“Then they’ll fit in your bag okay,” he says. “Good thing you’re on wheels, though. The ashes don’t weigh much but the jars weigh a ton.”
He wheels. He does not go so far as to put his earbuds back in, but as they head toward the door, he does begin to bop his head to the beat coming from them. His shoulders jiggle, too, like something you’d want to have a handyman come fix if it was in your house.
Outside, the air is brisk, and the sky above the treeless glare of the parking lot almost as huge as the sky Grandpa Amos described. Lennie dons his leather jacket, inserting his player-bearing arm into its sleeve first. She tells him she wants to stop at a florist.
T
he graveyard is not what it was in Grandpa Amos’s time. The little fence is still there, though, and in good repair; and, contrary to the predictions of Hattie’s Chinese relatives, someone has been keeping after things. The whole affair is larger than Hattie remembered, too—an acre or so, with what look to Hattie like some lovely old elms. Leafless, but never mind. They’re something a body doesn’t see too often, what with Dutch elm disease—that distinctive vase shape. Maybe these are a replacement cultivar? They seem, in any case, a miracle. Less miraculously, a shopping mall has sprung up since the last time Hattie visited, so that the oldest gravestones face loading docks and dumpsters. Gaping doorways, containers. Trucks. The word “façade” has never been Hattie’s favorite; but how far preferable a façade to this bald fact. She focuses on the enormous bunch of roses in her arms, bringing them to her face as she begins walking the grassy aisles between the graves. The ground gives underfoot; has the weather been as weirdly warm here as it’s been in Riverlake? Men hurl objects into a dumpster—
bong!
—as she begins placing a rose in front of each gravestone. A different color for each; she did clean the florist out. The older gravestones pitch and lean. They are of thinner, darker stone than the newer ones, elaborately lettered and irregularly spaced. The newer ones, in contrast, are both more monumental and more organized, the family having grown better at anticipating its space needs with time, it seems—less apt to find themselves with an extra body to work in, or a no-show. How is that? Anyway, the ground, too, grows slowly more even, until it begins to resemble a putting green. And here come, among the many names she doesn’t know well, some names she does. Her great-great-grandparents. Her great-grandparents. Their many siblings and cousins and spouses and children—so many children, grown up and not: This one age seven. This one age two. Baby, three weeks. Baby, six weeks. Baby, one week. Babies, babies, babies. Though how many Amoses and Samuels and Jeremiahs and Joshuas, too! The female names are also mostly biblical—Sarah and Mary and Ruth—but with some family names mixed in: Hattie, like her. Georgia. Caroline, like her mother and grandmother. The men are born and named by the Book.
Overhead, amid the thickening clouds, a biplane drones by, its propellers spinning. Loud, but not nearly as loud as the loading at the shopping mall.
Bong!
Distractions. And yet as Hattie moves down the line, she feels a dawning orientation all the same—an awareness, not so much of what her mother would have called her
ultimate dependence
, as of the vastness of death—its unreasonable, infinite creep. Of what a different scale people are in comparison—mere nano-things. And how improbable our ability to absorb energy and use it, much less to reason and dream and imagine one another—one another’s thoughts, even, one another’s feelings.
Testimony to something
, her mother would say. And,
Must not there be a giver of this gift?
Hattie only wishes she were as sure, as she goes up and down the rows, her flower bundle lightening. Must there?
A snow sprinkle. Tiny flakes melting as soon as they hit the ground. Or, no: They disappear even before that, midair. Turn into mist. So the ground must be warm, then—from retained heat or microbial activity, or both. It’s a comforting idea, somehow.
But is she driving Lennie crazy, lingering like this? No, he has his music. Boxes to unload, too. An athletic boy, his stiff hairs bending, now, with moisture. Hattie can feel drops on her face, in her hair; she wipes them away.
How quickly the clouds have piled up, thick and gray; what a brilliant light must shine above them. But down here, it’s just the changeable midwestern weather—not unlike what they see in Riverlake. The nimbostratus clouds bringing real snow, now, and a hush she appreciates as she comes to the newest stones, with the sharpest carving: Grandma Caroline. Grandpa Amos—her sweet grandpa Amos. Uncle Jeremy and Susan—she stands before these last gravestones a good while, too. On his, their children wrote,
WHO WANTED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANT TO BE HUMAN
. And on hers:
WHO UNDERSTOOD
.
