Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

My nose began to bleed. I had thought I was crying but then I could taste the metal of it. I had little experience with nosebleeds, and my mouth filled with coagulated clots like small chunks of liver. I wiped my nose and could feel the clots amid the mucus and blood. Still I lay next to his remains — there was no more apt word for the cobbled-together form I was curled against — I would lie there and preserve him somehow with memories. I would reassemble him with chat. I would say Good morning in the morning. I would say Good night at night. Not to do so ever again was just unthinkable. I would lie there and tell him the story of every movie I’d ever seen. I would not be no guy’s sister. I would lie in there until — until I began to weigh my options.

When we arrived at the parking lot and the funeral men set up the gurney and the pallbearers again came to carry the body out of the hearse, I decided to make my presence known. It was getting out not exactly when the getting was good but at least before the smallest crowd. As Robert’s friends lifted the casket onto the gurney I pushed up on the lid, poked my head out, and made my presence known. I clambered out the rest of the way. The light of the world hurt my eyes.

“What the hey?” one of Robert’s friends exclaimed.

“It’s Gunny’s sister,” said another.

“What were you doing in there?”

And then my mother came running over, tears raining down her face, and she just brushed me off and held me and motioned to the boys to close the casket lid.

In the cemetery there were rifles fired in the air in salute. More guns for Gunny. I recall that. There was a concrete park of angelic gargoyles or beastly cherubs — who could tell one from the other? There were white crosses and covered pots of geraniums and perfectly coned yews. There was a drummer, as I had expected, though no one broke his sticks and made a wish. There was “Taps,” mournful and familiar:

Day is done ,

Gone the son.

It will stun ,

No more fun ,

Have a bun.

And then the bridge off which the bugler hurled his lungs:

Night is nigh.

Say good-bye.

People die.

There was a large flag folded neatly, amazingly into a triangle, then given to my mother, who neither held it to her heart nor thanked the skilled folder. She hurriedly crammed the thing into her handbag. And then the driving home. There were casseroles people had brought with tinfoil over the top, and the kitchen table was piled high with them. It looked like someone had died. And since someone had, this look at least did not contribute to any lies. I went upstairs to my pink room and basically stayed there for a month.

My parents arranged for a medical leave from school for me and I was told I should rest until I felt better. Our house had become a kind of krankes Haus. The local newspapers were brought to my room and I tried to read them. In our county, I learned, all the loons were stuck: I would just be one of them. But in fact it was widely reported that all the county’s loons were flightless, had caught a kind of botulism — from the fish they ate that had drunk bad water. Was this tainted water from clinic runoff or the natural occurrence of toxins in a lily pad? Who knew? There were some arguments on each side. But the birds’ wings had frozen in place, so the birds not only couldn’t fly but drowned right there in the water. Other articles told of ducks, deranged by mercury, who were reputedly wandering off from their nests and then making new ones, forgetting to go back to the first. I lay in bed, sick and not eating, storky beneath the sheets, my thoughts landing arbitrarily on this or that, like light moving past a window. The fulfillingness of my life’s every day had not just faltered but completely stopped.

The weather cooled; Japanese ladybugs, brought years before as pest control for the soy, had taken over the farmhouses, ours included. They formed shiny orange coverings on our windows and doors, and if you brushed at one it bit you. At night the ones that had made their way inside spent their time whacking themselves against the lampshades.

Songbirds, drunk on fermented mulberries, and leaving purple fecal puddles on branches and railings, once again got themselves confused and failed to get going south, lingering instead in the bare trees.

On Hoopen Road three cows were electrocuted in a storm.

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. I was reliving my old homework from Mythology for Freshmen. The work of grief, where only unsteady progress could be made, seemed at first Herculean. Then Sisyphean. Then Persean. Then Echovian. Then one was turned finally and prematurely into a flower or a tree, with a flower’s curvature and a tree’s yearning reach. Paralyzed. But with shoes. And dinner. And chores. I did improve , to use a medical verb, without actually feeling better, and as the autumn weeks went by more and more I left my room and began to help my father with the harvest and sometimes even rode with him, taking the small roads, among the drumlins and moraines to Chicago, delivering potatoes and our three-season spring mix to some restaurants, as well as occasionally setting up at the farmers’ markets there. My father wore my brother’s dog tags wherever we went. Certain moments the whole earth seemed a grave. Other times, more hopefully, a garden.

We would start off bright and early into the rising sun, the ground billowing up its dew in such heavy, magical vapors that when one was in the troughs of the highway one couldn’t see a foot ahead and the fields looked as if they were on smoky fire, preparing for the visitation of ascending or descending gods. Which could it be? Perhaps it was true what people used to say about our county: outer space was interested. But then the air would clear and the day would be awash in light. I studied the third-cutting hay rolled into tight coils on the fields and placed at perfect distances from one another, as if by an art department.

One had to get on with life, out of good manners if nothing else. My dad and I would strike up random conversation. “Seahorses give birth,” I would begin. “But they’re male. Why do we even call them male, if they give birth?”

And my dad would be silent, driving, considering. Then he would speak. “Because they insist on it. They don’t want what happened to ladybugs to happen to them. These ladybugs have masculinity issues to beat the band!”

I tried to laugh. I appreciated his trying to acknowledge me, be with me, though it had become difficult for him. Ahead of us ballooning clouds floated there absurdly, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Groups of geese crawled through the sky, their metallic honks declaring their departure south.

We would stop somewhere to eat and do just and only that: stop and eat. We got BLTs and soup and then would continue on our way. The brilliant gold leaves and grasses, the drying roadside timothy and bluestem, all looked on a nice day like a hymn to sunlight, when in fact, if one actually thought seriously about the situation, the mechanism of their dialogue with the sun had been shed entirely. The honey locusts had gone first, raining shimmering trails of seedlings into the gutters of the streets in town. Then the yam- and ham-hued maples. A papery caramel of leaves or a trail of maize or both lined every road we were on. How like the end of love to leave a beautiful corpse. When they weren’t gold against blue, like something royal, the oaks bore the flat blackish red of a blood orange, and my father and I would drive along staring out at them through the windshield, each of us thinking our own thoughts. One evening migrating songbirds, oriented toward the moon, mistook a red-lit cell phone tower for their destination and we watched as they all shredded themselves in the tower’s steel supports. More disastrous love performed in symbols. As we passed, my father slowed down, then sped up again. Silence was not the worst thing, though it still contained sorrow and making-do. Here and there a rabbit scurried across our path.