The Flicker of Old Dreams Read online

  And now the pastor calls on Mrs. Purvis to say some words about her husband. She stands before the guests in a funny hat, clear she rarely wears one as she’s constantly touching and adjusting it. She unfolds something from her pocket, shoulders slumped, no words. Snow dusts the piece of notebook paper, and still she says nothing, but pulls her shoulders straight, her mouth tight. Whatever emotion she had when she wrote on this piece of paper, she will not show it now.

  “Me and Al have only left Petroleum once in our lives. We went to a wedding in a big city that lit up at night. We saw all we were without—malls, neon lights, stylish clothes. People teased us about our lot, and when we came home we saw, in comparison, what a small house we live in, the mismatched furniture and dishes, the wind showing us where all the leaks and cracks are. I was glad to be home. The truth is we don’t need as much as people tell us we need.”

  A small child tugs at his mother’s coat.

  “Albert, like a number of you, spent many winters at the hotel. He used to call it boarding school, and he referred to his room as his dorm, where he made lifelong friends. The Petroleum Hotel is where he learned to blow bubbles with gum, how to whistle with two fingers, and how to do back handsprings down the hallway after bedtime, for which he was rightly whipped. This town made him who he . . . was.”

  She fixes something under her coat and continues. “I know some of you worked with him at the grain elevator when the railroad made its last run through Petroleum. None of us knew then what would become of us or our town. And somehow we’ve carried on, and I know I’ll find a way to carry on after this loss, too.”

  A snowflake melts on her nose but she refuses to wipe it dry.

  “I missed Al this morning. I missed the smell of his coffee at breakfast. I don’t drink the stuff—it burns a hole in my stomach—but sometimes I make it just so the house smells like he’s with me.

  “I miss the way he looks over the newspaper to read me the editorial and then tells me all the ways he disagrees with it because he wants me to know his opinions and he wants to know mine. I miss his little cough whenever he put his head on the pillow. Now falling asleep is too quiet. And in the spring I’ll miss him coming inside after he’s mown the lawn, tracking cut grass through the house. Most days are made up of simple moments, and he was a part of my sense of comfort and belonging here.”

  She folds her paper again, finished now, and moves back to her chair without looking up. The pastor reaches out to touch her shoulder but she’s already slipped past and doesn’t seem to want any more attention drawn to herself or the hat.

  The pastor spreads his arms as if reaching around all of us. “We therefore commit the body of Albert Purvis to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

  The singing begins. It’s a hymn I don’t know—usually our customers go for “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” or “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The others don’t seem to know this one either, not past the first verse anyway, as most are just humming. By the third verse, only the pastor is singing. Over his shoulder, I see a rattlesnake, head sliced off, hanging over the fence, and wonder who will keep the rattle.

  Snow melts on the empty metal seats as it lands, and guests begin to set flowers on the casket. A small child sets a snowball there and gets smacked on the bottom—the first tears of this service.

  30

  At the close of the service, those who carried the casket place their boutonnieres on top of it. Most have come from work, their hair matted with dust and sweat and flecks of hay. Larry Rogers is among them, and I look at both gloved hands until I see an empty pocket of leather the missing finger would have filled.

  The pastor lowers Mr. Purvis into the ground with the crane. After, Pop shakes hands with guests, while I walk inside the chain-link fence, collecting trash, plugging divots, folding chairs, rolling carpet. The pale sun climbs higher in the sky, though the air is dramatically colder than only a few moments ago.

  The widow, escorted at each elbow, takes small, slow steps toward the flurry of these next few hours—all the guests and condolences and food. But none of this is closure or even reality, which will be much quieter, like walking through the same motions of your old life and having none of it feel familiar.

