Nouspique Books

Take the Page 99 Test:

Ford Maddox Ford said the best way to tell if a new book is any good is to flip to page 99 and start reading.  If, by the bottom of the page, you feel the urge to move on to page 100, then you should buy the book.  Now that we have etexts, page numbers are a little artificial, but Ford’s test still seems to work.  In this case, I’ve copied the text from page 99 of The Land’s pdf version:

______________

from him on a big stump of a log that hasn’t been split yet for firewood.

You were gonna bash her head in with a brick, weren’t you?

Yeah, so?

You were really gonna do it.

Justin looks at me with his inscrutable blue eyes, and when I look back into them I can’t tell whether I see innocence or evil. Watching Justin, I’m beginning to think there’s only a fine line between the two. It’s like thinking about angels and devils. We think angels are these nice beings of light who give us comfort and watch over us. I’d like to think Mom is an angel now, and that she watches over me. But then there’s the angel of death—not the sort of angel you’d want to give you comfort or to watch over you. Come to think of it, maybe I’m the angel of death, and maybe Justin’s a devil, my mirror, watching me from the far side of the river that flows between us.

You were really gonna do it.

Dad told me to.

No he didn’t.

Sure he did.

You mean to tell me that while I’m walking over our land with that nice lady, Dad pulls you to one side and says: “Son, as soon as you get a chance, bash her over the head with a brick”? Is that what he said?

No. Dad said something different.

Well what did he tell you?

Justin sits himself up straight on the bench and recites something by heart, something I’ve never heard before, and when it comes out of his mouth, it has a hollow tinny sound, like he’s a robot with a metal head. This is what he says:  “Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.”

Dad teach you that?

_______________

Still not sure?  Settle in with the first 20 pages and have yourself a good read.  You can either read it below, or download the sample and read it on your favourite ereader as a pdf, epub or kindle-readable document.

I tramp through the field behind the house, a gentle slope to a spongy patch of ground where the water settles after a steady rain, then a long rise past the old maple to the barn. There’s that sucking sound of my boots pulling out from the mud, like the earth is breathing, but with raspy emphysema lungs. Em watches me from the kitchen window. I can feel her gaze. It was her as prodded me to visit Beamsworth’s. I gotta make the trip, I know, but I’d rather put it off ’til tomorrow, what with all the chores I have to do, getting ready for market on Saturday. Em says I should take a bin to Beamsworth’s as a thank-you—a nice touch—not the sort of thing I’d think up all on my own. I haven’t got a bin ready, so I’ll have to make one up over at the barn. I been lugging two shopping bags full of turnips, butternut squashes and gourds which I’ll dump into one of our thirty litre blue plastic bins. The squashes is heavy buggers and they sink me further into the mud than I’d like to go. My boots is damp enough already because they been sitting outside in the rain—not directly in the rain, mind—I got more sense’n that—but under the shelter of the side porch, outside nonetheless so’s to attract the damp.

The barn’s old, but I been through it beam by beam and know it’s sound. It don’t look it on the outside because all the boards is weathered to a bare bone grey, but on the inside things look different. Take the posts for example: big pillars the width of a man’s waist, cut from trees the likes of which they don’t grow no more, and the wood as blond and as fresh as the day it was milled. Then there’s the floor down below, where my dad used to keep pigs, poured concrete, a pristine lime, all of it sloping to the south end of the barn and a drain. We used to hose it down every day, and all the water and all the pig shit would slue its way to the south and, in the end I guess, go back into the land it come from. No money in pigs no more so I don’t follow that routine nowadays, though out of habit I still like to hose down the floor from time to time. There’s no cause for it to get dirty except as we sometimes kill a deer crossing the property and hang the carcass above the drain. I ain’t a hunter but deer’s a bloody nuisance trampling through the gardens, besides which a little venison don’t hurt none in the diet.

