My Private Wobegon

stories from home

There were just two of them, a man and a woman, in the little country cemetery on the day before Memorial Day, yet the distance between them was as vast as the distance between the living and the dead.

They had once been great lovers, and for a time they were married, so perhaps they had even been intimate—but that would have been a long time ago, maybe ten or twelve years ago, thought the man, whose knowledge of the past was imprecise.

His name was Vic, and this time, too, he was late to pay his respects. From the meadow where he had parked his truck he saw that Jennie was already at the grave site, her head bowed, hands folded in front—from a distance she looked like a gray statuette, a fixture among the white crosses and speckled headstones and bright wreaths, an incongruous memory in a sleepy landscape of dreams. An east wind, the kind that brings rain, lifted her dress then forced it tight against her thighs and pushed it into the crease between her legs. Then her hand rose to brush the hair from her cheek.

Vic rubbed his hands on his jeans. It was in his hands that he felt the loss. They were stained from his handyman's work and they still smelled of fish. He clenched a fist and snapped a punch into the palm of its mate, then did it again so he could feel the sting. He was afraid his hands would betray him.

He turned away and tried to spit into the rolls of sod in the back of his pickup, but his mouth was too dry. He checked again the tools he'd need for repairing the grave—the shovel and trowel and clippers—and the kerosene for cleaning the small headstone he'd sculpted himself years ago. It was from a piece of sandstone he'd found near Turk's Bluff, and on it he had inscribed "Little Fish" and the date that marked both the birth and death of the infant. The stone had left a reddish soot on his clothes and on his hands. It had stayed with him for a long time.

But today was Jennie's idea. She had found him last night at the Greener Pasture with a telephone call that had put an end to Lyle Greer's fabulous tales of an enormous, uncatchable flathead in the depths of Lake Hutanga. Vic was greeted by a business voice, a voice without attachments, a voice that seemed cool and dry and brought sandstone to mind. His fingers curled into his palms as he listened to Jennie explain that she had stopped over on her way to the coast for a meeting, to pay her respects at the cemetery, and found the grave site so ill-maintained that it was embarrassing. The grass, what little there was over the grave, was all brown and dry and so sparse that sandburrs had grown up. Something had to be done, something just had to be done, and when she demanded to know if he had even been there in all these years, Vic reached for the tape measure on his belt, pulled the tiny hook at the end of the tape and claimed he'd driven by a few times and checked it from the road. Weakened, he'd agreed to meet her the next day to repair the grave, to make it look respectable for Memorial Day.

It was kind of like a business deal, Vic thought, as he returned to the bar. The rest of the evening he leaned on the counter, absently playing with the tape measure he'd unclipped from his belt. He would uncoil it a foot or two, brood over the bizarre incongruity of intimacy and distance, then let it rattle back into its shell again. The boys in the bar, in a ritual of mock sympathy, kept buying him bottle after bottle of Coors until that incongruity dissolved into a blue-green sea of bliss.

But this morning at the M & P Café, Jody Hacker had leaned over as Vic was swallowing the last bit of his hashbrowns and wanted to know what in Sam Hill brought his ex-wife back into town, anyhow.

"Memorial Day," Vic heard himself answer, "I guess." He fingered the tape measure on his belt and was dimly aware of some promise that had been made.

Now, at the cemetery, the sod bounced against his legs as he carried it toward the grave site. Tiny balls of the moist, dark underside broke off and rolled down his pants legs and into his boots. He was glad to hold something in his hands, ballast, as he approached the grave, as he approached Jennie.

She was hunched over, kneeling, in a posture Vic mistook for prayer. Her dark hair was like a cocoon around her face, and as he stacked the sod beside the grave he realized it wasn't prayer but writing that had brought her to her knees. On her lap was a notebook and in her hand a pen stopped then lurched across the page. He returned to the truck for the tools and caught the river scent from his hands of the carp he'd caught the day before, or perhaps it was the day before that. He'd washed his hands many times since then, but the scent lingered. In the meadow a cottontail hopped away, stopped, watched him warily, then nibbled at the tender new grass as Vic carried everything he thought that he would need to the grave.

"I pulled out the burrs while I was waiting," Jennie said, as Vic began working. She was still bowed over the notebook, but now she was biting on the end of the pen. Above her head a bee courted her hair.

An ant crawled over Vic's boot. He shook it off and started breaking the ground. He tried to be careful, gentle with the shovel, as if brushing dried skin from a wound. He outlined a rectangle, like a window frame, over the grave then skimmed off the surface to make a bed for the new sod. He roughed up the bottom to encourage a deep rooting.

