When the funeral home called to tell Ray he could come for the remains, he walked into the office and they handed him a plastic bag full of ashes that looked like concrete dust. They’d tried to sell him an urn at the time of the arrangements, but he’d said he didn’t want one, couldn’t figure the point if he was going to spread the ashes soon as he got them. Seeing that bag in the passenger seat beside him, though, he was starting to second-guess himself.
Ricky Mathis was the first person in his family to be cremated, a decision Ray made because burial carried the expectancy of visitation. There was blood kin and church family and close friends and folks who didn’t really know Ray but knew of him and respected him, so would feel obligated to show. Those people had kids and grandkids, and the thought of having to see that many faces and shake that many hands was overwhelming. He just wanted it to be over.
A red clay pull-off cut a half moon into the shoulder along Highway 281 just a mile or so short of Wolf Lake. Anybody who wasn’t born and bred in Little Canada wouldn’t even have noticed there was anything there. A small seam in a thicket of greenbrier marked the trailhead, but the path really didn’t open up for twenty yards or so. From the road that seam didn’t look like anything more than a part in hair, a place a man might pull over, take a leak, and catch chiggers if he wasn’t careful.
Ray pinched the vines between his fingers to avoid the stickers and slowly brushed his way into the thicket. When the trail opened, a rocky path climbed through thick shrubs of sumac and pokeweed, stubs of sassafras filling the air with the smell of root beer. Two gnarled dogwoods stood at the entrance to the graveyard. The trees were planted a gate-length apart so that their limbs converged to form a natural arbor. There was a chain-linked fence surrounding the yard, more a deterrent for bear and deer than to ward off trespassers. Weeds had grown high against the fence.
Ray’s second cousin Lester used to weed-eat the place so the old-timers could come up on Sunday evenings when the weather was fair and put flowers on the graves, but from the looks of things, Lester hadn’t come in ages. Most the old-timers were gone. Truth was, Lester was ticking toward seventy himself and Ray wasn’t far behind. As he flipped the fork latch and swung open the gate, he thought maybe there had come a changing of the guard, and that fleeting thought hit hard because there was no next generation. Lester didn’t have kids and the last of Ray’s family was hanging there in his hand. There were two more graves to be dug at best. Sooner or later a day would come when the trees grew up and the names washed from stone and the bones in the ground became just another forgotten part of the place.
A honey locust leaned out over the headstones at the back corner of the lot and that’s where Doris was buried. Ray’s mother had died a fairly young woman in her fifties, not long after Ray got married, and it was at her funeral that Doris had chosen this spot for her own. Everyone else had gone back to the church, but Ray’d needed some time to himself. They were sitting together holding hands by the freshly covered grave when a doe and her yearling fawn came into the clearing. The older deer craned her neck to pull a few low-hanging pods from the branches of the tree. Doris whispered in Ray’s ear that when the time came, that was where she wanted to lay.
Of course that bean tree was scraggly back then, maybe fifteen feet high with limbs sprawled out like vines. Forty years had straightened it some, but for the most part it had grown out rather than up so that it now cast a wide oval of shade. On a limb above his wife’s grave marker, Ray’d hung an old set of wind chimes that she loved, but there was no breeze, no sound, just an unseasonable heat and the smell of smoke easing in from someplace not so far away. The Tellico fire had grown by thirty-eight hundred acres over the weekend. There was no end in sight.
He opened the bag and dabbed his finger into his son’s remains, smearing the ash between his forefinger and thumb. As he was studying the tan gray color and the way the ash felt almost oily between his fingers, his mind took him back to the sound of his son’s laugh, a memory so vivid and sensory that he looked around, unsure whether it was in his mind or reality.
When Ricky was a boy he’d get so tickled that his face would turn purple. He’d forget to breathe. He’d keel over laughing so hard that often Ray was afraid to take things any farther for fear the boy might actually suffocate. Ray was remembering one time when he borrowed an old leaky johnboat from Odell Green and plugged the holes with plumber’s silicone to keep the vessel from sinking. He took Ricky across Cedar Cliff Lake to catch walleye at the base of a waterfall. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten and back then he’d seemed to believe his old man was God’s gift. They split a lunch of Lance crackers that Ray called nips, and dropped peanuts into glass-bottle RC Colas for dessert. Between the peanut butter in the crackers and the peanuts in the soda, Ray’d caught the gas that killed Elvis, and every time he let one rip, that boy liked to have died. Ricky was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep still and Ray fit a life jacket around his neck, believing wholeheartedly they were going to flip the boat and drown.
Ray shut his eyes and waited for the remembering to fade. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been plenty of good times. It was just that the good times hurt too much anymore, that they were so far gone they could leave a man wondering what was the fucking point.
Walking a slow circle around the base of the tree, he shook the remains from the bag a bit at a time like he was spreading fertilizer. When the bag was empty, he pinched the seal closed, then folded the plastic into a tight square that he slid into his billfold pocket. Ray looked down at his wife’s grave marker, a simple granite plaque with only her name and the dates bookending her life. A few leaves lay atop the stone and he knelt down to brush them away. When he lifted his head, there was a coyote standing within thirty feet watching him curiously.
Ray couldn’t move. He held his breath until suddenly he could feel all the blood rushing into his face, his heartbeat throbbing at his temples. He could hear his pulse and he imagined the animal could hear that beating as well and he wanted desperately for his heart to stop so as not to break the spell.
The coyote’s yellow eyes stared unblinking, its ears raised to attention. Ray could see the dog’s nose working to make sense of him, but for a brief moment there was just this invisible, fragile thing stretched between them like a length of thread. He felt air touch the back of his neck first and then the chimes above him began their slow, dull song. The coyote raised its head ever so slightly, snout angled toward the breeze, and in one soundless movement turned and was gone.