The Covenant (7 page)

Neither of them had aged in my memory; one remained dreadfully old, the other strangely youthful, and I supposed they would always be that way now.

*   *   *

Eventually the house poured our visitors out in drips and drabbles and left my father and me alone, truly alone. We sat at the dining room table. There was a bottle between us now, and a bucket of ice, and a world of silence. He wouldn't look at me, but his lip got stiffer with every drink.

Finally, he pulled off his black armband and tossed it on the table. He stood up and walked to the den with the graceful stagger of a gentlemanly drunk, one hand ready to catch himself against the nearest wall and prevent his drink from spilling.

“This is where I found her,” he said, pointing to a place on the rug by the television. “She got up sometime during the night. I thought she had gone to use the bathroom. When she didn't return, I looked for her.”

He stood over the spot, absently caressing it with his socked foot. “I don't know why she came downstairs. Maybe she wasn't feeling well and didn't want to bother me. When I found her, she was still breathing, but the light had gone from her eyes. She didn't see me, didn't hear me. It was already too late.”

He brushed against the door and caught himself on the doorknob. “But that's not what's bothering you,” he said.

“It doesn't feel like she's gone,” I said.

He staggered back to the table and slid into his chair. “I know what you mean.”

Did he?
I had been seeing her ever since we got home from the cemetery. She'd be in the kitchen or the den or somewhere, but when I looked, it was another woman or the edge of the china cabinet or the shadow of a drape. I wasn't seeing her ghost so much as my own memories of her. It was like we'd gone to somebody else's funeral. She should have been there beside us, playing the gracious hostess, a role she had mastered ages ago. Her absence was an aching hollow.

“Everything just feels unfinished, somehow,” I said.

“What if we finish this bottle?” He held it up to the light. It was about half full. “Would it be finished then?”

“Maybe.”

He made us fresh toddies and we clinked glasses. My old man could mix a damn good cocktail, but I had a difficult time enjoying it. I heard her walking around upstairs. Or maybe it was my grandfather. Dad didn't seem to notice. We had never talked about my special friends. Considering all that had happened over the last few days, and how their sudden reappearance always seemed to presage my life falling apart, I figured it was about time I told him.

“What time did you say Mom passed?”

“I didn't say. I'm not sure what time it was. After midnight, I think. I left the hospital around five in the morning.”

“I was in jail.” He looked a little surprised as he sipped his drink. “There were two other women in my cell. Sometime during the night, an elderly woman came to the door and asked for me. My cellmates said she told them not to wake me.”

He glanced at me over the rim of the glass, his eyebrows wrinkling his forehead. “You think it was your mother?”

“The jail doesn't allow visitors at night.”

I couldn't read his eyes. He blinked once, then drained his glass. He set it down with a shrug. “Maybe it was her.”

It was my turn to look a little surprised.

He smiled. “Jacqueline, it's just like you to think you're the only person in the world who ever saw a ghost.”

“Have you seen Mom?”

I think I hoped he had, but he shook his head no. “Now, your grandfather is a different matter. He's still hanging around.”

“You know about him?”

He chuckled at my surprise, then waved his hand vaguely at the ceiling. “You can still smell him sometimes. He had a distinctive smell, something you never forget.”

“Like coffee and cigarettes,” I said.

“And hair tonic and wool and body odor. Your grandfather only bathed on Saturdays.”

“Sean and I tried to tell you.” A light shone suddenly in the window. A car had pulled into the driveway. Dad leaned back in his chair and parted the curtain to see who it was. “But you didn't believe us.”

“You were just kids, scared to death. What was I supposed to say?
Yes, your grandfather's ghost lives in the attic, now go back to bed
?”

He walked to the door, opened it, stepped outside and closed it behind him. I finished my drink and left the glass on the table while I fetched a slice of chess pie from the fridge. When I returned, Dad was still outside. I peeped through the curtains and saw him talking to the redhead from the funeral. I sat down and ate the slice of pie, then made another drink. While I was pouring, the car backed out of the driveway. Dad waited until it was gone before he returned.

