Torch (22 page)

He sat up and put his bare feet on the floor and then stood carefully, unsure of his legs, as if they’d recently been released from casts. He had a mission. Two missions. He was going to get the dogs from Kathy Tyson—she’d been taking care of them since days before Teresa died, and with the funeral and the comings and goings of so many people in their house, they had not yet picked them up—and then he was going to come home and kill himself.

He considered not going to get the dogs. It would make sense logistically, but he decided against it for two reasons. One, the dogs would be a comfort to Claire and Joshua and if he didn’t go get them now, there would be the next funeral to deal with and the dogs would remain at Kathy’s for at least another week. And two, he wanted to see them one last time.

First, he shaved. He had not shaved since the morning of the funeral and a shaggy beard was starting to grow in. He felt the least he could do if he was going to kill himself was to shave. He also dressed in a good shirt—not a flannel one like he normally wore, but in the white shirt with turquoise snaps that Teresa loved. When he wore it she would croon her rendition of a cowboy song, which she had likely made up herself, probably the moment she first saw him in that shirt. He tried to recall how the song went, but for the life of him he couldn’t. He would never hear it again, he realized, unless, of course, there was a heaven after all and then she would be there waiting for him and happy that he was wearing that shirt. She would be wearing her hospital gown with nothing on underneath, or perhaps she’d be wearing the blouse and skirt that Claire had picked out for her to wear in the casket, over her best underwear and bra, the outfit she’d worn also into the incinerator. Bruce allowed himself to wonder for a glimmer of a moment about the person
who had loaded her into the incinerator. Whoever it was would have been the last person to lay eyes on her. But then he remembered that was not true. She had been burned in her casket, a state law, and the last person who saw her was Kurt Moyle, the owner of the funeral home, who stepped forward and reached up his hand and softly lowered the lid on her just as they sang the last line of “Amazing Grace.”

Like her death, Teresa’s funeral had not been the funeral Bruce had imagined seven weeks before when they had first learned of Teresa’s cancer and he’d allowed the movie version of her funeral to play in his mind. Bruce didn’t behave the way he’d thought he would. He didn’t take anyone’s hands in an attempt to either console or be consoled. He didn’t say anything about how his wife was in a better place now. What he did was try his best not to look at anyone. Looking at people made the strength in his legs disappear. He held on to chairs, walls, at one point even to Teresa’s coffin, to keep himself up. When he looked at her parents a phrase came instantly into his mind:
stampeded by grief
. Teresa and her parents, in her adult life, had not been terribly close. Still, at their daughter’s funeral they howled and pawed with their hands, mussing each other’s clothes. They were not howlers; never had he imagined that they would paw. Claire and Joshua were the opposite, moving from the chairs to their mother’s coffin, from her coffin to the drinking fountain, from the drinking fountain to the little stand where they’d put the book where people could sign their names. They seemed to both know to keep moving in this circuit, apart from each other, but in synchronicity, swooping like owls on a night hunt, wide-eyed and silent. When they passed Bruce their eyes lashed on to his like ropes for climbing that landed, dug in, then gripped and grew taut. He looked away from them as quickly as he could, though he was forced to appear to be looking at other people. Manners dictated that.

“I’m so sorry,” they said, each of them, over and over.

“Thank you,” he croaked. Those two words like the pits of plums he sucked the fruit from and then spit, sucked and then spit. He wondered if it were possible to add up all the people he’d thanked over the course of his entire life, whether that sum would be equal to the number of people he thanked on the one day that his wife’s body was to be sealed in a wooden box, shoved into an incinerator, and burned, at an extremely high temperature, to ashes.

• • •

Kathy Tyson expected him. He’d called the night before and she said he could come by at any time. It took him several minutes before he could speak to her because Spy and Tanner were so glad to see him, jumping up like they were trained not to do, almost knocking him over when he stooped down to their level.

