Six weeks after the funeral, the postal service continued to deliver mail for our neighbor’s dead wife. The adults were dropping dead left and right. Mr. Landry had a heart attack in the teacher’s lounge. Mrs. Rosamond took some pills for a headache and never woke up. Calvert Stevenson, who made funny faces whenever we walked past his yard, slipped off his roof. Mr. York was asking his wife a question when he choked on a cherry tomato. The neighbor’s wife was not so different. One day she was with us, and then she was gone. We were kids. We paid attention.
Our parents took us to the funerals. We got fat on funeral potatoes and sparkling cider. We did our best to look depressed. When we ran out of tears, we had to fake our sadness like everybody else.
In our home there was always talk of the dead. My mother said the lake of fire and brimstone was not infinite. Some were doomed to be reborn as animals, others must wander as spirits to tempt the righteous, and those who had dishonored the image of God would cast off this human form and become the elements: the fornicators would be transformed into dirt and the liars blown hither and thither to serve as the wind. The world was a mysterious place carefully measured by the wisdom of God.
My father, the biologist, said this was nonsense and when we were dead we became nitrogen, phosphorus, and methane. He showed me pictures of what it looked like in rabbits. Simple proteolysis, he said.
The mail was my comfort. The mail was the last routine in a neighborhood of chaos and spirits and unfinished questions. The mail was yeses and nos, black and white, inside and out. It carried on with or without us, indifferent to weather or public polls or the breadcrumb count in mother’s meatloaf.
The neighbor and his dead wife, Brother and Sister Vance, were boring people and received boring mail. There were advertisements from Mr. Harvey who owned the used car lot. There were sympathy cards. Dead Sister Vance received a pen-pal letter from an orphaned child in Morocco, and Brother Vance received yet another notice from the library for an overdue book. Me and a few other boys stole the mail hoping it would offer a clue to the mystery of the dead adults. After reading the mail from the safety of the tree house, we rapped knuckles to see who had to return it to the appropriate mailbox.
One afternoon there was nothing but a padded manila envelope in Brother Vance’s mailbox. When we opened it, there was a sudden breath of spoiled meat. We removed two sealed plastic packages. Lewis Snyder, who was the only one of us who paid attention in Biology, recognized they were kidneys.
“Whose kidneys?” we asked. “Sister Vance?”
They looked like oversized beans. They were knotted and wrinkled and diluted in a jellyish fluid. Were it not for the biohazard labels, they might have seemed perfectly at home in a grocery aisle.
Lewis said the kidneys must have been destined for some military laboratory with the rest of dead Sister Vance. He had read about it in an issue of Weird Tales he found in the attic. Jimmy Felch said he was lying. I said this must be a mistake or somebody’s sick joke. Lewis shrugged. We all shrugged. We had read Weird Tales, too. We knew what was possible. But we didn’t know whether to be horrified or enchanted, or if such feelings were distinct. We left the kidneys on Brother Vance’s doorstep. We rang the doorbell. Then we hurried back into the tree house.
We used the telescope to watch Brother Vance through the window. He did not seem alarmed. He went to the cupboard for a bowl and filled it with ice. Then he placed the kidneys, still wrapped in the biohazard plastic, in the bowl. He sat at the kitchen table. He read the packaging label. His face was twisted with a half-smile, like he was trying not to scream. He turned the kidneys over in his hands. Occasionally, he glanced anxiously out the window as if hoping the mail truck would return.
That was last month.
My father sipped tea and tried not to grimace as he listened to Brother Vance tell this disturbing story. I listened from the stairs. Usually my mother sent me to my room when there were visitors, but she was in bed with a fever. I worried about why Brother Vance had come to us. Maybe he knew we took his mail. My father was neighborly with the old man, the two of them talking by the fence, and they often shook hands at church, but we had not been to church since before mother’s first headache. Father said when God made up his mind to change things we would go back. Until then nobody inside these walls muttered so much as a God bless you.
Brother Vance told my father he had tried to return the kidneys to the hospital. He was greeted by a secretary who explained the hospital had a strict policy on organ donation. Brother Vance explained there had been a mistake and he was not donating them. He said he had signed paperwork. He told the secretary he wanted the matter resolved. Then he produced the kidneys in the glass mixing bowl full of ice and the secretary contacted her supervisor. The supervisor took one look at the kidneys and contacted the medical chief of staff. The two hospital men shuffled through papers. Eventually they apologized and admitted there had been a mistake. Brother Vance thanked God and told them how relieved he was his wife could be properly laid to rest. Except the hospital men refused. They said yes, there had been a terrible mistake, but there was nothing they could do.
