Grave Concern, page 5
As Kate gathered courage to rise, the chimes tinkled again. “You are very fortunate girl,” came Madama Della’s voice, “overall. However, sorrow is coming.”
Kate didn’t like the sound of this. Maybe her parents were right, she shouldn’t have come. But Madama Della, it seemed, was just getting started.
“You will have sorrow, yes, but happiness too. You will meet a tall, dark stranger. You will travel far, far away. For many years, you will be not completely happy nor completely sad.”
The woman checked Kate’s palm again, as though taking a second look at a word on a page. “Yes, confused, disoriented. But you will, after a long journey, find your heart again.”
Madama Della sat back as though satisfied.
Not sure of proper protocol, Kate said, “Uh, thank you,” and stood up. Madama Della once more tinkled the chimes and opened her hand, indicating Kate’s chair. Kate sat down again.
“No rush, dear,” said Madama Della. “Old Della not see so good any more. Your eyes. What colour are they?”
The question seemed odd to Kate after such deep prophecies of the heart. But then everything had been odd, from the moment she’d walked in. “Uh, sort of brown, I guess,” Kate said.
“I see,” sighed Madama Della. “Just two things more. You will come back here, Kate. You will return to this town. This is real message of the hand.”
Madama Della leaned back into the darkness as though done. She pulled her hands off the dimly lit table and folded them comfortably over the front of her many-layered skirts.
And the other thing? Kate wondered.
“Oh, and prophecies I have given, these are no in order,” said the Madama. “What spirits tell me will not be tamed or harnessed. These are more like wild horses, running free everywhere. The future will come, everything, as I have said it, all in time. But most caution, Do not try to bring future by what you hear now.”
Kate pushed off the duvet and lay naked in the cool morning air. This memory of Madama Della had been like a weird echo of itself — was she remembering the actual encounter? Or her memory of the encounter the night before she’d pointed the Drive-Away toward home? Jeezus, as Mary would say, déjà vu all over again.
Outside her window, the snow fell gently on. Kate got up and walked downstairs. The old Fahrenheit thermometer read twenty-nine. Just below freezing. She tapped the glass face of the old barometer. As a teenager watching her dad do this, Kate was scornful: Who still kept a barometer on their wall? Now she read it with equanimity. Fair. A perfect winter day that also happened to be Christmas. Kate decided to walk the three kilometres, give or take, to Mary’s house.
“Blow into his nose,” commanded Mary, standing stolid but relaxed in rubber boots.
“What?”
“You heard me. It’s how they get to know you.”
Skeptical, Kate did as she was told. Ned Nickers pulled away. “There, you see? I told you no living creature could withstand this breath.”
“Coincidence,” said Mary, and laughed. “C’mon. You must be starved. Go on into the house while I get Ned Nickers his Christmas hay.”
Over way too many Pillsbury croissants spread with real Newfoundland cloudberry jam — “an old Christmas tradition,” Mary grinned — Kate, at Mary’s urging, filled in the details of John Marcotte’s request.
Mary admitted she was puzzled. “Why would he suddenly want to know where his son is buried, do you think?”
“Dunno. I don’t think there’s anything deep or nefarious about it. I just figure, time passing, getting older, you know. Maybe he’s feeling guilty about J.P.’s upbringing, which wasn’t exactly a model of positive discipline. Maybe he’s lonely, softening up in his old age. People change. Well. Some people change.”
“True. You can see him sitting there all alone watching TV, maybe starting to blame himself for the way things turned out.”
“One time when J.P. was hanging around with his smoking buddies, he had a huge black eye and swollen cheek. I just put it out of my mind, avoiding embarrassment, I guess.”
“For him.”
“For me. Myself. I hate to say it, but I think I felt ashamed of my weakness.”
“Weakness?”
“In thinking his situation shameful, that I was somehow better than him. Am I making any sense?”
“Not much.”
Kate hesitated, then ploughed on. “You know, whatever he was proclaiming there by the drugstore was four-lettered, but at the same time it was like he was absolving the perpetrator. As though he deserved ill treatment. Very weird.”
