Dog on the Cross (11 page)

She wasn't always this way. My entire childhood she thought church unnecessary, her Christianity composed of the typical clichés about doing unto others. But after Father died—the same autumn Kenneth moved down and bought his ranch—she began to go three times a week: Sunday morning and night, Wednesday evenings for potluck and singing. I thought it was her way of expressing grief. I was sixteen at the time and consoled myself with school-work and grades, applications to college. By my senior year I'd received a scholarship from the Journalism Department at the University of Oklahoma. I walked in to tell Mother and found her sitting at the table, praying over handkerchiefs and putting them in the mail.

In a way, I felt I lost her then, both parents in the same year. Never mind that she was still breathing, raising a garden, and going to lunch with friends. Whenever I stared in her eyes, got close enough to see my own reflected back, I knew something had left. Much of the time, she reminded me of the familiar house on the block that a new family moves into and makes unrecognizable. It's the same structure, same paint and lawn. But the presence of the occupants changes the building so completely that it suddenly feels from another country. It even has a different smell.

Hearing a sound like something dragging carpet, I turn to see ushers closing the sanctuary doors. They
walk down opposite aisles and take seats at the front of the church, begin to watch, along with the rest of us, a portly gentleman rise and make his way onto the platform. He has thick glasses, a thick head of hair slicked toward his crown. I can tell he feels awkward performing the service. Grasping the edges of the podium, he forces up the corners of his mouth, eyes trailing to the casket below him.

As he leads us in prayer, I think how I've seen such glances before—reverent and troubled, anxious beneath the facade—men who suppose they're looking at the shells of sinners, spirits writhing in an eternal blaze.

I
SPEND THE REST
of the afternoon trying to reach my mother, slipping away from the reception hall to a chipped pay phone in the breezeway of the community center. The phone just rings, and when I try an hour later, I get a busy signal. At home, it's the same buzzing, so that evening I drive over to check on her. I have to knock several times before she answers and lets me in.

Standing in the hallway, still in my dress clothes, I allow Mother to walk on ahead as I take a few moments to examine pictures on the walls. When I was a child, she began framing photos of our relatives. Now there are hundreds nailed up—you can track any family member from old age to youth. The ones nearest the door are black and white, photographs of
people dead by their fifties. But as you walk, the pictures become color. There are ones of mother as a very young woman, a slim girl in a flowered dress standing on the running board of a Plymouth. Next to these are photos of her brothers, a sister I was never able to meet. Janet committed suicide in her twenties, hanging herself from the cedar in front of her house. She looks a good deal like Mother, though her features are a bit darker and she's fuller through the hips. There's a nice photograph of her as a child, sitting on a pier in shorts and bathing suit, feet dangling in black water. It's one I've studied a thousand times, though I continually forget to ask Mother where it was taken. In it, Janet's laughing and glancing to her side, eyes crinkling at their corners. Someone has placed an arm on her shoulder, but here the photo cuts off. I stare at the arm and then a few more pictures, trying to find one of Kenneth. Finally, I pull myself away and walk down the hall toward the living room.

Being inside the house has become stranger of late. It sometimes strikes me that everything about my life has advanced, changed in various ways, but Mother's home is roughly identical to how it's always looked. The carpet is the same orange-and-brown shag, the shelves stacked with the same knickknacks. The television is a Sony—I bought it for her last Christmas—but you can still see the twenty-year
indentations from the old set. When I walk by the kitchen, I notice a box of cereal on the counter, this counter the same metallic flake I remember slicing bread on as a child. It takes me a while to register that the cereal—advertisements for cell phones on the front—is actually from this decade.

I walk into the living room and settle into Mother's recliner, begin listening as she tells me about her day. She's sitting on the couch beside me holding a glass of water, one leg crossed beneath her, left hand at her brow. Her fingers are cupped slightly around her eyes, as if shielding them from a glare. Although she's gained weight in recent years, she's still quite pretty—elegant eyebrows and skin, an oval face embedded with bright pupils. She's nearly seventy and for thirty years has dyed her hair jet black. I study the crushed-velvet look of it and, after she's meandered through various topics, turn the conversation toward the funeral, asking rather bluntly where she was. Not seeming to have understood my question, she gives me a puzzled look.

