“When you’re getting old, either your body goes first or your mind goes first.” Her mother said it to her while they walked from either the wake or funeral, she doesn’t remember the difference. She was little, wearing her darkest dress (navy).
Earlier that day, on their way in the car, her eyes had still been puffy from crying. “We’re supposed to wear black” she cried. “You’re a kid Chrissy, no one’s going to care”, her mom said, through puffs of a cigarette. “It’s dark enough”, she said after another puff. It felt mean but it was right.
At the train station now, decades later, she thinks of it again; how the cigarette smoke curled into her mother’s hair. How it was her mother’s father’s body, but her mother’s mother’s mind that went. And how she could’ve been a little nicer as a kid, or just a little quieter. She’s thinking of this when someone taps her shoulder, like they do in movies, a hand coming in from out of frame, the audience finding out who it is only once the camera moves, only as the character moves to see, so we all find out at the same time.
Franklin, her brother. He’d come into town a day earlier, from the other direction than her. The other train line I mean, the one that comes from the city. He asked how she was, how the farm was. She’d said she lived on land, but she wasn’t a farmer. She’d said it a hundred times, but he loved his sister the farmer.
They were twins but you wouldn’t have known that by looking at them. From a distance, you’d think they were strangers just meeting, him excited to see her, her maybe with other things she could be doing. If you spent some time with them though you’d pick up on it. The laughs were the same, usually a beat before anyone in the room got the joke; their hands were the same and the way they rolled their eyes.
They were in the car now, driving through the small town in which they’d both grown up. They drove past the Chinese place that was never open at the right time and the Aldis and the coffee shop that always burnt the coffee. She’d missed a question.
“What’d you say?” she asked, turning from the window to him.
“I asked if the funeral is outside or inside.”
“Aren’t they all inside?” she asked.
“I feel like in the summer it’s half and half. Remember Uncle Ted’s?” They’d been to more of these than most people their age.
“I was just thinking of Uncle Ted’s. Why’d we call him Uncle Ted if she was Mom’s uncle?”
“Why’d we do anything the way we did it? None of that parenting made sense, looking back on it.” He said it laughing a little.
“I’m sure it’s inside. It’s too hot to have a casket outside in this heat.”
“I think that’s a wake. When you see the body, I mean”, he said.
“She would hate it being outside.” She said, watching out the window again. They passed the soccer fields and made a right onto their street.
“Uncivilized!” Franklin whispers in his mom’s voice, making Christina chuckle.
~ ~ ~
When her brother got the call, he was in the city. He was in the little courtyard in the middle of his apartment complex, trying to get some fresh air. On three sides of him were walls five-stories-high, each floor with rows of windows, most windows with AC units humming and dripping, fighting to keep the summer from inside the building. Directly in front of him was a tree lined street. Ash trees, though Franklin didn’t know that. It was an off-street that was seldom used for anything but parking. Five kids played some special version of soccer they had concocted with three goals and two balls and lots of shouting. The shouts echoed around the other buildings and into the courtyard where Franklin stood. The shouts and hums and drips mixed together with the other noises that a city makes you deaf to. A phone ringer cut through it.
He took the whole call out there, it was short. All he did was “hmm” and “okay” and then asked a few logistical questions. The answers you can’t hear from where you’re watching but if you wait until his partner Eva comes home, he’ll recount the call and she’ll ask him some questions while they walk to the park after dinner (their summer night routine).
“Who found her?” Eva asked.
“It sounds like the caregiver did, but I didn’t ask.”
“Ben, right? The nurse?”
“Ben yes, that’s his name, I can never remember it. From the service. He came in the morning to make sure she was ready for an appointment or something and he found her in bed.”
“In bed, that’s great. I mean, peaceful, at least.” She said it and waited a long time to hear what he was thinking.
They were off their street, walking down the sidewalk to the park just north of them a few blocks. A few other people ran or biked by. The birds were in their commute: finches and sparrows still poking around, gulls flying to their nests; there was a heron both of them missed flying directly overhead, back to the pond by the shore. The bats had just started to come out, banking above their heads silently, on mute.
They talked about if Eva would come to the funeral, and he said she didn’t need to. She wanted to but she also knew how Franklin felt about the pressure, and how much his mom had wanted them to get married and have kids. “She doesn’t have forever” his mom would say. Franklin would bat it off. Neither of them had wanted kids. Eva was worried about bringing anyone else into the world, trending how it was. He would agree out loud and add, in his own head, that he thought he’d be awful as a parent, that he didn’t know how he’d do it.
They sat there in the park that was no bigger than the lot their apartment complex used up. If you look now, you can just see the back of them, sitting on a park bench, looking at a small field with an old silver maple, a willow, and a few smaller oaks. You aren’t close enough to hear them talking but they just stopped anyway. She’s angled towards him a bit; her arm is around his shoulders. He’s faced directly ahead, and he points to the fireflies that are just starting to signal with their slow blinks, right above grass height. They stay on the bench longer than they normally do.
Around the same time that Franklin got the call, Christina did too.
