Love Letters of the Angels of Death (15 page)

“I'm out,” you say. “I broke the gravity. How do you like
that
?”

And the truth is I like it just fine. I'll never tell you, but I cheated. The truth is I used my own muscles to help rock myself away from you in the end. I let you out. The truth is nothing is broken.

Sixteen

The conduit is opening again. It happens through the phone, as it often does. This time, the caller is your Dad. And he's mad – so mad he's quiet and speaking almost a full octave below his usual pitch.

“I can't trust myself to deal with it like a civilized person,” he's telling you. “I need you to take it from here.”

“Dad thinks I'm civilized?” you ask me after you've hung up.

And I almost laugh. Your powers of civility are not what have moved your father to call you. He's not looking for decorum. He's looking for justice. I can imagine him right now – still sitting on the edge of his bed with the phone in his hand, thinking about how he'd made a mistake when he failed to name you Wormwood.

It makes me laugh because it's funny – the way the family wants you to stand up at their funerals when they're sad and say something to tilt the hurt until they can feel it just right, in a way they can manage. But when they're angry, the same people you comfort want you to stand up and say something awful – something to rattle a load of brimstone out of the sky.

That's what your Dad is calling for today. He wants brimstone. He wants it yellow-green and stinking and burning and falling all over the crummy municipal cemetery where his parents are buried under sandy gravel and a skiff of grass that never quite gets green. It's a cemetery set into the side of a hill with a view of the Rocky Mountains on one side and a custom cattle feedlot on the other – cows and flies and manure as deep as muskeg. The feedlot cemetery – it's not Butcher Hill. It's the graveyard for the dead on the other side of your family.

“I can't believe it,” you're telling me now. “I cannot believe something this ridiculous is actually happening.”

I listen as you explain how your uncles went to visit your Granddad's grave on Father's Day – just a few days ago – and discovered the headstone that had been sitting there, waiting for the end of the world, marking their father's grave for the last twenty-one years, was gone.

“Unbe-frickin'-lievable,” you say as you're looking up the number for the offices of the town that manages the Feedlot Cemetery.

The missing headstone was one of those slabs the government will award to veterans, if they ask. I don't remember seeing it myself, but you tell me it was grey granite cut into a rectangle, flecked with starry black and marked with your grandfather's name and his rank in the Canadian Armed Forces.

“Warrant officer,” your Dad has told us. “That means he earned it – in Sicily. Normandy wasn't the only beach.”

And now the headstone is gone.

Before they got too mad to deal with it, your Dad and uncles found out a cemetery groundskeeper had moved their father's stone. The almighty man with the mower said he couldn't take it anymore – that tiny space between your grandparents' headstones that made it too hard to maneuver his machinery, or whatever. So he took one of the headstones out – the smaller one, the one we got for free through a government program, the soldier's stone.

“They claim they've still got it, and it's safe and sound in a shed somewhere.” And that's all your Dad can tell us before he knows he can't say another word about it.

You've punched your way through the touch-tone menus and connected with the town hall. I can hear you speaking into the telephone. Your sentences are short and hard.

“I need to talk to the town manager – Right now – No – I understand – No, I don't need the cemetery bylaws explained to me. I need my grandfather's headstone back. I need someone to show a dead veteran some respect – Listen – You have got until two o'clock tomorrow afternoon to send me a photo of the headstone. Two o'clock – Write it down. I need proof that someone knows exactly where the headstone is and that it's undamaged – If I don't see the picture in my email inbox, I'm calling the police – I'm going to tell them the truth. I'm going to tell them the headstone has been stolen. And I'm going to send the police looking for you.”

It doesn't end there. You're on the computer for the rest of the night, writing a press release, sending it out to newspapers, pasting it up on the baffling stonewall the town administration has thrust up to protect the petty despot who cuts the grass and rearranges the monuments at the Feedlot Cemetery.

“He must be the mayor's troubled nephew or something,” you say into the computer screen. “They're all inbred and nepotistic down there. And you know what we are to them, Brigs – a family like us? We are nobodies.”

I squirm the way I always do when you get like this.

“Well,” you're still saying as we lie in bed that night, “they've messed with the wrong family of obscure little nobodies this time.”

Your press release is picked up by the daily newspaper in the city closest to the Feedlot Cemetery. They devote most of a page to the story, complete with a photo you sent of your grandfather standing by a fountain in Italy in the 1940s.

Across the country, back in Halifax, the story runs in the newspaper your grandfather used to deliver when he was a kid. Its tone is cautionary – a warning about moving out west and vanishing into oblivion.

The newspapers all quote the sound-bite you've crafted for them. “My grandfather fought the Fascists for us, so the least we can do is fight city hall for him.”

It works. There's a town councillor and then the mayor on the phone apologizing and telling you how disgusted they are and promising this never would have happened if they hadn't been away on summer holidays.

“So do you want us to have the groundskeeper re-install the marker? We'll make him waive the fifty dollar fee and do it for nothing.”