  This is what I can’t help but think as I see her hunched figure in the backseat of a truck. That when the flowers have wilted and the neighbors’ plates of baked goods have been washed and returned, Mrs. Purvis will eat alone by her husband’s empty chair, sort through mail that still comes in his name, and what does she do with all the quiet? Maybe she can’t get out of her mind the stranger in the other hospital bed, forever behind the drawn curtain, the only one in the room when her husband died. Maybe she hates that she never learned his name or the name of the nurse who rubbed circles into her back until someone she knew arrived. Maybe she looks at the beautiful notes of sympathy she’s received and wonders how those same, heartbroken friends can return so quickly to conversations about gas prices and basketball scores, as if the world were still the same.

  “Good work today,” my father calls out over the noise of the crane, waving thanks to Pastor Lundy, who gets paid extra to fill the hole.

  “Can I help you with the chairs?” Pete asks, already lifting one and collapsing it flat.

  I can hardly look at him.

  “Did you do what you had to do?” he asks, reaching for a second chair.

  My yes is as sharp as the words he asked me to speak to Robert.

  “That’s a girl,” he says.

  “Will I see you at the Purvises?” Pop asks.

  “I’ll stop in,” he says. “Can’t stay long.”

  He turns to me with a pleased smile, each arm passed through several flattened chairs.

  “I’ll leave these beside your van,” Pete says.

  My father, who’s been rolling the carpet, tries to stand up when his knee catches. He tries again and slips on an icy patch.

  “Do you need help?” I call, racing over.

  “No,” he says, grimacing as he stands. “Let’s finish up here.”

  I watch him favor one leg as he helps move chairs and fake grass. Last of all, we collect the flowers Pop will deliver to Mrs. Purvis.

  “How’s your knee?” I ask him.

  “Fine,” he says. And then an admission, “It’ll be just fine.”

  “This was a nice service,” I tell Pop as he bundles lilies and mums in his arms.

  “Yes,” he says. “A good one.”

  He hands me a bouquet, the petals cold and wet against my skin.

  “Why the lunchbox?” I ask as we walk toward the hearse.

  He drops a flower but doesn’t bend down for it.

  “Albert used to keep it by the front door, ready to head out to the old job,” Pop says. “I guess she wanted to remind them both that, somewhere inside, he is still that man.”

  You see fliers sometimes about seminars that’ll retrain workers for new jobs. Mostly they want you to learn how to use a computer and relocate to a bigger town. The guys you see walking ahead of us toward their trucks, that’s not who they are. Ask most of these guys what they do for a living and they’ll name jobs they haven’t done in over twenty years. Their bodies hold the memory of their former work, like phantom limbs.

  “I hope Doris has this kind of turnout,” I say, as Pop opens the back of his truck.

  “Each funeral is different,” he says, which is his way of saying Doris will likely pay the price for the town’s feelings about Robert.

  The wind tears petals from our flowers as we hurry to lay them inside. Then I follow my father’s flag back to town.

  I can’t help but think it sometimes, how he and the pastor and I are literally burying Petroleum. Every day there’s work for us at the funeral home means the community has become a little smaller. One more home gone dark. One more truck rusting in a yard.

  Pop takes the road to the Purvises’
house while I head home, past the unemployed, forever lingering outside the diner. One last turn to Crooked Hill Road, and I find the upper windows of the hotel lit up with one glum face looking out during what I assume is homework time. When I pull into our driveway, there are more cigarette butts.

  31

  The day after a funeral service, I scrub and vacuum and put everything in order. You’d be surprised at the state of our house after the mourners leave. Already, today, I’ve had to turn off bathroom faucets, throw out scraps of toilet paper, and itemize petty thefts—missing candles, floral arrangements, whole boxes of tissues, even items from the fridge.

  Pop will spend the day making follow-up phone calls and visits. He’s good at this, though it wears him out. Comforting stoics is not easy work.

  We eat omelets for dinner, needing a break from elk. Our mealtime is quiet. A breather. I don’t know what tires me out more about funerals—the bursts of activity or the long periods of waiting. But sometimes it is two or three days before I recover.

  Pop pours himself a drink.