“Not that weird, I guess. Teen torn in two, still trying to believe in the happy family myth. In any case, it would all go a long way to explaining J.P.’s direction in life.”
“Yeah.”
“And you were doing that female thing, wanting to rescue him. Good job things turned out the way they did, or, in my experience, you’d be the one underground.”
“You saying I’m one of those bad-boy groupies bent on reforming the poor dear?”
“You don’t really seem the type, I have to admit. But it’s been decades, Kate. You were both so young. People do change, as you say.” Mary pulled her feet off the chair where they’d rested and stood up, looming over Kate. Long-legged and square-framed with a square-ish face to match, Mary exuded reassurance, an old-fashioned kind of faith in the mundane. “Look, dear, I believe the sun’s after trying to come out. It’s Christmas. A beautiful day for a stroll in the country. I’m thoroughly sick of the bad in this world, aren’t you? Let’s go out and look for the good.”
Tactical Assault, Terminator 4, TRON. Exactly a week after a lovely Christmas Day spent with Mary, Kate stood in deep despair before the DVD rentals shelf at Ho Lam Video and Electronic. Why hadn’t she figured out how to get pay-on-demand on her parents’ TV? She knew why. It would require a whole new set-up, not the rabbit ears her parents had been perfectly happy with. And that would require more monthly expense, not so easy to square with a marginal business model such as Grave Concern.
Okay, Kate told herself, quit the pity party. Try the B’s. Bachelor Party Massacre, Bachelor Tom and His Bikini Playmates, Back to the Planet of the Apes. Kate felt warm in her winter coat. Way too warm. A hot flash was making her dizzy and a little short of breath. Sweat broke through her antiperspirant and congealed under her arms, threatening to trickle down her sides. Someone lingered behind her. Okay, so she knew she’d already spent way too long here. She stifled a scream, arising not from fear of the lingerer but dread of the lame New Year’s Eve she would endure if she left movie-less.
Before Kate’s eyes, a DVD materialized.
“Excuse me, Miss.”
Miss, not Ma’am. Kate’s mood lifted considerably.
“May I recommend this one? If you haven’t seen it, that is,” said the lingerer, who apparently belonged here. It said so on his nametag: Lanh (Leonard) Ho Lam, Manager.
Julie and Julia. Kate restrained the urge to grab the movie from his hand. Yes, she’d heard of it. Yes, this could save the day. And, more important, the night. She thanked her deliverer, whom she now recognized as the all-grown-up son of the Vietnamese couple who’d set up shop here back in the eighties. She’d of course left town by then, but learned these new truths on occasional visits. Kate had never really considered such “new” arrivals true townies, though they’d been here, what, well over twenty years. As long as Kate herself.
“You must be a mind reader,” Kate said, as she followed him to the cash. “I thought I was doomed to New Year’s Eve perdition, or — or excommunication. Or something.”
The corner of his mouth twitched as Lanh/Leonard — who looked about thirty but had to be older than that — keyed in the $1.99 Kate owed. Kate left the store feeling light as air. She knew what Manager Ho Lam thought of her: crazy old bat. But there was the advantage of pushing fifty: she couldn’t give a flying fart.
At around ten o’clock, feeling the urge to nod off, Kate opened up the bubbly she’d put by and plugged the movie into the machine. As best she could, Kate resisted insidious gravitas, and 2010 slid in smoothly, even joyously — on Julie’s and Julia’s pluck.
Kate bounced from bed on the first of January — no hangover, no regrets. Save one: the day was a holiday, and Kate wanted to get to work. She phoned Mary, who, by virtue of not being on call, warily agreed to Kate’s plan to hunt down that humblest of graves that bound Kate inextricably to John Marcotte.
They met by a swath of forest on the edge of town, an area well used by walkers and skiers, but harbouring dark corners untouched by existing trails. An old loggers’ trail, known locally as the High Street, bumped along its north side. No one, not even on four-wheelers, dared use the High Street in summer because of the metre-deep potholes and mud. Now, in winter, all such nastiness was hidden deep in snow.
