THIS IS THE THIRD FUNERAL IN the last two years. The first time, flying home in the early fall, Doug stopped to buy a black jacket on his way to the airport as the cab waited on the street. That funeral was not a surprise; he should have had his clothes already. The second funeral was virtually the same, though it was a shock, and it was the heart of summer. He stood in the sun with his black clothes on, in Saskatchewan again, glad for the ceremony, glad to have someone tell him where to go.
Beginning the drive alone back to the coast after the second funeral, he tried to see what others saw of his home. They talk about its flatness. They get lost, they say, because it’s all the same. But it’s not; there are changes all around. That quarter he would snowmobile on as a child is fenced now. Someone’s drilling a well in the southwest. They’re letting that small stand of poplar grow. He used to sit there with Lena some Sunday afternoons. They would build a small fire. They had a shelter there and nobody came looking. They weren’t big drinkers so the vodka she stole at Christmas lasted forever. Nobody could see. Nobody was looking.
There had been a cow at the edge of a dugout on the right side of the highway, to its chest in water. He saw it trying to get out, slipping, stumbling, and then standing again. He drove into the yard and steered the car around the gravelled circle to stop by the door. The heat was singeing when he stepped from his car. When he knocked on the door some teenage son looked at him unimpressed. We know. We’ll get it out. You’re like the hundredth person who’s stopped.
Then he was in Saskatoon again. He let his car run on the street. He took off his tie and waited a minute before going in. It was so much hotter there than where he lived by the ocean and it was cool in the rental car. He remembered the perfect temperature at the viewing. He’d pressed his hand on his dead nephew’s chest, trying to be sure. He wanted to be cool, but a neighbour came by and knocked on his window, motioned to turn off the car but he pretended not to understand. The neighbour had quite a vocabulary but eventually went back into his house.
With the other mourners he ate a Nanaimo bar and walked around looking at all the pictures in the house. And the pictures were all over, as if it had been planned. Not just the death and the reception in this room after the service, but the life itself in its photographed stages.
But this third funeral is what makes him recall the others. The first and second passed more easily, though he was closer to both those people — one a grandmother, one a nephew — than to this third dead person, who he doesn’t know at all.
He drives his parents to the viewing, because it is winter and he has rented a car again. His mother has to run back and turn on their Christmas lights before he can back out the driveway. His father, in the front passenger seat, looks next door, where their neighbour is pulling his tree down the small slope to the street. His silence is atypical, yet he holds it even when his wife returns to the car. He looks out the side window all the way to the funeral home, while Doug’s mother talks loudly about the man whose funeral it is.
Doug’s wife and his children are not with him, and when they arrive at the viewing, he looks around for a familiar face as a reflex, and, despite himself, reaches briefly for a hand to hold sometimes, though no one is beside him. He has no friends in the small room where they have the coffee urn and stacks of white cups.
It is his parents’ pastor lying in the coffin, and he walks with his mother into the room with the coffin, ready to help her across a thick edge of a carpet, if there is one, or any obstacle. He doesn’t know. It is all flat, it turns out, if you follow the plastic carpet there for the snow being tracked in and lying like a path in a garden. She does almost catch a foot on the edge where it meets the soft carpet that covers the whole room, as she steps back from the coffin.
“Easy, Mom,” he says, as he steps toward her. He puts a hand on her back and holds her elbow with the other.
Her wet face looks up at him, teary.
“He was such a good man, eh Doug?”
Though he doesn’t know, he says yes.
“And he looks so kind,” she says, still peering up at Doug. “Just like in life.”
And because Doug doesn’t know how a corpse might be kind, and because his mother looks at him defenseless and open-eyed, he looks into the coffin and sees the old man. At the top of a dull long-suited slim body, the head lies above a sharp white collar and solid brown tie, and the closed eyes have the look of dreaming and momentarily Doug thinks the closed-mouth smile on the face had been planted there deliberately, post-mortem, though he cannot say so to his mother, but then he recalls having seen this man twice, after all, and yes, he did look kind.