  “Did you ever check on Doris?” I ask as he starts to leave the room.

  He slowly nods his head.

  “She was asleep on the sofa when I stopped by. I didn’t want to wake her.” He swirls his drink. “She’s quite thin,” he says.

  He opens his mouth as if to say more and then closes it again, always cautious when observations cross over into gossip. He starts to walk up the stairs, anxious, I think, for that first sip.

  “Robert asked if you might stop over,” he says, pausing on a step. “I think he may have decided to go with my ideas for the service.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s feeling too many obligations right now,” he says. “You can see he’s overwhelmed.”

  “Let me clean up dinner first,” I say. “Then I’ll check in with him.”

  I walk casually into the kitchen and bend over in relief. He wants to talk. I’m no longer caught between him and my father. I breathe and breathe.

  Once the kitchen is clean, I dress in hat, scarf, and parka.

  I call upstairs, “I’m heading out, Pop.”

  “You have to go to the side door.”

  “Why?”

  I put on my gloves.

  “Front room’s so crowded with her tarps and easels,” he says, “you can’t open the door.”

  Crossing the street, I raise my scarf over my face. Stray snowflakes whiz by here and there. I haven’t knocked on the Goldens’ door since my trick-or-treating days.

  As I walk up the driveway, I nearly trip on chicken wire and netting that have been stacked behind the back wheel of Robert’s truck. More lay by the driver’s side. I have to watch my feet the whole way. At the side door, I knock lightly.

  Robert answers. He’s wearing an undershirt and jeans. Without the jacket, he’s much thinner with unmuscular arms. He seems to have shaved in bad lighting, a strip of stubble across one cheek.

  Before he can speak, Doris calls from another room. “Who’s there? Robert? Has someone come to the door?”

  I try to speak quietly. “My father said you wanted to talk to me?”

  “Robert, is . . . ?” There’s a spasm of coughs and heaves for breath.

  “Oh, my God,” I whisper. “Is she all right?”

  “Hold on, Ma,” he calls, but the coughing and wheezing continues. “Maybe you’d better come in.”

  He holds the door open, the memory of our angry words between us as I step inside.

  We follow the sound of his mother’s coughing.

  The wooden floor is slanted, everything on a tilt, and spattered in so many colors of paint as if it’s been stepped in, sat in, and tracked about the house. We walk into the living room and the spots of paint continue to the carpet, even the arm of the couch. Doris sits at one end, wearing a green knit cap and the housedress I have seen so often.

  The room feels damp, a humidifier misting in one corner. A portable oxygen tank beside the couch sounds like the machine that fills balloons at the fair. Robert props a pillow behind his mother and adjusts a tube in her nose, taking out, then reinserting the little prongs into her nostrils, smoothing the tubes that stretch from her nose and over her ears like glasses.

  “There,” he says. “Wasn’t your worst.”

  His mother tries to push him aside to see who has come into the room.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mary,” she says in a thin voice that doesn’t sound finished with its coughing fit.

  Doris leans forward, moving a cup and a bottle of hand lotion to one side of the coffee table but giving up on the pile of newspapers and random clutter.

  “I’m not prepared for guests,” she says, leaning back into the couch again.

  “Oh, I’m not staying,” I say.

  “Nonsense,” she says. “Sit. Sit here.”

  I step over slippers and a magazine to reach the couch. I sit down at the far end. The fabric is sticky.

  Up close, the woman I’m used to seeing through the window has a gray tint to her skin, a rattle in her breath. Her milky eyes look unusually large against such a thin face. There seems to be so little of her beneath all that fabric. But there is a charm to the paint splattered on her housedress and how her face is wiped clean of makeup the way I would see her in my workroom: honest, like the dead.

  “I’m sorry for the mess,” she says, seeing my fingers pick at the fabric. “I’m sloppy with my acrylics.”

  Finished paint-by-numbers, some still wet, lean against the baseboard.