He didn't tell me about his visitor and I didn't ask. He just said, “Did you make your old man one of those?” So I made him a toddy and got another slice of pie from the fridge and watched him eat it.

“So who picked out Mom's dress?” They had buried her in a hideous black fringed thing with tiny white flowers, sequins, and pearl snap buttons, something she'd have never worn while she was alive.

“Deedee Mills took care of everything for me.”

“I wish they had done a better job with her face.” I don't know why I was bringing this up. I knew I sounded like some grumpy old maiden aunt complaining about the fecklessness of the mortician. I don't know why I wanted my mother to look like the woman I knew instead of some wax effigy poured by someone working from a bad photograph.

I liked the way they did things back in my grandfather's day. People used to keep their dead at home until it was time to bury them, instead of sending them off to be powdered and puffed up with facial prosthetics by medical school dropouts. Because when you lived with the dead taking up the dining room table or the parlor or the bed, with the smell of them getting a little riper every hour, you got used to the idea they were dead and after a few days of having them around, you were finally ready to put them in the ground. Glad to put them in the ground, glad to be rid of them so you could move on. Because they were only meat, and rotting meat at that, and the funeral was a release from grief, a thing to be welcomed, realized, and got through and put behind you, rather than dreaded and avoided. Because the funeral is just the beginning of grief, and because we tidied it up and perfumed and preserved it, people could go on pretending their loved ones weren't dead for a couple more days, until the day we laid her in the ground and pushed the dirt in the hole, and stood a rock up over her and carved into it her name, a couple of ultimately meaningless dates, and maybe a lie or two, until even the names and dates and lies were erased, until even the meaning of the rock itself was forgotten and it was pulled up and used as a doorstop and the field was plowed over and planted, until some day someone decided to put a highway through and they unearthed her bones with a backhoe and called in some college professor to bend over her with his patient brush and his dentist tools and pronounce,
Here lies a woman
.

So the grief started out stunted and deformed and pretended and only realized at the end, when they filled in the hole. That's why you see those little crosses and wreaths all up and down the highway—people can't let go of the dead because we create the illusion of burying them alive, or if not alive, then not entirely dead either. You end up suffering your grief alone with nothing but the memory of that lifelike body lying in the cold airless dark all alone, listening to the descending convocation of politic worms.

Maybe that's why I hated my father so much at that moment. He was moving on, eating his pie and drinking his bourbon and already thinking about tomorrow's redhead. Maybe he could do that because he had a chance to say goodbye to her, while I had avoided her telephone calls and slept through her last attempt to reach out to me. Who was I to judge the dryness of his wrinkled face? Where were my own tears?

“Didn't she know I was staying the night?” I asked Dad.

“Who?”

“That redhead from the funeral.”

The bastard didn't answer. He got up and put his plate on the kitchen counter and poured his ice out in the sink. I followed him, my insides buzzing like a horsefly, itching to shoot my heart out of a cannon against the white hump of his infidelity.

“I guess there'll be no end to the pussy now,” I said, spat.

He set his glass in the sink. I think I grieved him more than the passing of his wife of fifty years. I always was his favorite. At least I got to be somebody's favorite. “Do you think your mother was stupid, Jackie?” He stared out the kitchen window into the dark.

“No.”

“Do you think she could be married to me all these years and not know?”

“Do you think she enjoyed living a lie, Daddy?”

“Your mother enjoyed being married to me. She accepted what came with that, the good and the bad. I can't help the way I am. I loved your mother, but I loved other women, too. Some of them very dearly. It wasn't just the sex, but that's all you could ever see. Ever since you were a little girl, you've never been able to love more than one thing or one person or one idea at a time. You're either mad in love, or you're crazy with hate. You're old enough to know by now that people are nothing if not a rat's nest of contradictions. Even the people we love.”