The directory of the mortuary where Brother Vance’s wife had been cremated also refused. He said he only performed services on complete bodies. It was a trade association policy. When Brother Vance asked if an exception could be made, the director showed him the Mortuary Services Manual, which clearly stated there was no fee scale for partial remains.
My father was already a little familiar with this sorry tale. Last month, right after we discovered the kidneys in the mail, Brother Vance had come seeking his scientific opinion. My father had examined the kidneys and insisted nothing could be done. The kidneys were dark and misshapen with yellowed cysts. I remember my father was concerned the kidneys might be a public health hazard, but Brother Vance had assured him he was not unstable or melodramatic. Just another desperate man in an impossible situation.
“Bodies are unpredictable,” my father had told him. “Once I cut off a lizard’s tail and it twitched for two months. Sometimes life holds on longer than it needs to.”
Now Brother Vance had come back saying he had tried to take father’s advice. He had tried to ignore the kidneys. He pulled the weeds from his lawn. He read books at the library. He changed the linens on the bed. He gifted his dead wife’s clothes to the thrift shop. He let the color of the kidneys shift from burgundy to pale yellow with reddish patches. The undersides became brittle and hissed juices. The smell was overwhelming. Unable to tolerate this heartache any longer, Brother Vance had buried the kidneys in his dead wife’s garden.
“I’ve tried to forget,” he told my father. “From my lips to God’s ear, I tried.”
My father had a difficult time understanding all this talk about the kidneys. He did not understand the problem. The wife was dead and the kidneys had been discarded. Was this a confession of grief? A plea for a blessing of comfort? Maybe he needed some money to pay the train fare to visit his daughter and take his mind off things? Brother Vance was the poorest man in the neighborhood. We were all poor, but Brother Vance was a fairy-tale beggar. Brother Vance insisted he was not interested in money. Finally, my father lost his patience.
“This is weird, Charles. Why are you telling me this?” he sighed, rubbing his bushy eyebrows so dramatically I actually thought they might fall off.
“I have a question,” Brother Vance said in a low voice, almost ashamed. “Is it medically advisable for a man to eat his wife?” A sacramental quiet filled the room. I felt an ache in my bones. My father’s face twisted.
“You’re not making any sense,” my father said, the blood rushing out of his cheeks. His hands trembled and he had to put down his tea.
“I am not ill,” Brother Vance insisted. “I am no monster. The scriptures tell us that a man shall leave his parents and cleave unto his wife and none other and their flesh shall be as one. I am a poor, ignorant man. For years I believed when we die we become as the dust of the earth. I am a good believer, Brother Houseman. I put little faith in the mysteries of science. Then yesterday my wife returned from the dust in a way I did not imagine.” He paused, licking his lips. “I buried her kidneys in the garden and now she has returned with the harvest. I have little money. There is little food in my cupboards except what I grow. So I ask you, Brother Houseman: Is it biologically sound for a man to consume his wife? Spiritually, it is permissible to twain our flesh as one, but what does science say?”
My father found it difficult to believe Brother Vance’s wild imagination until the poor old man reached into his coat pocket and pushed into my father’s hand a misshapen parsnip. It was from the garden. We had all seen one of Brother Vance’s vegetables. He grew them every year. Sometimes he went door to door and other times our mothers sent us to his house with a little money and Brother Vance brought us into the root cellar and let us choose which vegetables we wanted.
What my father held was a parsnip but also not a parsnip. It was wet. It was ugly. It was fat and curved, unmistakably shaped like the dead wife’s kidneys we found in the mail. Brother Vance insisted he had pulled a few dozen of these parsnips from his garden. He had searched for his dead wife’s kidney where it had been buried, but now it was missing.
“Impossible,” my father whispered. His hands trembled.
Brother Vance told my father that for the past month he had been a model of devotion with the parsnips, as if his wedding vows had been written for such an occasion. He kept them clean. They watched his wife’s favorite television programs together. They prayed together. They did word puzzles. Sometimes they argued. When he feared moisture might accelerate their decay, Brother Vance sealed them in glass jars. On rare occasions he removed one of the parsnips from the jar and rubbed its skin. For a moment they were together again, Brother Vance said, just the two of them.
“We are much happier,” Brother Vance smiled.
“Take me to see,” my father said. I too wanted to see this Jack and the Beanstalk nightmare. Normally, my mother would have gone with my father, but she was still down with the fever. Father pointed to me on the stairs and told me to grab my coat.
Brother Vance led us into the root cellar. My father, suddenly second-guessing himself, ordered me to wait inside. He had no idea what was down there, and I was only a boy.
