Creative Nonfiction: The Dead

By Steve Passey

 

“They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.”

― Ernest Dowson, fr. "Vitae Summa Brevis"

 

Birth and Death

I am alone on the street save for a couple standing beside an ancient baby carriage. The wind blows just enough to move the carriage so that the springs squeak. The man has to be nearly six-a-and-a-half feet tall. He is dressed formally – if I can say that – some sort of black trousers, a white shirt and a black vest – none of it of matching cloth. It is an assembly. He wears an old hat. His hair is long and the white and yellow color made out of smoking cigarettes and his posture erect and weary and he says nothing. The woman, dressed in voluminous layers of white from head to foot, her head covered in a white linen shawl of some sort, dirty and unkempt, is talking and talking but to no one in particular. She makes her orisons and moves along the street in front of the carriage as if in pantomime. 

Help me, she says, to no one. Help me with my baby. Please help my baby.

She sees me and she comes over. Help me, she says, please help me. 

I look in to the carriage and there, swaddled in a mess of stained and unwashed blankets, is a dead baby. It’s lips and eyelids and the fingers of the one hand I can see are blue. A few flies land and start into flight then land again, dancing on the infant’s quiet body. I can smell it too, smell the miasma of death. That is what brought the flies. The odor.

I look at the woman and she looks right though me. 

I can’t help you with your baby, I say. I don’t know what to do. 

She moves off then, back to her mummery along the empty street.

Help me, she says, please help my baby. 

This is the only dream I have ever had that I woke up from. It is the smell I think, no other dream I have ever had had a smell. 

What do dreams mean even? 

Nothing. 

How are you supposed to know what you are supposed to do? 

 

A Wedding, a Funeral.

He came from nothing and was not sure of who might have been his biological father. He did love his mother. They were close. He forgave her every failure; such was the power of her apologies, her promises. She never closed her door to him. Not when he’d been arrested, not when he’d been broke. He or his brother. He got in a lot of fights. He never stole anything. He drank, at times, drinking everything. He would be drunk every day for weeks on end. He got married, he got divorced. His first wife was insane, a gaping hole of imaginary grievances and cawing anger. He was a rescuer by nature, but not all people can be rescued. Some of the drowning drag you down with them. 

He sold cars. He worked in the oilfield service business. Dissatisfied in his forties, he went to school and became a counsellor. He never asked for help. He did ask forgiveness. You could not say no to him. He did quit drinking, for long stretches. He never once went to rehab, or joined AA. 

Once, at a hockey game, he saw a guy he thought he recognized. A big man, crew-cut, lantern jaw. I know that guy, he said to his friends, but I can’t remember from where.

In between periods he went up to the guy and told him, hey I know I know you, but I forget your name. The guy laughed. Well, Chris, the guy said. You do know me. Back when you first met me, I was a staff sergeant with the Rocky Mountain House RCMP detachment. I busted you a few times. 

They both laughed. 

I knew I knew you, Chris said.

Are you doing alright, the old cop asked?

I am, he said, I really am.

He had met a good woman.

When he remarried it was quite a party. He and his brother hit the floor and danced a jig like you have never seen anyone dance a jig. A jig is a ridiculous dance – all dance is ridiculous - but they had joy - joy - and they were a delight to watch. I thought, for no other reason other than the jig, that he must have originally come from the east coast, from the fisheries and the brightly-painted houses built on the cliffs and on the foggy rocks, where they still play the fiddle and dance those jigs but no, he was from here, and he just liked jigging. His wife wore a red dress and was inspiring. Her sisters, her bridesmaids, were euphoric. Everyone watched and clapped their hands in time. The wedding trumped even an Irish wake.

Joy.

A few years later he had not seen his brother in a while so he went to the basement suite the brother rented and let himself in and there was his brother, dead on the couch. He’d been dead a week. Pneumonia. Who dies of pneumonia now? Only those alcoholics who are profoundly alone. He woke up alone. He drank alone. He slept on the couch alone. He was sick alone. He had no one to care for him, not even anyone to say: Go see a doctor. Chris felt terrible about his brother’s passing. He did not blame himself, and no one else blamed him. He worked every day and had a lot of overtime. He had a new family, with two children under six years of age. He just felt that he should have been the one to say: I’ll drive you to the doctor.  