“Yeah, I keep forgetting how complicated you are,” I stabbed from hell's own heart. “How many sacrifices you made to keep your marriage together. But that's all over now. You're free to chase all the tail you want.”

He passed without looking at me, shuffled wearily down the hall and climbed to the top of the stairs. He stopped with his hand gripping the wooden rail. He looked old. He had aged a hundred years before my eyes, this frail, tottering old drunk. “I'm going to bed.”

I stayed downstairs, because I had to finish something, even if it was only a bottle of whiskey.

 

10

I
WOKE ON THE PORCH SWING ABOUT
eleven in the morning
,
my throat as dry as an old eraser, the singing of the birds in the trees like fingernails clawing the blackboard of my skull. Dad sat in a glider rocker reading the morning paper, a tray at his elbow with two glasses and a sweaty pitcher of orange juice. I grabbed an empty glass and poured it to the brim, downed about half of it before I started tasting the vodka. I surfaced long enough for a breath of air, then finished it off and wiped the crust from my lips with the back of my hand.

“Have another,” Dad said, so I did.

We sat on the porch and drank a pitcher of brunch while the unseasonably warm morning turned into an unseasonably hot day. He read his paper and I read my fortune in the bumps on my tongue. We said nothing about what we said to each other the night before—actually, what I said and now regretted. He regretted nothing, except perhaps being my father. For the next few days we pretended it never happened, drank like a pair of old sailors on shore leave, sat up nights watching basketball on television. Pretending was how we got on with our lives without making them any better. I pretended to be trying to pull my life together and make something of myself, and he pretended to believe me. He wore a black armband any time he left the house or had visitors and I pretended to grieve with him, while he took his phone calls in the bedroom with the door closed and I pretended not to notice or care. If I were the suspicious kind, I might have suspected him of tumbling Mom down the stairs. But this was real life, not a movie.

In the end he paid me to go home so he could stop pretending. He was anxious to get on with his widower lifestyle. I drove back to Memphis that afternoon and cashed his check.

His money kept me from sleeping in my car a few more weeks. In the old days, which is to say about a year ago, I would have blown it on a bank of heroin taller than my head. They say it gets easier with time. They lie. It wasn't getting any easier and I was still an addict. I hadn't used in more than a year, yet I still wanted it every day, still thought about it all the time. I used to tell myself I wasn't an addict, that I could quit anytime I wanted. If you can lie to yourself, you can lie to anybody.

Speaking of liars, the preacher had told me it would be three weeks before I could start photographing his plantation house, which was about how long I calculated my dad's money would last. Three weeks stretched into six and I stretched that money until the threads were showing, adding to it whenever I could, which wasn't often. Times were hard. April and May were hot and dry, which made for fewer car accidents and fewer opportunities to make the pie higher.

I called the preacher occasionally and left messages. He called me back less often and dropped excuses. For some reason, he never asked me why I skipped out that night at Jenny's and I was happy enough not to offer an explanation. The house he had planned to salvage in New Orleans was on some list of historic homes. Never mind that it had flooded up to the Plimsoll mark during Hurricane Katrina and sat abandoned ever since, crack house and flophouse for every derelict and wretch in the area. He said it was easier to get a visa to North Korea than permits to dismantle and salvage whatever history the house had left in it. Then there were difficulties arranging the trucking, difficulties getting construction equipment. I was starting to think I'd never see a dime from his collection plate.

Preston called one Tuesday in May and sent me out to Pleasant Acres Hospice to photograph a women who had caught a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with her face after it fell off a truck and smashed through her windshield. They said it was a miracle she hadn't died. People have funny ideas about miracles. Now she was a twenty-seven-year-old potted plant who spent her days staring at whatever potted plant they planted her beside. God only knew if she had a thought in her head at all, or if she was screaming inside all day long. Her family had already collected on the accident. Now they were going after the nursing home for neglect. I hated working nursing homes, but I needed the money.