Torch

  But today was not the day to die, he decided. So far, each day had been like that. It was one thing and then another. The day after the funeral, which was originally to have been his last day on earth, Joshua’s truck broke down and he needed Bruce to help him fix it. There was a part they’d ordered that wouldn’t come in for five days. Plus, he could not very well have hung himself while Teresa’s parents and brother were still there visiting. In the days after the funeral he’d done his best to be a good host, despite the circumstances. He took them to Flame Lake to visit the Ojibwe Museum, to Blue River to eat walleye at the Hunt Club. They’d had a horrible shock when they arrived at the airport in Duluth, what with Pepper waiting to greet them instead of Bruce and the kids.

  “There’s still enough time to see the body,” Pepper had told them when they got off the plane. They stood in a corner of the airport near a sheet of windows with the sun beating brutally through. “The body!” Teresa’s mom had shrieked, then ran off not knowing where she was headed, bogged down by the huge purse she carried, and stopped eventually by a giant potted plant in her path.

  Teresa’s parents and her brother had not wanted to see the body, unlike Bruce and Claire and Joshua, who protested angrily when told at last by a curly-haired nurse that they would “have to say their goodbyes.” They’d spent four hours in the hospital room after Teresa took her last breath, which all of them had missed. Claire and Joshua had been racing to Duluth after having spent hours trying to get Claire’s car unstuck from the snow and slush that it had become mired in on the ice in the middle of Lake Nakota. When Bruce had woken up beside Teresa he had gone to get a cup of coffee. It sat now, its half-and-half forming a skin across its wretched surface, in the mug that said WYOMING! on the windowsill of the big window in the room. Four hours was an unorthodox length of time to stay with a dead body at St. Benedict’s Hospital, but they had Pepper on their side, plus they had the excuse of Teresa’s parents arriving soon.

  They did their best to be unobtrusive. After those first rounds of uproarious weeping, they muffled their cries by pressing their faces into pillows or one another or, most often, into the body of Teresa lying dead on the bed. She was still warm when Claire and Joshua arrived. They held on to her through her blankets, and then slowly the warmth receded, became only an island on her belly and then that cooled too and they touched her no longer.

  When Bruce had entered the room with his coffee, he had not realized she was dead. Minutes before, he’d been in bed with her. Her eyes were open but seemed unchanged. He’d said a few words to her about the weather, which was cold but sunny, March but still winter. The same snow that had fallen when, as far as anyone knew, Teresa didn’t have cancer still sat frozen into layers on the ground. He went to her then and took her hand, hot and swollen from all the needles attached to it, but then he looked at her and what he saw—the not thereness of her—made him fall hard and, without his being aware, from his feet onto his knees.

  While they sat with her and waited for her parents and brother to arrive they cooperated with the nurses as best they could. Teresa had wanted to be an organ donor, but because of the cancer, her eyes were all they could use. Until they were surgically removed, they needed to be preserved, which, Pepper kindly explained, called for ice. They agreed to keep the bags of ice on Teresa’s eyes forty-five minutes of each hour, and Bruce agreed to be the one to keep the time. He took his watch off and set it on the bed near her hip to remind himself of the task.

  Finally, the curly-headed nurse stepped in to tell them that Teresa’s parents and brother were waiting for them in the lobby and did not care to come up. After their initial resistance, Bruce and Claire and Joshua knew they had to go. Bruce and Joshua approached Teresa solemnly one by one, each of them bending to kiss her cold lips. Claire began sobbing hysterically all over again, even more loudly than she had when she’d first walked in and seen her mother dead. She pushed Bruce and Joshua violently away when they tried to comfort her, batting her arms at them. Then she quieted and told them without looking up that she wanted a few minutes alone with her mother.

  Bruce stood silently with Joshua outside the closed door, and then together they walked to the end of the hallway, where there was a window from floor to ceiling. Joshua looked out over the streets of Duluth, and then beyond them, to the lake. Bruce looked at Joshua. He hadn’t seen him for days. In the brief minutes of each day that he and Claire had not been consumed by what was happening with Teresa, they had been consumed by the whereabouts of Joshua. He had left messages on the answering machine, he had left notes on the kitchen table, but he had not appeared. Over his absence Bruce had raged, Claire had wept, Teresa in her delirium had cried out his name: Where is Joshua? Where is Joshua? until, in the last days, she had intermittently believed him to be right there in the room. Bruce still didn’t know where Joshua had been and now he didn’t care. He was only glad that Claire had brought him here. He knew that Joshua was also asking the question, Where was I? Where was I when my mother died and where, because of me, was Claire? He wanted to say to Joshua that it was okay, but something stopped him. It’s okay kept forming in his mouth, then turning to mist.

  “Your mother, she thought you were with her all yesterday,” he said, which was fairly true—she’d hallucinated his presence the day before, as well as Claire’s, and a dog they used to have named Monty. “She believed you were right there sitting in the chair.”

  Joshua turned his pink eyes to Bruce for a moment, then he shifted them wordlessly back out to the streets.

  Bruce reached over and began to massage Joshua’s back, the way he’d done in countless attempts to ease Teresa’s pain.