“No,” you say. “We're coming to do it ourselves. You can tell the groundskeeper he'll never touch that headstone with his bare hands ever again.”

Plans are made for me and you and your Dad to go to the Feedlot Cemetery to put the stone back on the grave. Of course, you're pleased about how it's worked out. I don't mind that. What bothers me is the way you glory in this – I'm not even sure what it is. We've come calling for justice but maybe this is more than just a settled score. Maybe it's vengeance. I'm never sorry you don't really have wings, but sometimes I'm gladder than ever – like now, when the wings on your back might not be downy and henhouse benign but hard and hooked like a bat's.

I am here with you anyway, in the sun and the high August heat, stomping the sole of my boot against the back of a shovel, cutting into the upper layer of the cemetery turf like the most brazen, daylight grave-robber ever. The real grave-robber – the one you foiled – the Feedlot Cemetery groundskeeper, is leaning against a backhoe at the entrance of the graveyard, working hard at not watching us. You're in the back of our pickup truck with a square-nosed shovel, pushing a load of gravel toward the tailgate so you can rain it down into the trough I've dug for your grandfather's stone.

Your Dad levels the gravel and tamps it down – slowly, sadly. If the gravel bed is uneven, the stone might strain and crack over time. And there'd be no one to blame for it – no one to accuse in the press release – no one but ourselves.

When it's ready, it takes all three of us to lift the granite marker into place. We set it at the foot instead of the head of your grandfather's grave – in a place flanked with swaths of grass wide enough for anyone to turn a mower without any complaints. The stone is much heavier than we expect it to be, but we manage it anyway.

We're all sitting on the ground, panting and sweating, when it's over. The air is blowing down the cemetery hill like the blast from a hair dryer, stirring up the smell of manure and hay from the feedlot.

“Hot,” you say. And you're bending, lower and lower, bowing until your cheek rests against the smooth, granite plane of the headstone itself. The granite beneath your cheek draws the heat from your flesh, diffusing it outward, away from you, across the stone's hard surface. The serif etched at the top of the W in “Warrant Officer” looks like it's about as long as the top of your thumbnail is wide, so you slide the end of your nail into it. It fits perfectly.

I hear you hum, like you're happy – or at least satisfied. “It's nice down here, Daddy,” you say. “It's cool.”

Your Dad isn't looking at you. It's been too much and he's had to pull away again.

But I'm still here. And I rest my hand on the stone, beside your face. Even in the sun, the rock is cold against my palm. Just like you, I feel something leaving me – something hot and dangerous we need to abandon here if we're ever going to be right again.

You're still on your knees with your face on the rock. But you've moved the nail of your thumb to the letter C, tracing its arc back and forth in the groove cut near the centre of a long Scottish name. It's your grandfather's name, your father's name, your name – the one you used to call yourself before you took mine.

“Feel it for yourself, Dad. It's smooth and cold and it's good.”

Your Dad is turning to look at you. He doesn't quite smile. “Come on,” he says. “Get off it. Move out of the way so I can take a picture of it for your uncles. We need proof that it's safe.”

You're slow to leave the stone. “Isn't it weird?” you begin. “It's so weird. Somewhere, in the earth there's a big, cold, billion-year-old rock like this already waiting for everyone.”

“Come on.” Your father jostles you, holding out his hand, his palm pressed right into the hollow between your shoulder blades – the flat, empty expanse of your back.

Seventeen

It's you who takes the RSVP card out of the wedding invitation envelope and mails it back marked yes. You do it even though I tell and tell you I don't want to go.

There's no arguing with you. “Forget it, dude. Deirdre is finally getting married to a man of her own. It looks like she's given up on you. It's got to be tough for you, but we need to make an effort to celebrate with her anyway.”

You make me crazy sometimes.

I never should have told you about Deirdre – the woman from my class in university who once looked at me across a table as messy as an unmade bed, strewn with notes for the group project we were working on. She sighed and hauled out that hackneyed old line – the one that goes, “How come all the good ones are married?”

“She is just a colleague,” I tell you – again. It's true – for me, anyways. It's still true even though Deirdre has gone from studying at the same school as me to working for the same big petroleum company as me.

You ignore my protest – my honest statement of a fact. When it comes to Deirdre, you always do. “I don't get this girl,” you say. “Every engineering school in the whole world is jammed full of men. She should have had her pick. Why did it have to be you?”

“It's not me.” I'm loud and petulant. “It's this guy – this Mitch guy.”

You purse your lips and hum. “I wonder if Mitch knows about you.”

You're enjoying it. It's clear. And it's not just because, all this time, Deirdre has been paying you a dazzling kind of compliment. She affirms our life together far more than she's ever threatened it.

“Of course he knows about me. Mitch works for us too,” I hurry. “He's an engineer in the Edmonton office where Deirdre works. He knows me. And I'm sure he never bothers to think about me – ever.”

You hum. “Is he tall?”