"I have to get all this down," Jennie said, the pen pausing then bursting across a line. "My counselor wanted me to record everything. She said it would be cathartic and facilitate closure."

The pen surged forward, stopped, then seemed to claw at the paper, scratching its way to the bottom of the page where it stopped with a jab of punctuation. Rising from the page it became a feather stroking the cleft of her chin. She shook the hair from her face and for the first time looked at him.

"What are your feelings now, Vic?" she asked, the pen poised at the top of new page.
Two butterflies swirled between them, landed on the broken ground, then rose and vanished on the breeze that carried them toward the meadow. Vic's hand slid up and down the handle of the shovel as his eyes followed their flight. They brought to mind a long fly ball.

"I used to play baseball over there. In that meadow," he said, nodding. "Over there! It was bigger then, like another country, and you could run forever under a fly ball. I remember how white the ball was against the blue sky, kind of like the belly of a fish.

"On Memorial Day, after the salute and gunfire and "Faith of Our Fathers" a bunch of us kids would get up a game using pie tins or broken branches for bases. One time, I don't remember for sure who it was, but it must have been Allen whatever his name was, that husky kid with the freckled face and big round chest. He must have been an orphan or something—he just stayed around here for a year or two with his aunt and uncle—but I remember that one day he hit one way over my head out in center field. Jesus, it was like a shooting star.

"I remember trying to look at the sky and the ground at the same time, trying to watch the ball against the blue sky and watch my feet so I didn't trip over any crosses or markers—that's how far he hit it—way out of the meadow into the cemetery!

"I ran as far as I could, jumping over graves and flowers but it came down behind me anyway and started rolling and ricocheting off headstones like a pinball; but then all of a sudden it richocheted right to me. I'll be damned! It caromed right to me. Right in my glove. In my hands!" He paused, staring out into the meadow where the butterflies had disappeared; a child's delight shone on his face.

"Without even looking I wheeled and threw home, and as soon as I let go with the throw I caught sight of home plate, how far away it was, just a speck in the horizon, just a tiny speck, but something happened—I don't know what, but somehow the ball rose and rose and soared and soared just like a dream and the next thing I knew it smacked into Michael Ludvik's glove and he slapped a tag across Big Al's ankle just as slick as anything you'd ever see on television."

He was leaning on the shovel, his hands folded over the end of the handle, grinning. He was so happy. But when he glanced at Jennie he suddenly felt foolish, unsure of what he was saying or why he was saying it. He'd gotten carried away and revealed too much.
But she had put the notebook aside and was digging at the ground with the pen, as if chipping ice. Grains of sand flew up and stuck to her dark hose. She pulled the hem of her skirt down to her knees.

"I wanted to bring some wildflowers," she said softly, eying the grave. "Lots of wildflower seeds. Black-eyed Susans and bachelor buttons and sunflowers and poppies and comos…all my favorite wildflowers. I even dreamed once about wildflowers spreading from here and taking over the cemetery. They were so pretty, swaying in the breeze." She stared at the ground she'd disturbed with the pen, then began smoothing it, patting it down.

"But the cemetery isn't a place for wild things," she said, abruptly rising to her feet and brushing the dried grass from her skirt.

The floss of dandelions drifted in the breezed and clung to her hair like snow. The scent of rain vanished and the small, marbled clouds fled into the west. In the northern hills a silent hawk rose above Turk's Bluff and in the dark corridor of trees that lined the river to the south some desperate crows squawked and chattered.

Viewed from above the cemetery was a serene refuge, the hub of order within the surrounding field and the grid of gravel roads.

On opposite ends of the grave they each went to work. While Vic rolled out the sod Jennie cleaned the stone. It was coated with dust from the fields and speckled with droppings from the many birds that had used it for a perch while hunting insects in the grass. Clumps of abandoned spiderwebs were matted against the stone like wet hair. Jennie picked off the webs then cleaned each letter and number of the stone as if wiping sleep from the crusted corner of a child's eye.

The name "Little Fish" had come from Vic, because that's how the stillborn infant had appeared to him at the time; and Jennie, too embittered at the time to dignify death with a proper name from life, had acquieseced. But that had been a long time ago, and recently, as a way of easing herself into sleep, she'd lay in bed and let her mind wander through all the proper names she could think of …all the Justins and Matthews and Austins and Jonahs…never settling on one before falling asleep, but for some reason the possibilities soothed her, allowed her to slip into a comfortable sleep.

During that first year she had been wild with a grief that had turned into an arrogant, reckless defiance. Then, in the death throes of their marriage, she and Vic had fought and loved with a terminal passion.

