Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

“I’ve never seen a dead person before.” Fleetingly, she wondered about her father, but he’d been boxed. “Is that a costume?”

“That’s his uniform from the Norwegian Navy.”

The corpse was balanced in the corner of the concrete walls, a small old man dressed in a pristine navy blue suit complete with epaulets. “Rescued from a Norwegian lightship that got torpedoed by a German sub. Thirty years later he was a county commissioner in Montana and the uniform still fits .” Rubbing his capacious stomach ruefully, Donald said, “If Grandpa’s genes were what they’re cracked up to be, I’d be still in the chorus line. Instead I spend my days on the wrong end of a number-three irrigating shovel or hitting the zerk fittings on Dad’s front-end loader with a half-frozen grease gun!” His sob, Evelyn knew, was not genuine. Her eyes were fastened on this peculiar effigy. It was certainly not a person. Nor was it remotely horrifying, though it did produce a strong sense of the ridiculous, perhaps due to a uniform right out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Evelyn asked cautiously, “What’s he doing here?”

“Oh, boy,” sighed Donald. “‘What’s he doing here?’ Well, Evelyn, we’re going to do a home burial with Gramps, oppressed by Granddad and promised themselves they wouldn’t spend two cents burying him. They told him so to his face. They said, ‘Granddad, you’ve been very cheap and mean. You never fed your cows in the winter. When you die, we’re not going to spend two cents burying you. We’re not buying you a headstone, and we’re not notifying your hometown newspaper in Trondhjem.’ My mother and father might be hard, but they’re not unkind. When Grandpa said he preferred cremation, my father said, ‘You buy the matches,’ and it was kind of a family joke — you know, a Norwegian family joke that’s not at all funny. Anyway, Grandpa bought a box of kitchen matches, and my folks still have them after about ten years. Tonight the old fellow goes up in smoke, which, given certain laws, is why we had to wait until we were snowed in to do it. We can’t get out and, except for you, they can’t get in, even if they see smoke.

“My mother really tried to reach out to him, but it was all lost on Grandpa. Everyone on the place was half starved while he paid into a pension plan through the Odd Fellows. And he had a high-dollar pinky ring, which was totally inappropriate to begin with, and which he swallowed once he knew the end was at hand. Said we’d only use it to buy train tickets out. These were all more or less jokes, but serious enough that he actually did swallow the ring. My folks and I are just unwilling to go in and get it, even though it’s pretty obvious we could use the money. Now—” he rapped his knuckles on the corpse’s stomach “—you’d have to use a chisel or tire tool or some damn thing.”

Evelyn, shivering from the cold, couldn’t quite keep her eyes off the corpse, and was tempted to blame it for everything. Donald said he was uncomfortable having it lean up against the wall like cordwood and put it in a small wagon, towing it around the room looking for a better place. “I remember when the damn thing was jumping around barking orders,” he said. He looked through the room for a place to park the wagon. “My dreams change every day,” Donald was saying. “For years I’ve also had a great interest in going to Mars. It seems more and more possible. If I hang on to my share of Grandpa’s pension and invest it wisely, I could be on one of the first trips. When I heard they’d found evidence of water there, I thought, Whoa , I could have it all: a hot tub on Mars! Here, this is good, I think….” He lifted the corpse out of the wagon and stood it in an upended metal stock tank, where it took on the aspect of a roadside shrine down in Mexico.

Evelyn tried to see the merits of hot tubbing on Mars, the plains of the Red Planet all around and the troubled, complicated Earth hanging on the far edge of the void. Donald had put her in a strange mood.

Donald, meanwhile, was gazing reflectively at his grandfather. “I’m sort of orchestrating the funeral tonight. There will be modest pageantry and some music. If only he could talk, eh? I can guarantee you he’d say we were doing everything all wrong.”

Viewed from the Red Planet, of course, casual wounding within families would seem trivial.

“What kind of music?”

“I have some bitchin’ tunes.” He reached deep into his beard in thought, his eyes moving slowly from side to side.

“So much snow,” said Evelyn. “If only you had a phone. Is he going to stay propped up okay? A few flowers would make a big difference.” She was losing her grip.

Evelyn sat at the kitchen table with a pile of old magazines, never quite taking her eyes off the weather. She had inquired about all the distances — to the county road, to town, across the fields, to the interstate highway — and finally Mrs. Aadfield, at the stove with a towel over her shoulder, told her she would just have to accept her predicament and that it was unlikely to last more than another night.

Evelyn was looking at the meat on a platter atop the stove.

“That’s not that moose, is it?”

“No, and I’d offer you some TV but Donald backed over the dish with the swather and the reception ain’t so good. Sometimes it skips off the stratosphere and we get Red Deer, Alberta. Dad watches it anyway, just for the movement. Says it helps his eyes.”

Evelyn said, “Can’t I make something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, a pie?”

“What’re you gonna make it out of?”

“You got any apples?”

In fact, they had a cellar full, and once Evelyn had them piled on the table, she abandoned herself to peeling them while she tried to remember how to make pie crust. None of these people knew what a terrible cook she was, and she wanted to bask in their not finding out. At the critical moment, Esther removed a box from the freezer and handed it to her: a brown generic box that said PIE CRUST, and inside were perhaps thirty crusts in a stack. “Jeez,” said Evelyn, “how do you get them apart?”

Eventually, Torvald and Donald reappeared in the kitchen. Esther suggested that being indoors, which they obviously craved, was a luxury to which they were not yet entitled. Nevertheless, they stood shoulder to shoulder pounding their hands together, then pulled off their insulated coveralls, stamping up and down, and seeming to become smaller as clothes piled around their feet.

“Everybody fed,” said Donald, reminding Evelyn that a herd of cows was often referred to by ranchers as “everybody.” “That old brockle-faced, crooked-horned, prolapsed, swinging-bagged, broken-mouthed, spavined whore chased Dad and me up on the wagon again, one of us ever trips we’re gonna be toast.”

“She’s going to town,” said Aadfield sternly. “I’ve had enough.”

“Must be three foot out there,” said Donald to Evelyn, turning his palms up hopelessly.

“Can’t you go to the shop and build something?” asked Mrs. Aadfield in a tone of exasperation.

“No, Ma, we can’t. The propane line is froze, and we can’t get heat to it.”

Donald led Evelyn to the living room, which bore no intuitive relationship to the rest of the house insofar as it was necessary to pass through two obscure doors to reach it. A small fireplace with a Heat-O-Lator insert was surmounted by the inevitable bugling elk against an overwrought tangerine sunrise; and it had been a long time since Evelyn had spotted tassels on furniture. A badly stuffed and moth-eaten bobcat was poised midpounce over a thoroughly dilapidated grouse, a tableau that proved to be a centerpiece for the windowless wall where hung various family pictures, including several of Donald as a rodeo star in pre — cross-dresser days and Grandpa in the Norwegian Navy. There was also a rather glaring colored portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales.