Grave Concern, page 2
Irrespective of the appalling weather, from the beginning Kate had, at best, an uneasy relationship with the phallic engorgements of her booming city. At first, she’d been merely puzzled by the popular weekend pastime of visiting gargantuan show homes just for fun. As time went on, she found herself increasingly put off by the patronizing patter of the nouveau riche. In the end, she felt downright exhausted by the stresses of upward mobility.
But the final straw was the day her beloved fifteen-year-old Toyota, still running perfectly, was rear-ended by a monstrous SUV. It was two weeks before Hallowe’en — she remembered because she’d been dreaming up a costume for an upcoming party. She and the Toyota had been crawling toward work at thirty klicks, reasonable given the whiteout conditions and a road more like a skating rink. The driver of the Cadillac Escalade didn’t even see her. In his quest to beat the light, he ran right up over her rear end, which, thank God, was fortified by a load of winter tires she hadn’t gotten around to putting on. That was the thing in this crazy town — let up for a second and you would pay, one way or another, to the gods of either nature or commerce.
In the event, Kate got a nasty jolt, which in turn necessitated the wearing of a distinctly unfashionable neck brace for the better part of three hellish months. The Cadillac captain’s response to the damage? From the pilot house in the sky had emerged a finely gloved middle finger along with a rude reference to female anatomy, culminating in a treatise on the obvious defects of a Toyota owner.
And yet, and yet. To retreat from her carefully wrought scaffold — to run back east, for instance — felt to Kate like cheating, as though some malfeasance were out to break her will.
In a dark hour one April night, abed in the howling city, the delicate fabric of Kate’s light sleep was rent: the phone ringing like hell’s fire alarm. All the way from Ontario, clear as black ice, a voice informed her that her parents, driving home from visiting friends Monday night of the Easter weekend, had been smashed head-on by a drunk careering over a hill into their lane. Nothing they could have done. Both killed instantly. Kate’s loud silence prompted the caller to stop speaking officialese and say gently, “I’m so sorry. If it’s of any help, I can supply you with the number of a crisis counsellor in your area.”
A crisis counsellor. Wasn’t that what they sent into schools when some disgruntled former student returned and shot up a bunch of kids? Was this a crisis? It wouldn’t have occurred to Kate to call it that. Godawful. Horrific. Heart-squeezingly, throat-achingly, stomach-churningly sad. But a crisis?
Kate was pitched headlong into funeral planning. In a fug of grief, she began to pack a suitcase. As she packed, Kate considered the word “crisis” again. One of her more optimistic employers, in an effort to bring Kate into the corporate fold, had once sent her for management training. The keynote speaker was all about Crisis (this was the eighties). The word “crisis,” he said, came from a Chinese character meaning “opportunity riding on the wings — or was it winds? — of a storm.” Bullshit, most likely. But it won over the crowd. True or not, it certainly made a person feel better.
Maybe that’s what this detestable news was — opportunity evilly disguised. Within five days, Kate had packed up her apartment, rented a Drive-Away and — despite her friend Gladys’s wry observations, dark warnings, and, finally, bald entreaties — moved back across the country into her parents’ house.
From the highway, Kate planned her entrance to a driveway that hadn’t seen a shovel in some time. She signalled and began braking. The Impala shuddered mightily as Kate slowed enough to turn but not so hard as to be rear-ended by the semi looming in her rear-view. At the last possible second, she turned the wheel and plunged through the bumper-high drift into a shadowy indentation in the whiteness she could only hope would yield. Whew, close! The logging truck flew by, horn blaring.
Opening her door proved a challenge, as the snowbank, stiffened by numerous passages of the county’s ploughs, held its own. Kate wiggled the Christmas table display out of the car and post-holed through the snow to the front door. There she waited, and waited, her bouquet-decked hand growing numb. Finally, she heard the tremulous sound of a latch, and, oh God, if it wasn’t old man Marcotte who opened up. Since when had the Marcottes moved out here? And now it came to her that this was the old shop, Marcotte Antique & Fine Upholstery. Everyone knew the place. You couldn’t miss it: An old rocking chair hung up on a high pole — it looked like a gallows — right next to the highway. Kate used to wonder whether big trucks clipped it as they passed.