The first time was at a Tim Horton’s in Fredericton, and he wouldn’t have remembered him except for the second time, when he’d seen him in the Omaha airport. He tries to remember this man now, with his dead body in the room, because of the grief all around him. It is hard, though, because of the remorse he feels recalling their first meeting, when he had worked at the doughnut store. He doesn’t want to think of it. The old man had come to the counter, smiling, and moving slowly.
He’d ordered a slice of pie with his coffee.
“I’m giving myself a treat today,” he said. “I did something really good today.”
But Doug had looked away and never looked again at the old guy’s face. He took his money and said to the hurried people behind him: “Who’s next?”
He’d forgotten his rudeness that day until he’d seen him in Omaha, and it hurts him more today because he would never know what the man had done that day long ago. When years later he saw the same man, alone, in the airport in Omaha, he’d tried to imagine the man’s life, tried to imagine what good he’d done. If you see a guy staring out the window at the airport, how do you describe him? If you know for sure his life stretches years back and also years ahead what is your obligation? And what if, at other times, their paths had crossed, and a man without a face, acting private in a public place, was indeed this dead preacher. Seeing a dead man three times makes you think. Maybe it was more.
Does it go on beyond the wet twinkle in his eye? Because if this is an airport it changes. And it could be any day, but it could not be anywhere. A man looking out the window to his garden would not want the same things, Doug knows, and the only reason anything registers is because of his sudden recollection of the time at the doughnut store.
Maybe, though, the man wants for nothing. This is a man alone. This is what? The postmodern man — without beginning, without end — which you see in books but do not believe in.
His eyes will narrow. He will find himself suddenly looking at empty space — the glass is transparent. The wall is glass. The place appears and is it coming or going?
It’s both. It is both, if it makes no difference, and this is where his eyes get wide. What decisions did he make to get here? He must be here. Is he here? Where is here?
Doug imagined the old man his own age, doing things he has done, or seen people do. The time he saw a man throw his keys on the ground in the grass, as the man’s wife told him this is over, this is it. The couple were on the lawn below their balcony. The old blind lady they’d mailed things for was on her balcony beside theirs. She leaned out.
“She can’t see,” the man’s wife hissed.
“She heard that,” he said, his anxiety public now, as if it wasn’t when he threw the keys.
No, that was a different man, Doug was sure, though he hadn’t seen the face. It was nothing to do with this man, who probably never had such a fight with his wife.
Doug had imagined the man in his youth, and now, recalling the memory he’d constructed watching that man stare out the window, he doesn’t know if he’d been unkind. He’s not sure, and he doesn’t want both of the two insignificant times he’d met this man whom his family now mourned at Christmas to have been less than generous. That he’d been a stranger to Doug makes it more horrible to imagine, not less.
In Omaha, he’d imagined this: Lying in bed when they were kids, naked for the first time together, hearing the sound of her parents up the drive, hearing them home early. This is the movies, the preacher as a young man said. Don’t joke around, she said.
He stood naked in her bedroom in front of the mirror and watched, for a moment, himself. With the thin string hanging from his used penis, with the flushed face and scrawny body, how could he feel so strong?
Stop it, get something on, she said.
But he kissed her. She kissed him.
Then the moment on the lawn: sure the blind woman knew all — the minor indiscretion at the office, etc. His wife’s mother and her poison. His wife’s reticence and the new email account she’d started after her vacation.
Oh. And now the staring out the window. Is it coming or going?
He’s sure now the story is unkind. He should be more generous. The indiscretions and the new email account just don’t fit. That couldn’t have been him.
It is impossible to know what he has imagined and what is real. He remembers the old man’s expression across the counter at the doughnut store, then in that cold viewing room he feels he can see his eyes, though the lids are closed.
