The doctor said, “Ritual mutilation.” Suggesting space aliens, I hoped.
The policeman let slip with, “Satanic cult.”
All along I thought they were bad-mouthing my Papadaddy Ben, but then I realized they meant me. At best they were referring to some crazed, at-large killer, but that was still me, sitting here in my bunny slippers and fur coat. Just by being a dead body with no wallet or blood, his wiener half torn off, that made my grandpa the innocent injured party. It didn’t seem fair. Yes, it hurt to have authority figures call me a “sadistic bastard,” but if I tried to defend myself I’d wind up in the electric chair, and that wasn’t going to improve the situation for my nana. Or help my already unruly, flyaway hair.
DECEMBER 21, 9:29 A.M. CST
A New Book and a New Beau
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It was at papadaddy’s funeral that I noticed my nana started to cough in a new, more intrusive way. Among infants, one might cry, but another will cough to attract loving attention. Other babies will drink vodka and gobble down illicit drugs. Other babies will date abusive men. Or overeat. Even negative attention beats ending up some Baltic orphan ignored in a crib, warehoused in a forgotten ward filled with castoff urchins. Coughing through Papadaddy Ben’s funeral, coughing and hacking at the graveside, this was my nana’s bid for sympathy. I never dreamed she’d escalate her emotional neediness all the way to cancer.
Despite my pleadings, my parents didn’t come upstate for the memorial service. They contracted for a video crew with a satellite truck that narrowcast the event in real time to their home in Tenerife. The paparazzi, however, flocked to attend. The New York Post ran the headline “Dad of Star Found Dead in Toilet Torture.”
In lieu of flowers or sympathy cards, my mother sent my nana and me lavish gift baskets of Xanax.
Each time the telephone rang I expected the police to call me in for death by lethal injection. For the funeral, I wore a black Gucci veil over black Foster Grants. I wore a stroller-length vintage Blackglama junior mink and black gloves, just in case some crafty sleuth would attempt to acquire my fingerprints from the communion rail. To answer CanuckAIDSemily, little Emily, the actual church was a rustic clapboard structure where a dead body did not seem out of place, juxtaposed as it was with paper plates of peanut-butter cookies. The congregants seemed genuinely distressed by Papadaddy’s tragic demise, and they displayed their aboriginal upstate empathy by presenting me with a gift: a book. Unlike the Beagle book or the Call of the Wild book, this tome was freshly printed, a new title, bound in handsome almost-leather. It seemed to be this summer’s beach read, for everyone present also carried a copy. Here was the moment’s mega–best seller, the Angela’s Ashes or Da Vinci Code du jour. A quick perusal suggested a postmodern work told from multiple viewpoints—very Kurosawa in structure—plot-driven, a sword-and-sandal epic filled with magic and dragons, sex and violence. I accepted it, their rustic offering of condolence, as graciously as my mother would an Oscar.
Printed in gold leaf along the spine was the title: The Bible.
As fanciful as anything penned by Tolkien or Anne Rice, this new tome presented an elaborate yarn about creation. In my heart, it would easily displace the Beagle book, with Mr. Darwin’s somewhat didactic nineteenth-century flavor. His saga depicted existence as a one-shot endeavor, a desperate struggle to endure and procreate. It’s no comfort when confronted by death to be assured that you’re merely some flawed variation of life reaching the end of its evolutionary blind alley. Whereas the Beagle book depicted a narrative of death after death, endless adaptation and failure—all history literally glued together with sperm and blood—the Bible book promised a happy life everlasting.
Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.
Which author, Gentle Tweeter, would you choose to read at bedtime?
This homespun church even held a weekly book club to discuss their newest literary sensation. To present the book, these simple upstate denizens coaxed forward a young boy child. As I was leaving the church with my nana, this darling towhead stumbled forth from their patchwork ranks. In both hands before him he carried this Bible book, and to my world-weary, eleven-year-old eyes he appeared an earnest sort, clad in his freshly laundered rags, a minor player destined to milk cows and sire similar agrarian laborers and ultimately die in not-undeserved obscurity, the probable victim of some future combine mishap. He, a rural David Copperfield, and I, a glamorous globetrotting fashion plate, we appeared to both be the same tender age. Some brutish farmwife pushed him toward me with her calloused hand, saying, “Give it to the poor girly, Festus.”
