Unlike me, Lindsay had bawled like a baby when we buried Charlie at that little mountaintop cemetery in Ansted. In the hot, cramped chapel of the local funeral home where the services were held, the family members were seated in rickety folding chairs on the front row before Charlie’s open casket. When some local, country preacher, who save for old-timey heroic reputation clearly did not know Charlie from Adam, began his spiel about what a good father and husband and War Hero and onward Christian soldier Charlie had been, Lindsay simply lost it for no good reason I could see. Well, she and Charlie had gotten along famously, I guess. Lindsay had uncharacteristically wept and sobbed in public and I had whipped out my handkerchief for her to clutch against her fountain of a face. She was crying enough for the both of us, was the way I saw it.
Lindsay had not been back to the Resdawn Memory Gardens since the day of Charlie’s funeral. I threw a left off Route 60 into the cemetery’s driveway, pausing for a moment, as I always did, to gaze at one of old Bernard Coffindaffer’s trio of crosses just past the entrance. I parked in front of the long concrete walk that led up the little knoll among the graves. I fetched a small paper bag out of the glove compartment, and then Lindsay and I walked slowly up the slope, hand in hand like newlyweds.
The metal vase attached to the marble slab at Charlie’s gravesite was still full of flowers from the last time I had hauled Momma over to decorate graves. Lindsay knelt down and ran her fingers over the raised brass letters of Charlie’s name on the plate that had cost me an arm and a leg.
The letters of my own name. Lindsay removed the old flowers from Charlie’s vase, and then began to arrange the wildflowers we had picked beside the four-lane.
—Do you ever miss him? Lindsay asked me.
—No, I told her truthfully. —But I think about him all the time.
But what I didn’t tell my wife of nearly twenty years was that I had begun to suspect that I was becoming more like Charlie every day, at least the way he had been as he grew old, with his dark moods and unspecified anger and his quiet hopelessness and sense of loss. And his profound loneliness. What I didn’t tell my wife of nearly twenty years was that what I often brooded about was when, in their long married life, my father and mother had been in love, and when had they stopped being in love, and what had held them together over the long years after their love was dead as a doornail.
Only one memory came to mind whenever I tried to imagine my parents when they might have been in love. In that memory, the three of us, Mom and Dad and me, are walking home from the movies at night in one of those small southern West Virginia towns where I was so successfully disguised as a child. I roam ahead of them down the dark, quiet streets, but never far. The trees along the walk, the maples and old oaks, are thick with summer leaves that rustle in a warm breeze. I run ahead from tree to tree, hiding within that strange dark the trees seem to shed like pools beneath them. As I run toward each tree, I try to titillate my fear by imagining that there are creatures back in the shadows, werewolves with quick wild eyes, who are just dying to eat me raw. I hug tightly to a tree’s trunk, pressing my cheek against the rough bark, deliciously anticipating the first bite. And there walking slowly toward where I wait in the darkness are my parents, my beautiful mother and huge, handsome father, swinging their held hands slowly in time to a song my father is singing low under his breath: Good night Irene good night, good night Irene. Over my mother’s beautiful face the shadows of leaves move, and light from a streetlamp trims her dark hair like a thin encircling flame. As he sings, Dad looks at Mom with an expression on his face I can only describe as awe. As I watch Mom and Dad walking toward me holding hands in the soft quietude of that sweet night, I sense a warmth and longing between them that must surely have been love.
When I looked down at Lindsay on her knees arranging flowers on Charlie’s final resting place, I saw that tears were streaming down her face. I gently pulled my dear wife up beside me and held my dear wife in my arms for the second time that day. I glanced around the little mountaintop cemetery to see if there were any witnesses to this public display of tenderness. But we were alone.
I had seen my wife weep more in the past year than I had in the previous eighteen or so. But she had never ever been a weeping obligation. I almost cried myself. What I had begun to understand was that I had always best found the pathway to my own pain through the pain of another person. I hadn’t cried at Charlie’s funeral, which was somewhat understandable, I guess, but I hadn’t cried at Mimi’s either, somebody I imagined I loved. But I could be brought to tears watching other people, perfect strangers even, on television news reports, say, grieve openly over loved ones burned beyond recognition or mangled in car wrecks or found murdered in the woods. Cheap sentimentality was another thing I shared with Charlie.
