George Barnes is a salt-of-the-earth man with a practical approach to life. And so he doesn’t think twice about looking on as the undertaker prepares his mother’s body. But once the body is lowered into the ground, the old woman haunts George in his dreams, not as she was in life, but as he saw her in death, with cotton balls in her eye sockets and her jaws wired shut. George is convinced that, with the mute movements of her jaws, she is accusing him. He should never have allowed his mother to be embalmed; it was an indignity to her body.
The following spring, as the dreams are subsiding, a farming accident shatters the Barnes family. While Emily Barnes is walking through the drive shed, Ford, the eldest son, throws the tractor into reverse and pins her to the wall. Faced with his wife’s body, George can’t help but remember his mother’s accusation, and so, with the help of his boys, he wraps his wife in a shroud and buries her beneath her favourite maple tree.
George has no choice but to keep the burial a secret, but this decision results in fresh hauntings which draw him into a paranoid anti-government jag. He and his sons tumble into a confrontation with the law that proves as twisted and as dark as George’s dreams.
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I’m counting ants. I wanna know how many ants is in the world. I know I can’t count all the ants in the world. That’d take longer than my life. But I can count all the ants in a square metre. Once I know that, I can figure out how many square metres of land there is in the world, which is easy enough with google, and multiply the number of ants by that number. It’s simple math, like Mom’s taught me how to do. Problem is, I could stare all day at the ground and never see but one percent of all the ants. Most are underground. I need to dig. I’ve got Dad’s measuring tape from his leather belt thingy what holds all his screwdrivers and hammers and whatnot and I’ve measured out a square metre of dirt behind the house. Now I’m taking a straight hoe from the vegetable garden and cutting a line in the ground where I’ve measured.
I hear Dad hollering. He’s always hollering about something. I’ll stick to counting ants. Maybe he’ll find me. Maybe he won’t. Don’t matter one way or the other. I hear the clomp of his boots on the gravel so I guess I’ve gotta mind whatever it is he’s hollering about.
He says I’ve gotta come to the drive shed. He really means it cuz he’s got hold of my arm and yanks me to my feet. I can barely keep up. It’s like he’s dragging me along behind. There’s three horses in the field. Probably a billion ants underneath the grass in the horse paddock. Three horses. A billion ants. That’s a ratio. Three horses weighing an average five hundred kilos. That’s fifteen hundred kilos. Wonder if a billion ants weighs fifteen hundred kilos. I bet it’s close. That’s something to think about: there’s as much ant in a field as there is horse. That’s a ratio too.
Mass is different than weight. The difference is obvious to me but Ford always struggles over this one. Ford’s dim about some things. Mass is absolute stuff. Weight is relative stuff. When we tramp into the drive shed, what I see is mass and weight. There’s Mom dead. That’s mass. And there’s Ford all heaped over her. That’s weight.
You can tell right away Mom’s dead because of the eyes. I seen dead before with grandma, but that was different. That was after they’d had a chance to fix up the body. They drained it and cleaned it and closed the eyes. I goes up to Mom and move the eyelids over the eyes so’s they don’t spook Ford and give him bad dreams. Eyes have jelly in them. I read about eyes. I read that eyes have a lens in them too, a lot like a camera, and the lens takes the light and focuses it on back of the eyeball where the retina is. The retina isn’t really a thing. It’s an area. It’s a collection of rods and cones that see different kinds of light. The rods and cones is mostly bundles of nerves wired to the optic nerve and then straight to the brain. The brain dies without oxygen. If a person don’t breathe for a couple minutes, brain cells start to die, but it’s nothing permanent. If a person don’t breathe for five minutes, that’s a different story. I read about it on the internet. Mom’s even worse than that. Dad says she’s been lying here for ten minutes now. If I don’t close the eyes, ants will crawl into them and eat all the jelly.
There’s a pool of pee around Mom’s thighs. When a body dies, the sphincter thingy lets go. I read about that too. I wonder if the word sphincter is like the word sphinx. In olden days, a sphinx would stand guard at a gate and if you wanted to get past the gate, you had to answer a riddle. In olden days, a riddle wasn’t a quickie with a punch line like Why’d the chicken cross the road? It was something more mysterious. If I was a sphinx and people wanted to get past my gate, here’s what I’d ask: when a mom dies, how does its children learn any more stuff?