Kate and her mom hadn’t gone to the “shop on the highway” often, but when they did, it was an occasion. Kate remembered her mother bending down, swiping a handkerchief across Kate’s patent leather shoes just as they entered the store. The man there always gave Kate a twisty peppermint sucker, something Kate never saw anywhere else. She was taught to say Thank you so much, Monsieur Marcotte, and not to stare or gawk. Then she would be sternly warned not to touch a single thing, and she would wander about, sucking her sucker and making sure not to let any part of her body or clothing brush the antique oil lamps and mirrors, while her mother and Monsieur Marcotte conferred over a cherrywood drop-leaf table or a bird’s-eye maple armoire.
No rocking chair now. The Marcottes must have sold the house in town and moved out here when he retired. Kate glanced down at the card attached to the floral display: Love from Guy and the gang in Wollongong, it said. Wollongong — sounded like Africa. Or Australia. That was it, Australia.
The old man was waiting, his green eyes piercing her confidence, just as they had all those years ago. Kate averted her own gaze and held the flowers out. “For you, Mr. Marcotte. Merry Christmas!”
Monsieur Marcotte. Antique seller, keen curler, but, more relevant to Kate, the father of Jean–Philippe (J.P.) Marcotte, object of her first heart-stopping, knee-wobbling, gut-searing love. A love Kate had learned to ignore but never, in thirty years, got over. Somehow she remembered to hand Marcotte senior Flower Power’s business card.
Back in the car, she turned the key in the ignition, saying a silent prayer to the gods of internal combustion. Yes — the engine caught. An ironic reversal. For it seemed not out of the realm of possibility that, at some time between Monsieur Marcotte’s answering his door and Kate’s return to the insouciant Chevy, her own beating heart had come to a complete stop.
Kate found herself back in town with little memory of the return. Her last delivery was at a large, white house with pretentious black columns and a portico. This house and its owners had been reviled when she was young, their grandiose renovation of a post-war bungalow considered spendthrift and somehow unseemly. Still reeling from the shock of encountering Marcotte the elder, Kate reached automatically to pluck the flowers from the seat behind. The bouquet consisted of a dozen enormous roses, six white, six pink, all swathed in a froth of ferny greens. Congratulations on your new baby daughter, the card read.
Kate snapped to. Oh, God. In forgetting Nathan Niedmeyer’s double anniversary, she’d also missed the relevant order deadline for Binary Blooms, the online discount supplier she normally used. There were nice Christmas greens at the ValuMart, but the cost would eat up much of the profit on the Niedmeyer order. What on earth would she put on Adele’s Nathan’s grave?
If Kate’s soul could be said to have a Facebook wall, it was now the devil made his first post. Kate looked up at the quiet house, its curtains closed. She glanced around the cul-de-sac, checking for spies. None. She flipped a tawny hank of hair from her eyes, gently caressed the bouquet on her lap. Crazy — the extravagance, the expense. Complete overkill, likely bigger than the baby it celebrated. She gently tugged at the thick satin bow binding the stems together. Really, in the great scheme of things, what were a few roses more or less?
Grave Concern, Inc. was located beneath the community bowling alley, which resided in what had once been the town’s community centre. While Kate had been knocking about in the larger world, the aged building, a millstone around the municipal neck, had been snaffled at a bargain by Bill Chambers, a local entrepreneur. Its many clubrooms were now divided up into small retail and office space.
When Kate had first apprised him of the nature of her business, Chambers, an old classmate, yanked off his dirty glasses and squinted meaningfully. Bill, or Billy, as she remembered him, their having parted scholarly company when Billy revisited Grade 3, clearly had some skepticism about the prospects of such a “quiet” (as he termed it) enterprise. But, as other offers for the space were not forthcoming, Bill acquiesced, on condition of a larger deposit than was, strictly speaking, necessary. Kate, meanwhile, considered her luck: Grave Concern’s tiny storefront came with its own fortuitously attached “office,” at one time the photo club’s small darkroom, which, being more or less useless for revenue generation, Bill threw in for free.
