Leticia’s funeral is on a Monday at the Catholic church – there is only one Catholic church in town, and another farther out in the county. But I stand outside and follow apart from the crowd, like a boy at a dance but not really part of the dance, hanging awkwardly about a corner or against a wall, wanting to leave and yet wanting to be there. I am sure everyone saw me.
So if I didn’t kill Leticia, and I don’t think I did, who did kill her? No doubt her uncle, or one of his f riends. Perhaps one of her friends, or the janitor at her school, or one of the so-far respectable men of the town: the mayor, or a doctor, or the editor, with some secret vice, turned in by his wife unable to tolerate it anymore, a scandal, a cause celeb no one could fathom. We were waiting for that to happen.
What did happen is that life went on and forty thousand more children died in the world of preventable diseases every day for the next four days, and no one in our town mourned them, or saved them, or knew: except me. What is the cure for death? Death. Guilt. Sorrow. Death. Hell. Punishment. Love. Writing?
When my disability payment comes I put fifty cents in a can on my bedroom dresser. When I have enough I will sponsor a child in Africa. That poor, ignorant black baby, starving, sick, abandoned, with no games to play, no mother’s love, no friends, no pets – a blank slate, a person-void, a child-shaped hole I will fill in. Charity, they say, begins at home, but charity, I say, that stays at home isn’t charity. Faith and hope....
There is a large dog that often comes into my yard, threatening my smaller dog. It is a beefy black and brown affair, with a square nose and short ears and a bobbed tail. I can see it urinating against a maple by the fence. Guy is asleep on the couch, but he seems to know the stranger is there. He lifts his head, his ears prick up; alert. Guy is a brave dog. He would fight the larger animal and he would die. Guy does not understand the value of discretion and cowardice.
The other dog sniffs his own urine, and, satisfied that it is acceptable urine, up to his normal standards of urine and not that cheap inferior store-bought urine people serve you nowadays and try to pass off as their own baking, trots around the corner of the house and out of sight. Peeing in public and proud of it. It is a dog’s life.
I used to have a cat but I convinced John to take her because I caught her scratching the furniture one day. The furniture is important. I want everything to be the same as it was, has always been, around me. I want stability, memory, respect. I want nothing to change. Except life, perhaps. Le plus ça change… .
So I am older now, by, what, seconds – I have a whole new perspective on life than when I last inhaled. Time does that. The brain ages. Dementia, senility, tiredness, forgetfulness, aches and pains. My mother wore a cloth diaper the last six months of her life and it was necessary that I change it for her and wash it out and apply it, which I did. We have no place to put old people in our town and I’d no money to place anyone there anyway. And all it made me think of was who will look after me when I am her age.
She was buried not in Vanier’s Cemetery, but in Green Mountain, called Green Mountain for some reason no one knows; there certainly are no mountains around our town. Not for a long way, and there they mine and cut lumber and make paper and it is hardly a place, in those Canadian mountains, you would call ‘Green’ or bury someone or think of your eternal rest. But that’s what they call it.
The ceremony had been a small affair. Ralphie, the butcher, had come in his best black clothes with his best pomade in his hair and took off his white apron at the graveside and lowered his head. Robert was there, but Robert goes to everyone’s funeral, not casually, but seriously. It is a service, mourning, he provides his fellow man, and very Christian of him it is too. The priest, or priest-like-person, the non-denominational Reverend Walters, Rebecca Walters, is actually United, but described her services as non-denominational – and perhaps they were, what do I know? – but was still thought of as ‘that United woman.’
There were seven of us there: me, Rebecca, Ralphie, Robert, John, Genevieve Bockman (a friend of mother’s) and Mrs. Bluto, our, and still my, neighbour – it was her garage Guy was always trying to get into. So we mourned, more or less, depending, and we buried her and we walked away and everything seemed so… odd, so very, very odd. That is what I remember, what I felt; it was a very odd thing to be doing, to have happen. My mother had never died before and my father, well, if he was dead we had not heard of it. And one day they will do it for me, but what that is I do not know.
The doors are open – it could be anything. Death, whatever it was, might be anything. No one knows. Yet, oddly, everyone thinks they know. Christians, Jews, Muslims, doctors, atheists, everyone has their scenario they tell themselves, but no one knows. It could be anything at all. It is almost exciting.
I make toast, as I always do before bed and eat it with a little jam, just a little jam, but no butter. Butter is an expense, and unnecessary – I am going to put jam on it anyway, why do I need to put butter on it first? The jam is from Mrs. Bluto’s preserves, seedy and tart.
Tomorrow I must do it. It has waited a long time, patiently, for me to do it, and tomorrow I will. But I say that every night. I lick the jam knife, first running it along my tongue, then pulling it between my lips, teeth apart and making a smacking sound. The sound amuses me, like a sloppy kiss, a playful bottom-slap, a muffled fart or a high-five. Finishing, I brush my teeth and go to bed.
Every night, some time in the night, Guy gets onto the bed with me. He is never there when I go to sleep; he is always there when I wake up. It has been like this his whole life. I never notice him; I always find him.
This time Guy wakes me up. He is barking early in the morning. It is still dark. The middle of the night. He never does that. I am tired, muddle-headed, and angry. I do not get out of bed. There is much ado outside, I can hear it now, the bell of the ambulance – or is it a police car? – rings clearly.
I close my eyes, exhale, and get up. I put on my robe and go to the window. I can see shapes. I can hear what I assume are voices but cannot understand or make out words. I scratch Guy’s ears, put the lead on him and go outside.
It is Mrs. Bluto’s house. And it is an ambulance, not a police car. And firetrucks. The firetrucks come to put out the fire. But then that is what firetrucks are for. They fail. The fire smoulders to a finish, having consumed everything that was once there. But you can still tell it was a house.
“Qui est-ce?” I say to Robert.
“Pardon?” he says.
“Oh. How is she?” I say.
“She is dead, I believe. They have put her in there, ” and he indicates the hospital van.
“How did it happen?”
“You knew her.”
“Yes.”
“You were her friend.”
“Yes.”
“She was old.”
“Yes.”
“Still…”
“Yes, ” I say, “still…”
Robert does not live in the neighbourhood. Why is he here? How is he here? It is two in the morning. Is he just passing by? But Robert is more insomniac than murderer, I’d bet. Still, one wonders. I am not sure Mrs. Bluto is dead. It is not something I can be sure of – people dying. It is hard to know what that is. Mrs. Bluto was younger than my mother, a widow since the wreck on The Roland Barts twenty years ago: the death of the sailor.
I still have a pantry of her preserves and eat one of her pickles every morning for the protein. I have become health conscious. I always eat lots of vegetables because they are generally cheaper than meat and less off-putting to prepare. I drink cow’s milk fresh from the dairy and I drink plenty of water to flush my system out. I wear a hat in the sun. I do not eat butter. I do deep knee bends and sit-ups. I do not go outside on smog days.
Still, I feel my age, especially when I look at the young girls of school age and, since I still think of myself as in high school, still fill my fantasies with me as I am now, there among the people and females of my high school time, they as pretty and desirable as they were at seventeen, me much cooler and smarter and funnier than I ever was at seventeen, but there, sitting across the desk from Shelley Tenner or Daphne Husene or Ella Agnew, shining. I think men’s magazines and men’s longings find their way to the topic of teenage school girls because that is usually our first sexual thought or memory, the first, at least for my generation, we noticed. It is the world we were young in, and no matter how old we get, we always, I believe, think of ourselves as seventeen.