Wake
The afternoon of his wake there were stories. They said an idling motor and carbon monoxide had killed him when he’d curled up in his truck those hours before dawn. He’d knocked and Della, that last time, would not let him back in. Dozens gathered to say goodbye to Russell Wallen, as if seeing him would answer everything.
We followed behind the casket up the steps into the diner. There were tambourines and fiddles and guitars. Blues and bluegrass echoed through the Black Cat. The place was packed from the front window back to the kitchen with everyone from the strange to the merely odd to the downright ornery—people he’d known from years to a day at every joint from here to there and back. They were everywhere, holding on to steaming cups of coffee and jars of shine, the air around us thick with cigarette smoke and warm with bodies.
A man slapped spoons on his knee near the open casket, which was beside the kitchen doors. Won’t come around my kitchen, oh, won’t come around my door. The song words slid out between his little yellow teeth and a woman with a thin braid wound more than once around her head tapped her black shoe against the tile. Won’t come around here again, come around here again no more. A party, and he’d have liked that, but the music was flat and there was talk and talk. He was a good ’un. A fine man, most of the time. In one corner of the room, I could have heard tales of what they said were prison days. In another, army tales. More gossip about him and Della. A thick-necked woman in a gray dress strapped a washboard around her middle and set to strumming. Sounds drowned out sounds.
“A regular take on peculiar, that Russell Wallen was,” a woman near me said.
From where I stood I could see the plain pine box, which would have pleased him, and an open lid, which would have not. I couldn’t help looking at his face. His mouth, as sealed shut as a pouch. Him. His. His. He lay dead in a box, and neither Russell nor father nor any name at all suited him now. Old tales said that when someone died, there’d be an owl hovering near the house, but it was the questions I’d had for years that circled the room and came back to curl up inside my empty chest as I looked at him and at this roomful of people he’d known. I watched Della where she sat in a chair near the cash register, shaking hands as people came in. We’d closed the Black Cat right after he passed, and we’d spent some of these last two days, Della and me, sitting at a booth circling one another with half-talk and no talk at all. It was you, I’d said, but I hadn’t been able to head beyond the beginning of a question.
“Don’t ask me about it.” Della shook her head. “Not now.”
A hard-looking boy with a bowler hat took out a harmonica now and his feet tapped time. Won’t come around my heart again, come around no more. I stood near the kitchen and spread my arms against the plaster wall, feeling the dryness against my palms as if it were a comfort.
When I finally couldn’t stand any of it, I grabbed my pack and headed out to drive. I drove along the river, up the main street in Smyte, around the corner where the public library was, past the dime store and back around, where a pizza parlor had gone in a few weeks back. I drove to the outskirts of Smyte, as far as the plowed roads would take me, took a left-hand turn at a field covered in snow where I saw the shadow of some critter slinking into the trees. I found a new way back into town, past houses with lights on and televisions going and children already tucked in for the long winter night. I ended up parking in the lot at the warehouse.
I climbed the steps of the factory building to Russell’s office. I tried to light the kerosene heater, but it seemed to be out of fuel, so I sat shivering. I opened drawers, found a bottle with an inch of whiskey. A blanket lay on the mattress where I had sat with Russell, and I huddled myself beneath it, the office phone down there with me. I drew my knees into my arms and breathed inside the tent I’d made until I felt warmer.
The phone rang and rang until he picked up. He seemed to know it was me before I said a word. “I somehow thought you’d call.”
“Been awhile, I guess.” His voice shrugged. “And, okay,” he said. “I admit it.”
“What’s that?”
“I laid out three cards last night, right here on the kitchen table.”
“You laid out a fortune, Cody?”
“Let’s just say I made up a story with cards,” he said. “And you might have been in it.”
The phone was warm against my ear. “Everything’s changed,” I said at last.
“What’s everything, Miracelle?”
I thought about the roomful of strangers. The sound of fiddles and the burnt taste of the coffee and neat whiskey I’d drunk. “Russell’s gone.”
“Russell?”
I held the phone with my shoulder and pulled my sleeves over my hands. I told about the Black Cat, getting to know Della, then Russell. And how the diner was to be closed for two weeks, a mourning banner strung across the Black Cat neon sign.
“For Russell?”
“He was my father, Cody.” Tears edged into my voice. “And he’s dead.”
I laid the phone in my lap, held my hands over it, like it was small fire to warm my cold fingers. But I could hear him.
