Cohen steps over his father’s body, finally, reaching with his toe for the far side like a burglar in a black-and-white movie, movement exaggerated, each step a gigantic cursive letter. But even with that large first step, even after reaching as far into the future as his leg will allow, Cohen’s heel comes down and touches the edge of the pool of blood, the mercury-red puddle that leaks out from under his father’s neck and outlines his head like a saint’s halo in stained glass.
Cohen hisses at himself for his clumsiness. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and holds on to the examination table with one hand for support, leaving a neat line of fingerprints all in a row. Each one is like the labyrinth behind Saint Thomas Church, the slowing curves circling back in on themselves, each with a middle that is never the end. He lifts his heel, contorts his body to try to examine the back of his foot, and there it is, a small dash of blackish red, like the sticky remains of a lollipop. He rubs his finger tightly along the heel of his shoe, transferring most of the blood from the back of his foot to his index finger. He stares at it, not knowing what to do next.
It is the blood of his father, the life that has pumped through him all these years. The blood that turned his father’s face red when he shouted from the front of the church, the blood that fled and left his father’s face white when he realized he had been found out, when Cohen’s mother stormed out onto the baseball field, when he was told to leave the church. It is his father’s blood, the same blood that in many ways is all wrapped up inside of him, pumping through his own body, circling his own maze of veins and arteries and capillaries that his teachers said could reach to the moon and back.
He sighs.
He walks through the basement holding his bloodied finger out to the side, as if it is someone else’s hand entirely, as if he is looking for a trash can to put it in. His feet are still heavy as he walks a straight line past the bodies on the stainless-steel tables, past the various coffins, some open, some standing up and leaning against the wall, others closed. He feels a twinge of guilt that one of their employees will have to be the first to find his father, and for a moment that is nearly enough to send him off track. Poor Beth, if she comes back this afternoon, before anyone else. What will she do when she finds Cohen’s father on the floor? Call the police? The ambulance? Cohen? Marcus, on the other hand, might faint. It would be like him to do that, to see the blood or the partially opened eyes of his already dead employer and drop over. The fainting funeral worker.
But Cohen does not want to be the one to find his father, not now. Did the neighbors hear the long and loud argument he had with his father last night? Did they see Cohen storm out, angry, muttering to himself? No, it would be simpler if he was not the one to find the body, if this accident was brought into the light by someone else.
It was an accident, wasn’t it? He looks closer at his father, at the scene. His father wouldn’t have done this to himself.
Would he?
With a deep breath, Cohen walks up the basement steps and out of the funeral home. He touches nothing on his way except the doorknob, and that he opens with his coat pulled down over his left hand.
Emotion catches him again, and his eyes well. He will never see his father again, not his smile or the tired lines of his face or his strong hands flexing away some phantom pain. Cohen wipes his eyes and clears his throat.
Outside, the city streets are quiet. It’s a small, vibrant city, drifting from north to south, down toward the river. It’s a quiet place in the middle of the afternoon before the children are released from school. It’s a green city, cement and macadam and asphalt sharing space with sycamores and oaks and maples.
Cohen feels better. It’s easy to begin to pretend he has not yet seen the body of his father when he is standing under that sky stretched tight, a sheet once white but now washed into a shade of gray. The early spring day carries a bite of winter that awakens him to his life. The air smells one moment of warm, earthy spring and the next of low, frozen, gray clouds. The air sneaks in around the edges of his overcoat, soaking in through his thin, worn suit, and he wonders if he has time to run home and change before going to his nephew’s baseball game.
He looks at his watch. He doesn’t have time. He remembers the blood on his index finger. He scans his suit, his coat, anywhere he might have accidentally rubbed his finger, anywhere he might have marked himself with his father’s blood, but he doesn’t see anything.
He looks up and down the sidewalk before squatting like a catcher beside one of the city’s new trees growing in front of him. It is no more than three or four inches thick, a sapling. But he thinks it would be better to clean off his finger farther from the funeral home, so he stands and walks another block on Queen Street to a larger tree, a sycamore with its winter skin peeling into spring. He wipes his finger on a piece of rolled-back bark, and it is a relief, removing his father’s blood from his hands. He wonders why he didn’t simply wash his hands in the sink. Was he worried Beth would return? Or was he simply not thinking clearly? He feels muddled, confused, the shock of finding his father mingling with the approach of grief.
It is a relief to him that spring is coming.
Cohen looks up and down the street again. He glances at all the windows, all the dozens of windows in the dozens of houses, afraid he’ll see someone looking out at him, someone watching him wipe his bloody finger on the rolled-up parchment of sycamore bark.
He feels a sob rise in his throat, thick with sadness and anger and regret. His father is dead.