When we got out of the pig business and into the organics, market gardening and such, I built myself a room on the south side of the barn where some of the sties used to be, a refrigeration unit the size of a bedroom, walls made of plywood and lots and lots of insulation. That way we can pick lettuce and such on a Monday and keep it fresh for market the next Saturday. I got it set up to manage the humidity, too, since there ain’t much point keeping vegetables cool through the week if they’re gonna turn soggy on you in the meantime. After I dump the squash and whatnot into a blue bin, I haul open the big door to the cooler and flick on the light. Not much left this late in the season, but I still manage to force some arugula in the greenhouse out back. Tubers do well. We still dig up hills of potatoes, and there’s rows of beets, though the tops can turn to mush if there’s a frost, and we grow all different colours of carrots—orange and purple and white and red. I throw in a bag of potatoes, a bunch of beets and a variety of carrots, and top off the bin with a plastic baggy of mixed greens. It’s a good offering. I snap on the lid and haul the bin out to the truck parked in the lane beside the barn.

The truck’s a Ford, a pickup truck. Seems inevitable we’d own a Ford. Our first-born came into this world in the cab of a Ford pick-up truck some thirteen years ago—a son, and healthy despite the ruckus at his arrival. We named him Ford so’s no one, least of all him, would ever forget the circumstances of his coming into the world. What we didn’t figure on was how that would lock us into a brand of truck. Can’t very well name your boy Ford then go out two years later and buy a GM, now can you? And now that we’ve gone organic, things have only got worse. We feel the pressure to go all green and ditch the big trucks and gas-guzzling equipment. But it’s hard. The farm’s pretty remote from things and it’s a rough land—hilly, and dirt roads that’s none too kind to a suspension. So far, they ain’t built the hybrid that could take the land around here. Which means, at least for now, we’ll keep buying Ford pick-up trucks, and our oldest can rest easy knowing that we haven’t abandoned his namesake. Or is he the truck’s namesake? I can never keep that one straight.

Beamsworth’s is on the edge of town, kitty-corner to the old stone church and the cemetery behind. Dad’s buried there, and Mom soon enough. I guess it’s a nice place to rest. We all used to go to the church there, parking on a Sunday morning in the gravel by the road running alongside, and we’d walk past all the headstones, me in my scuffed black shoes and dress pants that never stayed straightways on my hips more’n five minutes, and Mom and Dad in their good outfits. So I guess it’s a familiar place. It’s comfortable. I never visited Dad’s gravesite all on my own. Only when Mom wanted me to take her there, wanted a strong arm to lean on, knowing one day she’d end up in that ground too. The soil in the cemetery ain’t as good as the soil on my land. I got a blacker soil, richer. They say it was dumped there by glaciers in the last ice age. I wouldn’t know. But in the cemetery it’s a sandier soil, well-drained, which means it’s drier. Better for cedar hedges and simple shrubberies. Mom always said she’d like some kind of evergreen near her headstone. I’m thinking maybe a juniper.

It’s noon, too early in the day for anything to be going on at Beamsworth’s. I lug the plastic bin up the front steps and past the sign that says Beamsworth’s is now a proud member of the Winter Family. Since when did that sign go up? I’ll have to ask Chester about it. All’s quiet in the foyer and there ain’t no one in the office or the visiting room or the chapel. Chester must be downstairs in the embalming room. I take the elevator down. No one ever rides the elevator except to move bodies to or from the basement, but I don’t feel like hauling a heavy bin of vegetables down the stairs.

When I poke my head into the embalming room, sure enough, there’s Chester, decked out in his white coat. Even though Chester and I went to school together, he looks at least ten years older‘n me. Emily once joked that for a guy who embalms people, he’s not very well-preserved. He has a full head of hair, but it went prematurely grey and now has the look of ash to it. While I spend most of my time doing physical kinds of work, Chester’s life has turned out more sedentary-like, blessing him with a tidy gut that oozes over the top of his belt and with arms that waggle like an old woman’s when he wears short-sleeved shirts. The only time he spends on his feet is times like now when he’s down in the embalming room handling a corpse. There’s some heavy lifting, too, like when he’s transporting a body from the hospital or the coroner’s office. Otherwise, his life as an undertaker is no different than any other pencil-pusher’s. He has a business to run and so he has to do all those bean-counting kinds of things you’d expect of any business.

