Your mom called to tell me, R is selling the farmhouse. She wanted to know if I wanted our wedding album and a box of pictures. Then there is the matter of our furniture from the last two places we lived. I kept some but you shipped the rest out to the old family place where it has sat in the dusty quiet ever since.
I called R, she said that she’d hold back whatever I wanted… the auctioneer came out and they photographed everything and sent it to me. I showed my husband (the h) and he said let’s go get that stuff. So we flew to the Midwest and we rented a 20 ft truck and came out to the farm with a dolly and a bunch of moving blankets and got to work.
But first we went to the cemetery. It wasn’t that large so I thought I could just find you. But there were multiple sections. The original cemetery was filled with marble stones in family plots, the ground uneven beneath the feet, the rows tight. I kept finding myself standing on the lumpy sticky sunken dirt of a grave. Oh sorry I’d say, ridiculously. It started to rain as I wandered the rows of graves.
As I tromped through the mud that sucked at my feet it began to rain in earnest. Around us the bare limbed trees were slick, black against a lowering sky. I worried that someone will see us - two people dressed in black, driving a big empty truck into a graveyard with out-of-state license plates - and call the sheriff about grave robbers or stone stealers.
I found your grandma and grandpa’s stone, at the back of the oldest section, where many of the stones have worn smooth, the etching no longer legible. Excited, I turn back to the truck where my h waited in case someone comes, he could move it to make room.
“I found Granma B!” I yell. But there is no stone for you.
I’m just trying to find you, I wail, and the sky opens up. Drearily I trudge down the next section, shivering, my pants sticking to me, a raft of mud on both shoes, my thin jacket clinging to my arms. Rain ran in little streams off the bill of my baseball hat. I brought a rain hat but forgot all about it. The h drove me to the new sections and he walked one end while I walked another, drenched to the bone, inspecting stones. We looked like bedraggled crows as we stalked through the graves. My h identifies what graves that were dug a year ago look like, and I walk through all the rows again. Nada.
Finally I realized, maybe there is no stone yet. R has had a lot to manage.I text your mom, and she confirms - no stone yet. “He’s next to Grandma B,” she writes. I had been standing over you - in fact on you - as I cried out your name to the streaming skies. I guess I’ll stop bitching about signs now.
Out at the farmhouse the furniture that once surrounded our lives sat in the stillness of decades. Remarkably there was almost no damage to any of it - the leather couch is still beautiful, the silk covered chair unstained, unscarred though there has been no heat or air conditioning in the old place for years upon years upon years. There are signs of mice but nothing chewed up. There were small piles of dead flies by each window and cobwebs everywhere.
It tookus a day and a half to load what we can. The work was hard and steady. The midwestern spring weather was changeable as ever - at one point birds sang and the sun shone and we were comfortable in light jackets as we work. Then the sky got heavy with low gray clouds and the rain returned in spurts and spatters, then cleared up again only for the wind to come screaming between the outbuildings and flattening the tall brown prairie grasses. The second morning there was a brief snow flurry because of course. Most of the time we could see our breath, a slightly spooky thing while inside the house, especially at night when the darkness was so complete I contemplated sleeping with my headlamp on. We lit candles to burn away the smell of ancient dust.
We pitched a tent in the living room because it was far too cold to sleep outside. First we had to clear it of furniture - ours, your dad’s, grandma’s - a task that took hours.
Getting up in the middle of the night I unzipped the tent and picked my way through a carnival of couches and chairs and end tables to the back door to go to the bathroom. Outside the moon was so bright I cast a shadow. The sky was vast with stars. On the horizon a bank of red lights blink in unison and after staring awhile I realized they are from the huge wind turbines now scattered across the flat landscape, like giant red-eyed scarecrows guarding the corn.
Back in the farmhouse my headlamp picked out a familiar shape - Grandma M’s old divan (to Grandma a couch was never a couch but a divan or a davenport). If ever there was a time and place for a ghost to make an appearance it would be in the dead of night in that abandoned farmhouse surrounded by empty acres bordered by winter-bare trees. I could easily imagine my headlamp illuminating Grandma sitting there next to your dad, where they sat in so many of the pictures filling the old photo albums packed away in the boxes surrounding me. Hi honey, she’d say. There she is! your dad would say.
But the couch was unoccupied and the only thing moving in the light I swept around the night-saturated rooms were motes of dust. The doorways yawned black and scary so I lit a candle against the dark pressing so closely in. I was too tired and cold to be scared and when my husband got up to go to the bathroom and blew out the candles before re-entering the tent, I did not stop him.
Of course your ghost was everywhere, in everything. Looking through your books I broke down crying. All that intellect, all that genius, all that knowledge just gone, I sobbed to the h. But it’s not true, really - your kids have your smarts, your deep influence on people like Daryl and Rob and yes me - you live on, in each of us. And my h now - he looked through your texts and took your thick The Electrician’s Handbook, and a few chemistry and calculus tomes.
Later, looking at your music and sound equipment, he was admiring. Wow, he said. C___ really took his music seriously, an observation so true it speared right through the heart of me and I had to go outside and stand under the cold spring sky, where puffy white clouds played bumper cars.
While we worked the birds sang in a loud and constant chorus - robins and wrens and mockingbirds, all birds you could imitate perfectly. Your whistling was one of those unexpected things about you, something other people would have to dig to know about you. D didn’t know, nor T, both surprised such a thing could be true about you. Maybe only your mom and me know, now - but surely you whistled for your kids. How delighted they would have been, a father who can magically repeat any songbird’s song to the point they’d sometimes fly down from the trees to have a closer look at you.
Uncle Larry came out while we packed and had a chat. It was so good to see him. I got tearful hearing him talk about their place out at the creek, the rental price of land, what acres he was still farming. I’m not sure why, I guess because I could feel, from him and me, the knowledge this would be the last time we’d ever see each other again. We admired the brand new pole barn, one of your last projects before getting sick. It looks beautiful, rearing clean and red among the flat fields dark with spring mud.
When I tell people about the trip they suggest I will find closure in it, but I did not, do not. I think that I will never be done with this grief, though I will, I promise, put it to good use, treating my life like the precious gift it is, which I haven’t always. Time is so short. You have to be happy, your mom told me when you broke the news of our divorce. How I cried at that. She was right, and you were too. You deserved so many more years, my dear.