Fowl Weather (4 page)

“You look out of breath.”

“It's that stupid hose. It keeps getting stuck.”

“It catches on anything,” she told me. “Does it ever stick on the door for you?”

I grimaced and headed back toward the duck pen. Linda had carefully shopped for an all-weather ultraflexible hose that wouldn't twist, tangle, or crease no matter how we abused it. Technology proved no match for the sorcery of the hose demon, which transformed our pricey “Kink-Not” model into the “Kink-Now.” After turning on the laundry tub spigot full blast, I slumped back
outside to meet the tiniest trickle of hot water. A fold had mysteriously formed in the sophisticated petrochemical hose exterior and its woven miracle-fiber interior near the basement entrance, and no amount of untwisting, untangling, or uncreasing via thrashing, flailing, or whirling would release the water flow. Once more I scaled the hill and dragged myself toward the house as our goose Hailey honked curses in my direction.

After I had melted the ice in front of both duck-pen doors, filled the pools, replenished the food, and herded the ducks and geese to their respective homes, I decided it was time to do something about the doors. They had begun to stick to the ground at the slightest provocation. The solution was trimming an inch off their bottoms for the second time in a couple of years. Either the land was rising, and we would soon have a mountain in our backyard, or the doors were sinking and would be swallowed by the earth's crust in a matter of months.

I was lying on my stomach, making the last awkward cut with a reciprocating saw, when Linda appeared on the back deck, calling me with a worried voice. “Joan's on the phone,” she told me. “It must be something serious. She said, ‘I need to talk to my brother right now.' She never calls you that.”

I rushed past her into the house.

M
Y MOM SAT
on the gold chair near the picture window, leaning forward. Her upper lip was white. I had never seen anyone with a white upper lip before. “Don't stand up, Bette,” warned Maureen, an administrative nurse who lived down the block from my parents. “You look like you might faint.”

“What am I going to do?” my mother asked.

Maureen explained to me and my sister Joan that my father had probably died from a heart attack. “With older people, the aorta
wall can be very thin. When your dad fell, the aorta probably burst.” He and my mom had been shoveling snow off the second-story porch of their house, and he had slipped on the landing on his way back inside. I wanted to ask why they would be out doing something like that at their ages—my dad, Bob, was eighty-four and my mom, Bette, was eighty-one—but it was a pointless kind of question, and I knew the answer anyway. Both of them had always enjoyed good health, except for my mother's occasional memory glitches, and they were proud of their independence. Just a few years earlier, my parents had ridden elephants across a river in Thailand to a place my father had called “the village of the long-necked women” with the authority of having heard the tour guide so describe it.

My father had made it as far as the bed before dying. His untidy posture, with legs hanging over the side, told me he was no longer of this world. A glance at the closet revealed two straight rows of polished shoes lurking in the gloom and belts hanging from an organizer on the door. Below the belts was a collection of ties. In my early years, my dad had barely set foot outside without wearing a tie, even while edging the lawn or washing the car. But he was genial rather than rigid, keeping things in their places and marking the calendar weeks ahead with tasks like “Clean Electric Razor” as a way of reinforcing his faith in the orderliness of the world. A friend of mine had once compared him to Beaver Cleaver's dad. That only worked if you subtracted the sanctimoniousness that made Ward a bit of a pill and replaced it with my father's good nature. I leaned down and hugged him. Air trapped in his lungs wheezed as I pressed against him, startling me for the briefest flash into supposing he might yawn, rub his eyes, and ultimately chuckle at my mom's mistaken conclusion about his condition.

For years I had worried about this day, waking up at night and
obsessing about losing one of my parents, while mice stirred between the walls and tree limbs creaked in the wind. Now that the dreaded event had arrived and my father had departed, I had turned into a monstrous soap bubble, hardly even there—an elongated, thin-skinned, air-filled film. Barely holding my shape, I floated toward the hairline cracks in the bedroom ceiling, dodged a wooden alligator that my grandpa had made me as a child, and steered toward the window on the landing to watch icicles melting. Photographs from the South Dakota Badlands and Monument Valley lined the walls on both sides of the stairs, and I drifted down a treacherous mountain pass.