Brought you some fresh veggies, I says.  I set the bin on the floor by the nearest embalming table.

You didn’t have to trouble yourself with that.

Now, now, Em and I wanted to show our appreciation.

Well it sure is good of you.

Chester pulls open the stainless steel door to the cooler. It looks like the door to an oversized fridge, one of those European fridges with a modern design and dull reflective surface. When the door swings wide I’m relieved to see that the cooler is empty except for a six-pack of beer and Chester’s lunchbox on the top shelf. He motions for me to hoist the bin onto the bottom shelf and he shuts the door. There’s a thermometer on the wall beside the cooler says it’s four degrees centigrade inside—a little too frosty for vegetables but perfect for a cold beer.

Chester and I don’t have a whole lot to do with one another. We both go to the Rotary Club so we see each other there and sometimes at church, too, though I ain’t so religious these days. Em says I should go more often, says it’ll be a comfort, especially now that Mom’s gone and I need to adjust to life being the oldest generation—no one before me and all that. She thinks one of these days I’m gonna come face to face with my own mortality, the way I come face to face with a coyote the other night, only with mortality, a little pop-gun of a .22 won’t be any help; what I need is a clear shot of religion. That’s what she says. Chester’s like that too, maybe because he sees all sorts drifting through his establishment haven’t got a notion which end is right-way up in this life of ours. People anchor themselves to other people, which is fine until those other people die, then what? But when people anchor themselves to religion, other people die but the ones left behind stay anchored. Chester’s all about a personal relationship with Jesus. That’s his anchor. The way he talks about Jesus, you’d swear they’re next door neighbours. Hell, you’d swear they swap wives every other month. Except for the small detail about Chester’s not having a wife. I just lost my mom yesterday and that don’t upset my universe half as much as I know it would if I heard that Chester was getting married. That would be a tear in the cosmic order of everything. Mountains would crumble to the sea and volcanoes would spew the devil’s bile. Poor Chester still lives with his mom and I think that’s made him a bit soft. I think that goes a long way to explaining his personal relationship with Jesus. When he asks me what’s my anchor if not Jesus, I tell him it’s my work on the farm, the smell of the soil after a summer’s rain, it’s knowing I bring something good from the land. He scowls at me, but I don’t recall him ever refusing any of the food I drop off on my way through town.

Well, Chester’n’ me, we may not see eye to eye on some things, but the two of us, we go back before memory, and that counts for something. He was the brother I never had. We played hockey together as kids and we camped out in the north wood lot and we went to 4H in our teens. Now there was a puzzle. Chester, the son of an undertaker, going to 4H. The kids didn’t mind none because everybody knew him from school, but some of the parents raised an eyebrow when they heard how the Beamsworth boy was in 4H. That took some rationalizing, usually with the help of St. Paul, something about undertaking being a lot like farming. I guess putting people in the ground is supposed to be a lot like planting seeds. Personally, I think it’s a lot more like fertilizing the seeds, but I’m not half as clever as St. Paul so what do I know? In any event, Jesus notwithstanding, and the lack of a wife and the presence of flab, I like Chester enough to find myself once a month or so in the basement of his establishment sharing a beer and shooting the shit.

Over the years, I got to know a thing or two about the undertaking business, or at least the part about embalming because it’s in the embalming room where we spend all our time. It’s a quiet, out-of-the-way place and perfect for a visit. Chester has two porcelain tables, each set with one end near a big sink like the laundry tub back home. Surgical tools sit on a counter, laid out in a row beside a machine that looks like it could have been assembled by a drunken technician who mixed up the parts of an old-style stereo, a slushie-maker, and a ham radio. This is the pump Chester uses to force embalming fluids into the carotid artery and to push all the blood out the jugular vein and through a hose into the sink. There’s a poisonous antiseptic smell to everything and it don’t matter what Chester do to sweeten things up in the room, that smell hangs over everything. In a matter-of-fact way, I come to accept it as the smell of death. The smell of death ain’t rot and it ain’t putrescence or decomp, it’s this formaldehyde frog-in-a-bottle smell that gets pumped into the corpse’s circulatory system and into its body cavity. I think Chester’s got so used to it he don’t notice the strangeness of it. Even now, he’s standing there with his latex gloves and munching on a roast beef sandwich.