“Miracelle,” he said, like calling up from the bottom of some well.
“Yes,” I whispered into the air.
He said my name again, then once more before I held the phone to my ear again.
“Tell me,” he said.
I cried, a few slow moments of it with no sound, and I told him about how small Russell had looked in Della’s arms, about the wake. “It’s finished.”
“What is?”
“This place.”
I heard a chair shift. Imagined the sounds his footsteps made across a floor. “What’s your future now, Miracelle?”
I held the phone and neither of us spoke. Far away there was a train, and a hint of snow, its almost invisible flakes, fell through the shattered office window.
I cleared off his desk and took out Ruby’s tarot, looked at the cards with their fancy women in silk dresses. Black-robed men, looking wise. All cards, she said, could open up the world for you if you looked inside yourself for the answers. You know what to do, she said to me now, and I jumped, her voice so clean and clear I could see her handing me the cards one more time. I shuffled, remembering what Ruby always told me. Keep your mind on the question. See all the possible outcomes.
My past, the Shaman of Disks. A woman on a horse, riding through a desert. That was true enough. My past was an empty place I couldn’t recall. It was potato slices fried in an iron skillet and tossed into a backyard. Come-and-go light from a kerosene lamp on a table down a hall. Scraps of soap, spoonfuls of lard. And Ruby. Her candlelight and her visions. The women who came seeking spells and charms and remedies. Men ready to take whatever she had. My past had been no more my own than hers had been. World without love and a woman riding through. Della sending me to Russell, Russell sending me back to the Black Cat, and there I was, waiting for the whole bunch of them to tell me my own name.
The Crone was my future. An old woman in a black dress. Ruby, if she’d lived long enough, or Della maybe, her hair swept up and pinned in place. Two women, mourning, the both of them, hearts full of love and nowhere to give it. How many nights did Della lie awake listening for Russell’s truck, after all those years, his body part of her bones and blood. Della. Her changing-color eyes no color at all this day.
And me, longing for Cody Black to hold me tight, wanting Russell Wallen, a daddy-shoulder where I could lay my head.
I was no fortune teller. All I did was give false hopes, put stars in the eyes of lost souls. I thought of that woman named Beatrice, the one with the kitten sweatshirt back at Dill’s, her wanting nothing but someone to send her back to Mr. No Good and his cheap bottle of red wine and a promise. It’ll be all right, sweetheart, I’d said when I’d no idea what was right or not for anyone, least of all myself. I’d heard Ruby tell it again and again, how fortune could come so quick, could change you forever. Who had I ever loved for longer than a few weeks before I wanted to shed them the way a snake sheds its skin? I was a motherless child trying to remember who cut her loose in the first place.
After midnight I let myself in the back door of the diner and prowled the kitchen. What was mine in this place? A second pair of waitressing shoes. A pair of pants I could have left behind. I left the lights off, glad for the dark, the line of light under the doors to the dining room. I sat on a chair near the stove, the same old plans in my head. Highway out, road atlas and putting my finger down on a spot. But I was tired before I even began. I needed to say goodbye to something, but I hadn’t yet figured out my hellos. I sat warming my hands by the oven, dreading the road and longing for it and wishing he were here. Russell Wallen. The slouch of his black felt hat in the rain, the scratched metal flask he’d send my way as we slid into the curves of roads and parked ourselves outside juke joints whose names I couldn’t remember.
The kitchen doors swung open and Della flicked the overhead light on. She set a kettle on the stove and got the instant coffee out. She didn’t speak, but pulled up a chair of her own, sat astride it. We both stared into the stove’s open door. When the water boiled, she filled two cups.
“What do we do now?” I asked her as I poured sugar into my coffee and stirred.
“Work’s always kept me who I am,” she said.
The coffee kept my words coming. “It was you, Della. You that night she died.”
She didn’t look at me. “I’ve known it every hour since.”
“It took the both of you, you and Russell, to keep the past in a drawer,” I said.
“It took me, and her, and him. It took all of us to make the past what it was.” She raised the cup to her lips and flinched with the heat.
“And what would the world have looked like if that night hadn’t happened?” I said. “What’ll it look like now?”
How much time there’d already been, but we sat, listening to the quiet. The kitchen. The diner out there, the crowd that had come for the wake now long gone.
“Right from the very first minute you saw me,” I began, but we’d been down that road and I got quiet, watched the end of my cigarette smolder.