I surfaced in the middle of a conversation between Maureen and my sister that made me realize that my father's fall had plunged us into a thicket of procedure. “The funeral home won't take him until you make a police report, so you have to call the police first,” she told us. “Then call the funeral home. They'll send an ambulance for him and work with the coroner's office on the death certificate.”

“Death certificate,” said Joan.

“You'll need several copies,” said the nurse. “You send one to his insurance carrier, if he had life insurance. The bank will need a copy, and so will your family lawyer. For the will.”

“Dying is a complicated business,” I remarked to nobody in particular, just to experience the reassurance of my voice vibrating in my head cavities. Death was beginning to seem distressingly bureaucratic as Maureen reeled off suggestions for composing the obituary, contacting the newspaper, and mailing notices to farflung friends. Rather than confronting the immensity of death, we had run smack into a level of detail somewhere between applying for a driver's license and buying a home. My father would have approved. He would have been in his element with all the planning,
while I was completely out of my depth. I was happy for the presence of my sister, who had already headed for the phone while I fought feeling overwhelmed by both minutiae and immensity. Only the middle ground of not-much-happening suited me. In my inability to act, I was approaching my mother's frozen state. But she wasn't merely in shock. She was diminished. My father had done everything for her, and with his life force gone, half of her own had vanished.

“The police are on their way,” said Joan from a rocking chair in the dining room. Over her head hung a pair of wall-mounted, diecast ashtrays from the Keeler Brass Company, where my dad had once worked as an engineer. One was shaped like a New England fisherman's head; the other commemorated the Bicentennial. “Do you want me to call the funeral home?”

“If you want to,” said my mom. The rocking chair creaked as Joan leaned forward to flip through a notebook of phone numbers. So many of my parents' friends had died over the last few years that my dad had paper-clipped a business card from VanderLaan & Sons Funeral Home to one of the notebook pages to streamline checking visitation hours.

As I took my mother's hand, her quiet panic flowed down my arm and into my stomach, sucking the blood from my legs. I sat beside her, on the hassock. Watching Joan work the telephone calmed me down, as did knowing that my organizational-genius sister Bette Ann would soon be driving in from Fort Wayne. I suddenly felt a little less at sea as I decided that the protocols surrounding death were more of a salvation than a burden. Though losing my father was a unique and enormous event to me, millions of people had traveled this same path before. The funeral-home visitation, church service, reception, grave-site ritual, and all the other obligations were like motel stays in the course of a marathon
road trip. Their sense of ordinariness helped fill the terrifying vacuum.

“I can't believe how suddenly he went,” my mom told me.

“At least he didn't go through a long illness,” I replied after a moment. It was all I could manage to say. “He would have hated to have had a stroke.”

“He's in heaven with the Lord,” said Linda, with more uplifting sentiment than I could have mustered. Then she switched gears to the practical. “Mom, would you like a cup of tea?”

She nodded.

I looked out the window to see Maureen standing on a porch across the street. As she spoke to someone on the other side of the door, someone half hidden in gloom, like my father's shoes, she turned her body toward my parents' house and gestured.

The simplicity of a cup of tea appealed to me. “I'll have one, too,” I said.

I
NEEDED TO GET
my mind off my dad. That evening I tried working on my music-review column for
The Beat
magazine. A day earlier, I had started an introduction, grousing about the terrible winter weather and the forty-inch-high snowpack in our backyard. These complaints suddenly seemed like small beans, but I couldn't come up with anything better. My brain refused to budge from my parents' living room and my mother's white upper lip. I reached for the
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather,
thinking I might find a snowfall fact to quote, but the book had vanished. Just that morning while listening to the BBC before breakfast, I had plopped it onto the cheap plastic parson's table next to my shortwave radio. Now it was just plain gone.