At last he was able to move from the porch into the house, the dogs pushing in with him. Kathy’s house was a cabin, all one room, with a loft for her bed and a tiny bathroom just beyond the kitchen nook. Her parents’ house was hidden behind a stand of trees a few hundred yards farther up the driveway. Kathy’s grandparents had lived in the cabin years before, while they built the bigger house up the hill.

“How about a cup of coffee?” she asked, and poured some into a mug without waiting for him to answer. They sat down at the table. A stick of incense burned on the shelf behind her, a tendril of sweet smoke rising above her head.

“We’re very grateful to you for taking care of the dogs.”

“I don’t mind a bit,” she said, looking around for them. They lay near his feet under the table, both of them licking their private parts. “I’ll miss them. They’re good dogs.”

“They
are
good dogs,” Bruce said. A couple of weeks ago, Teresa had asked him to give Kathy a jar of jam that she had made, as a thank-you gift, but at the last minute Bruce left it on the kitchen table, feeling it was too valuable to give away, not for its contents so much as for Teresa’s writing scrawled across the label on the lid.
Raspberry, June
.

“What happened to your face?” she asked.

He pressed his fingertips to the scab on his cheek. “I slipped.”

She nodded. The bowl that sat between them on the table held a single tangerine.

“How’s work?” he asked. She was a cow inseminator like her father. He didn’t know whether cows were inseminated year-round or what she was doing home on a Wednesday at noon.

“Good,” she nodded. “We keep busy.” She stood up and refilled both of their mugs. She wore jeans and a purple shirt and a cluster of crystals and beads and stones around her throat and wrists and fingers. Once, Teresa had chatted with her about having her as a guest on
Modern Pioneers
to discuss the art of reading tarot, Bruce remembered now, though nothing had come of it. He had known Kathy all of his life, though, sitting here in her house, he realized he hardly knew her at all.
They’d gone to school together, she four years behind him, and then when he bought his land they were neighbors, and they helped one another out in a neighborly way. He remembered that she played softball, not in high school, but now, for the Jake’s Tavern team.

“Spring’s on its way,” he said. “It’s already here, I guess.”

“Yep,” said Kathy. It had officially been spring for nearly a week. They both looked out the window at the snow, which was melting, the weather having warmed to the low forties.

“So that means you’ll start practicing soon.”

“Practicing?” she asked.

“Softball.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, blushing a little. A lock of her brown hair had come loose from her ponytail, softening her face. She pushed it behind her ear. “I don’t know if I’ll do it this year. It’s very time-consuming.”

“It keeps you busy,” he said.

“It’s not only practice and games, but I’m also the secretary.”

Bruce nodded. He wondered what the secretary of the softball team would have to do.

“You could play with us. We could certainly use some men. It seems like only the women in this town want to do anything. To join in.”

“I would want to play for Len’s Lookout,” he said sternly.

Her eyes flickered from her hands to his eyes and then back to her hands. “I can understand that,” she said, a little breathless.

“Len’s … what are they?”

“The Leopards.”

“Len’s Leopards,” he said quietly, ridiculously, without any intention of joining a softball team. Teresa had waited tables at Len’s Lookout. Everyone had loved her there. Leonard and Mardell, the customers from Midden and from the Cities. Mardell had taped Teresa’s obituary to the wall at the bar, along with a picture she’d taken of Teresa at the annual Christmas party. People had left flowers beneath it and notes and votive candles that burned until they burned out. He hadn’t been there to see it himself, but Mardell had called and told him about it, how the notes and flowers were piling on the floor and covering the pinball machine that sat nearby.

“It’s almost his name,” Kathy said.

“What?”

“Leopard. It’s almost Leonard. Only one letter is different.”

“Oh. I never thought of that.”

She reached back to her ponytail and draped it over her left shoulder. “It would be a way of honoring her perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Bruce, without committing himself. Now that they were on the subject, he hoped she would not say how sorry she was. She’d already said it at the funeral. He cleared his throat and then coughed hard, as if to free something caught in his lungs.

Her phone rang, but she did not answer it. When the machine clicked on, the person on the line hung up. “It’s my mom,” she explained. “She never leaves a message. That’s how I know to call.”

