Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [200]
So many of the names were French or Irish. There was one with the image of an electric guitar etched into it. Beside that marker, another with a man’s name. He’d died in his early thirties, and next to his birth and death dates were the words: A Loving Husband and Father. But the H, u, and s of Husband had been chiseled away at the corners, the work, the caretaker lady later told me, of the dead man’s grieving girlfriend. I kept walking past stones that were spread farther apart. Beyond them lay a pile of faded memorial wreaths, plastic flowers, deflated balloons, and soggy teddy bears. Just west of it, in the shadow of a thick stand of blue spruce, lay the graves of babies.
I turned around to get back to work. I could see Mom putting away what was left of our lunch. Sam and Jeb were already standing with their shovels. I took a different route back to them, and there it was carved into the back of a granite slab: CLEARY. I slowed and walked around to the front of it. There was my old best friend’s first name, his dates, born two years after me and dead at twenty-five. I called Jeb over, and he joined me and we stood there staring at the stone, the three of us together again, roaming downtown and the avenues. I looked back at our father’s deepening grave. Sam stood in it, swinging the pick down over his shoulder again and again, and there was the dirt alley and Cleary’s small asbestos-sided house, his mother drunk on the couch, his father’s big Chevy down in Boston. My once-a-month visits with Pop on the other side of the river when I’d tried to wash the smell off me—the dope, the alley dust, the trash of dumpsters we searched through for something to drink or break or eat. I took long showers and washed and dried my clothes. I tied my hair back as tightly as I could. At my father’s apartment, I tried to stand straight, my chest out, and speak as if everything was all right and under control. I tried my best to flush away our friend and all we did together. And now here he and Pop would lie in the same stretch of ground, any past secrets exposed and irrelevant.
Mom waved goodbye from her car, and we three kept digging. After nearly eight hours we finally got down to six feet, the surface of the ground a couple inches above my head. Jeb gave Sam ten fingers to step in and he climbed out. He turned around and extended his hand and Jeb grasped it and Sam, still as strong as he’d always been, pulled him up and out of the hole.
It was just me now. Sam offered his hand, but I said, “Wait, buddy,” and I lay down at the bottom of my father’s grave. It seemed so much deeper than six feet, the dark walls of earth at my sides and head and feet, a blue rectangle of sky so far above. I smelled clay and cool stone. I closed my eyes for just a second, but it was too dark, too eternally dark, and I stood and climbed fast out of that hole.
WE HELD the burial on Fenway Park’s Opening Day. While thousands of fans streamed into those seats surrounding that green field in Boston, a small group of us gathered to lower Pop’s pine box into the earth. The sun was out, but it was cold enough you could see your breath in front of you. Sam had helped me find a Catholic priest who’d known our father. From the yellow pages I hired a bagpipe player, then called the local Marine Corps recruiting office in Lawrence. They sent a young captain and seven Marines, and while we gathered at the foot of Pop’s coffin and open grave, these eight young men in dress blues stood at attention alongside it. The captain was a handsome young Latino, his eyes shadowed beneath the visor of his head cover, his white-gloved hands stiff at his sides. The priest, graying and respectfully jocular, had finished a prayer and was talking about Pop, how even in a wheelchair he’d make it to Mass, how when he couldn’t a layman would drive out to his house to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was language from the church Pop had turned to and used his entire life, and I was glad they were out in the air over his body and grave.