I held Lindsay tightly. We stood there clinging to each other in that mountaintop cemetery, as she blubbered her heart out. She wasn’t bawling simply for the waste of Charlie’s life, of course. She was grieving for us, for what we had lost somewhere along the line. For the “death of love,” maybe, which is how Lindsay had put it in another short entry in her journal I had read at some point and committed to memory: “Still more notes of lament. Cold winter day. Both of us trapped inside. Both of us retreated into our inconsolable interiors for privacy in our pain. Death of love. Death of love.”
—Now, now, I had mumbled and patted my wife’s back. —Now, now. Lindsay pushed out of my arms and fumbled to light a cigarette. She stood there smoking and looking around the little mountaintop cemetery and at the dark woods beyond the fence.
—I just want to make one thing clear, Lindsay said. —I am officially, as of now, finished with all that boohoo bullshit. I don’t plan on being the victim any more. I’m finished with feeling pathetic. I am not the perpetrator here, and I will not be the fucking victim. I don’t know what your plans are. I don’t know if you’re coming home or not. There’s nothing I can do about what you do. But if you are still seeing that woman, just don’t come home. If that’s over, then maybe we can try again. But, frankly, I’m not certain this marriage is going to survive. I’m not sure I care.
When we reached the stone planters three quarters down the walkway, I led Lindsay left across the grass, until we reached the grave of little Joshua Feltzer, who had died in 1988 in his only year of life.
Beside the ground-level grave-marker-plaque, somebody had placed a yellow Tonka truck, with Joshua’s construction co. hand-painted on its door, and a yellow Tonka earth-moving machine, both of whose beds were filled with blue Easter-basket grass. In that blue grass were positioned a dozen or more of those tiny plaster-of-paris angels, many of which I had put there myself over the past months.
I had been coming out to the Restlawn Memory Gardens at least once every week, and I had gotten in the habit of sometimes stopping at the Ben Franklin’s general store in Billville to buy a little angel, at about six or seven bucks a pop, which I would place among the other angels Joshua’s regular mourners had left him, along with the blizzard of cigarette butts you could always find around the gravesite.
I took the latest store-bought little angel out of the paper sack and handed it over to Lindsay.
—I wondered what you had in there, she said as she turned the little angel over in her hands. I told her about the time I had brought Mom and my sister out to decorate graves when I had first spotted the Tonka vehicles packed with angels over Joshua Feltzer’s grave. When I had started to pocket an angel for a sort of symbol souvenir, my sister had convinced me to put it back where it belonged, you jerk! I mean, what was I thinking, my sister had wanted to know. Stealing an angel from the grave site of a little dead baby. Since then, for reasons I couldn’t explain,
I had been hauling little angels out there now and again and leaving them, I told Lindsay.
—You certainly have some peculiar hobbies, Lindsay said. She vaguely gestured at the cigarette butts littered about the gravesite, and then lit one of her own. I fired up a joint. I loved the scorched smell of dope- smoke in fall air.
Lindsay said —I wonder what they think about the proliferation of little angels. When they come out here to mourn for their little boy and see all the extra angels.
I had also wondered about that myself, I told Lindsay, about what the person, or persons, who came out here to smoke like stoves over Joshua Feltzer’s grave thought about all the extra angels. I had wondered if they thought it was a sign of some kind, some message from the beyond, some small miracle maybe? Did it fill them with wonder? Did it give them comfort? Or did they think it was some sort of cruel goofing on their grief? I knew myself it wasn’t the latter. I sure wasn’t making fun of them, I assured Lindsay. But I wasn’t sure why I had been doing it. It was a mystery to me, that’s what it was, like it was a mystery to the mourners, I said. It just seemed like an interesting, enigmatic thing to do and then write about doing.
—Like the mystery of why Sigourney Weaver beat you up in front of a mirror over an imaginary point of honor?
—Remember the time when little Lulu . . ., I started to say, but when I saw the glint in Lindsay’s eyes, simply shut my trap.
—So why did you get so sappy about little boys’ graves and little angels? Lindsay asked.
—I don’t know. It seemed like something somebody would do in a country song.
—You always have tried to live your life like a country song. Full of fucking melodrama and cheap sentimentality. I hate dumb country music.
—In my book, there’s nothing like a High Lonesome soundtrack for the story of a good-old-boy’s life.
