Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [199]
IT WAS a weekend in April, the sun high in a cold sky, and Jeb and Sam and I wore sweatshirts and sweaters and had been digging for three hours. We were only down two and a half feet. Nearly halfway through the day, our mother showed up with water and sandwiches she’d made herself.
One of the caretakers of the cemetery had cut into the grass the shape of the grave we were to dig: four feet wide, eight feet long, and we were to go down six feet. I’d brought two picks, two long-handled spade shovels, and two short. I’d brought work gloves and a jug of water, too.
The cemetery was less than a mile from Pop’s house. There were nearly as many hardwoods and pine trees in it as there were graves, and most of those went back before the Civil War. Sam started in first with the pick, tearing up the brown earth, then he stepped back and Jeb and I began shoveling into a pile the clumps of dirt and leaf-rot and lingering turf. After ten inches or a foot of this, we hit rock and it took all three of us two hours taking turns with both picks to get through it. When we finally got back to dirt, we’d only gone down another foot and a half. We stopped and passed around the water jug. Not far off, someone was burning a trash pile, the woodsmoke drifting through the pines behind us. The air was still and cool, and high overhead a chicken hawk soared south toward the Merrimack.
I wiped the sweat off my forehead. We went back to work. Less than an hour later, it was a sweet surprise to see Mom’s tired red Mitsubishi pull up to the cemetery gate, to see her walking toward us with a picnic basket and more water. She was wearing sweatpants and a black wool sweater, her hair blonde and gray. We hugged and thanked her. We dropped our pick and shovels, pulled off our gloves, and sat on the ground to eat.
Two months earlier, just minutes after the coffin was done, she and Fontaine had walked down that long corridor carrying measuring tapes, scissors, a staple gun and staples, a roll of cording, and the beige satin sheet off Pop’s bed. While Jeb and I and our friends went home for a few hours’ sleep, my mother and wife lined the inside of Pop’s pine box with the same sheet he’d slept in the last night of his life.
Now Mom was sipping her water, her eyes on the grave of her ex-husband. She was sixty years old. I’d been in her life since she was twenty. In the coming months she would lose her mother, then Bruce, but this recent loss was enough. Over eight hundred people had come to Pop’s funeral: his two older sisters from Louisiana, their grown daughters and sons, cousins of ours we barely knew. There were writer friends from his time in Iowa City, ex-girlfriends and two ex-wives, Peggy singing “Summertime” up in the balcony. There were hundreds of students from over the years, drinking buddies from Ronnie D’s, retired professors from Bradford, waitresses and bartenders and former cops. And there were his six kids from forty-year-old Suzanne down to twelve-year-old Madeleine. Pop had eaten life, and his death had left a cavernous, gnawing hole in the air we moved through.
Many times over the years, my mother had told me that Pop had been the one love of her life. “He was a self-absorbed son of bitch, and we could never stay married, but he was the one.” She still had Bruce, her man of thirty years, but sitting on that grass with us she looked to me like a widow.
The night of Pop’s death, Jeb and his building partner were coming over to watch a movie. Bob got to Pop’s first, heard the water running in the shower. He knocked on the bathroom door but got no answer. He opened it and found our father slumped under running water that had turned cold. Bob pulled him out and did what he could, but Pop was gone.
A slight wind had picked up. It was sifting some of the dirt back into the hole, and it was hard not to think of those last moments, my father soaping himself on his shower bench, the hot water coming down, then whatever the first signs were, a final pain I did not want to think about him suffering alone. I stood and