I became obsessed with finding it. Perhaps because I was powerless to do anything about the loss of my father, I wanted the
small victory of holding the book in my hands again. The two stacks of CDs on the tabletop couldn't have concealed the thick, compact field guide even if they had conspired to do so, but I shuffled through them anyway. On the floor beside my chair sat a small pile of books. I examined each book carefully, assuring myself that the field guide hadn't disguised itself as a history of Congolese music or a Swedish murder mystery. I widened my search to a heap of papers on my desk, a mound of mail on the file cabinet, and other detritus scattered about the room. I checked the bookshelves, too—then the air conditioner, windowsills, and the stairs. Just to be on the safe side, I checked the parson's table again. The field guide had to be there, but it wasn't.

In the unlikely event that I had spirited the book downstairs, I decided to ask Linda if she had seen it. I didn't reach this decision lightly. She was always asking me where her things had gone, and I would answer, “I don't have any dealings with your Chap Stick” or “Your snow pants are entirely your own affair.” Her eyeglasses got misplaced the most often. She literally had a basketful of them. Her prescription glasses were for walking-around seeing and driving. Then she had drugstore magnifying eyeglasses for watching television and stronger pairs of magnifiers for reading.

“Why can't you just use your prescription glasses?” I once asked her. “They're blended bifocals, aren't they?”

“The angle is wrong when I'm lying on the floor,” she replied. “The blended part of the bifocal is too low.”

Since her drugstore glasses were made of easily scratched plastic, she usually kept more than one pair of each magnification in the basket, where they could all rub up against one another and compound the scratching problem—if they made it into the basket at all. One fateful evening, I received the scare of my life upon walking into the living room to find Linda on her faux-sheepskin
rug reading Thomas Hardy while wearing two pairs of eyeglasses at the same time, one pair on top of the other. “I can't find the 3.5-power glasses, so I'm using two pairs of 1.75s,” she explained.

“Make sure and do that the next time people are over,” I told her. “Or in a restaurant. I'd love to see the reaction in a restaurant.”

Linda hadn't seen the missing field guide. We had field guides for trees, mushrooms, birds, birds' nests, fossils, insects, butterflies, the night sky, and Michigan wildflowers. What we needed was a field guide for locating the
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather.

I
RETURNED FROM
the funeral home in a bad mood. That was understandable. A good mood just wasn't part of the funeral-home experience. But the visitation hadn't turned out to be the wrenching experience I had anticipated, because I hadn't had much of an opportunity to wrench. Despite our official status as the bereaved family, we'd been expected to play the part of good hosts. That meant my mom, my two sisters, and I ended up consoling visitors instead of the other way around, and I had no idea who most of the visitors were.

“Such a shock,” said a man leaning against the most unusual walker I had ever seen. Snatching my hand, he clasped it briefly against one of the tubular metal wings that projected from either side; then he rolled toward my mother on large wheels. Behind him, his wife towed her portable oxygen canister. “We're so sorry,” she told me with a quivering mouth. I touched her lightly on the shoulder and said it was okay.

Strangers continued filing in as “South Rampart Street Parade” tootled from hidden ceiling speakers in tribute to my father's love of big band music. Supported by my unflappable sister Bette Ann—Bett excelled in social situations—and Joan, who concealed
whatever awkwardness she might have felt, I fulfilled my duties blandly enough to avoid monopolizing any guest. For the most part, I kept my composure by keeping my distance from the softly lit figure of my father in the casket and acting as gatekeeper to the room. Just when I thought I would emerge unscathed from my close encounters with humanity, a woman I hadn't seen in decades hailed me. Thin as a straw and with straw-colored hair to match, she was an old classmate of mine from Blessed Sacrament Elementary School, Eileen Kucek.

After telling me how sorry she was to hear about my dad, she said, “Have you heard anything from Marcie Jaglowski?”

“Uh, no,” I told her. I knew the name but couldn't connect it to a face. “Should I?”