Chester hands me a beer and takes one for himself. I twist off the cap and throw it into a garbage can filled with reddish balls of cotton batting. One of the tables is occupied. A vaguely female form lies underneath a white cloth.

Wanna see how it’s coming?

I wave him off, then check myself. It hadn’t occurred to me until this instant that the form under the white cloth is my mom. I must seem acutely thick to Chester. Or is this normal? I feel like all my senses work, but maybe I’m missing great gobs of information. You’d think when there’s a body in a room, that would be the first thing you notice when you go in, but here I am, stuffing a bin full of vegetables into a mortuary cooler, cracking open a beer, and only then noticing the shroud laid over the form on the embalming table.

That my mom?

Chester nods. I’ve finished the embalming. Sutured. Washed down. But there’s still the cosmetic work to do. Maybe later’s best.

No, no. I can look now.

You know, why don’t we leave it ’til Marge has–

It’s fine, Ches.

You sure now?

Sure.

We stand to either side of the table at about the level of Mom’s shoulders. Chester reaches over the end of the table where the sheet hangs almost to the sink, and taking hold of the end, draws it up and over the head and down far enough that I can see the bare shoulders and clavicles and the very tops of the “Y” incision from the autopsy. Chester apologizes for revealing that bit, but I wave my hands. It’s not like he’s dealing with some pansy-assed fruitcake who’s gonna turn all blubbery because his mom’s laid out on a slab. It is what it is.

Here’s what it is:

In front of me is an old woman, barely recognizable, skin almost translucent, like brittle paper, slender, no meat on her bones, not in life, not in death, grey hair gathered in a ball behind her head and held in place with a mess of net and pins, hawkish nose pointing down to a gaping mouth. Chester says sorry about the mouth. Hasn’t had time to seal it shut. Says that was next on his list. I tell him not to worry about it. If I’m going to drop in unannounced like this, I can’t very well expect him to apologize for not being finished, now can I? Then I get curious and ask how he plans to seal the mouth shut. Chester turns to the counter where he’s lined up all his surgical instruments and searches out a tool that looks like a glue gun.

This here’s an injector needle gun. He waves it in the air and smiles.

Show me.

What. Now? On your mom?

No, on you.

Chester don’t get sarcasm, or can’t think of nothing to do with it except scowl. He loads up the gun with ammo—needles and wire—and taking hold of mom’s jaw, fires two rounds, one above, one below, leaving two tails of wire which he winds around each other like the ends of a twist-tie, tighter and tighter until the teeth almost come together. He pushes the wires inside the mouth and adjusts the lips so the mouth is closed.

Marge will get it right when she does the make up.

It looks like Mom is smiling in her sleep, but it’s more a sly grin, as if she’s been dreaming something lewd and it’s come out in her look.

I’ve gotta put in the eye caps too. Chester sets what looks like two oversized contact lenses on the sheet.  You know what?  I’ll do this later.

I’m the sort who wants to know how everything works, like when I was a kid and pulled apart Dad’s gas-powered mower. And more’n that, if I’m gonna be the one paying the bill, then I think I’m entitled to know what Chester’s doing to my mom. I’m starting to think maybe Chester’s more squeamish than me about all this. What Chester don’t want me to see is how Mom’s eye sockets is stuffed with cotton so when we lay her out for viewing, her eyes don’t have that sunken look to them. The eye caps have a sticky backing to keep the eyelids closed, otherwise they might pop open during the viewing and there’d be these two white cotton batting eyeballs staring at the guests. I guess Chester don’t want those eyeballs staring at me either. Must think I’m sensitive or something. But it is what it is.