Only once having signed the lease and moved into the new office space did Kate come to understand the full implications of the term “overhead.” First came the Mothers to Pin Setters (fondly, if inaccurately, known as the PMS league), a kind of self-help gathering of depressed postpartum moms who bowled their way to new life and sociability on Wednesday afternoons. Thursdays saw the disquieting descent of the Singing a New Toonie Head Pins, a motley collection of casual bowlers from up and down the valley. Each paid a toonie a time to be placed on a constantly shifting roster of teams, booked in week by week according to a complex algorithm developed and understood by none other than Foxy Raymond at the behest of the hapless Bill Chambers. Fridays saw the arrival of the Early Birds, a group of aged bowlers named not for the hour they bowled (ten till twelve), but for the hope that some gentle activity would, like their namesake, keep their nemesis, the worms, at bay. This sprightly crew had an unfortunate tendency to drop and dribble rather than actually bowl the balls, which made the last day of the week, which should have been a happy one for Kate, rather more migraine-inducing than ever.
Regardless even of Kate’s innocence of the true implications of “overhead,” her confident lessee’s face had been a fake. Neither then nor now had Kate any idea how she’d keep up with the rent unless locals stepped up the dying. Grave Concern, after all, required a certain briskness of bodies. Why? Because, first, a critical mass must be reached to yield a sufficient subset of bereaved who would even consider Kate’s service; and second, it took time for those same bereaved to relinquish the guilt and fear of censure said service invoked.
Kate kneed the computer’s ON button and plugged her camera in. She sincerely hoped the Niedmeyer photos would show all right, what with having been snapped just minutes ago virtually in the dark.
Of Kate’s menu of grave-visit offerings, Adele had selected the Photo Finish option, which guaranteed same-day mailed or emailed Before and After photos of the grave, showing how the grave visitor (Kate herself, of course, barring expansion) had cleaned up the site and laid fresh flowers or whatever was requested. Photo Finish was the cheapest option; all options, in fact, included photos. Plot Driven, the next step up, added weeding and grass trimming around the stone itself as well as that of one unserviced family member plot. The Grave Beyond, Kate’s deluxe package, appended to the standard service both regular stone polishing and basic Photo Finish on a second grave of the client’s choosing. The Grave Beyond also allowed for special idiosyncratic requests, such as the verbal delivery of particular prayers, poems, songs, or confidences to the dead. Each option had further price points within it, depending on the specificity and frequency of visits.
Luckily, it being winter, Kate had had little cleanup to do at Nathan’s grave. Actually, none. There wasn’t much action at the cemetery these days, the snow being calf-deep. However, she’d had to arrange the flowers so the pink showed up well against both snow (white) and stone (black). And find something suitable for a ribbon (luckily, once she’d dug down through the snow, she found the last bouquet’s ribbon well preserved). Then she’d had to adjust her camera manually with frozen fingers and try to bounce the light as much as possible off the stone itself in the falling dark, without getting reflective glare. A certain professional flare was expected in photo results, which Kate generally delivered. At the graveyard, she hadn’t been able to gauge the results by her camera’s display, which was scratched all to hell. Well, now she’d see.
Kate clicked “Import” and glanced up at the clock: 5:15 p.m. She blinked a long blink, afraid of what the screen might reveal. But it was all right. The photos were pretty good, not great, but good enough. Dear old Adele would be pleased.
Kate attached the photos to an email and pressed “Send.” Sat back in her wonky secretary’s chair circa 1978, well satisfied. Pleased, even. Not such a bad business, after all. Her doubts about the prospects of a grave-tending venture somewhat quelled, Hope reared its head, and so did Kate, lifting her eyes from her computer and gazing into the distance.
Maddening in every other sense, the office nevertheless undeniably boasted a million-dollar view. A carpet of grass rolled down a gentle slope to River Road. On the far side of the road along the riverbank, a few majestic red and white pines still unmolested by the Pine Rapids Beautification Committee waved their feathery foliage in the breeze. Beyond, the Pine River continuously whispered of its storied past, when it had carried the mighty giants felled by larger-than-life loggers all the way to the junction at Big River, where Valleyview now stood. There, the mighty timbers had been squared, made up in giant cribs and piloted still farther down the liquid highway — to the grand St. Lawrence, and thence by ship across the sea.