I shrug. “Tall-ish.”

“Taller than Deirdre?”

Just when I thought we were moving on to Mitch, Deirdre's future, I see you're winding the discussion back toward me after all. You want to know if Mitch is a good match for Deirdre – a better one than me. The truth is the woman looks like she could be a sister to me. She's tall and strong and pale and loud, like the lead soprano in an opera by Wagner. I do understand that Deirdre and I look good together. Why did they have to take that picture – the one from the competition where Deirdre and I were sent to represent the university? The school flew us all the way out to Halifax and made sure we were photographed at the awards ceremony – me in a cheap charcoal-coloured suit and Deirdre in red lipstick and a black cocktail dress. The photo ran in the newspaper back in Edmonton. You came home with three copies of it piled into the basket on the bottom of the baby stroller.

“This is so totally going in our scrapbook,” you cackled over the scissors as you clipped the photos out of the newspapers.

Good together – I hate to hear you say it, you and the lady at the coat check in the Halifax banquet hall who handed me Deirdre's long red dress coat saying, “I went ahead and got your wife's too while I was back there.”

I've never confessed what the coat-check lady said – not to you. But Deirdre heard it.

I try to picture Mitch, Mr. Deirdre, in my mind – nondescript, plain old Mitch from the Edmonton research and development office. I want to see him in charcoal grey with a Valkyrie on his arm.

“I think he's about her height,” I tell you.

“But you're not sure?”

“Not really.”

“Then we definitely need to go to this wedding.”

It isn't easy to do. Deirdre gets married while we're still living up north. We drive for five hours through November ice and salt to make it to the city – to the old Protestant cathedral that will look pretty in Deirdre and Mitch's wedding pictures.

The ceremony has just barely begun as we come in late and sit in the back. Deirdre is already at the front of the church. Through her veil, we can see her broad back and her long white neck.

“Look,” I whisper. “I told you they're the same height.”

The wedding itself is short and political. The officiator is actually a government cabinet minister, and he can't help but slip the name of the Premier into his remarks.

When he's finished, Mitch and Deirdre turn around to face the rest of us. They're arm in arm, pacing away from the altar. They're halfway up the aisle – a march blaring on the cathedral organ – when Deirdre stops, just for an instant. She's seen me – seen my own broad, pale face looking back at hers from the last row of the chapel. She raises the hand that isn't threaded through Mitch's arm and waves. Everyone else turns to see me. And I feel a little sick.

Your elbow stabs into my side. “Go ahead, Brigs. Wave back at her.”

I nod – once for Deirdre and once for Mitch.

When the organ stops, I can hear you laughing – everyone can.

“Did you see that?”

I hustle you out the chapel door – the other chapel door, the one Deirdre didn't use. But all the doors lead to the same foyer, the one where Deirdre and Mitch are lined up between their wedding attendants, waiting to be congratulated on their life together.

When it's our turn to greet them, you shake Deirdre's hand with both of yours and she claims she doesn't remember the time, years ago, when she met you in person once before. I cringe as she says it, but the whole story just seems to make you love her even more. You still haven't quite stepped aside before Deirdre starts to move. She's hugging me. There's a bouquet of calla lilies and ribbons pressed against my shoulder blade. I feel the heat rising from the white satin pinched beneath her arms. And I'm sick all over again.

We're out in the street, walking back through the dark city blocks towards our car. You stop laughing long enough to rise up on your tip-toes, holding out your arms like a mummy, lowering the pitch of your voice, making yourself as much like Deirdre as you can. “Oh Brigs, you came,” you quote in nothing like Deirdre's voice. “I can't tell you how much it means to me that you came all this way.”

I can't stand it. I snatch you off your feet, my arms closed around your torso, and I spin you once and then again, in circles on the slippery sidewalk. Your legs fly out straight behind you, your feet barely missing the parking meters, and you start to squeal, but the spinning takes your voice away. You've buried your face in the wool of my coat, against my shoulder.

“Stop,” I say as we turn. “Stop it.”

I'm setting you down, your feet on the top of a retaining wall that runs along the sidewalk, beneath the wedding church. The extra height of the wall brings your face close enough for me to look right into your eyes.

“Stop.” I say it again. I say it even though I know you're not jealous.

You're laughing, kissing my cheeks and my forehead, your hands on my face. “Sweet, sweet Deirdre,” you say. “My favourite rival – one weak and meaningless, just another human being – one you can halt in the middle of her own wedding march.”

“You do not have any rivals.”

“Oh, that's not it,” you interrupt. “That's not it at all.”

You're reaching for my hand, making that mark again, drawing the line along the bone from my knuckle to my wrist.

“I do have a rival. And it will never get old or fat or married. Heck, Brigs, it could be here with us right now, for all we know.”

It's this again. “Don't say it – ”

“I will say it.” You push at my chest, stepping down from the wall, walking backwards along the sidewalk, calling to me. “My one true rival – it's coming for you whether I dare to say it or not.”