Closer to the centre of town is a florist named Alan Trueblood. He ain’t a Rotarian but I give him my business all the same, mostly because he’s the only florist in town, though a good one. That’s who Mom used when Dad passed, so I figure she’d like to have the same for herself. Stands to reason. When I step into the shop, the bell tinkles and the smell of roses and whatnot fills my sinuses and gets my eyes to watering. Alan is a little fruity, if you know what I mean, but a good soul, and he comes from behind the counter to offer his condolences, she was a good woman, no doubt I’ll miss her dearly, gone to a better place, happens to us all someday, in God’s hands, and surely she deserves the very best floral arrangement. He pulls out a catalogue of wreaths and fancy potted arrangements for me to look at, but my eyes is streaming and I can barely see the pictures. He figures I’m all broke up about things whereas it’s his damn product what’s doing this to my eyes. I point to a good arrangement of spring flowers and pussy willow branches and such and I plunk down enough money to cover the cost of shipping it direct to Beamsworth’s and I high-tail it out of there before a sneezing fit starts. Alan chases me onto the sidewalk, waving a card I’m supposed to fill out with some kind of a message.

What am I supposed to say?

He smiles and shrugs:  I don’t know.   Whatever you feel in your heart.

I stare through the blur of my tearing eyes.  Well, what do other people say?

Oh, some say things like:   we miss you mom.  Or you could do like it’s from your boys:  we love you grandma. Something like that.

I tell him I like the grandma thing, like it’s from the boys. It’s important to make them feel included in all this.

Once I’ve settled all of that with Alan the florist, I drive out of town and back to the farm. I hate the town. It makes me feel claustrophobic. I like the fields and the lines of trees and the stone fences and barns.

Too bad I have to go back into town tonight. We all do. There’s two hours of visitation upstairs at Beamsworth’s when we’ll all have to stand around the casket admiring Chester’s handiwork, abusing our nostrils with the pollen and formaldehyde and plywood glue, smiling like idiots and sharing platitudes none of us believes but all of us says anyways because we don’t got the wherewithal to come up with anything better to say.

When I pull into the drive, Ford is by the side door playing fetch with the dog but otherwise looking spiffied up for tonight. His hair’s still wet from a bath and shampoo. He’s getting to be a big kid now, not the sort who has a sudden growth spurt and turns overnight into a bean pole, more the sort who spends a couple years enlarging all the way around, not so’s you’d notice from one day to the next, but so’s you’d notice after a couple years how you had a man standing in front of you instead of a boy. He has thick tawny hair like his mom, and a lot of his mannerisms, from the way he talks to the way he throws the stick for Woofie to fetch, they borrow something from her too. He’s precise and there’s an orderliness to him. It comes out even in simple things, like the way his hair falls on his head, the neat line of his nose and of his jaw, the snap of his wrist when he lets fly the stick.

I call out to him and he waves. I ask how he’s doing and he says fine. I ask if he wants to talk and he says no.

Em’s inside with Justin. They’ve struck a deal. Justin don’t want a bath, but he has to get cleaned up for the visitation. Em has agreed to read extra words to him from the dictionary and he’s agreed in return to climb into the tub. Justin’s odd that way. He gets preoccupied with words. He collects stones too, but only certain kinds. He has criteria for his stones, but we can’t penetrate to whatever place in his brain the criteria live. We bring him stones as a way to connect, but it don’t matter whether they’re smooth or rough, round or jagged, grey or coloured, he rejects them all. Yet he has shoe boxes full of stones he’s discovered in secret moments out in the drive or tramping through the fields, and somehow these hold for him a cosmic importance.

We home-school. There ain’t no other way. Ford would be fine going on the bus and spending the day with kids his own age. But Justin?

Sometimes Em has the kids write for her. Justin’s stories go like this:

Once upon a time there was an ancillary king. He used to be an adjunctive king but lost his crown. He used to be an adjudicative king before that, but kept going backwards until he abdicated.

