the talisman in her shaky hands and blinking hard. She seems oblivious to Mom’s silent cue. “Let’s not hash over those times. They’re over with … We are family.”

Oma might miss Mom’s cue, but Marie doesn’t. She comes to me and suggests she and I go outside for a little bit. I shake my head.

“Of course you’re not going to show him any respect now,” Aunt Jeana says to Mom. “You didn’t then, why would you now? After he saved your life, you ran off, taking his grandchildren with you. But then, that’s what I’d expect from the lot of you. That man lost his dream, and what did the three of you do in his time of need? You left him high and dry, without even looking back.”

“Oh, wait a minute here,” Marie says, moving away from me. “I was here through it all, Jeana. Not the night it happened, but almost every day before that. And I can assure you that the way Sam treated Lillian and these kids, most women would have been gone long before Lillian left.”

Aunt Jeana looks at Marie like she’s seeing her for the first time. “Who are you, anyway? You aren’t family. What are you doing in this conversation?” She jabs her fingers at Marie, then at Mitzy and Peter. “This is a family discussion. I own this house, and I’m telling you all to leave.”

“Honey?” Peter says to Mom.

“I just want someone to take Lucy out of this room. Please, just get her out of here.”

“No!” I shout. “I’m not going anyplace. I have a right to be here. I’m family! And so is Marie, and Mitzy, and Peter. Why do any of us have to leave?”

“Lucy’s right,” Peter says. “Blood or not, Tess and Lillian and these kids mean something to us, Jeana, and we’re going to be here for them if they want us to be.”

My insides melt from Peter’s words, and I don’t care if he snores or farts or is a tattletale. I want him to be my daddy now more than ever.

“But we have private matters to discuss,” Aunt Jeana snaps.

“What is there to discuss?” Mom asks.

“There are arrangements to be made,” Aunt Jeana says. “And I don’t care how much you three despise him—God rest his soul—but he is going to have a proper burial. If it were up to the lot of you, he’d be tossed in a ditch to rot like a deer, but he’s my brother, and he’s going to be buried in a church by a minister, in spite of what you heathens think.”

“Okay, Jeana. That’s enough,” Oma says. In my whole life, I’ve never heard Oma use such a harsh tone. Not even when she talked about Rose Pottor. “You have insulted us enough for one day, and you’ll stop right now. Clay is right. You
don’t
know what went on in this house. No one does, except those of us who lived in it, and you’ll not be judging us like this.”