240
"Hell."
"Don't say that."
"Why not?"
"You don't know."
"Hell I don't." I wrap up in the newspaper.
BOB HAU6EN
"You don't." Father presses
his
body,
his
red body slagged like
Grandma's but hard, slowly presses his body up and moves it to the
big window.
I try to say
this
softly, Fatherish: "She'd
be
a lot easier to
live
with if she didn't bawl so much.
If
she was braver."
"Yes."
My Father's burnt face curls up like Grandma's chair.
My
Father has two moles on the side of
his
nose.
My Father is crying.
Grandma is dead.
Grandma died with us for four months and twelve days and we
found her dead in her bed one morning four months and twelve
days after she jumped into our house. Our house still smells Grandma.
We, Father and Mother, Lloydie, Jane, Kathy and I; stand
in a funeral home room inspecting Grandma's body in the casket
An expensive casket. A very good casket, the funeral man said, it
will last for years especially
if
cased in a vault of concrete or sted
under the ground where Grandma will dig down. I saw the ground.
It has
grass
on it.
Mother
is
crying. "She looks so pretty. So pretty."
The careful embalmer added the color, pink, glazed on Grand·
rna's cheeks, and faint yellow,
all
over the rest of her skin.
He
stretched her skin tight, padded it, and unwrinkled it all, even the
no longer burnt flaps closed down over the eyes of
Gran~ma.
The
hairspikes dressing her head curl up in springs. The scales are gone.
The careful embalmer arranged coils to cover the bald patches:
Mother snuffles in her hanky. "She looks so pretty."
Lloydie, Jane and Kathy are crying. Jane and Kathy cried
when Grandpa died, too. They'd met him twice. Lloydie wasn't
born yet.
I am crying. I don't know why ; I hope because she looks
so
pretty and she didn't want to.
Silent, red Father looks at no one, fingers the heavy drapings
at the entrance to the dimly lit room and comes no farther in.