“God, girl.” The stove clicked as it cooled down, and she laid her hand on my bare arm. Her voice was soft. “We think it’s easier to forget than to remember. To not speak rather than say what we know.”
We sat saying nothing at all until she got up, fetched a bag from the storeroom, reached it to me. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her coveralls. “The things he died with, Miracelle.”
Inside the bag was the gun I’d left in Russell’s office. And a thing I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years. A notebook, across its cover a taped-on piece of paper. My mother’s handwriting.
Della and I didn’t talk as we headed out into the cold night. We crossed the highway, passed the steps of the warehouse where I’d often sat for cigarettes, rounded the building and made our way to the river. She shone a flashlight at our feet as we made tracks in the snow, then as we stood on the steep riverbank looking down into snow there, too, and patches of ice. The river had frozen over, its muddy waters still alive. We could hear them seething underneath winter and ready, already, for spring and whatever came after that.
We stood saying nothing, though we were both full to the brim with the world. World full of a river at night and my father’s memory. Full of times before and times that might or might not come again for both of us. Times free of what had been. Times untangled, free and clear, as free as anybody could be of whiskey and grieving, love and wanting. I watched the smoke from our cigarettes rise and disappear, little trails of gray in the frozen air, and I thought of all the roads the both of us had taken and all the ones we might still travel.
I’d sat with her in the kitchen with my mother’s book for almost an hour, then made my way to the empty dining room, where I sat with coffee, reading. I read the recipes for love potions. Ones to ignite passion. Red coxcomb and gold from desert’s dust. To make a soul remember. Lavender and calendula in equal parts. I read about what she’d wanted and not had. Head of a holler and loneliness as her daddy fiddled love songs to the wife who’d closed her heart away. Cards, charts that showed the alignment of planets, lifelines and the color of someone’s eyes after a full moon. These were the arts my mother tried to believe in, the magic at which she failed again and again as we took to the highways and set up shop in one more town. And then that night, the truest fortune she ever told. Snow will fall and fall, she said. Pages were torn away, some of them streaked with what could only have been her blood the night she died. And at the end of the journal my father’s words, his last night on earth.
“I guess this is as good a time as any,” Della said as we moved close to each other, shielding the fire from her lighter in the space between us.
She’d come out to the dining room after I’d read from the book, sat across from me and held her hands out to me like she was begging. I saw the lifeline on her palm and I want to tell how it ended. No fork in the road, no paths over the side of her hand. I want to tell how I hated her. To tell how I found one thing to take from her that she could never have back again, like she had taken Ruby from me. That wouldn’t be the truth, in the end. All I felt was a hollow place inside me where the questions had lain for so many years. All there was as we sat there was mourning. The hating I wanted became another thing, and then another until I finally reached a place inside I could live with. If that place wasn’t forgiveness, it was a place almost as necessary.
Now we stood in the cold by the river, flipping through the pages of the journal, tearing out a recipe here, a love charm there. We took a whole page from that time in the desert, how Ruby had walked the sidewalks of Willette, New Mexico, in the pitched heat of summer. Those afternoons of waiting for Russell Wallen’s love. Between us we knew there was no such thing, really, as forgiving or forgetting, but she held the lighter against the bundle of words. That moment would become in my memory a kind of spell. A spell made of fire, Della’s and mine.
The words caught and flamed up, an easy and quick brilliance that lasted only a minute. It lit up the planes and lines of Della’s face. How beautiful she was, I realized, and I met her eyes. We both looked, up and up and up. The flames made ashes and those rose too, up into the bare branches of trees. Della let go of the burning sheets but I held on, thinking on the words I’d read.. Are women always ghosts? Our bodies empty after we send our hearts out again and again, hearts made of waiting for love. Wind moved along the river, a low howl of cold and snow’s drift.
There was no final truth in that spell. Maybe I laughed or cried or recited some kid-prayer about souls before morning. Maybe, at that very last second, I hummed, even. Hummed the song from that record Ruby loved, the song she was playing over and over on the night she died. Love me in the morning, love me at night. Love me, Radiance, honey, till long past midnight. Were the souls of lovers there, weaving their way above waters of all the past? Ghosts settled at last and ready to wake us. I thought I heard Della say that. Or maybe there was nothing but silence as I let go of fire and watched the ashes catch the air, traveling past both of us toward the river, unsure of where this night would take them.