Mary was skeptical. “Kate, dear, it’s a large bit of cold, white stuff all around.”
Kate smiled. “I know.” Snow was good; snow was according to plan. “Snow is our friend, Mary. We’re going to float right over it like angels on a mission of mercy,” she said. “Now stop thinking so much, and strap those things on. We’re going to do this in methodical fashion, in a search-and-rescue type grid pattern, so we don’t miss anything. The sooner we get this over, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Mary wholeheartedly agreed. Obediently, she strapped on the old wood-and-gut snowshoes Kate had found in her parents’ garage. Kate stepped into her mom’s ancient cross-country skis. She shouldered a small backpack filled with camera, flagging tape, compass, water bottle, and a Googled aerial map, and slid off. Mary stumped along behind, humming a tune Kate thought she recognized.
It wasn’t long before dense bush narrowed their relative difference in speed. Together, they bowed down the branches of bushes, lifted lighter deadfall out of the way and clambered over the larger downed trees. Above them, huge pines filtered the sun, casting a net across the snow.
Mary was doubtful. “What’ve we got to go on?” she said. “Anything?”
“Just some initials carved in a tree, is what old man Marcotte said. But I’m thinking there’s gotta be more than that, right? I mean this is a mom burying her son. She’s hardly going to want to lose track. I figure they chose a spot where there’s some permanent natural marker. Like a big rock or a rise in the land. Or maybe they brought something along. A metal pole or a wooden cross, something they could stick in the ground to mark the spot. Hopefully tall enough to stick out of the snow.”
Mary was impressed. “I’d say you’ve been doing some thinking yourself.”
“Just a few sleepless nights — damned right,” Kate replied. “By the way, keep an eye out, here. Murphy’s Law: the grave’s gonna be just where we’re distracted by conversation or fighting our way through deadfall.”
“Where’d you get such a practical streak? I’ve never known this side of you, Kate.”
Kate shrugged, although she thought of her dad, an electrical engineer at the hydro station up the river his whole working life, the likely source of her single pragmatic gene. True, his little projects around the house had waned in later years, but that was only because of the arthritis in his hands, and later, an energy-sapping faulty valve in his heart. Kate hadn’t realized until her return how the house had been allowed to deteriorate. Not that her parents couldn’t have hired help. But her dad had been proud, a perfectionist, dissatisfied when things weren’t done just so.
Kate and Mary combed a rectangle of land, using the High Street and a power line as boundaries to north and south, reversing direction again and again with no positive result. After an hour and a half of this, Mary called over to Kate.
“Kate dear, just wanting to share that my feet are officially clumpets. If we’re to continue, I’ll need to call the insurance about adding the clause on loss of limb.”
Kate laughed. “Okay, okay. We’ll give it a rest — today.”
They shuffled back to the High Street, and Kate tied a piece of bright plastic tape on a tree trunk as high as she could reach, to mark where they’d quit. Driving home, Kate asked, “What’s a clumpet, anyway?”
“Ah, now that’s where the Newfoundland heritage gives the advantage,” said Mary. “It’s a bit of iceberg, of course, floating out in the bay.”
Soon they were back in Kate’s driveway, just short of the black hole that led into the Smithers garage. Kate leapt out and hauled open her car’s recalcitrant rear door with a grunt worthy of Wimbledon. A woman on a mission, she dove under the seat, throwing out a muddied paper cup, a tire pressure gauge to which a used piece of gum was firmly fixed, and, at last, with the aid of some foul language and a mighty yank, a heavy-duty extension cord.
She reappeared, triumphant. “Mercury’s dropping. I’m gonna need this,” she said, by way of explanation.
“Where’s the plug?” Mary said.
“In the garage.”
Mary stepped out on her side. “What, you can’t just drive in?”
“Mary. Think again. Look at the door!”
Mary looked. The garage, a free-standing, asbestos-shingled affair, listed to the right, its doorway more parallelogram than square. “I see what you mean,” Mary said.
“Door hasn’t closed since the ice storm in ’98.”
