After a week I no longer considered the undertaking in terms of my father and me, or even as a writer going through another writer’s papers. My thinking shifted to a more formal role, that of an archivist faced with an enormous holding of raw material. I organized and collated and distributed. I stopped looking at pictures or reading, and simply made decisions in my head—this goes here, that goes over there, here’s a new one for a fresh pile. I could have been sorting marbles or Tupperware.
I packed everything in liquor boxes and taped them shut. The stacked cartons made a double-rowed wall that blocked four windows in the hall outside his office. A few weeks later I arranged for a moving company to transport my father’s papers to Mississippi. The movers charged by weight. Their estimate of Dad’s archive was eighteen hundred pounds. My inheritance.
Chapter Ten
AN INCREASING concern was my father’s ashes. They still sat on the bookshelf where we’d put them after the memorial. The family hadn’t settled on a plan, then we procrastinated as other priorities arose. One morning I awoke to thunder, followed by the pounding of rain against the windows. I was momentarily disoriented. I thought I was a kid and glanced about for my brother, undergoing a surge of anxiety that we were late for school. The remnants of a bad dream fled in fragmentary images, followed by the awareness of reality. I was in my childhood room, my father was dead, and I had a twelve-hour workday ahead of me.
The house was silent, my wife still asleep, my mother in the living room. I took coffee outside, where the shadows in the tree line glistened black. Every surface was a prism displaying the softened green of June. It was rainbow weather, but they were hard to spot among the hills. The air was a pane of lead—as my young son once said, not a sky in the cloud.
I finished my coffee and entered the house. Mom came into the kitchen, moving in a determined way, with an expression I recognized as secret satisfaction. I enjoyed seeing her this way. It was familiar, the way she’d always been: purposeful and private. The past few weeks had been hard, and she’d behaved with emotional distance, an armor to grief. She looked at me and spoke quietly. “I took care of your father’s ashes.”
Mom had decided the backyard was appropriate but worried the heavy ash might kill the grass. Equally bothersome was the prospect of wind blowing them onto the neighbor’s land or into the gravel driveway, where she might inadvertently roll over them in the car. Mom had been waiting for a morning such as this. The chill air had been very still when she woke up. She could feel weather coming. Her plan was to scatter the remains just before the rain dampened the ashes and held them in place.
Earlier she’d sat on an outdoor swing beneath a canopy, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, alert to the barometric shifts in the atmosphere. At the first slight sprinkling of rain, she emptied the plastic box. It took longer than she’d expected, and the ashes didn’t really scatter. Just as she finished, there was a bellow of thunder, and hard rain fell. She hurried back inside, her timing impeccable.
I nodded and refilled my coffee, wondering if the clap of thunder had been the same one that woke me. Was it coincidence or metaphysics? Or maybe all metaphysics is nothing but coincidence to which we assign meaning after the fact. It didn’t matter. I asked her where the ashes were.
“Want to see?”
I nodded and followed her outside and across the narrow strip of land, scraped flat a hundred years before to form a yard I’d mowed as a child. Erosion had brought the steep slope six feet closer to the house. The hill itself was going over the hill. Mom led me to the edge of the yard. A few feet past the grass, she pointed to several clumps of ash, solidified by the rain into dark gray mounds.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not going to blow around the yard.”
“No, it won’t.”
“How’d you pick this spot?”
“It’s where your father always peed.”
We stood there gazing at the rain-pocked hummocks of ash. I put my arm around my mother, unsure what to do or say. My siblings weren’t coming back to the house. Nobody else would ever know where the ashes were. In time they’d make their way down the hill to the rain gully, merge with Triplett Creek, flow into the Licking River, drain to the Ohio River, join the Mississippi River, and progress south to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. It was a long trip. Part of him would make it.