That was his name, Festus. He placed the book in my black-gloved palms.
While I was not immediately smitten, Festus did pique my romantic curiosity. A spark, most likely statically electric in nature, jumped between his person and mine, so strong that I felt the tiny shock through my elegant hand-wear. I accepted his gift with a simple nod and a murmur of gratitude. Feigning emotional distress, I pretended to collapse against him, and his sturdy farm urchin’s arms caught my fall. In our clinch, Festus’s prepubescent hands seized me bodily; only the Bible book lay between the full contact of our sensitive groin areas.
Festus, holding me an instant, whispered, “The Good Book will sustain you, Miss Madison.”
And, yes, Gentle Tweeter, Festus was an uncouth primitive, fragrant with the poultry manure lodged beneath his fingernails, but he did use the word sustain.
Ye gods. I was thrilled. “Au revoir,” I breathlessly bade my hardy swain. “Until we meet in …” I covertly checked the book’s title. “… in ‘Bible’ study.”
His ardent child’s lips whispered, “Fierce wristwatch …”
And from that moment forward I was putty in the young farm laborer’s hands. My fertile mind immediately began to spin romantic scenarios set in his world of subsistence agriculture. Together, we would scratch our daily bread from the hardscrabble upstate landscape, and our love would be the unvarnished stuff of a Robert Frost poem.
For comfort after the funeral, Nana Minnie had baked apple tarts and Bundt cake with lemon drizzle and apricot flan. Spiced crumb cake, maple bars, cherry grunt, peach cobbler, pear Betty, raisin slump, coconut crisp, walnut pandowdy, cinnamon buckle, plum trifle, and hazelnut fool. She built pyramids of pecan sandies on plates. Platters of gingersnaps and shortbreads. Busy frosting cupcakes and glazing doughnuts, she wasn’t much more of a widow than she’d been before. You never know the complicated deals two people negotiate in order to stay married beyond the first ten minutes. It could be she knew about Papadaddy’s traffic island antics. For my part I found the Jack London book on the parlor shelf and carried it back to my bedroom with a plate of cupcakes and read it, waiting for the chimpanzee embryos. By the middle of the novel I decided that what two people don’t say to each other forges a stronger bond than honesty.
Nana’s strawberry cupcakes were bribing me not to tell the truth. It might be the cupcakes were punishment for my lies. On my nana’s farm you could see only as far away as the next tree. That made it hard to think of the future. Any future.
Not the day of my papadaddy’s funeral, not the day after, not even the day after that, but a week after the funeral I was still eating. My Nana Minnie broke eggs, poured milk from a paper carton, knifed a yellow square of butter off a plate she took from the refrigerator. She sprinkled flour. Coughed. Spooned sugar. Coughed. Showing me all of the terrible things that go into making food: vegetable oil, yeast, vanilla extract, she dialed the oven temperature and ladled foamy batter into muffin tins, coughing the words, “When your mama was your age she was always bringing home head lice.…”
Nana Minnie told her life backward while she cooked, reciting details like ingredients. Like how my mother used to wet her bed. How one time my mom ate cat poop and Nana pulled a tapeworm as long as a spaghetti out of her bottom. Even that image didn’t stop my eating.
/> She went on—at length—about how my mother had bought a lottery ticket and won the fortune that was to be her grubstake as an aspiring movie actor.
At night, the Beagle book stuffed between my mattress and box spring made sleep impossible. I’d lie awake with the book’s lump lodged in my spine, certain the local district attorney would knock at my bedroom door to serve a search warrant. The investigators would grill me under a bare lightbulb, insisting they’d found several words printed in reverse on my papadaddy’s dead wiener, printed backward in mirror writing. It was obvious those words had rubbed off or been transferred from the murder weapon. Those words were the fingerprints they needed to convict a suspect. The reverse words included Wollaston, wigwam, guanaco, Goeree, Fuegians, scurvy, and, most damning of all, Beagle. A team of police goons would toss the bedroom and discover the stashed book.
In the rare event I drifted off, my dead Papadaddy Ben would roll a hot-dog vendor’s pushcart into the room and serve me boiled kielbasas smothered in sauerkraut and blood. Or a plate of steaming cat poop tapeworms smothered in marinara sauce.
