Gifted by John Daniel

Author:John Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

seventeen

My father was buried on Sunday, December 6th. Nobody knew what he would’ve wanted, so he was cremated and put into the ground next to Leenie. Burned or whole, that was the place he’d want to be for all eternity, next to the only woman he’d ever loved. For the next few billion years, anyway, until the sun becomes a red giant and cremates Earth back into gas and dust, and the gas and dust drift on and by and by start new stars and solar systems. When I could bear to think about his last moments, I wondered if he’d seen something, some glimpse, through the opening doorway that he thought led to nothing. Pinned as he was, he couldn’t have reached for it, the way my mother did when her end came, but I wanted to believe—neededto believe, I guess—that he saw something that shocked his materialist mind, some kind of dawn over a landscape he’d never dreamed of.

The medical examiners didn’t do a full autopsy. Judging from his wounds, they said, he probably died from a lacerated liver caused by the blunt force of the cave-in. The report was released to Cart and Josie, as my temporary guardians. Jonah was too explosive to talk to, so Josie told Cloudy about it. Later, Cloudy told Josie that Jonah had called the examiners’ office himself because he didn’t trust anything coming from Dismal Acre. In that conversation, Cloudy said, they’d told Jonah he shouldn’t have brought the body in. It’s better when we can examine at the site of death, the guy explained. Jonah thanked him for that advice and asked, “Should I have left that ton of rubble on him too? And if rats starting nibbling his toes and buzzards started gathering, should I have called you for instructions?” There was no way, he told the guy, that he’d have left his best friend in the broken mess of his house with the wind and rain coming in and whatever else. If he had it to do over, he said, he’d bust his butt to bring in the body even quicker.

I wasn’t brave enough to look at my father in the funeral home, but after he’d been cremated I told them I wanted a handful of ashes for myself. They weren’t real keen on it, but they opened the box. The ashes were shades of gray, fine and coarse mixed together, with some bits that had to have been bone. I put my handful in a plastic zip-bag .

The day we buried him was windy, cold, working up toward sleet or snow. Pastor Rogers had to hold down the gold-edged pages of his Bible with his gloved fingers as he read from Ecclesiastes, and he kept it short. He’d spoken in the church service, earlier, but the best words came from Jonah and Cloudy and Wendell Truckner from Siuslaw Pacific, the guy who’d hired my dad twice. Len Peppers was there, in a wheelchair, looking like a prophet fallen on hard times.

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