At first you think it’s clever. There’s a kind of sense to it. I’m no whiz at grammar but I know enough to write a sentence with a subject and a whatever-it-is and action in between. Justin knows how to put all the parts of the sentence together and he can put the right parts in the right places. But he ain’t got so much as spit for an idea what they mean. It’s like running a meat grinder. He knows what meat is and he knows how to turn the handle. But he don’t have a clue what to do with all the stuff coming out the other end.

Justin knows I’m a dad. But he don’t know I’m HIS dad. A dad is a label, a category. And that’s what I am. As far as I can tell, I’m no more to him than a rock in his shoe box or a word in his dictionary. Em loves him desperately. God help me, I know I’m supposed to feel for him the way Em do, but I just can’t bring myself to it. I guess Em and I are different. To be truthful, I’m a bit afraid of Justin. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if he has a soul. It’s not that I think he’s possessed by something that pushed him out and took his place, more that he was born hollow and some lesser creature took shelter inside. He’s a coyote living a strange and feral logic. Or a bird of prey that floats in the updrafts of a world all his own. But I never tell Em these things.

I walk in all cheerful, or as cheerful as I can be when we’re getting ready for a funeral, and give the boy a kiss on the top of his head. He’s got darker hair, like mine, and slate-blue eyes that stare at you in a detached way that could just as easily be ageless wisdom as infantile slobbering. Justin has the dictionary open at the B’s.

After an early supper, we stand in the reception room at Beamsworth’s, door shut to keep out visitors until exactly seven o’clock, four of us gathered around the casket. Ford is moved but composed. You can tell by his face how he’s struggling to be a man about things. Em puts an arm around his shoulder and draws him close.

It’s okay honey, she says. It’s okay to cry.

Ford says good-bye to his grandma. He touches her on the wrist folded across her torso, not on the skin, but on the sleeve. There’s the hint of a tear in the corner of each eye, but he never squeezes them out fully formed.

Em takes Justin’s hand and leads him closer to the casket.

Let’s say good-bye to Grandma.

Justin pokes at her shoulder like he might poke at a dead dog with a stick, then, satisfied she’s dead, he wanders to the window and fiddles with the venetian blind: open, closed, up, down.

Chester’s got Mom done up in a violet dress with a high collar that hides the sutures. A good choice. Em found it when she was going through her things. Pearl earrings and matching necklace, something Dad gave her before I was born. What gets me is the smoothness of the skin on her cheeks. I was getting used to the wrinkles, and now, in death, they’ve disappeared and a kind of false youth has settled onto her face instead. The lips are a bit thinner than I would have liked, but all in all Chester’s done a good job.

When Chester’s sure we’re ready, he throws open the doors to visitors. There ain’t many people. It’s a small town, and we home-school and keep to ourselves. There are some friends of Mom’s from the home where she lived. A trickle from the church. A few from the Rotary Club who never knew Mom but come out of respect for me. It’s the usual crap. Stuff about how she lived a good life, it was her time, now she can be with Walter, or God, or both of them, like she’s flying off to a celestial three-way. The time comes for all of us. How’d she go? In her sleep? Ah, well, that’s lovely. She went peaceful then. Much easier to think about it knowing things followed the natural order. She looks so lifelike lying there. Chalk up another good one for Ches. She would’ve been pleased.

After two hours of this shit, I’m exhausted. It don’t seem like much, but there’s quite a strain to talking up nonsense with people you don’t know no better’n the man on the receiving end of your tax return each April. This is my mom and, to be honest, except for Em and the boys, there’s no one I care to be with when I mark her passing. I know I’m supposed to be sociable. I know all these others only want to pay their respects. But I don’t care to talk to them.

The only relief comes the next day at the funeral, a small affair in the room next to this. Ruth-Anne Hendershot brings her two and sits in the back. The older girl is Ford’s age and grown-up enough to slip into the platitude bullshit like the rest of us, but the younger girl is seven or eight and talks in a big whisper through the whole service, question after question about why we’re doing what we’re doing and where’s the old lady going. I expect some folks find the girl annoying, but it puts a smile on my face. Ruth-Anne is mortified and afterwards apologizes for her daughter but I thank her; it’s the only natural thing about the whole service.