“Today,” I explain. “Kenneth's funeral.”

She nods, and for a moment I'm not sure she's going to respond. I'm about to begin a different approach when she tells me she's not been feeling well.

“What's wrong? Is it your stomach?”

“No, no, Spencer. Just tired. Think I'm trying to get a cold.”

She explains there's a flu going around her church, a subject that leads to a series of fairly involved stories about people I've never met.

The entire time she's talking—and it's often this way with us—I attempt subtle gestures to indicate I'd like to turn the discussion back to a previous topic: clear my throat, begin nodding, scoot to the edge of my chair. But this does nothing, and soon I'm forced to interrupt.

“I really wish you'd been able to make it,” I tell her. “The service was nice.”

She nods.

“They had more flowers than I've seen at a funeral, wreaths and stands of gardenias.”

She says it does sound nice, asks if I'd like something to drink.

“No. Really, I'm—”

“I just made a fresh pot of coffee and I have orange juice and prune. There are some beautiful apples I got on sale yesterday. Here,” she says, standing, “I want you to look at these.”

I follow her into the kitchen, trying to figure a way of expressing my disappointment without causing an argument, watch her slice an apple neither of us will eat.

She sets it on the table and we both pull back chairs, staring at the fruit, listening to the refrigerator hum. She begins to relate a conversation she had with a black man at the store, how she told him she
didn't understand why they wanted to be called “African Americans.” I nod from time to time to indicate interest.

After fifteen minutes have passed, I push back my chair and tell her I need to go, ask if she'd like me to take her to breakfast in the morning. She says she's sorry, that she can't, has to be up early to help with a yard sale at church.

“You know,” I warn her, “if you're coming down with something, maybe you ought to take it easy for a few days. You don't want to go and make it worse.”

She looks up, creases her brow, and I can tell, for a moment, she doesn't know what I'm talking about. Then her forehead relaxes, and she reaches out to squeeze my arm.

“I think I'll be just fine,” she says.

T
WO WEEKS LATER
—fast food and alimony, editorials that elicit calls from members of the city council—I'm standing in my driveway inspecting a metallic green truck. I've just learned that before he died, Uncle Kenneth visited his lawyer and had the vehicle assigned to me in his will. The truck is a 1970 Ford, an extended cab with dual exhaust and polished chrome mud flaps. It has a toolbox that runs the width of the bed, side mirrors the size of cutting boards. Paint is just beginning to flake around the gas cap, but for the most part the pickup is in excellent condition. Kenneth's attorney called me
about it yesterday afternoon, and today—still dazed, full of skepticism and interest—I woke early and had a friend drive me out to get it. Sitting next to my Volkswagen, framed by lawn and pavement, it looks horribly out of place.

I walk back inside, take a beer from the fridge, and study the truck from out my kitchen window. This morning, I was shocked to think of myself in possession of the vehicle, but standing there it has begun, almost, to grow on me. I can't imagine precisely why Kenneth willed me the pickup, but my guess is that he branded me a fellow in the cause and wanted to make a contribution. There had been several reunions where he complimented me on columns I'd written—columns on gun control or minority rights, the antiunion stance of most Oklahomans. Slowly, I begin to feel the gift is a bestowal of karmic goodwill, a sign from beyond the grave that I'm serving the gods of ethics and taste. Holding the beer toward the ceiling, I perform a silent and impromptu toast.

That evening I drive the pickup over to Mother's, park in view of the front windows. I often surprise her after dinner, offer to take her for ice cream or a walk, but today my motives are skewed. I want her to see the truck, to indicate some amount of guilt for having missed the funeral. I want her to admit how terribly judgmental she is, how self-righteous and
smug. At the very least, I want her to see that despite his lack of religion, Kenneth was a generous man.