Two flowers for each of them. Uncle Jeremy and Just Susan, Hattie used to call them because Susan did always insist on being called that—just Susan.
And here: Hattie’s mother’s grave—lying just where it should. And next to it, Hattie’s father’s grave. Lying just where it should, too, as if everyone knew her parents would end up here.
Māma, Bàba
.
Their headstones are the only ones with Chinese characters, of course—her parents’ Chinese names, Gĕ Kāilìng and Kŏng Lìngwén, carved, top to bottom, along the right edge of the stones in red. And in one corner of each stone, a clump of bamboo. Bamboo done by chisel! Amazing.
Bamboo, which bends but does not break.
Māma, Bàba
.
She closes her eyes. It seems to her she has been painting her way all along to this moment—retreating that she might inch forward, like a snail. How sorry she is to have missed their old age! And how can they never have met Josh, or Joe? She wishes she had been there when they died—together at least, she heard. Not long after they finally escaped the Mainland; of his ’n’ her tuberculosis. The end of their story is unreal to Hattie. Far easier to picture are her parents as she knew them: young and modern and rebellious. They were never going to grow old; they were never going to weaken; they would sooner have been dead than be buried in a Christian cemetery.
Or in Qufu, either, probably
—Fallen leaves return to their roots
notwithstanding. But would they have minded being reburied there? Or, more accurately, re-reburied—?
No one more agreeable than the dead
, Lee used to say.
More trucks. The rest of the flowers. Hattie catches Lennie’s eye. He leaves his earbuds to dangle as he maneuvers a large cardboard box over to the graves. Out of this comes an aluminum folding table, on top of which he places a large red silk square that threatens to fly or slip off, and two smaller squares of shiny gold that, though of a heavier weave, are likewise too slippery to stay put. He anchors them all with dishes: a fried fish, a pork knuckle. A poor roasted chicken with its neck skewered and wound into an S. Dried fruit; fresh fruit; candy; cake. Cups of wine. In front of the food, he places two pillar candles and a jar full of sand in which to stick incense; and in front of the table, to one side, some long sticks of sugarcane. Then he starts to cut through the grass. Jabbing a half-moon spade into the ground, stepping on it, rocking it. He fashions a kind of trapdoor, then rolls this back, snipping the grass roots with a pair of clippers as he goes. Does he really know just where Hattie’s father’s urn lies? It does seem so, for in goes the shovel and out pops the jar without fanfare, the dirt raining away. Next, Hattie’s mother’s jar. The jars are sturdy white ceramic with blue markings—two feet high or so, maybe fifteen inches in diameter. Sealed, pockmarked, a little dirty, and quite extraordinarily unextraordinary; they could be for pickled vegetables. Hattie can see where there might once have been writing—her parents’ names, presumably—but the writing is too faint to make out now. How to keep them straight? She stoops to pick one up, but Lennie signals her to wait. Some rummaging and, ah—he produces some wet naps from a plastic tub and cleans the urns with these. Then—sparing her the bending—he presents the urns to her.
“In China, women aren’t allowed to touch anything,” he says. “But this is a free country, right?”
She accepts her mother’s urn, kissing it lightly; the jar is cold, the glaze pitted and clammy. Lennie takes it from her and presents her with the other urn, her father’s. She kisses this, too, coming away this time with a little something on her lips. Grit. She wipes it away.
Twins.
Lennie sets the urns on the gold silk squares on the table. His hair drips as he leans forward; he flicks it back with a snap.
“Bones, not ashes,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“See how tall the jars are?”
“Yes.”
“The tall jars are for bones.”
“Ah.”
“They’re put back in the same way they were originally.”
“Originally?”
“In the womb.”
“Ah. In fetal position, you mean.”
He nods. “If you want, we can open a jar and see how they’re doing.”
Open a jar?
“No thanks,” she says.
“It shouldn’t smell,” Lennie reassures her. “It’s only when we open graves, you know, that things are—” He gestures with his unbraceleted hand.
“You mean there’s still flesh?”
