Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [114]
I have another tarp in the shed, so I grab four bungee cords and suspend it above one corner of the pen so they’ve at least got shade, the knuckleheads. Even as I’m walking away Cocklebur is standing tippy-hoofed with her snout in the air, trying hard as she can to get a bite of the new tarp, but she is built far too low. The tarp is safe, and the fun is done.
Jane and I are back in the office. She has had a fine nap, and Anneliese has taken advantage of the time to make a grocery run. Jane sucks her thumb and beams at the ceiling, which is nothing but white texture. I get down before her and we talk some. At first she can’t be troubled to unplug her thumb—she keeps her forefinger hooked over the bridge of her nose—but then she decides to talk, and her brow furrows and her gaze grows earnest, and she works her lips, but after all that it’s still just gack and hack. Then she starts bicycling and making spinach faces, which means the storm is gathering and the squarelip is not far behind. Hearing the van, I gather her up. Let’s go help Mom unload groceries, I say, and then I wonder when exactly it was I began calling my wife Mom.
The day we buried Jake the funeral procession was winding through the country to the cemetery when a biplane appeared in the sky. High enough that it looked like a gorgeous yellow toy, but low enough that you could see the shine and polish of the fuselage, and the blue star painted on the underside of each wing. The plane was moving right to left, and crossed the road directly above the fire truck driving point. After proceeding a gracious distance, it rose slightly and banked a slow turn, then flattened out to cross again, this time left to right. And so it went for the next ten minutes and eight miles, the line of cars moving sedately down the road, the biplane tacking gracefully windward and lee. When we arrived at the cemetery the craft rose to circle in the distance. The engine noise receded to altitude.
We were walking to the back of the black Suburban containing Jake’s casket when Jed squinted at the sky and nodded toward the plane. “What’s the plan?” he asked me. “Not sure,” I said. The biplane is owned by a friend of ours. John had given him a call. Jed looked square at me, and for a split second I saw the old reckless flash.
“Well, I hope he gives ’er hell.”
We drew out Jakey’s little casket and bore him to the grave.
To the best of my recollection it has always been sunny when our family has convened at this tiny place. I don’t read the sunniness as any sort of sign, just note it. It was sunny when we buried my sister Rya after her heart and lungs finally failed her little soldier spirit at the age of six. I was a junior in high school then, bound in a few short weeks for a cattle ranch in Wyoming. It was sunny when we buried Eric, just ten years old and nine years older than the doctors predicted—which is not to fault the doctors, as they failed to factor in my mother. I was at loose ends in those days, out of college but trying to find my way. And it was sunny when we buried Sarah, just feet from where Jed is standing now, facing the only death possibly worse.
The pastor gathered us in close. There would be a prayer, after which we would linger, leave the cemetery slowly, the children each with a flower. But first the pastor drew our attention back to the airplane, which had descended again and was approaching from the south on a line parallel to the cemetery fence. When the airplane drew even with us, well above the treetops and some two hundred yards to the east, the nose lifted and it began to climb a quarter circle until it was pointed straight up and then it continued on around, until it was upside down, the wheels at zenith. As the plane broke over to complete the loop, the engine stalled and went silent and remained so for a breathless pair of seconds, and then black smoke puffed from the cowling and we shortly heard the cough as the engine fired and caught and the craft carved a slow turn back