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She had the burner on, she had the teapot ready to warm. She said, “You’ve been very kind and I haven’t even thanked you. You must have some tea.”
“That would be nice,” he said.
And when they were settled at the table, the cups filled, milk and sugar offered-at the moment when there could have been panic-she had a very odd inspiration.
She said, “What is it really that you do?”
“That I do?”
“I mean-what did you do to him, last night? Or don’t you usually get asked that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Do you mind? Don’t answer me if you mind.”
“I’m just surprised. I don’t mind.”
“I’m surprised I asked.”
“Well, okay,” he said, replacing his cup in its saucer. “Basically what you have to do is drain the blood vessels and the body cavity, and there you can run into problems depending on clots and so on, so you do what you should to get around that. In most cases you can use the jugular vein, but sometimes you have to do a heart tap. And you drain out the body cavity with a thing called a trocar, it’s more or less a long thin needle on a flexible tube. But of course it’s different if there’s been an autopsy and the organs taken out. You have to get some padding in, to restore the natural outline…”
He kept an eye on her all the time he was telling her this, and proceeded cautiously. It was all right-what she felt awaken in herself was just a cool and spacious curiosity.
“Is this what you meant you wanted to know?”
“Yes,” she said steadily.
He saw that it was all right. He was relieved. Relieved and perhaps grateful. He must be used to people shying away completely from what he did, or else making jokes about it.
“And then you inject the fluid, which is a solution of formaldehyde and phenol and alcohol, and often some dye added to it for the hands and the face. Everybody thinks of the face being important and there’s a lot to be done there with the eye caps and wiring the gums. As well as massage and fussing with the eyelashes and special makeup. But people are just as apt to care about the hands and to want them soft and natural and not wrinkled at the fingertips…”
“You did all that work.”
“That’s all right. It wasn’t what you wanted. It’s just cosmetic things we do, mostly. That’s what we’re concerned with today more than any long-term preservation. Even old Lenin, you know, they had to keep going in and re-injecting him so he wouldn’t dessicate or discolor-I don’t know if they do anymore.”
Some expansion, or ease, combined with the seriousness in his voice, made her think of Lewis. She was reminded of Lewis the night before last, speaking to her weakly but with satisfaction about the single-celled creatures-no nucleus, no paired chromosomes, no what else?-that had been the only form of life on earth for nearly two-thirds of life-on-earth’s history.
“Now with the ancient Egyptians,” Ed said, “they had the idea that your soul went on a journey, and it took three thousand years to complete, and then it came back to your body and your body ought to be in reasonably good shape. So the main concern they had was preservation, which we have not got today to anything like the same extent.”
No chloroplasts and no-mitochondria.
“Three thousand years,” she said. “Then it comes back.”
“Well, according to them,” he said. He put down his empty cup and remarked that he had better be getting home.
“Thank you,” said Nina. Then, hurriedly, “Do you believe in such a thing as souls? “
He stood with his hands pressed down on her kitchen table. He sighed and shook his head and said, “Yes.”
Soon after he had gone she took the ashes out and set them on the passenger seat of the car. Then she went back into the house to get her keys and a coat. She drove about a mile out of town, to a crossroads, parked and got out and walked up a side road, carrying the box. The night was quite cold and still, the moon already high in the sky.
This road at first ran through boggy ground in which cattails grew-they were now dried out, tall and wintry-looking. There were also milkweeds, with their pods empty, shining like shells. Everything was distinct under the moon. She could smell horses. Yes-there were two of them close by, solid black shapes beyond the cattails and the farmer’s fence. They stood brushing their big bodies against each other, watching her.
She got the box open and put her hand into the cooling ashes and tossed or dropped them-with other tiny recalcitrant bits of the body-among those roadside plants. Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion-calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body.
Nettles
In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Su
I have driven around in the hills northeast of Toronto, with my husband-my second husband, not the one I had left behind that summer-and I have looked for the house, in an idly persistent way, I have tried to locate the road it was on, but I have never succeeded. It has probably been torn down. Su
I have found the golf course-I think it the right one, though the ragged verges have been cleaned up and there is a fancier clubhouse.
In the countryside where I lived as a child, wells would go dry in the summer. This happened once in about every five or six years, when there was not enough rain. These wells were holes dug in the ground. Our well was a deeper hole than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our pe
The well driller-he was sometimes called the well digger, as if nobody could be bothered to be precise about what he did and the older description was the more comfortable-was a man named Mike McCallum. He lived in the town close by our farm but he did not have a house there. He lived in the Clark Hotel-he had come there in the spring, and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. Then he would move on.
Mike McCallum was a younger man than my father, but he had a son who was a year and two months older than I was. This boy lived with his father in hotel rooms or boardinghouses, wherever his father was working, and he went to whatever school was at hand. His name was Mike McCallum too.
I know exactly how old he was because that is something children establish immediately, it is one of the essential matters on which they negotiate whether to be friends or not. He was nine and I was eight. His birthday was in April, mine in June. The summer holidays were well under way when he arrived at our house with his father.
His father drove a dark-red truck that was always muddy or dusty. Mike and I climbed into the cab when it rained. I don’t remember whether his father went into our kitchen then, for a smoke and a cup of tea, or stood under a tree, or went right on working. Rain washed down the windows of the cab and made a racket like stones on the roof. The smell was of men-their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks. Also of damp long-haired dog, because we had taken Ranger in with us. I took Ranger for granted, I was used to having him follow me around and sometimes for no good reason I would order him to stay home, go off to the barn, leave me alone. But Mike was fond of him and always addressed him kindly and by name, telling him our plans and waiting for him when he took off on one of his dog-projects, chasing a groundhog or a rabbit. Living as he did with his father, Mike could never have a dog of his own.