When the old man’s face is staring right at you, square, his ears bracket an expression that is completely earnest. There are small plugs of black and/or grey growing from his ears. His uncontrolled eyebrows seem dry and foreign compared to his open, dark eyes. Wet eyes, that offer, that are eager, and —
Because they are new to you, you assume they are sad, because that is how sad sad would be, if you want to know the truth. But he licks his dry lips and smiles. Hello, he says, with a rich voice that cannot lie.
So, he’s not here for sadness, but you are available to it. Maybe he’s only open to hope because he’s a believer, a man of faith, without putting too fine a point on it.
Okay, suppose that were true. This man died in a cold winter while shovelling snow. It was in the Christmas season and his heart, Doug supposes, was swollen, content.
He didn’t smoke. He spoke to his grandson before going out into the cold. The grandson had a new job and for the first time in his life got paid for the time he took off at Christmas. The job was nothing special. Not a never-ending stint at a research hospital, not a first-line winger on a good NHL team, not even a union job with the RM. But it was a good job and the grandson had called from the top floor suite he rented with his fiancé. Her family was all fine. They’d had turkey that day. The father-in-law snored on the couch.
Was the dead man’s piety a response to sorrow on earth? Did he believe in heaven because of his miserable lot in life? No. No.
He took pleasure in a job well done. His peers may sometimes have ridiculed him but the cold concrete exposed as he shovelled gave him as much pleasure as the souls he’d saved for his God, or for the sake of the souls themselves, however you’d like to look at it.
So you’ve got to look somewhere else in this man’s life. That’s how you’ve come to the idea of him staring out the window of an airport building to a field of planes moving unnaturally on their tiny wheels.
He thought of the thin ankles crossed below her green skirt. He imagined the time before his marriage when he’d lusted after his wife. Sure, he’d felt the same once they were married, but it wasn’t the same. It had taken him forty-three years to allow himself to enjoy this feeling.
It’s okay; she’s your wife.
But she hadn’t been.
Now that he allowed himself this pleasure, almost anything could remind him of the sight of those ankles crossed like the brown wet legs of a colt struggling to stand. How had they gotten so tanned? What did she do in the wild grass of the yard or the poplar forest beyond?
The thin metal legs descending from the bottom skin of the plane to hold its hard wheels, for instance, might make him remember. His own wrists one day as it rained, when his gloves were so wet he’d removed them before reaching for the hand of a long-forgotten friend met suddenly and by surprise. The pale brown trunk of a tree in a pot beside the hospital’s elevator.
Well, that one, at least, makes sense; the leaves of this artificial plant were the same edible green as his wife’s skirt on that troubling occasion those long days ago.
But what of those who cannot marry? He knows he’s lucky. He knows he’s next.
So what is he doing with no luggage and no plane ticket?
I’ll leave that to you.
What were you doing on that day, when nothing had to be said, when you finally allowed yourself to see the world, to see the connections from each human standing upright on the same concrete floor out into the world, where we are each too small, then back in? When one of these flesh nodes caught your eye because his face was blank and so was the wall he stared through?
He’d like one day, without close relatives and friends in the room, to be as open as this man was, staring into the mirrored darkness as if his own loving people were there with him, even though he knew he was alone. But as Doug’s red-eyed mother walks out to the car on his arm and he tries to hold his breath through the thick clouds of exhaust, he forgets his father, who he hasn’t heard say a word all night.
“Go help your dad,” his mother says, just before he shuts her door. So he walks back in and finds his father’s coat, finds his father, too. When they get to the car his father stands staring at the world around him, and tail lights and reverse lights are all lit up around him as he stands in the fog of exhaust. Doug swings his gaze around, looking for whatever has caught his father’s attention. Then he looks back and sees the door open, his father bending to smile at his mother.
“Yes,” his father says, though Doug doesn’t know what he answers to.
But it doesn’t matter anyway. What kind of great act is so small it deserves only a slice of pie on a weekday afternoon?