AN INCREASING concern was my father’s ashes. They still sat on the bookshelf where we’d put them after the memorial. The family hadn’t settled on a plan, then we procrastinated as other priorities arose. One morning I awoke to thunder, followed by the pounding of rain against the windows. I was momentarily disoriented. I thought I was a kid and glanced about for my brother, undergoing a surge of anxiety that we were late for school. The remnants of a bad dream fled in fragmentary images, followed by the awareness of reality. I was in my childhood room, my father was dead, and I had a twelve-hour workday ahead of me.
The house was silent, my wife still asleep, my mother in the living room. I took coffee outside, where the shadows in the tree line glistened black. Every surface was a prism displaying the softened green of June. It was rainbow weather, but they were hard to spot among the hills. The air was a pane of lead—as my young son once said, not a sky in the cloud.
I finished my coffee and entered the house. Mom came into the kitchen, moving in a determined way, with an expression I recognized as secret satisfaction. I enjoyed seeing her this way. It was familiar, the way she’d always been: purposeful and private. The past few weeks had been hard, and she’d behaved with emotional distance, an armor to grief. She looked at me and spoke quietly. “I took care of your father’s ashes.”
Mom had decided the backyard was appropriate but worried the heavy ash might kill the grass. Equally bothersome was the prospect of wind blowing them onto the neighbor’s land or into the gravel driveway, where she might inadvertently roll over them in the car. Mom had been waiting for a morning such as this. The chill air had been very still when she woke up. She could feel weather coming. Her plan was to scatter the remains just before the rain dampened the ashes and held them in place.
Earlier she’d sat on an outdoor swing beneath a canopy, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, alert to the barometric shifts in the atmosphere. At the first slight sprinkling of rain, she emptied the plastic box. It took longer than she’d expected, and the ashes didn’t really scatter. Just as she finished, there was a bellow of thunder, and hard rain fell. She hurried back inside, her timing impeccable.
I nodded and refilled my coffee, wondering if the clap of thunder had been the same one that woke me. Was it coincidence or metaphysics? Or maybe all metaphysics is nothing but coincidence to which we assign meaning after the fact. It didn’t matter. I asked her where the ashes were.
“Want to see?”
I nodded and followed her outside and across the narrow strip of land, scraped flat a hundred years before to form a yard I’d mowed as a child. Erosion had brought the steep slope six feet closer to the house. The hill itself was going over the hill. Mom led me to the edge of the yard. A few feet past the grass, she pointed to several clumps of ash, solidified by the rain into dark gray mounds.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not going to blow around the yard.”
“No, it won’t.”
“How’d you pick this spot?”
“It’s where your father always peed.”
We stood there gazing at the rain-pocked hummocks of ash. I put my arm around my mother, unsure what to do or say. My siblings weren’t coming back to the house. Nobody else would ever know where the ashes were. In time they’d make their way down the hill to the rain gully, merge with Triplett Creek, flow into the Licking River, drain to the Ohio River, join the Mississippi River, and progress south to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. It was a long trip. Part of him would make it.
Rain began falling again. Mom went back in the house. After a few minutes I did, too. Mom handed me a paper sack. Inside was the last of Dad’s ashes, sealed in a rolled-up plastic sandwich bag. She made a joke that it resembled a nickel bag of pot, and I told her it had been a long time since she bought pot. She tipped her head and said, “I don’t think I ever bought any. People just gave it to me. I thought it was so cool.”
I looked at the bag in my palm. My father kept getting reduced, subdivided into packets. I was reminded of a battle scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur cuts off the arms and legs of the Black Knight, leaving him a limbless trunk, still trying to fight. Though I didn’t want the leftover scraps of my father in a snack bag, I had to safeguard them. I was tired of it all—the house, the decisions, the porn, and now a nickel bag of ash. Standing in the kitchen and holding the remains of my father’s remains, I had nowhere to take my irritation. My wife was exhausted, my mother slightly lost. At night they drank and tried to laugh.