I go up the sidewalk and tap the doorframe. I can hear the noise of television from the living room, the cadences of a preacher, so I walk around back. She spots me through the glass door and slides it open.

“Spencer,” she asks, “were you just around front?”

“Yeah,” I say, stepping into the air-conditioning, “I knocked.”

I see she already has on a housecoat and slippers, but her hair and makeup are done. “Sorry about that,” she says, laughing. “I just took out my hearing aid.” She goes over to the coffee table, turns down the television, and places a small plastic nub inside her ear. “It makes me nervous when I'm here by myself.”

I fall into the recliner, flip the handle at its side. “You feel like ice cream?”

“Do I feel what?”

“Like ice cream.”

She turns the knob on the hearing aid until it squeaks. “I'd need to put on some clothes.”

“We can just go to the drive-through if you want.”

“No. It's half melted by the time they hand it to you out that window.”

She gets up, goes into her bedroom to get dressed.
I press the mute button on the remote, noticing how different the preacher looks when you can no longer hear him. Then, suddenly remembering, I turn off the set, walk down the hall, and go back and forth among the pictures till I find the one of Janet.

“Mom,” I call. “Where was this photograph taken?”

“Where's who?”

“This picture of Aunt Janet?”

“I can't hear a word you're saying.”

I lift the frame from the wall and take it down to Mother's room. She's on the side of her bed in tan slacks and a blouse, buckling shoe straps around her ankles. When she looks up, I show her the picture.

“Where was this taken?” I ask.

“Cleveland,” she tells me, concentrating on her feet.

“Uncle Kenneth's old place?”

She nods.

“I didn't know he had a lake.”

“Well,” she grunts, “he did.”

“Was it big?”

“I never went.”

“He never invited you?”

She shakes her head, stands and smoothes the front of her slacks.

“Why did he invite Aunt Janet and not—”

“Spencer,” she interrupts, “I don't remember. That was fifty years ago. Jan was nine or ten when that was taken.”

We walk back into the living room and I watch her sort through her purse, remove the items she wants, and place them inside another. We start up the hall and I rehang the picture, open the front door. Mother steps onto the porch and pauses.

“Where's your car?” she asks.

“There,” I say, pointing toward the truck.

Mother squints, furrows her brow.

“It's Kenneth's,” I tell her. “He gave it to me in his will.”

Slowly, she cranes her neck, glaring up at me, and for a moment my stomach sinks. It's like facing an adult after you've smashed a car window. Then this feeling fades, and I begin to grow angry. I want her to drop the pettiness, the righteous indignation. I want to tell her she should act more like the person her religion is founded on. But instead, I just ask if she needs help getting in.

She shakes her head.

“Mother—”

“You go without me.”

“Please don't be like that.”

“Spencer,” she says, squeezing past, “I'm not going to hear any more about it.”

She goes inside, leaves the door cracked a few inches. Soon, I hear the television come back on, the preacher's Southern lilt. I reach inside, turn the lock, close the door to, and walk back down the steps.

By the time I pull away from the curb, I'm so
angry my hands are shaking. I stop at the intersection, consider going back and having her explain to me why she's too good to ride in a dead man's truck. I sit with the engine idling, watching as a pack of children runs down the lawn next to me. They move in single file, their arms extended like wings, the one at the rear trailing a toy on a length of string. They circle and then come about, crossing the street, going up the opposite lawn, disappearing behind a hedge. I look after them for a while and then reach up, draw down the gearshift and put it into drive.

T
ODAY IS
S
UNDAY,
hot and bright. I make coffee and lounge in my sweats, read till a quarter past noon.

At one, I walk outside and circle the pickup. I open the passenger door and slide across the seat, noticing the layer of dust on the dashboard, the interior dull-looking and grim. I swipe a finger across it, rub the powder into my thumb. Opening the ashtray, I find a number of butts, the glove box brimming with receipts and playing cards, a tire gauge. I go back in the house and rifle through the utility closet. Ten minutes later I'm outside again, garden hose and bucket, Armor All and chamois. I wash the truck from license plate to hood, use my shop vac on the carpet.