It culminated here on the grave, on what would have been the child's first birthday; after a night of dancing she was defiantly happy and determined that they should bring a bottle of wine and some bread to the cemetery to celebrate a life that never was. There was bitter salvation in the irony—and the sharpest of it would make her laugh and snap her head and send her hair lashing through the air.

It was one of those spring nights when the moon was hazy and there was a sultry charge in the wind that made her feel crazy and vile and immune from misfortune because it was misfortune that sustained her. She'd hugged the bottle of red wine and Vic palmed the bread as they wandered back and forth through the cemetery under the dull light of the moon, offering toasts and a chorus of "This Little Light of Mine" to the names they found inscribed along the way.

When they finally reached their son's grave they pitched the blanket and planted a lighted match in the ground. Jennie was quick to blow it out before it could burn out; she laughed, clapped her hands, then took a drink and sang "Happy Birthday" before rising to her feet and taking the first steps of an improvised dance. She swirled like a leaf caught in an eddy, her arms spread to encircle a huge imaginary partner, and her head titled back to face a sky full of whirling stars. The wine splashed from the bottle in her hand, tricked down a bare leg, stained her bare feet and dried in the grass. It splashed on Vic, who rose and tried to dance with her but surrendered when he realized that her spirit for dance was so much larger than his.

When she collapsed next to him on the blanket, they passed the wine and bread back and forth, swaying and bumping shoulders, bouncing off one another as Jennie began sing silly children's songs. Her hands illustrated the songs, carved images in the air to accompany "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "It's a Small World" and then again "This Little Light of Mine"—the whole time laughing and rocking back and forth, a part of her still dancing because she was so happy because it was working so magnificiently—the song and the drink and the dancing and the sultry wind and the irrevenence subduing all those crazy daytime feelings that whirled around in her stomach like wild, wounded birds.

It was still working when she lay back and felt Vic's tongue licking the wine that was drying on her thigh; she was still dancing, still singing, still creating images in the air with her hands even as she slid out of her clothes. When he filled the space above her, her hands stopped against his chest, explored it like a darkened wall, then slapped at it as if killing a spider, laughed, then pulled him closer, down to her, and bit at his neck.

For a moment, hovering over her, pinning her arms, he eclipsed the moon and shielded her from the warm wind; she couldn't breathe the way she wanted so she struggled free and pushed him away, but then some old fear, some darkness interceded and she despised both his absence and his presence, and then she despised the damp ground that had first felt so good against her hips and the thick sultry air that was so exhilarating—she despised it, its heaviness, its weight—and when she arched her back and pushed up against him, she didn't know if she was resisting him or some infliction in the air. She raked her nails at whatever was in front of her, drew blood from his cheek, cried out, and then pulled him down to her, clung to him and felt so relieved to finally lash out against some flesh and blood other than her own. She felt something warm, wine or blood, on her breasts, and when she rolled free she started shaking uncontrollably; her lips quivered, her hands shook until she hugged herself and coiled up in the blanket with her back to Vic and the headstone, and finally was able to sob quietly into the darkness.

Vic lay a hand on the blanket, on her hip, as if steadying a rattle, and looked up at the stars because he didn't know what to say. A thin streak of blood stained his cheek.

Now, twelve years later, he was on his hands and knees, pressing down the sod, trying to make everything just right. The edges had to to be flush, and the seams fused, so it would look nice for Memorial Day. Rising to his feet he methodically walked toe-to-heel over the seams, using his weight to fuse the separate pieces. When he stepped back to look he wasn't sure that it was better than before. The rich grass, the neat rectangle, the clean stone—for some reason it all made him afraid. He looked at Jennie, started to say something but cleared his throat instead; the hand that had begun to reach across the grave stopped in midair and retreated to the tape measure on his belt.

The day was moving on and the breeze had stopped. It was the time of the afteroon when the birds were silent. The caretaker, an old man in coveralls, circled the meadow on a riding mower.

Other people had come into the cemetery and were arranging flowers or stooping to pull dandelions from graves. An older couple who wore matching glasses made their way around the graves, pausing to point at the headstone or comment on a family name. She carried a wreath and he carried a tripod, and as they walked from grave to grave, the distance between them always remained the same.

Jennie took the tiny wreath from the florist's sack and lay it carefully beside the clean headstone. The red flowers were bright against the fresh green sod.

"There," she said, rising, "now it looks respectable."

He currently lives in Boise, Idaho, with his daughters, Maiya and Amanda. A son, Gabe, lives in Japan.