Lindsay simply shook her head and said —So, where are you going to put this one? She kept turning the new store-bought angel over in her hands. I couldn’t read Lindsay’s expression. I couldn’t tell if she were getting teary or pissed again. I bet teary, standing as we were over a dead baby’s grave, for Lindsay was such a softie when it came to country-song items like dead little angely babies. But maybe pissed.
—I don’t know where I’ll put it, I told her truthfully. The blue grassy beds of Joshua’s vehicles were piled with angels, jam-packed, angels tumbled on top of angels, as though the business of Joshua’s Tonka vehicles was hauling angels off to some angel-fill. One of the angels in the back of the truck was broken, I saw, its little head knocked clean off. I bent down and picked its headless body up, holding it in the palm of my hand, the cups of its tiny wings framing the chubby, sexless, bone-white body, the hole in its neck like the gaping mouth of a baby bird sprung wide open for a worm, or to sing or scream. I bent down again and fingered through the blue grass until I found its head, whose hair looked like a glittery, golden helmet, and whose eyes, these painted blue dots, gave it a startled look. It was almost too good to be true, as far as symbols go. It couldn’t have been better if I had made it up out of the blue.
—Poor little angel guy, Lindsay said and took a long draw on her cigarette.
—What should I do with this broken guy? I said.
—Why don’t you keep it for a symbol souvenir, Lindsay said. —Isn’t that what you really want to do?
I shrugged, but I accepted this as a sort of permission, and I put the little broken angel and its golden head in my pocket for further consideration and appropriate use.
Lindsay bent over and stubbed her cigarette out in the grass, and then held the butt in her hand.
—Just toss it with the others, I suggested. I put my roach out on my tongue and swallowed it.
—The little angel? Lindsay said and lifted her level gray gaze to my face.
—No, I said, —your butt.
—I’m not a graveside litterbug, Lindsay said.
I said —Nobody would know the difference.
Lindsay said —What about little Joshua? What if he’s riding up on one of those clouds looking down at us right now? That could happen in a country song, couldn’t it?
—You bet, I said.
Lindsay put the store-bought angel down on the ground and took a tissue from her suitcase of a purse. She knelt and began picking up all the cigarette butts around Joshua’s gravesite and folding them into the tissue, which she then put in the purse. Lindsay picked the store-bought angel back up and looked at it again; then she said —I get the picture. You’re writing all this up right now, right? As we go along, right? And if I do something interesting enough with the little angel, if I put it in a place that is full of symbolic import, meaningful with metaphor, well, then, lucky me, I get a mention in the book, right? I get a line in your stupid country song, right?
—That’s not what I’m doing, I said, getting edgy and scared and huffy. I tried to keep my mind clear as a bell. I needed to remember everything in this scene down to the last detail.
—That’s what the fuck you are always doing, dear, Lindsay said softly, and looked at me with her wide gentle gray eyes, like I was a glass tower-of-turds.
—Okay, mister symbol-man, Lindsay said and knelt down. She slipped the little store-bought angel through the open side window of the yellow Tonka truck. She maneuvered it behind the steering wheel. —There you go, Lindsay said and stood up. —Now you’ve got a little truck-driving angel-man. So tell me, is that enigmatic enough for me to make the book?
—Jesus, I said, really impressed, committing her every word and move to memory. —I wonder what in the world little Joshua Feltzer’s mourners will make of that.
—Just spell my name right, Lindsay told me.
—I wonder, I said, —what a little truck-driving angel’s handle would be.
—Elvis? Lindsay speculated, and I was really impressed by that too.
—You haven’t even said you’re sorry, Lindsay said. —What did she mean to you, Chuck? Tell me.
—Not much really, I stammered. —It was just a thing. I was flattered. She made me feel like I wasn’t a fat old guy.
—You bet. How can I ever believe anything you say? Ever again. Ever.
—But, but, but . . .
—Or anything you write. How can anybody?
—Okay, in a way I really loved Holly. Giving Holly up was the hardest thing I ever did.
Lindsay turned from me and began to stride down the slope. I stood there for a moment watching her go. Then I hurried after her. When I caught up with her, I took Lindsay by the hand, and we walked like that, my wife of nearly twenty years and I, my bride and I, hand in hand, on down the hill to my vehicle, like we were at the end or the very beginning of some dumb country song.