  “Oh,” Joshua said, leaning into Bruce’s hands. “That feels so good.”

  When Bruce woke on the ninth day that Teresa no longer lived on the earth he knew that now was his chance. He could feel the quiet of the house around him; so quiet it was as if he weren’t inside of his house but rather lying again in the field where he’d woken the morning before. He opened his eyes but felt unable to move, the weight of his sorrow pinning him to the bed.

  “Shadow,” he called in a high-pitched voice. “Kitty kitty. Kitty kitty.” He heard her feet land on the floor above him, in Claire’s room. After several moments she appeared in the doorway. “Come here,” he implored sweetly, though she did not move from her place by the door. He lay in bed gazing at her. She had known Teresa as long as he had. She had been on the bed sometimes when they’d made love, making a space for herself in the farthest corner as long as they didn’t cause too much commotion.

  He closed his eyes and said out loud, “I’ll be dead soon.” And then he wept in several short yelps and fell back to sleep.

  At noon he woke with Shadow’s weight on his chest.

  He put his hands on her warm body and instantly she purred. Usually the weight to which he woke did not have a form. Usually it was a series of pictures too wonderful or terrible to bear. Images of Teresa either very happy or very sad, very healthy or very sick, each of them torturing him in their severity. Sometimes a question would occur to him with such ferocity that he felt his body grow unbelievably heavy, as if the weight of him in that instant would break the bed. Why had he not quit working immediately when they learned she had cancer? Why had he not spent every minute of every day and night with her from the moment he met her? And then darker questions would come, questions that were not actually questions, but bullets from a gun that implicated him in her death. The doctors believed her cancer had started in her lungs. Had it been the wood stove? Had it been the insulation he had scavenged from a job and used? It could have been anything, the doctor had told them, uncurious when they’d asked. But anything was anything—it did not exclude Bruce. It encompassed him and all the things he’d made for her and touched and delivered to her for almost twelve years.

  He sat up and put his bare feet on the floor and then stood carefully, unsure of his legs, as if they’d recently been released from casts.
He had a mission. Two missions. He was going to get the dogs from Kathy Tyson—she’d been taking care of them since days before Teresa died, and with the funeral and the comings and goings of so many people in their house, they had not yet picked them up—and then he was going to come home and kill himself.

  He considered not going to get the dogs. It would make sense logistically, but he decided against it for two reasons. One, the dogs would be a comfort to Claire and Joshua and if he didn’t go get them now, there would be the next funeral to deal with and the dogs would remain at Kathy’s for at least another week. And two, he wanted to see them one last time.

  First, he shaved. He had not shaved since the morning of the funeral and a shaggy beard was starting to grow in. He felt the least he could do if he was going to kill himself was to shave. He also dressed in a good shirt—not a flannel one like he normally wore, but in the white shirt with turquoise snaps that Teresa loved. When he wore it she would croon her rendition of a cowboy song, which she had likely made up herself, probably the moment she first saw him in that shirt. He tried to recall how the song went, but for the life of him he couldn’t. He would never hear it again, he realized, unless, of course, there was a heaven after all and then she would be there waiting for him and happy that he was wearing that shirt. She would be wearing her hospital gown with nothing on underneath, or perhaps she’d be wearing the blouse and skirt that Claire had picked out for her to wear in the casket, over her best underwear and bra, the outfit she’d worn also into the incinerator. Bruce allowed himself to wonder for a glimmer of a moment about the person who had loaded her into the incinerator. Whoever it was would have been the last person to lay eyes on her. But then he remembered that was not true. She had been burned in her casket, a state law, and the last person who saw her was Kurt Moyle, the owner of the funeral home, who stepped forward and reached up his hand and softly lowered the lid on her just as they sang the last line of “Amazing Grace.”

  Like her death, Teresa’s funeral had not been the funeral Bruce had imagined seven weeks before when they had first learned of Teresa’s cancer and he’d allowed the movie version of her funeral to play in his mind. Bruce didn’t behave the way he’d thought he would. He didn’t take anyone’s hands in an attempt to either console or be consoled. He didn’t say anything about how his wife was in a better place now. What he did was try his best not to look at anyone. Looking at people made the strength in his legs disappear. He held on to chairs, walls, at one point even to Teresa’s coffin, to keep himself up. When he looked at her parents a phrase came instantly into his mind: stampeded by grief. Teresa and her parents, in her adult life, had not been terribly close. Still, at their daughter’s funeral they howled and pawed with their hands, mussing each other’s clothes. They were not howlers; never had he imagined that they would paw. Claire and Joshua were the opposite, moving from the chairs to their mother’s coffin, from her coffin to the drinking fountain, from the drinking fountain to the little stand where they’d put the book where people could sign their names. They seemed to both know to keep moving in this circuit, apart from each other, but in synchronicity, swooping like owls on a night hunt, wide-eyed and silent. When they passed Bruce their eyes lashed on to his like ropes for climbing that landed, dug in, then gripped and grew taut. He looked away from them as quickly as he could, though he was forced to appear to be looking at other people. Manners dictated that.

  “I’m so sorry,” they said, each of them, over and over.

