So help us, we spread her remains in a minnow bucket. It shouldn’t have come to that, but there was a law against scattering ashes in the lake, and we had to be clandestine out in the boat, the rope tossed casually over the side, the sooty remainder of her trickling out through the sieve holes. We played her favorite music: Sinatra, Bennett—old-timey, feel-good stuff—and sipped G&Ts as we plowed through the chop. No one said much, although Daughter-in-law Judith read a prayer. To throw off a suspicion that could hardly have existed, Nephew Jonathan put out a fishing line, ostensibly trolling. He didn’t catch anything.
We did this because we loved her and because she loved the lake—loved it as if her body had once sprung from its mothering waves fully formed, her toes first sinking into life at the waterline. This is not far from the truth. She grew up along the shore, came into all of her consciousness, womanhood, marriage, and grief within ten miles of the beach. Consider this: an entire life lived in sight of an otherwise insignificant body of water, a whole existence spent with that water sloshing under your eyes. We felt we owed it to her.
If we bear guilt, we bear it unequally—some of us holding more burdensome shares than others. Daughter Nancy carries a heavy load, having been so ensnared in her final years. It was Nancy who suggested the minnow bucket, also Nancy who mixed the G&Ts. We don’t hold this against Nancy. Rather, relief couples with our guilt, the unspoken gratitude that it was she and not us who had to make the unpleasant arrangements. (Her carpet had to be cleaned twice to scour out the scent. The tombstone engraver was full of excuses for failing to cut her name correctly.) But Nancy was obdurate, just as she had been as a child, locking herself in her room for thirty minutes a day to practice the oboe.
It’s not as if we didn’t offer to help. Cousin Thorpe—help him too, for that is his real name—was good about visiting. He would call beforehand, inquiring as to what she needed, and patiently listen to her electromagnetic garble, as if those scrambled, torturous syllables would ever reveal what peanut butter was most desired, which pickles were truly sweet. We know he kept the food, along with whatever money she remembered to offer. We don’t hold this against him either. She had plenty of money, and Juanita, her live-in help, prepared all of her meals. Two more causes for relief.
And Niece Emilia would appear at her door one evening a month—her round, pocked face scrubbed pale as the waxing moon—offering to play the piano. In fact it was not an offer but a demand. She played Bach’s two-part inventions to perfection, later the three-parts, but never with more feeling than that long dead composer’s clavichord would have allowed. Did we hold this mechanical playing against her? Better her sturdy, robotic hands marching across the keys than ours. We know Sister Rachel obligated her to do it, a strange condition of Emilia’s continued room and board into adulthood. Rachel might have been taking advantage of her daughter, but she and the deceased had long ago given up speaking. Emilia was the closest available peace offering, the most convenient sacrifice at hand.
Nephew Joseph’s ministrations were less effective. He pointed out, rightly, that lawn care was an issue. She had quite a lawn—legacy of her property’s former life as a lakeside resort. The guest cottages no longer stand, and the individuated docks, short and stubby with cherry wood trim, no longer finger the shore, but the posts and the foundations remain. They pop up among the weeds leading down to the beach like the remains of some long-lost, underachieving civilization—the Vikings in Newfoundland, maybe—and a riding lawnmower is in perpetual danger of upending on a hidden cornerstone and tumbling, Viking-like, into the drink. The operator must be skilled and attentive; Joseph is neither. Joseph has been driven mad by a clutch of personal electronic items that chew up his sanity with incessant reminders of what the rest of us are up to—which isn’t much, but enough to land him wheels up in the shallows one sunny afternoon, his ankle pinned under the blade deck. Do we bare responsibility here as well?
Safe enough to acknowledge our blood is at fault and leave it at that. Why slog through the drudge of more family history? We’d have to re-tell the story of Brother Jake targeting the neighbor’s boat with bottle rockets on the Fourth of July, of Sister Millie’s insistence that we stand on our heads after holiday meals to ease digestion, of Son Robert—who no longer moves among us, help him too—selling half the resort to fund a massive architectural debacle on the far side of the lake, as far from her as he could manage without severing the aquatic tie. It looked a lot like a tree stump—if a tree stump could be three stories tall and filled with sadness.
Because these stories are sad, even if they are also amusing to those of us living farther away from the source. We never had to visit her after Husband Pauly’s death, after Son Robert’s collision with the highway abutment, after the drinks, after the strokes, after the knees went and carried away the mind, leaving her immobile and unable to comprehend her immobility. We never had to play the who-am-I? game at her wheelchair side, making asinine gifts of stuffed dogs to replace the ones we took away while she slept. We didn’t have to do these things unless we wanted to—which we rarely did, sustained as we were by our last image of her spitting up lasagna.
Guilt, guilt, and more guilt—but at least it’s of a familiar kind. We’ve studied it in enough movies and books to know what to do. The key is to ask ourselves little edifying questions like, did we ever make her happy? and then mull hard on the answer even as we sit as our own judges in our own easy chairs, and it’s as easy, really, to decide no as it is yes because both judgments come down wrapped in a soft blanket of cliché. There’s certainly enough evidence for both sides. There’s enough evidence for everybody. We’re all just swimming in evidence!
Consider the night of her twenty-first birthday. We have it on good authority that Husband Pauly took her dancing under the old pavilion at Pike’s Point, her dress swirling under the soft, moth-lit ether of a summer moon. Sounds nice, and it probably was, newly engaged, some war or another just over, the bulk of a sun-drenched, water-beaded life drifting out over the lake like the scent of a thousand, harmless cigarettes. Or, years later—but not far away—the sight of two children, a daughter with a good work ethic and a son with a love of speed, running up from the beach with a stringer of fish stretched between their tiny fists. (What a buoying sight that must have been: her children linked by an unbreakable chain of silver.) Or, even later, the story of her jumping up on Big Band night at the Highlander to direct, impromptu and ecstatic, the weekly rendition of “In the Mood.” She invited the trombone player home afterwards. Twenty years her junior, she threatened to ply him with drinks. He went. There were witnesses.
So who can say if we ever brought her joy? Certainly not us. Yet it was us who put what was left of her in a minnow bucket, us who towed her remains through the waves while we sipped booze and blared old music. It shouldn’t have come to that, but there was a law, and, in our defense, no one else was around to tell us no.
C.M. Barnes holds an MFA from the University of Montana and lives and writes in Iowa City. His work has received a Glimmer Train 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers, the 2012 Phoebe Winter Fiction Prize, the 2013 Literary Laundry Award of Distinction for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2013 Southwest Review Meyerson Fiction Prize and the June 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open. His work has appeared in Phoebe, Literary Laundry, Cargoes, Booth, Digital Americana, Squalorly, and Clapboard House and is forthcoming in Arcadia and Prick of the Spindle.