As bad as any nightmare, one day my nana was sorting dirty laundry and came into the kitchen carrying something blue. I was seated at the kitchen table eating a cheesecake. Not a slice of cheesecake—I was paddling with a fork, halfway across an ocean of cheesecake, not tasting a bite, I was cramming it down so fast. Open on the kitchen table was the Bible book. I stopped reading and chewing, midswallow, when I saw my blue chambray shirt wadded in her hands, and I worked hard not to gag.
Not that I actually chewed my food. The way I ate, it was more like the reverse of vomiting.
Poised in my face, as close as the next hovering forkful of cheesecake, were the mysterious dried sputum spatters. Her face bland and guileless, my nana asked, “Raindrop?” She coughed the words, “Can you remember what’s this mess so I know how to pretreat it?”
First, I wasn’t sure I actually knew. Second, I was sure she wouldn’t want to know. Edging my tasty cheesecake away from the moldy, yellowing blotches, I said, “Dijon mustard.”
To my horror, Nana lifted the crumpled fabric near her face, peering close. She scratched at a crusted patch with her fingernail, saying, “It don’t smell nothing like mustard.…” The scratched spot sprinkled down specks like powdered dust. Specks landed on my fork. On my unfinished pan of cheesecake. Nana Minnie brought the besmirched shirt closer to her face and reached toward it with the tentative point of her tongue.
“It’s not mustard!” I shouted. My fork clattered to the kitchen floor. I stood so quickly my chrome chair teetered and fell over behind me. The crash brought my nana’s full attention to my face. I said, calmly now, “It’s not mustard.”
She stared, her tongue pulled safely back inside her mouth.
“It’s sneeze,” I said.
She asked, “Sneeze?”
I’d needed to cover a sneeze, I explained. No tissues were at hand, so I’d been forced to use my shirt.
My nana’s shocked, round eyes surveyed the sizable Galápagos archipelago of stiff deposits. “This is all your boogers?” she asked, as if I were the person about to die of some gruesome cigarette-induced chest condition.
I shrugged. I’d stopped caring. As long as I didn’t hurt her, I would let her think I was a dirty, disgusting animal. I was eleven years old and bloating like a blue-ribbon sow.
As if on cue she coughed, and coughed and kept on coughing, embarrassed and hiding her red face behind the knot of blue shirt still in her hands. Coughs that rattled like Papadaddy Ben hawking the tobacco spit from far down in his throat. The veins stood out in her neck like Darwin’s maps of major river systems. These were coughs so bad she couldn’t stop even when we both saw the bright red she was coughing all over the already-there dried sputum stains.
Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.
What I learned is, it’s never too late to save anybody. And it’s always too late. And what are the chances you’ll make any difference? And instead of declaring to my nana that her grandbaby was a liar and that her husband was an inverted sexual pervert and that her own movie-star daughter didn’t like her very much, instead I told her she made the best peanut-butter cheesecake in the whole wide world. And I held my empty plate up to her and begged for yet another helping.
DECEMBER 21, 9:33 A.M. CST
My Countdown to Good-bye
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Late at night, in my upstate bed, I once again became the naturalist. Settling into sleep I sucked a sugary sweetness from under my fingernails, and stared up into the darkness where I knew the ceiling to be. And I listened. I listened and counted. I could always tell where my nana was—the kitchen, the parlor, her bedroom—by the sound of her coughing, like the regular call of a bird, but a sound both reassuring and terrible. That coughing. Those coughs. Simultaneously, they served as proof she was still alive, but that she wouldn’t be forever. Nights I learned to cling to the sound of each cough, each volley of hacking and wheezing, and to find comfort in the noise. Despite the hard lump of the Beagle book stabbing me in the back, I could eventually fall asleep with the Bible book open against my heart.
The same way people will count the seconds between lightning and thunder, I counted the seconds between coughs. One-alligator, two-alligator, three-alligator. Hoping the longer I could count the better Nana Minnie might feel. Hoping at least she’d fall asleep. If I could get to nine-alligator I’d tell myself that all she suffered was a chest cold. Maybe bronchitis, but something curable. By twenty-alligator I’d be dozing, seeing my dead, half-naked nightmare Papadaddy Ben claw at my blankets with bloody hands. But finally the coughs would come back, the choking and gasping for breath, so rapid I couldn’t squeeze even one alligator between them.