He gave her a small smile. It seemed that he should leave, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel happy, but he didn’t feel sad either. He felt a glorious sense of safety from the rest of his life in Kathy’s small house. It was not like the way he’d felt before Teresa got cancer, before he knew there was anything he needed to feel safe from. It was an entirely new sensation, and it filled him up like a drug.

“So I was thinking, I wanted to tell you, if you ever want to take a walk or talk on the phone or whatnot, I wanted you to know that I’m here. I mean, if you ever need an ear, I’m just right down the road.”

She got up to stoke the stove.

“I should go,” he said, standing. “But thank you again.”

“I enjoyed it, being of assistance.” She walked him to the door and then stood on the porch as he drove away with the dogs beside him in the cab.

He drove past his house and out to the highway, to Len’s Lookout, where he parked and shut the ignition off. He sat waiting, as if for Teresa to come out, as she’d done when he came to pick her up after her shift. It was just after one: several people were inside eating lunch, their cars and trucks were in the parking lot. He recognized almost all of them. He started the engine again and drove to Norway and back, a sixty-mile roundtrip that took him a couple of hours because he avoided the highway and took the long way, on mostly dirt roads, for no reason at all.

When he got home Joshua was there, and together they cooked up a pound of hamburger, pressing it into four patties. They covered the patties with ketchup and ate them without buns. When Teresa had died they had all abruptly, inexplicably, without having mentioned it, stopped being vegetarians. It was one of the first things that changed. As Bruce did the dishes, Lisa Boudreaux pulled up into the driveway and Joshua
went out to greet her. Fifteen minutes later they walked into the house and Lisa handed Bruce a card.

“This is from my mom,” she explained almost inaudibly, without looking at him.

“Thank you,” he said. He could not think of who her mother was. Lisa he recognized from school functions over the years, and also Teresa’s funeral, though she had not spoken to him then, which meant she had not said she was sorry, a fact he now found himself strangely resenting.

“Would you like a burger?” he asked, though they’d eaten all the beef.

“We’re going upstairs,” Joshua said curtly. Teresa had not been a strict mother, but neither had she allowed her high school–age children to sleep with their romantic partners in her house. Bruce watched them walk up the stairs and didn’t see them for the rest of the day.

On the morning of the tenth day he woke from a dream in which he was murdering Teresa by beating her to death with his fists. He lay on his side, staring at the line of small yellow circular stains that a leak in the roof had made last year where the ceiling met the wall. He heard Joshua and Lisa in the kitchen. Almost immediately Lisa began to laugh, rather loudly, he thought, given the fact that she was in someone else’s house at nine o’clock in the morning and it was obvious that he was not up. Usually by nine Bruce would have been up for three and a half hours, but he’d been sleeping late since Teresa died. He was on a vacation from work—which would actually become permanent since he would soon be dead.

“Josh,” he hollered out from his bed three times before receiving a sullen, almost vicious, “What?” in return.

“Will you feed?”

Joshua said he would and then, without another word, the front door slammed shut. Bruce listened until he heard them drive away. Once the sounds of their engines faded, the house took on the quality of quiet he’d felt the morning before—that he was not in a house, but a field. He lay there in it, his eyes not shut but merely lowered as if to shield against the sun.

It came to him then: he was not going to be brave enough to kill himself.

It came whole and solid, like a fish that swam up to him, the same way it had when he’d decided the opposite. He wailed, and then wailed and wailed, so loudly that all the animals came and jumped up to be near him on the bed—Spy and Tanner and Shadow. The dogs licked his face and throat and arms and hands, as though he were a plate, and then a new sound emerged from him, one he’d never made before or witnessed anyone else making: a kind of whimpering and peeping and coughing and hooting all at once.

When he quieted he became aware of the fact that he was encased by animals, the dogs lying against him on either side, Shadow above him, pressed up against the top of his head. He was surprised that Shadow in particular had stayed so near, in the midst of such horrible noise. He reached up and stroked her with both hands, the tears dripping silently at last, off his face and into his ears and neck and hair.