Chris began to drink again. His brother gone, his mother dead years now, and no promises came to him that he could have faith in and no apologies he could believe. The drinking finally wrecked him. He quit drinking again - sure - but it was not enough or in time enough and he died of it. Complications of lifestyle, demons unburied come back to bury the sexton. He was interred in a family plot beside his brother and his mother and a sister – a sister who, some years before, had fallen from the balcony of a third-floor apartment during a party on a night when the temperatures were in the minus-thirties centigrade. No one saw her fall. A boyfriend had inquired as to life insurance and thought he just might have been named as a beneficiary. No and no. But there she is together with their mother and their brother under the earth. 

A year after his passing his wife attended a party where they’d brought in some sort of a medium – a Vedic astrologer to be specific. The astrologer told her (the widow) that Chris had come to her to ask her to apologize to his son for him, to say that he’d said some things he regretted and that it was illness, medication, and the confusion that dying makes for the mind that had made him say those things. I am sorry, he said, I am so sorry. The other thing he’d asked for was a tombstone.

I understood that. He’d grown up poor and died too young and feared, like all the poor and the dead, that he’d not be remembered. He wanted to look on the earth in which he was laid and see his name beside the names of his mother and his brother and his sister.

 

Exhumation.

Once, coming out of a Wal-Mart at ten at night, I walked past an old Chevrolet pickup with a topper. There was a woman standing beside it, smoking. She was very tall, over six feet I think, and she was dressed in layers of clothing even in the summer evening’s heat, all of the clothing ill-fitting and inapt and brown. From the back of the truck the unmistakable smell of rot came. 

That’s dead-animal smell, my girlfriend said. That’s like the renderer’s truck. 

She’d grown up on the farm. She knew. She was right, it smelled like death. Dead meat. Animal flesh, spoiled, sweet too - enough to make you retch.

The woman smoking looked at us without blinking until we looked away. She stared us down. We walked to our vehicle and drove off.  

That was strange, my girlfriend said. 

A few months later we broke up. Mostly, she would inveigh against me with a constant series of subjective tests. If I passed, which I could by agreeing with her, I was allowed to take another test. If I failed, which was often, she would rail against me in the languages of conspiracy theory and insults posing as arguments. I would sometimes fail deliberately and egg her on. Her rants were cruel and boring. Finally, she told me that she wanted two things: Never to work, and to have a dog. I failed for the last time and she was rid of me. I wouldn’t argue. I had told her once that I would be a comfort to her body and a balm for her soul but she doesn’t care about poetry. Someone has to feed a dog. Love, for most people, is conditional. It is something on a ledger. The only thing she did not barter in bad faith was the encounter with that odd woman in the parking lot from which we had both walked away. We dissolved into a caricature of an unhappy union. The smoking woman remained a daemon, a vague shape looming in the night standing watch over a collection of carrion. This, I imagined, was an assignment. 

I tell people about this odd encounter and they always say the same things: Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you call someone? Hey, I say. We did do something. We left. Let the living tend to the living, let the dead look after the dead. When I think of it, I think of the woman as being distinct only at the red ember at the end of her cigarette, the rest of her is diffuse, form merging with scent, the guardian standing in the shadow of the gate. 

Do not interfere, her posture said. 

We saw nothing, our steps answered.

I have never dreamed that dream again. If I did, when the madwoman in her unlaundered volumes of white cloth came to me with her frantic recitations, I’d ask her only: What is your baby’s name? I believe that it would be enough, and that that would be all anyone could do. The dead just want to be remembered, before they forget. The dead just want to rest, because they are weary. The dead don’t belong anywhere. The few years we get forbid us the hope of living longer, so we beg for epitaph, we plead for name, we ask prophecy from dream.

Steve Passey is originally from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the short-story collections Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock (Tortoise Books, 2017), the novella Starseed (Seventh Terrace), and many other individual things. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominee and is part of the Editorial Collective at The Black Dog Review.