  “Thank you,” he croaked. Those two words like the pits of plums he sucked the fruit from and then spit, sucked and then spit. He wondered if it were possible to add up all the people he’d thanked over the course of his entire life, whether that sum would be equal to the number of people he thanked on the one day that his wife’s body was to be sealed in a wooden box, shoved into an incinerator, and burned, at an extremely high temperature, to ashes.

  • • •

  Kathy Tyson expected him. He’d called the night before and she said he could come by at any time. It took him several minutes before he could speak to her because Spy and Tanner were so glad to see him, jumping up like they were trained not to do, almost knocking him over when he stooped down to their level.

  At last he was able to move from the porch into the house, the dogs pushing in with him. Kathy’s house was a cabin, all one room, with a loft for her bed and a tiny bathroom just beyond the kitchen nook. Her parents’ house was hidden behind a stand of trees a few hundred yards farther up the driveway. Kathy’s grandparents had lived in the cabin years before, while they built the bigger house up the hill.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” she asked, and poured some into a mug without waiting for him to answer. They sat down at the table. A stick of incense burned on the shelf behind her, a tendril of sweet smoke rising above her head.

  “We’re very grateful to you for taking care of the dogs.”

  “I don’t mind a bit,” she said, looking around for them. They lay near his feet under the table, both of them licking their private parts. “I’ll miss them. They’re good dogs.”

  “They are good dogs,” Bruce said. A couple of weeks ago, Teresa had asked him to give Kathy a jar of jam that she had made, as a thank-you gift, but at the last minute Bruce left it on the kitchen table, feeling it was too valuable to give away, not for its contents so much as for Teresa’s writing scrawled across the label on the lid. Raspberry, June.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  He pressed his fingertips to the scab on his cheek. “I slipped.”

  She nodded. The bowl that sat between them on the table held a single tangerine.

  “How’s work?” he asked. She was a cow inseminator like her father. He didn’t know whether cows were inseminated year-round or what she was doing home on a Wednesday at noon.

  “Good,” she nodded. “We keep busy.” She stood up and refilled both of their mugs. She wore jeans and a purple shirt and a cluster of crystals and beads and stones around her throat and wrists and fingers. Once, Teresa had chatted with her about having her as a guest on Modern Pioneers to discuss the art of reading tarot, Bruce remembered now, though nothing had come of it. He had known Kathy all of his life, though, sitting here in her house, he realized he hardly knew her at all. They’d gone to school together, she four years behind him, and then when he bought his land they were neighbors, and they helped one another out in a neighborly way. He remembered that she played softball, not in high school, but now, for the Jake’s Tavern team.

  “Spring’s on its way,” he said. “It’s already here, I guess.”

  “Yep,” said Kathy. It had officially been spring for nearly a week. They both looked out the window at the snow, which was melting, the weather having warmed to the low forties.

  “So that means you’ll start practicing soon.”

  “Practicing?” she asked.

  “Softball.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, blushing a little. A lock of her brown hair had come loose from her ponytail, softening her face. She pushed it behind her ear. “I don’t know if I’ll do it this year. It’s very time-consuming.”

  “It keeps you busy,” he said.

  “It’s not only practice and games, but I’m also the secretary.”

  Bruce nodded. He wondered what the secretary of the softball team would have to do.

  “You could play with us. We could certainly use some men. It seems like only the women in this town want to do anything. To join in.”

  “I would want to play for Len’s Lookout,” he said sternly.

  Her eyes flickered from her hands to his eyes and then back to her hands. “I can understand that,” she said, a little breathless.

  “Len’s … what are they?”

  “The Leopards.”

  “Len’s Leopards,” he said quietly, ridiculously, without any intention of joining a softball team. Teresa had waited tables at Len’s Lookout. Everyone had loved her there. Leonard and Mardell
, the customers from Midden and from the Cities. Mardell had taped Teresa’s obituary to the wall at the bar, along with a picture she’d taken of Teresa at the annual Christmas party. People had left flowers beneath it and notes and votive candles that burned until they burned out. He hadn’t been there to see it himself, but Mardell had called and told him about it, how the notes and flowers were piling on the floor and covering the pinball machine that sat nearby.

  “It’s almost his name,” Kathy said.

  “What?”

  “Leopard. It’s almost Leonard. Only one letter is different.”

  “Oh. I never thought of that.”

  She reached back to her ponytail and draped it over her left shoulder. “It would be a way of honoring her perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Bruce, without committing himself. Now that they were on the subject, he hoped she would not say how sorry she was. She’d already said it at the funeral. He cleared his throat and then coughed hard, as if to free something caught in his lungs.

  Her phone rang, but she did not answer it. When the machine clicked on, the person on the line hung up. “It’s my mom,” she explained. “She never leaves a message. That’s how I know to call.”

  He gave her a small smile. It seemed that he should leave, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel happy, but he didn’t feel sad either. He felt a glorious sense of safety from the rest of his life in Kathy’s small house. It was not like the way he’d felt before Teresa got cancer, before he knew there was anything he needed to feel safe from. It was an entirely new sensation, and it filled him up like a drug.