Cold Comfort-Unpublished Story

by Greg Mollin on September 10, 2011

Cold comfort

by Greg Mollin

 

 

Jack didn’t think it was right to have a funeral on such a nice day.  The bright afternoon sun that warmed his face felt like an intrusion on what should have been a gray and somber occasion.  The cool breeze he felt on his skin belonged in a park circulating the scent of barbeque, not tickling the petals of the flower arrangements in front of him.

His father stood next to him, arms crossed over the pint bottle of vodka in his coat pocket.  The man had sat quietly in the passenger seat sipping from it as Jack drove them up from the city to the hillside mortuary that morning.  The old man was half drunk by the time he stepped out of the car.

He lent his father the extra pair of dark glasses he kept in his glove compartment hoping to cover some of the damage done during the drive over; though it wasn’t just protecting his father from the scornful looks of the other guests-Jack didn’t think he would be able to handle it were the old man to start crying.

He squeezed his father’s thin shoulder.  “I’ll be right back pop,” he whispered.  “Don’t go wandering off, okay?”  His father nodded.

Jack had spent the late morning and early afternoon helping his aunt with the business of seating arrangements and graveside decoration.  The woman had moved quickly to task with a peculiar glee, almost as if she were setting up a surprise party.  She spent an hour sitting in various folding chairs deciding at which angle the flowers should be placed and gauging the distance between rows so as not to ruin the view for those in the back.

It had all been fine until the guest of honor arrived.  Once the mortuary delivered the casket, Jack’s aunt Rachel had fallen apart.  It had taken at least forty hugs, a handful of tissues and finally a slug from his father’s pocket bottle to quell her sobbing.  Jack felt as if he’d earned a moment alone.

A small group stood smoking cigarettes a few yards away next to a tall row of poplar trees that separated the burial lawn from the rear of the mortuary.  Jack smiled at the people and noticed a few of them whispering to each other as he passed by.  He wasn’t familiar with the faces.  They were most likely people that had worked at the hospital with his mother.

Jack was always surprised by the number of health care workers he had seen smoking over the years.  His mother, a nurse, had been a two pack a day smoker before the emphysema had forced her to quit.  The breeze picked up and the poplars swayed consecutively down the line behind the group of people as if being strummed by some giant unseen hand.

Jack kept walking up the small rise until he was alone.  He stood among the bronze grave markers watching a row of vehicles that snaked slowly along the road below.  He could hear the faint sound of music drifting up the hill.  Coupled with the array of bright colors on the cars, it seemed more circus convoy than funeral procession.

He heard crunching footsteps behind him and turned to see Marilyn making her way up the leaf strewn hill.  She wore a knee-length black dress and a necklace with a shiny pendant that winked in the sun as she walked.

Her hair was tied back in a neat blonde bundle.  It was always a wonder to him how she managed such deft configurations with only a few blind movements behind her head.

She attempted a smile and opened her arms for a hug as she reached him.  She was wearing dark glasses and Jack wondered whether she had been crying.

“Oh Jacky, I’m so sorry,” she said, squeezing him tightly.  He could smell her perfume and the vanilla skin lotion she always used.  “How are you doing?”she asked and took a step back.

“I’m okay I guess.  I’ve just been standing here thinking what a nice day it is.  It’s too nice, really.”  He knelt down and picked up a leaf that had blown at his feet.  He traced a finger over the veins that splintered the translucent skin and spoke without looking up.  “I’m glad you could make it.  I know it’s a long trip over the mountain.”

“It wasn’t too bad aside from Janie making me listen to her Kid’s Bop CD all the way here.  Not to mention her singing.  How do you tell a ten year old that her singing voice is atrocious?”  She let out a little laugh and pulled off her sunglasses to rub her eyes.  Jack noticed the telltale puffiness of recent tears.  “I saw your father down there.  He looked a little wobbly.”

“He should be.  He almost polished off a pint of Kamchatka on the way here this morning.  At least he’s reliable.”

Marilyn turned.  Jack followed her gaze down the hill.  The majority of the stragglers had shown up and a fairly large group were milling around the grave site.

