OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD had no fences. Front yards spilled one into the other, and I could cut across them from my house to the end of the street, sometimes following a path worn by the feet of the older kids through a caragana hedge that tried to create a border. Not much went on in front of the houses. The artery of the block was the alley where we gathered after school and on weekends to play kick the can or run-sheep-run or anti-ay-over, bouncing the ball over the roof of my parents’ collapsing garage. Because the front was more private, Ona and I chose a spot at the edge of her verandah under one of her mother’s roses as a graveyard. The ground was soft there, and the roses, with their short lives and their stems whose bite drew blood from our fingers, seemed to be the perfect graveyard flower.
The summer Ona was seven and I was eight, we scouted the sidewalks and gutters for the dead: a bird fallen from a nest or gutted by a cat, a moth with torn wings, or, when we were desperate, an ant or a dried-up earthworm who’d been stopped mid-crawl after the rain. Both of us went to Sunday school, she at the Lutheran Church at the top of Central Avenue and me at First United, about six blocks away. We were learning about resurrection. We were learning about bodies rising from the earth at the sound of a trumpet and climbing the clouds to heaven. Both of us knew there’d be cotton candy there and fat little angels that looked exactly like our pink plastic dolls, except that the celestial beings had wings and eyelids that wouldn’t click when they opened and closed.
For crosses we stuck together two Popsicle sticks with Elmer’s Glue or, for a small creature like an ant, two toothpicks. Sometimes we’d cover the wood with foil Dad gave me from his pack of cigarettes. A lucky find was a single earring Ona’s mother didn’t want anymore, a flattened pearl disk the size of a nickel. We saved it to use as a tombstone for a bird.
Because we didn’t have boxes small enough to coffin our dead, we collected the fluff from the cottonwood tree that bordered our two yards near the front wooden walk. We’d pinch together a soft nest to put the body in, then cover it with more downy seeds. From our cutlery drawer, I’d stolen a tablespoon to dig with; my mom was the least likely of our parents to notice or to get mad if she did. With every burial we said a prayer, the scary one I recited every night before I fell asleep. Ona didn’t know it, but she was quick to learn.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
We’d fill the cap of a pill bottle with water and another one with the tiny green peas from inside a caragana pod, set these beside the graves, then wait. The creatures we’d buried would want to eat and drink when they woke up. Because I got out of bed earlier than Ona, I was the first there in the morning. Day after day, though, nothing happened. The silver crosses glinted in the early sunlight, the ground was undisturbed. We heard no trumpet, just my brother practising his trombone in our living room. The sounds that drifted through the open window wouldn’t have caused anyone to be born again.
One morning we decided to dig up the grave of a robin we’d found smashed below Ona’s front window. At first we thought it was alive; its chest was moving. Just before I picked it up, Ona shrieked, “It’s worms!” The breast writhed with small red whips. We quickly stuck the robin back in the ground and banged our hands down hard on the dirt. Though we didn’t talk about it, that was the end of our graveyard. We weren’t as crestfallen as we could have been, because as of yet, there was no personal connection. No pet of ours had died. The desiccated, broken, stepped-on or torn-apart were strangers. The animal closest to us, my family’s dog, Tiny, had been with us at most burials. She lay beside us on the grass, alert and watchful as the mythical dog I didn’t know about then who guards the gate to the underworld.
Our role as undertakers led Ona and me into our first and last business venture. In stealing the caps of pill bottles to use as miniature bowls for the victuals of the dead, we’d noticed that the wad of cotton on the top looked exactly like the cottonwood fluff we’d used to pillow the bodies. The fluff also resembled the narrow sheet of cotton batten scrolled in long blue paper that sat in our medicine cabinet. Mom would tear off a piece to hold over my ear when my eardrum broke after hours of pain, the pus running out of it. Earaches were one of my torments.
Ona and I dragged a wooden chair from her kitchen and picked cotton from the big tree’s lowest branches. I’d dumped the inch or two of cocoa from the tin I’d found in Mom’s pantry and washed it out. We picked until the tin was full.
At the end of our block and across a busy street stood Ralph’s Food Market. Everyone in the vicinity shopped for groceries there, and the cashier, Mrs. Murphy, knew all the local kids. Ralph, the owner, let customers charge what they bought. Mom settled her bill every month so she wouldn’t get behind, but many of our neighbours, those better off than us, never paid, and Ralph often had trouble making the rent.
Tiny always came with me when Mom sent me for a loaf of bread or a can of peas. She’d sit on the corner on the slight rise of the McMurchies’ lawn at the end of our block. In the firm voice I’d learned from my brother, I’d tell her to stay. We didn’t want her running into traffic. From the store window I could see her as faithful and still as the statue of Greyfriars Bobby I’d seen in a book. The store workers smiled when they looked at her, and they’d say something nice to me. Tiny stared intently as I crossed the street to her, then ran ahead of me, doubling back to urge me on as we made our way home.
With Tiny at her usual place on the corner, Ona and I waited politely in the grocery line until we were at the register. We showed Mrs. Murphy our cocoa can of cotton and said we wanted to sell it. She pried off the lid and looked inside. “This is worth a dime,” she said. That was enough for both of us to buy a Popsicle.
“That’s great,” I said. “We’ll be back with more!”
“I think that’s all we’re going to need right now. I’ll let you know when we run short.”
I knew by the look on her face—a mix of amusement and kindness—that waiting for a request for more cotton would be like waiting for the birds and worms and insects to rise from the ground and wing their way to heaven.
TINY DIED seven years later, shortly after we’d moved across town to a different, shabbier house and I’d started high school. Ralph’s Food Market had closed by then, and the Pioneer Co-op had taken over.
No one prayed, and no one buried her. My brother, the one she loved most, had left home by then. Dad, who’d sold his rifle and didn’t put down animals any more, took her to the vet when she couldn’t stand up one morning. She was thirteen. Mom and I cried as Dad wrapped Tiny in a towel so she wouldn’t bite and carried her to the car, her red pointed ears poking above the terrycloth. He didn’t bring her back. I didn’t ask where she’d ended up. I didn’t want to know.