“Sometimes. You wouldn’t believe the smell. That’s the hardest part of the job, the smell. My dad used to say I’d get used to it, but I never did. He says that’s because I was born here. He says real Chinese can get used to anything.”
Bong!
The trees are frosted white now, and the ledges of the tombstones. Lenny’s shoulders and hair, too, and his collar, and the flaps of his jacket pockets. A world of the ledged and ledgeless.
“You pick the bones out of the rotting flesh?” Part of Hattie wants Lennie to shut up, but she’s curious, too.
“Only if there’s no choice. Mostly we pour in some rice wine and leave the body to steep. Crack the lid for air. That speeds up the decomp rate. Even better’s if you let the insects and animals do their thing, but most people aren’t into that. A lot of other bone pickers use chemicals these days, but we do things the old-fashioned way. It’s not as fast as the chemicals, but hey. It’s organic.”
“Good for you.”
Lennie rakes the dirt back into the graves, then rolls the grass back down and stomps. By spring the cuts will have knit themselves up; it will be hard to tell that any of this went on. But does that make it all right? Is this what her parents would have wanted?
Do you not see how people want? Do you not see how people hurt?
Lennie begins to wrap the jars in the damp yellow squares.
“Can we mark them first, to keep them straight?” asks Hattie.
“Sure.” Lennie searches through his box and finds a blue marker.
“Permanent ink?”
He nods.
She writes the characters for
Māma
and
Bàba
, as neatly as she can, on the bottom of the jars.
Māma, Bàba
. Thinking as she writes how she had not known before Joe and Lee died that you could see life leave a person—that you could see their color drain away, and the light leave their eyes. But there it was. Their hearts stopped, then their brains stopped. And then never mind that their bones and skin cells went on a while longer, nonsensically. Long before their bodies cooled, they were gone.
Māma, Bàba
.
Now Hattie sees Greta and Grace and Sophy, all in jars. Chhung and Mum and Sarun and Gift. Carter and Candy and Beth and Ginny; Everett and Judy Tell-All and Jill Jenkins. Tina and Johnson. Flora. Herself. In fact, if Josh pots her up, it will more likely be in ash form. Still, it is everyone’s bones she sees, in white jars with blue trim, on a long table. Reveille and Annie. After all that walking, all that talking, all those experiments and cookies and e-mails. Their names are in blue magic marker; their silk squares ripple under them.
“Leaving the headstones, or taking them?” asks Lennie.
Taking them?
“We can arrange relocation if you like,” he goes on.
“Leave them,” she says. “Please.”
“You want firecrackers?”
To advertise what they’re doing?
“No, thank you.”
“How about offering respects? You’re supposed to kneel and
kē tóu
”—he pulls the pillow out of the box and begins to demonstrate. But Hattie grew up in China; she doesn’t need to be shown how to stand in front of the table, or how to raise the incense sticks high in the air, or how to step forward and place them in the incense holder. She backs up, kneeling a bit creakily on the cushion—the damp—then touches her forehead to the wet grass.
Māma, Bàba
.
Tears, snow.
She bows twice more.
Lennie offers her a hand up and a handkerchief for her forehead.
“When I was little, we had chants,” she says, after a moment. “A monk or two, sometimes more.”
“Those were the good old days,” says Lennie.
He wraps the yellow bundles in bubble wrap, fastening the wrap with packing tape. The ripping of the tape is loud and harsh.
“You should put them in your luggage and check them,” he says. “If you carry them on, you might have trouble getting through security—these days, especially. Unless you have their death certificates? That can be a help.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, then, you should check them. Some people feel the bones should stay right with you; but others think the spirits understand that these are modern times. And your parents have been stuck here for so long, they’re probably willing to do anything to spring the coop.”
“Okay.” She nods. Whatever.
“These going to the Mainland?”
She nods again.
“Then you’ll want to have them cremated. Otherwise you could have trouble getting them into the country.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Of course, there’s almost always someone you can pay off. As I’m guessing you know.”
“I’ll have them cremated.”
He turns his collar up. “If you’re going to have them cremated, I should probably point out that we can take care of it, if you like. That is, if you don’t have a local crematorium you’d prefer.”