“What about you?” she asked.  “I’ve been worried.”

“I’m good.  I think about it quite a bit, but I’m still sober.  I just wish that—“

Marilyn turned and looked down the hill again.  She was twisting the silver pendant on the thin chain it hung from.

“It looks like we should get back down there, Jack.  I doubt they’ll start without you but I’m sure your dad’s wondering where you are.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he is,” he said.   Jack tossed the leaf he was holding and watched as the breeze caught it and sent it tumbling and gliding low along the grass down toward the road.

The weather and seeing Marilyn brought back old memories.  The summer vacations they’d spent on Lake Shasta with his parents in a rented houseboat, fishing in the cool mornings with his father and dining together on the deck as the evening sky turned fiery shades of purple.

His mother loved the lake.  She would spend hours lounging in a recliner, half-reading some paperback novel in the shade of her big straw hat.  She loved to sit there in the afternoons watching for the different birds that roosted in the trees along the shoreline, calling them out by name or yelling to his father to go and get the Audubon book for her.  That was the woman he wanted to remember-the one smiling brightly underneath her silly hat- not the one with empty eyes that struggled for breath.

Jack and Marilyn walked down the hill together and as they neared the gravesite a young man in a priest’s collar approached them with a nervous grin on his face and an outstretched hand.

“You must be Mr. and Mrs. Abershaw,” the man said.   “Please accept my condolences.  I’m Father Lawrence, your Aunt Rachel asked me to say a few words about your mother.”  Jack shook the man’s hand.

“Jack Abershaw, Father.  This is my ex-wife Marilyn.”  The man’s face flushed and Jack felt a pinch on the back of his arm as Marilyn extended her hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Father Lawrence,” she said.

“I think we’re about ready to begin,” he said, motioning for them to follow.

He escorted them back to the gathering and Jack nodded at the people he recognized on the way to his seat.  Jack hadn’t seen many of the faces recently.  His mother had had quite a few friends but not many that made it to the hospital during her final stay there.

He wondered why people would go out of their way to watch someone tucked into the ground, but not take the time to visit a living person who might appreciate the gesture.  He supposed it was the bitter reminder of mortality.  Better to see the end result and bring closure without the unwanted reality of communication with another dying human.

As Father Lawrence began a brief and slightly uninformed synopsis of his mother’s seventy-four years, Jack felt his father begin to lean heavily on his right shoulder.  He looked at the man’s face but the black glasses obscured any clue as to his consciousness.  He smelled the abrasive, metallic scent of the cheap vodka on his father’s breath.  Jack put his arm around his father, attempting to straighten him up in the chair.  His father sat up suddenly and pulled the bottle from his jacket.  He was fumbling with the cap and Jack tried to cover it with his own hand to hide the bottle.

“Leave me alone,” the man snarled.  Father Lawrence stopped speaking and looked up from his notes.   Jack felt the eyes of the group on him and his father.

“Why can’t a man have a drink at his own wife’s funeral, huh?” he said, pulling away from Jack’s grip and successfully opening the pint bottle.  He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it back in dramatic fashion, almost toppling over as he did so.  Jack braced the old man and looked up at Father Lawrence.  The priest interpreted the mute gesture and continued.  The murmur in the small crowd subsided as he stuttered back into the eulogy.

The priest finished and Jack helped his father to stand during the reading of The Lord’s Prayer.  The old man swayed slightly and seemed to be trying to pull away, but when Father Lawrence asked if anyone else would like to say anything about the departed, he did not fight as Jack held him firmly in place.

Jack’s Aunt Rachel went to the front of the group and thanked everyone for coming.  She was six years younger than Jack’s mother but she looked very much like Jack remembered his mother looking before the cancer.

Rachel seemed uncomfortable, but Jack thought it was more likely from her navy blue dress being a little too tight than embarrassment from his father’s outburst.  The women in his mother’s family were all a bit on the heavy side- round, red-headed cherub-women with wide hips and wider smiles. Rachel was no different.  Jack remembered how his mother would joke about her weight, calling herself “pleasantly plump”.