The movers were coming at the end of the week, and we were behind on preparations. I set aside my feelings. It wasn’t difficult. I hadn’t cried, hadn’t allowed myself to feel sorrow. There was simply too much to do. I went upstairs and tucked the Baggie in my suitcase. I still had boxes to fill, arrangements to make. We were low on packing tape. The gutters needed cleaning. I had to cancel the phone, talk to a lawyer, pay final bills. I could mourn later, be irritated later.
I’d spent the summer organizing everything into two groups: one for Mom’s new place, a duplex in Oxford, Mississippi, and the rest bound for my house a few miles away in the country. Her load was furniture, clothes, and kitchen goods, while mine was Dad’s desk, books, guns, and porn. I walked the rooms of my childhood home one last time, knowing I might never see them again. Empty, it was no longer Dad’s house. I saw it as my parents had in 1964—the broad staircase, beautiful woodwork, and turn-of-the-century light fixtures. The living room seemed enormous without bulky furniture, centered around a fireplace with a mahogany mantel and carved posts. A good home for kids.
My father chopped firewood every day until age sixty, primarily using a long-handled double-bit ax. For tough hardwood, he resorted to a heavy maul. Dad stored the tools outside, exposed to weather, which rendered them worthless. I intended to keep his ax. The chipped blade was dull and rusted. I loved the hickory handle, split at least twice and crudely repaired with small nails, ragged duct tape, and wire as loose as bangles on a wrist. I knew my father had made these repairs, because my mother would have known to use screws for the wood. She’d have wrapped individual pieces of wire instead of one long piece destined to unravel quickly. The ax represented a part of my father separate from all other aspects—the outdoors. Splitting wood was the only activity I ever witnessed him doing outside, and, more important, the only task he’d ever let me help with.
My initial job was to gather pieces of bark to use as kindling. As I got older, I hauled armloads of firewood to the house. Next I graduated to placing a log upright on the chopping block, turning it in just the right way for Dad to see a knot. At age ten, I wielded a hatchet to trim small branches off the logs and split softwood for kindling.
Dad talked as he worked, calling each log a warrior, describing his combat. A heavy piece of oak with multiple hidden knots was a log that fought back. A stroke that split the log cleanly at a single blow was a beheading. Bark was blood. Chips were body parts. If he misaligned his aim and cut off a small strip of wood that flew across the yard, he said his opponent had thrown a dagger. This was partly for my entertainment, but it went deeper for Dad. As I watched him split log after log, sweat running down his face, vapor puffing from his mouth, I understood that he had entered an illusory realm in which he was determined to defeat an army of soldiers one by one. His competence increased as the foes became more real in his imagination. It was important that I remain silent, a squire to the knight. Afterward, Dad set the ax head on the ground and leaned on the handle, breathing hard from exertion. He stared at the plain of battle with an expression of triumph.
My car contained guns, bundles of cash I’d found hidden about the house, and boxes of vintage pornography. If I got pulled over and searched, I’d probably go to jail. If I had a wreck, money and porn would litter the interstate, mixed with my funeral suit, my grandfather’s rifle, a shotgun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, the remnants of my father’s ashes, and whatever was left of me.
The last items to pack were Dad’s ax, the old maul, and a broadsword that wouldn’t fit in a box. Without plan or forethought, I carried them to the edge of the hill. Mom had cast the ashes in three distinct areas, now little more than gray streaks in the ground. A few tiny piles of sediment lay beneath blown leaves. I pushed the sword blade through the ash into the soft earth and pounded the hilt with the maul. I did the same with the ax. I placed the heavy maul on a pile of brush. I’d acted on impulse and now spoke without filter. “I know you were curious about the afterlife. Just in case there is one, I figure you’re here and know what I’m doing. The sword is for Andy. The ax is for John Cleve. The maul is for Turk Winter. I figure you’d appreciate this. Okay, Dad. See you.”
A flash of silver metal glittered on the ground. I picked it up and wiped it on my pants to clean the dirt. It was a stainless-steel disc used by the crematorium to identify the corpse and later placed with the ashes. Number 179. An odd number. Square-free. A safe prime.
Dad.