In bed, I sucked my fingers clean. My nana and I had been making popcorn balls all day, and the smell of popped corn filled the house. Did I say how the next day was Halloween? Well, this was the night before Halloween, and we’d been cooking popcorn balls to distribute to trick-or-treaters. Like offshore sweatshop laborers, we’d combined the popcorn with corn syrup and drops of orange food coloring, then shaped the corn in our buttered hands to make knobby miniature pumpkins. We’d pressed triangles of candy corn to make them orange-colored Jack-o’-lanterns with pointed eyes and vampire teeth. As packaging, we’d wrapped them in waxed paper.
And did I mention that I’d secretly laced all of our Halloween treats with my ample, unused supply of funeral Xanax? Well, waste not … I’d reasoned.
A cough came from my nana’s bedroom, and I counted: One-alligator … two-alligator …, but another cough came too fast. With the detachment of a Darwin I began to categorize the coughs by their qualities. Some rasped. Others gurgled wetly. A third type amounted to only a species of breathless hiss. It might’ve been the first cough of a baby learning to breathe, or the last failed breath of someone dying.
Listening closely, lying in bed, my fingertips tasted like buttered pancakes smothered in syrup. When the last cough came, I counted: One-Mississippi … two-Mississippi … three-Mississippi … until a new cough sent me all the way back to counting from zero.
My parents didn’t celebrate Christmas or Passover or Easter, but how they celebrated Halloween was compensation for a million ignored holidays. To my mom it was all about the costumes and adopting alternative archetypal personas, blah, blah, blah. My dad was even more boring on the subject, waxing on about the inversion of power hierarchies and subjugated children recast as outlaws in order to demand tribute from the prevailing hegemony of adults. They’d dress me as Simone de Beauvoir and parade me around the Ritz in Paris to beg for gender parity in the workplace and snack-size Hershey bars, but really to demonstrate their own political acumen. One year they dressed me as Martin Luther, and everyone I met asked whether I was supposed to be Bella Abzug. Grown-ups, fie!
In my upstate bed no co
ughs came for so long I’d counted up to sixteen-alligator, and I crossed two sticky fingers under the covers, hoping for luck. I considered, briefly, dressing as Charles Darwin this year, but didn’t want to have to explain myself on every hillbilly front porch in this tedious missing-link neighborhood.
I hit twenty-nine-alligator. I got to thirty-four-alligator.
The bedroom door swung open, soundlessly, and a withered hand reached toward me from the shadows in the hallway. A figure began to crawl into the room, desiccated and skeletal, its face a leering skull stained with tobacco juice. Instead of ghostly chains it dragged a silver belt buckle. One bony hand stretched forward, offering a long, dried dog boo-boo nestled in a hot-dog bun. The poo-poo log was garnished with a golden squiggle of Dijon mustard. This same monster I saw every night, or some version of it, and it came as good news lately, because it meant I’d finally fallen asleep. No more counting. I was having a nightmare, but I was asleep. It meant my nana had fallen asleep.
The bed that had once been my mother’s bed felt deep and soft. My nana had changed the sheets today, and these smelled airy and fresh from a sunny afternoon on the clothesline. Nothing hurt.
The cadaver of my Papadaddy Ben swam across the floor, its gabardine pants wadded around its anklebones. The grinning skull hissed, “Ye murderer!” And as it crept closer, the corpse left a trail of blood smeared on the floor behind it.
Nothing hurt.
As fast as a cough, the thought hit me: the Beagle book. I couldn’t feel it. The painful lump of it. The grinning monster of my dead papadaddy disappeared, and I was awake. Scrambling from under the blankets I found no blood on the floor. The door was shut. I plunged both arms under the mattress, all the way to my shoulders, and felt around. I found no book. I crawled along the bedside, feeling everywhere between the mattress and box spring, still no book. A nightmare beyond my worst nightmare. I knelt beside the bed and prayed to still be asleep and only dreaming. Not that I believed in God back then, but I’d seen my mom play a pious nun in a film one time, and her character had spent half her screen time on her knees muttering demands into clasped hands.