It was a bloody shame, of course, these ancient old-growth forests winding up as ship masts of the imperial British fleet. A catastrophe, you could say, despite what local legend would have one think. Which just proved a truth Kate was grasping all the more firmly with the approach of her fiftieth birthday: that most things in life could be understood as though reflected in a mirror — at shiny face value or from the shadowy rear. You could gawk at a grand past of hardy souls setting forth to wrest civilization from merciless wilderness; marvel at the doughty fur traders, heaving twice their weight on their backs — singing all the while; stand in awe of First Nations tribes, moving in seasonal cycles with the land. The grand romantic story. Or you could step through the looking glass, where darker truths prevailed. Like famine and desperation, carnage and exploitation, rape and pillage and war. Nature “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson so aptly wrote. (Pretty good, Kate considered, for a guy who’d never attended a Junior B Lumber Kings game of a Saturday night.)
Kate put her feet up on the desk by the computer and pushed the secretarial chair back to its limit, in order to pursue further this train of thought. Like it or not, narrative would pile up. And Pine Rapids was full of it. Rife with romance. Pulsating with plot. Haunted by hagiography. Layer upon layer of the stuff. A tragicomic bloody compost heap.
At 5:28, an email popped up on Kate’s screen:
My dear Kate: Thank you for sending along the pictures. I can forgive them being a day late. I understand things are busy, this time of year. However, I am not as inclined to excuse the fact that, despite their excellent quality (perhaps a little on the dark side), the photos you sent are not of my dear Nathan’s grave but that of Norman Litwiller, who rests in the row behind. The roses are lovely indeed. I can only hope Norman was more fond of pink than Nathan, who can’t stand the shade. Could you please redo? Happy Hanukah! Your trusting customer, Adele Niedmeyer
Kate put fist to forehead and groaned. Dropped head to desk.
A blast of cold air from her office door brought it up again.
“Well, if it isn’t Hank Dixon!” she said, working up a grin. “What can I do for you? Have a seat!”
Hank Dixon took his time, having apparently to check out each corner of the room before making the momentous decision to sit down. Kate sighed. All she wanted was a hot bath and her bed.
“How’s she goin’?” said Hank, in his slow, thoughtful drawl.
Kate shrugged in a way that said, As well as can be expected.
“Heard about that business up on Wycliffe Road, I expect?”
Under the desk, Kate’s knee bounced at a furious rate. “Madge Fitzgerald’s dog? Too bad, that.”
“Madge is pretty broken up about it.”
“I can imagine.” Kate’s mind was racing — was Hank hinting dog-grave visitations? And what would one put on a canine crypt — rawhide chews? “What was the mayor doing out there, anyway?”
“That’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question, ain’t it, right there,” said Hank. “Only one other house up there, beyond Madge, like.”
Okay, okay, she’d ask. “And who’s that, Hank?”
“Little Bo Peep!” Hank snorted. “That’s what I call her. Bogna … Bojana something. Polish name, like. Family’s been out there for years; she stayed and kept the place. Anyway, there’s been some talk, eh, about her and You Know Who.”
Kate knew Who but did not particularly want to hear the What.
“So, Hank, you made an appointment. What was it you wanted here?”
“Gonna sound weird.”
“I’ve heard weird.”
Hank looked around again, the four corners, the door. “Fact is I’ve been having my own dog troubles.”
“Oh?”
“You know that white house with the brown trim, out the Cemetery Road?”
“Sure. Pass it regularly.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I never go by in my truck that mutt don’t come out of there like ten bats out of hell, givin’ chase, like, snappin’ at my wheels. Wouldn’t be so bad ’cept when I get out to pay respects to the folks, the bloody hound won’t leave me alone — snarlin’ and yappin’ right up to the grave. Nearly took off my hand the other day.”