Dad’s gone off to the barn and Ford ain’t doing nothing but cry over the body, so I go around back of the drive shed to take a pee. I pee on an anthill. I talk to my sphincter. I ask it a riddle: Is my pee acidic enough to burn ants? Some things is acidic and some things is caustic. Then there’s water which is right in the middle. If I held out my finger and poured pure sulphuric acid over it, the acid would burn my finger right to the bone, worse’n if I’d roasted it in a fire. The funny thing is: if I held out my finger and poured quick lime over it, which is caustic, the same thing would happen. Why is that? Why can two things so different from one another end up doing the same destruction? You’d think that if acid dissolves things, then the opposite of acid would make things whole. But that’s not how it works. Or maybe it’s just our notion of opposite don’t work.
When I go back around to the front of the drive shed, Dad’s laid out an orange tarp beside the body and he’s easing the body onto the tarp a bit at a time, first the legs, then the torso, then shimmying the middle in the pee-soaked dress. Ford won’t do a damn thing, so I have to help. Ford’s still talking like Mom’s right there in front of him and he’s made some stupid mistake like spilling a carton of juice. Dad’s trying to hush him now because he’s got something important to say. It’s kind of a set speech, the sort of speech grown-ups give when they’re trying to explain something to you in a way that makes it sound reasonable even though you know and they know there’s nothing reasonable to it at all.
Dad’s going on about how grandma died last fall. That’s when he lost his mom. Thing is: after she died, Dad went over to Beamsworth’s and watched what they did to the body, gettin’ her all ready for the funeral. He says: at first he didn’t think anything of it, seein’ as that’s how it’s always been done. That’s how it was for his dad, which is my grandpa who died when I was too little to remember. And that’s how it was for grandpa’s dad. And so on as far back as anyone can remember. But just because a thing has been done a particular way since forever is no reason it should still be done going forward. He watched what Chester did: how he put two slits in grandma, one in an artery and one in a vein, and pumped embalming fluid through her body; how he put cotton balls in her eye sockets and covered them over with eye caps; how he stapled pins into her jaws, pins with wires attached to them, wires that he twisted round and round ’til grandma’s mouth stayed shut. But afterwards, when they’d put grandma in a big wooden box and lowered her into the ground, pictures of her started to haunt Dad. He thinks maybe grandma is trying to tell him something. Maybe it’s wrong to do all this stuff to a body after it’s gone.
Dad sticks his arms under the tarp and picks up the body.
Ford says: What’re you doing?
Dad says: We’re gonna do right by your mom.
Dad carries her through the basement door of the barn and tells me to open the cooler door. When I swing it open, the room fills with the smell of thyme. Dad lays the body out on the floor, then shuts the door behind.
Ford says: What’re you doing?
Dad says: We don’t need no funeral home with cotton balls and eye caps. We don’t need no government regulations telling us we gotta pump your Mom full of toxic chemicals that cost us ten thousand dollars. We’re gonna give her a proper burial.
Dad leads us back to the house and up to their bedroom to go through Mom’s things. He pulls out dresses one by one and holds them up and asks what we think, what would be a good dress to bury Mom in. Ford thinks this is crazy, but when I nod to a yellow dress with purple flowers, Ford nods too and it’s settled. Dad pulls it off the hanger and stuffs it into an overnight bag he’s laid out on the bed. Then he stuffs in underwear and shoes and a hair clip and earrings. Dad says we need a shroud. Ford don’t know what Dad’s talking about, but I know from reading about the shroud of Turin on this web site I like. We don’t have anything that counts as a real shroud, but we have some pretty big table cloths in the linen closet, so Dad pulls out a big ivory cotton table cloth and stuffs it in with the clothes.
Downstairs, Dad’s in a rush to get back to the barn, and Ford, well he’s stumbling around in a daze, so he’ll go wherever Dad tugs him, but me, well my stomach’s grumbly cuz I didn’t eat no breakfast this morning. I pull three peanut butter cookies from the cookie jar and stuff them in my pocket and I pour myself a glass of milk which I gulp on the spot. I munch on the cookies as we walk across the field and I wipe the last crumbs from my face as we’re going into the barn.