  “It’s like an art gallery in here,” I say.

  Her smile is tentative, as if trying to decide if I’m giving a compliment or criticism.

  “Would anyone like some tea?” she asks.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” I say.

  “Ma, no. That’s too much trouble.”

  But she gets up anyway, slowly, using the handle of a little cart that holds a canister of oxygen. She takes it with her to the kitchen.

  “Mind if I make a fire?” Robert calls to her.

  “Yes, do that,” she says.

  Her steps are so tiny it takes a long time for her to cross the room.

  Robert crouches before the fireplace, arranging logs into a teepee.

  “Mary,” he says. “I’m sorry about . . .” He lowers his voice. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”

  He jabs at the fire.

  “I want to focus on the time I have left with my ma,” he says, “I just get frustrated when anything gets in the way of that. This isn’t an excuse for my temper.”

  I can feel the tension ease in my jaw.

  “You’ve changed your mind?” I ask. “You want to use my father’s ideas?”

  “No,” he says. “I’d rather come up with ideas that mean something to me. But of all the people here, I shouldn’t have lashed out at you.”

  The fire, only smoking until now, ignites and Robert warms his hands. His hair is a mess. How can he not want to press it flat with his hand?

  “I’m nearly finished with the questions,” he says. “And enjoying them too. They’ve really helped open things up between me and my ma. She’s told me stories I’d never heard, and we’ve been playing music together the last few days. She’s trying to decide on her favorite.”

  “Really?” I ask as the kettle whistles in the other room. “You’re listening to music together?”

  “I bought her a CD in Agate the other day. I only thought of it because of a question on the form you gave me.”

  We turn toward the noise of Doris struggling with a tray, cups and spoons and a sugar bowl clinking. She holds it so low it looks like it might hit her knees.

  “Oh, Ma, that’s more than you needed to do.”

  He hurries to take the tray from her.

  “That’s too much to carry,” he says. “And what did you do? Leave your oxygen in the kitchen?”

  “I’m all right,” she says, but seems relieved to let go of the tray.

  Robert
looks for a clean space to set it down, and I notice that so much tea has sloshed from the cups, they’re mostly empty.

  “This is the problem with trying to take care of my mother,” he says, catching my eye. “She still insists on doing all the caretaking.”

  I look at Robert, both of us bruised and glad for each other’s company. He puts a hand on his mother’s back to guide her. “Sit in this chair, Ma. I don’t want you too close to the fire.” As he retrieves the oxygen cart and gets his mother settled in again, I reach for a cup.

  “This one’s mostly full,” I say, trying to make do.

  Robert tries to reinsert the tubes into his mother’s nose, as she fights him. “No. I’m telling you no. I don’t need that right now.”

  Her hands bat him away.

  “Stop fussing over me,” she says. “We’re having tea right now.”

  Robert picks up a cup that’s all but empty and sitting in a pool of liquid. Doris only now sees what has happened, and I hear “Stupid, stupid” under her breath.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Robert says. “Can I admit it?” He gives a wry smile. “I kind of prefer wine at this hour.”

  Doris swats at him again. And, more upset, says, “We don’t have wine.”

  “I’m going to have a look in Dad’s old work area,” he says, standing. “He used to stash bottles in the back corner.”

  Once he’s gone, Doris and I sit stiff and quiet, machines gurgling, wind clawing at the house.

  “I was afraid you were going to be one more person bringing over a casserole,” she says.

  “A casserole?”

  “People like to show up with them at the end,” she says. “I’d rather they didn’t.”

  “You don’t like casseroles?”

  “Other times in my life I would have enjoyed so many visitors and so much food,” she says. “But I get tired easily now. Poor Robert has to keep making excuses for me.”

  “I can leave if you’re tired,” I say.

  “No. Stay,” she says. “I suspect you’re here to help Robert make arrangements.”

  I pick a piece of lint and a stray hair from the couch, then wish I weren’t holding them.