It was midday, too hot to do anything productive. She sat on this wooden chair, sweating a bit, in a room that had plastic draped over some of the furniture. The chair was near this big open window with a curtain that wasn’t the right weight and it alternated getting blown first inside the room, then, the breeze moving through the open house, pushed out the screenless window. It all looked out of a Terrence Malik movie, if you’ve seen those. Outside the window you can see acres of prairie, but before you can focus on it, you hear her phone, two rooms away and she hears (and ignores) the first set of rings. When it stopped ringing, she waited listening to the quiet house creak in the breeze. A beat or two later it started ringing again and she knew right away what they were going to say before she got to the room to answer it, but she answered it anyway. Same as before, you can’t really hear the person on the phone or what they’re saying exactly, though since we’re inside you can hear the buzz and mumble of someone talking on the other line. In the same voice and with the same pitch as her brother had, Christina adds her “hmms” and “yeahs” and “okays”. She asks a few questions and eventually clicks the phone off. She sets it on the table and goes back to the room with the wooden chair.
You can see more of the room now, as she walks back in. It looked like a white room before, but you can see now it’s in the process of being painted (pink). Still two walls to go. There’s a small dresser under plastic and a small, uncovered writing desk, where the chair sits. On the desk is a large book with gridded paper, keeping track of ins and outs, timing, yields; the various things a big farm would need to know, though this one is pared back, as she really only grows what she herself needs, too busy for the farmer’s market circuit these days. On a slip of paper under the book is the list she was making when we first found her, though she’s forgotten about it now. It was a list of the things she needed from the town over. Her and Paul were supposed to go later that day, once it got less hot, once they knew what was open and what they both needed. Paul lived in a house down the road. She’d been seeing him a few years now, on and off, and she thought now about how to tell him about the call, or when she should.
You see her profile now, her sitting at the desk while she looked down at the book, not really reading any of it. She isn’t even holding the pen; her hands are in her lap. You can look past her at the window with the curtain that can’t decide where it wants to be. As it switches from inside to outside, it passes the back of her chair. You move with the breeze and follow the curtain outside. Closest to the house is a small shed in short grass with a few bushes. Rabbits use the brush to hide from the larger birds sometimes, though it’s too hot now to be out, hungry or not. There’s a fox family that lives under the shed that she lets be. The cricket and cicada noise comes in waves, as loud as thunder when it crests. Beyond the shed and the grasses, it turns into real prairie, acres of dry grasses, waist high, with clover and milkweed and wildflowers. Bees getting work done in the blazing sun.
There are three rows of chairs. You’re outside now, looking at the rows from behind and a bit above, like from a branch. The front row is full, the second has a few open chairs, and no one sits in the last row. There’s a big tent set up, white plastic flapping, but because of the angle of the sun and where everything was when they set it up earlier this morning, only the back two rows are in the shade, the front row in the heat, facing a small platform that the priest stands on now. A long grey metal box, between the chairs and the priest, is already being lowered by small wenches, turned in sync by a few workers who have done this three times today already.
“Wasted shade”, Christina would think in a minute, when she turns around from her front row chair. She sees the shaded back row through the two people sitting behind her who she doesn’t make eye contact with. She hasn’t seen them in more than five years. A cousin she used to have a nickname for, and an Uncle that gave her her first beer when she was younger, moping around at a family picnic, probably too young to drink but too old (“cool”) to play games with the other cousins.
Next to Christina was Franklin. He wore a cheap black suit; he had a nicer wool suit at home, but he had looked at the weather and thought this one would breathe better, even if it didn’t sit on his shoulders right. They sat near the middle in the front row. Neither cried out loud, though Christina, to the surprise of a few in the second row, would wipe her nose a few times, and her eyes under her glasses. She would say she was dabbing sweat if she needed to, but no one said anything. She’d have a sunburn on her shoulders tomorrow, a white strap on each shoulder where her dress covered.
When the lowering was finished, and the grey box was in its final position, the priest would read the final prayer. There wouldn’t be any speeches from the family or any friends. Everyone who wanted to talk had the opportunity earlier. Neither Franklin nor Christina did, and no one made any comment about that. The grey box would stay in the ground under a tombstone that already had a name carved into it. If you did the math, that first name had only lived to 35. The stone left room for another name, that would get carved in later that week. The math for the new set of dates would get you to 85, which was a good long life, so says the second row to the first row.
They’re on their way out now. From the cemetery to the parking lot. She walks next to her twin brother, the same height, almost the same shoulders though his suit makes his look wider. The clouds give them a little break from the sun. A breeze comes at their back. These little birds, swifts they’re called, come from thin air it seems. They spiral overhead, banking and diving, catching insects that no one else can see. Their tails are forked, and wings end in a sharp point. They look like little weapons.
Franklin looks from the sky to his sister. His sister still looks at the ground.
“I can’t believe they did it outside in this.” Franklin says.
“She would’ve hated it.” She jokes.
“Primitive!” Franklin, mimicking his mom’s voice, quietly.
They’re almost to the cars when Franklin takes his suit jacket off. He asks if she wants to walk around for a bit, now that it’s cooler. She looks up at the sky, past the dog-fighting Swifts, and says sure. They wandered the grounds, each quietly remembering all the time they’d spent outside when they were younger, while the adults talked inside.
At one point Franklin asks about her dress. Christina says that she’s pretty sure it’s black. He says that it’s definitely navy. She says she doesn’t think anyone noticed. ■