“Before my time, thank Christ,” Mary said. “You gonna offer me some hot chocolate, or what?”
After a slow start, business-wise, to the New Year, by late January, Kate could barely keep up. There seemed to be a run on grave guilt, as though the town’s bereaved suddenly mourned their dead all at once. Moreover, Kate noticed a distinct uptick in out-of-town clients — not so much far-flung city folk whom she’d habitually envisioned as her major market, but those who resided only just out of town. Up the highway as far as Sturgeon Falls. Down the highway to Valleyview — and beyond. Kate was getting the distinct impression some people, at least, were burying their loved ones here in Pine Rapids, expressly because of Grave Concern. It may have had something to do with Kate’s offering a midwinter introductory discount (50 percent off for the first six months), posted on Grave Concern’s website and inserted in strategic print-media classifieds across the land.
Or not. In the year and a half since her not-so-grand opening, Kate had found little logical reason why business flourished or faltered at any particular time. The ebbs and flows made little sense. Far be it from Kate to complain. She loved her little hubbub: the ordering of flowers, the rushing back and forth to the communal town cemetery that welcomed any religion or none, the invoicing of her now grand total of thirty-one clients, the keeping of accounts, the making up and placement of ads, the taking and sending of photographs, the reading of bad but heartfelt poetry to a patently docile underground crowd, the surrogate delivery of secrets and longings through the earth from living to dead. To say nothing of her underpaid and less appreciated toil for Flower Power. By the end of the month, Kate was averaging eleven-hour days — exhausting, but not killing. Commuting to the office was a non-issue; she could walk from the house in ten minutes or drive in three. She often walked home for lunch.
On just such a post-lunch jaunt, Kate stepped into the decidedly down-market Giant Lion department store, known to locals as the “Pussy Cat Palace.” She was looking over a bolt of ribbon for possible business use when she noticed Hille, her Christmas party hostess, quickly bury her face in a free-standing rack of sports jerseys. The rack rolled a bit, and Hille shuffled with it, trying to sponge her leaky eyes on a Maple Leafs sweater, apparently with little success. Kate, feeling a twinge of genuine sympathy for her old schoolmate, waited for Hille to collect herself. Finally, Hille made a move toward the cash — and the automatic door.
Kate sauntered over and faked surprise. “Oh! Hi, Hille, how’s it goin’?”
“Great, thanks!” Hille faked back. “How are you, Kate?”
Hille’s plummy peepers made it impossible for Kate to carry on the ruse. “Uh, something wrong?” she said. “You look upset.”
At this, Hille burst into tears, and the teen cashier glanced up groggily from a violent bout of texting. Kate put her arm around Hille’s shoulders and steered her through the Palace’s door, which had been wildly flapping since, mid-outburst, Hille had stood on the floor sensor.
Kate’s office was just a hop, step, and jump from Giant Lion. Kate settled Hille in one of her two cheap client chairs, and rustled up a cup of coffee in the ex-darkroom turned back office.
“It’s funny,” said Hille. “I’ve been curious about your business ever since you came back. ’Cause you know I just came back to town not that much before you. ’Course I never went so far away, either!” Hille looked around as though she’d just dropped into Wonderland. “I thought we might have stuff in common, y’know? But I was too shy to come in.”
Hille? Shy? That was new.
“Why’s that?” said Kate, setting down Hille’s coffee, to which she’d discreetly added a shot or two of Tia Maria, a client’s Christmas gift.
“I don’t know. Dead people. Graveyards. You know. I thought it might be like a funeral home, I guess.” Hille took a gulp from the steaming mug.
“More autobody shop, I’d say, if we’re talking décor,” said Kate, reviewing the seventies chrome-legged office chairs, the free pharmacy calendar, the depressing dark wood-veneer desk acquired at the Valleyview Goodwill.
Hille laughed and took another swig.
Well, Kate thought, at least the plastic surgeon didn’t excise her sense of humour. “So what’s up, Hille? Why so glum at the Pussy Cat Palace? I mean, besides the awful price of those jerseys.”