The cancer had changed all that.  By the time she was diagnosed as terminal, Jean Abershaw had lost all of her plumpness.  Her adorable apple cheeks were sunken and hollow.  The once large hips only sharp bones jutting from underneath a pale blue hospital gown.

Jack felt tears coming, and when his Aunt winked at him as she stood in front of the casket that held the remains of her sister, he had to grit his teeth and force his gaze to the ground in order to avoid breaking down and sobbing.

Jack realized he was still gripping his father’s hand and helped the man back to his seat before the guests filed by one after the other with condolences and farewells. He smiled and thanked them all.  He was relieved that his father didn’t begin snoring loudly until everyone had gone and it was only the two of them left at the graveside.

The sun was descending in the sky to the west casting shadows across the clearing and the empty chairs around him.  Jack tried not to look at the box that sat suspended above the dirt hole in front of him.

His father moved and Jack heard his bottle hit the ground below his chair.  He reached down and picked it up, tucking it into his own pocket and reminding himself to throw it away before beginning the drive back to the hotel.

He looked over at his father snoring next to him and then at the shiny wooden casket holding the body of his mother.  He missed her more than he had realized.

“It should have been you, you know that?” Jack said to his snoring father.  “You should be the one in the box.”  His father kept snoring, oblivious to Jack’s words.  Jack thought of all the times he’d watched as his father hurt his mother.  All the nights he lay awake listening to the man berate his wife in a drunken rage. All the bruises and lies that accompanied him to school during his childhood.  Jack felt anger rising in him.

His father was slumped over and Jack saw that his chair was beginning to tip.  It crossed his mind to grab the old man but his fury wouldn’t allow it.   Jack just watched as his father’s thin body passed the toppling point and fell over.

He hit the ground hard.  The old man let out a loud groan and woke in a twisted pile next to his chair.

“What happened, Jacky?” he asked in a childlike voice.   His arm was bent behind him.  His face was a mask of panicked confusion.   A translucent line of saliva escaped from the corner of his mouth.

Jack said, “Oh my god, are you okay, pop?”  He tried to stand.  The shock of his senseless inaction kept him frozen.  His father was mumbling to himself and cradling his right arm.  It bent out at a strange angle.  “Let me help you up, okay?”

“I think my arm is broken!” the man yelled.  “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Jack said.   He pulled the man back to his seat.  “You just fell over.  I wasn’t paying attention.  I’m sorry.”

“If your mother was here she wouldn’t have let this happen,” the man said.  He leaned over and started crying.  “She never let me hurt myself.  She always took care of me.”

Jack saw his mother standing in front of the stove with her arm in a sling, his mother holding an ice pack to a bruised eye.  The anger simmered.

“We’d better get you to a doctor,” Jack said, not wanting to look at the man weeping in front of him.  Jack looked around for someone to help him.  He could see Marilyn and his aunt talking to the priest off in the distance.

“Just leave me,” his father said through his tears.  “I’m all alone anyway.”  He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.  Jack saw his good hand searching his jacket pockets.  “Where’d my bottle go?” he asked, opening his eyes and looking hopefully up at Jack.   His thin gray hair shifted in the breeze, the deep lines on his face were wet with his tears.    Jack looked down at his father and felt guilt and remorse, but it was pity that overpowered him.  He stuck his hand into his pocket and felt the bottle there.

“You finished it, dad,” he said.  “Do you think you can walk?”  His father wiped at his face with the good hand.   He seemed to be able to move the injured arm slightly.

“I didn’t break my legs, did I?” he said, grabbing onto Jack and pulling himself to a standing position.

They walked together through the tall grass under the canopy of trees.  His father was talking under his breath.

“What’s that pop?”

“Your mother would have loved this view,” he said, looking up at the palette of color in the darkening sky.

The sun had dropped below the green hills and the breeze that moved the branches carried a chill.  Jack could see his father shivering.  He put his arm around the old man and pulled him close to his body.

There was another funeral group ahead of them, gathered in a small circle close to the road.  In the fiery stillness of the coming evening Jack could hear a woman crying.

 

 

 

 

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