It’s the minister from the church who conducts the service. He’s a real porker who can barely fit into his vestments, and that’s saying something given that vestments are supposed to be loose-fitting one-size-fits-all get-ups. We had to meet with him yesterday, supposedly for a dose of pastoral care is what they call it, and to help plan the service. But really what he did was get us reminiscing about Mom so’s he’d have some personal tidbits to share in the service without having to admit he didn’t know Mom from a hole in the ground. He was sneaky that way. There’s readings about breathing life into dry bones and the resurrection of the body at the end of time and whatnot. There’s hymns, too, old stand-bys that you ain’t allowed to sing unless there’s a thin-sounding wheezer of an organ somewheres in the background.

When it’s all done, some of my recruits from the Rotary Club walk the casket to a side door and load it into the hearse and Chester drives it across the road. The cemetery’s close enough that, except for a few of the biddies from Mom’s residence, we don’t bother to drive. There ain’t enough at the funeral to hold up traffic in town. Then again, it ain’t much of a town for traffic. You could walk through the streets blindfolded without much fear. At the graveside, Justin is fascinated by the motors that lower the casket into the ground. While the minister is trying to say his piece (or is it peace?), Justin gets louder and louder, explaining to Em how a motor is just a generator in reverse, electricity and magnets to produce motion instead of motion and magnets to produce electricity. The minister don’t know what to make of Justin and gives Em the kind of look that might burn a hole through a brick wall. Em tries to shush the boy but he won’t let up. She whispers to him how they’re putting Grandma into the ground now, but he comes back in a big voice about how Grandma’s somewhere else now and what they’re putting in the ground is just a body and a box made of wood. The boy’s right. I can tell by the looks circling the graveside that people think he’s being insensitive. But it’s Justin and he don’t know from sensitive. Besides which he’s right. Can’t argue with right.

Funny what things grab your attention at a time like this. For me, it’s Ford and the way he and that Hendershot girl—what’s her name? Maggie? Marnie?—the way they make goo eyes at one another across the hole in the ground. Ruth-Anne home-schools too. Single-mom with insurance proceeds took a house in the centre of town where she could work half days at the library and spend the other half teaching her girls about the love of Jesus Christ and the Lord God Almighty. That’s the difference between us and Ruth-Anne—we home-school for a real reason. Well, once a week, Em or Ruth-Anne or one of a handful of other home-schoolers in the county, they get together at somebody’s home or go on a field trip so’s the kids don’t get lonesome with their book learning at the dining room table. Socialization’s well and good until they get to that age when the hormones start acting up. Then, at least in my opinion, it would be better to lock them all up in fruit cellars and attics and such until the storm passes and they can move safely into adulthood. But until somebody heeds my advice, I’ve gotta watch Ford’s face melt to mush every time I look up from the dirt at my feet to scan the handful of mourners at the graveside.

After Ches has lowered the box into the ground, and after I’ve dropped a clod onto the box with a dull wet thud, we drift towards the church and into the basement where the ladies have set out a table of cookies and squares and a coffee urn and pots of tea in silly crocheted cosies. The ladies is almost as many as us, so the conversation teeters towards church gossip, which seems to be the way things go when you find yourself stuck in a church basement. The minister comes around to make sure the family’s okay and to quietly fish for his honorarium. Part of me wants to make him work for it, but the bigger part of me wants the conversation to be done with, so I reach to my inside pocket and pull out an envelope with the cheque already made out. Ford’s off in a corner with that Marnie girl, making pretend grief to pull sympathy out of the poor girl the way he’d suck caramel out of a candy. Meanwhile Justin’s found the furnace room and is clanking around the pipes trying to figure out how it all works. Intake and output, filters and vents, fans and motors. That’s all he’ll talk about on the drive home and for half the afternoon.