I waited in the kitchen. The floors were dirty and the windows smudged with grease. Empty cupboards. Rats whispered in their secret language behind the walls. It was a sad, lonely place to call a home.
“God have mercy on this house,” my father whispered as he came through the back door. He stood in the doorway, his eyes far far away. Not even he had words for this mystery.
“Could it be the resurrection?” Brother Vance wanted to know.
“Not likely,” my father told him. “If God is anything he is an artist, not a gardener.”
My father said something must be done. He told me to tell the neighbors. As always, the neighbors were happy to witness a crisis and even more pleased to be part of such an unfortunate miracle. The women emptied their pantries and filled Brother Vance’s cupboards with food so he did not have to eat the remains of his vegetable wife. Some of the men invited Brother Vance to talk with them. They were widowers. They sat in Brother Vance’s kitchen and told stories of their dead wives with a well-oiled seriousness. One man cried. Another folded his arms philosophically across his chest. One of the men said he was unable to pack away his dead wife’s clothes because it was the last smell of her in the house.
“Lady Death, thy perfume hath seduced me,” the philosophical man said. “Goethe.”
Another man said he still prepared a plate of food for his dead wife each night. Another had not washed his bed sheets in a month because the shape of his dead wife’s head was on the pillow. A tall man with a voice like cigarettes said that since his wife died all the pictures of her in the photo album were out of focus. Nobody believed him, but he said it was true.
At one point the philosophical man leaned forward and told a riddle. “I am silent but full of screams, enormous but invisible. I crush a man but have no weight. I embrace all but have no body.” He waited for the other widowers to take their guesses. Then, after a lengthy silence he said, “I am grief.”
Late into the night they drank warm beer and continued this deranged mental autopsy. The women had all left, but the men continued to plant grief in each other’s minds, a grief that swelled inside them like Jack’s beanstalk.
Father told me pain was like that sometimes: pain made real by the ridiculous.
I wanted to stay but father told me there was nothing to see here and to go home. It was the first time I did not take his word as the law.
I used the side door and circled around the house. Then I lifted the doors and crept unnoticed into the root cellar. It was damp. There was frost on the windowpanes. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling. I had trouble getting my feet to cooperate. I was caught between fear and the gruesome pleasures of anticipation. I stumbled through the root cellar. I wanted to look. I must know the salt from the sugar. I was filled with dread at seeing what was forbidden, but I would not be denied this nightmare.
I found the heavy glass jars on the shelf. There were dozens of parsnips. The jar hissed when I opened it. There was an odor. Maybe it was brimstone or maybe just nitrogen. Maybe it was something else. I held the parsnip under the light bulb. It ached with life and sent ripples in my chest. Sister Vance, or what was left of her, did not look ill. She was quiet and alone, but not the monster I had expected. It was just another of God’s creations. Or his punishments. Or just somebody else’s unfinished business.
I walked home in a daze, tripping over my feet. The night was ruined.
We heard nothing of Brother Vance for a long time. Then one day a letter arrived for my father. I read it alone in the tree house. It was from Brother Vance’s daughter. She wondered if my father would collect Brother Vance’s belongings from the root cellar and attic and ship them to her now that Brother Vance, like my mother, had passed on to his eternal reward.
There were not very many keepsakes. Everything fit in two cardboard boxes. The only thing my father did not include was the last misshapen parsnip preserved in the glass jar. He kept that for himself.
Father placed it on the bookshelf in his study where he could look at it when he gave me tutorials in scripture. He was quite the disciple now. He had the wearied look of a ship-wrecked sailor, though he did his best to look cheerful. He often turned his chair facing the window where he seemed to be looking at the mailbox or the garden he had planted. He tended to it regularly, even if he was disappointed with the results. When he came inside with hands full of dirt he never washed them, always rubbing the dirt between his fingers until his hands were coarse.
Visitors from the neighborhood came to see father. They brought sympathy cards. They brought funeral potatoes and sparkling cider. He thanked them, but his mind was elsewhere.
Late in the afternoons father would shuffle to the mailbox and then return to his study where he examined cross-sections of vegetables under a microscope or pored over biblical verses. When I tried to capture his attention by playing the piano or showing him the drawings in Weird Tales he ignored me. “In just a minute,” he would say, scribbling or muttering. “I’m almost finished.”
Sometimes, while I waited for father to answer my questions, I gazed at the jar on the shelf. It seemed to be listening to us. Months—even years—later it showed no signs of decay. I could see the teeth marks where Brother Vance, or perhaps it was my father, had taken a bite and left it unfinished.