Time’s Body

WAS a smoother ride too much to ask? Todd stiffened his legs against the urge to leap over the chasm and seize the crank from the hulking gravedigger.

“Daddy?” The whispered voice was Sylvie’s, her gloved hand sliding into his. He enclosed it but kept his eye on the casket as it staggered downward, the sockets of the metal winch frame creaking and groaning with the weight on the cables, the weight of oak and the weight of Melanie. But not so heavy as it might appear from the poorly calibrated mechanism and the oaf working it. Who knew better than Todd how breathtakingly slight the weight of his wife was by now, like a girl before puberty, before everything afterward. Near the end, when he would lift her from bed, she seemed like the young Melanie available before only in pictures and the stories of others, but even so her eyes had known him, eyes full of the heart of the woman she had become. If she were here—and was she not, in some new way, here?—she might just laugh at that troglodyte turning the crank; she might say, Oh, sweetie, you’re only angry at him because I happen to be dead.

“Daddy?” Could his daughter be trying to rescue both of them from this appalling descent? He nodded that he was listening but stayed put. He pressed his lips together. No one else, not even a beloved child, could decide for you what you had to stay and see through. His eyes smarted; his neck ached. He’d been awake most of the night, at first in the desolate bed and then, during the small hours, in Melanie’s chair by the window, the Mississippi below invisible until first light revealed wide brownish water between the bare trees of the bluff. Hoarfrost, like an efflorescence of calcium, had coated branches, still-dormant grasses, and perennial flowers between the bluff edge and house, the flagstones of the empty terrace—a day of chalk in which to bury his wife of thirty-four years, decades during which she, the implant, had improbably, even readily, taken root in the hometown to which long ago he had thought he was bringing her only temporarily. Now, at the end of the morning, a March prairie wind shaped to the earth delivered biting grains of snow, even under the undertaker’s canopy.

Todd gasped as the spray of lilies and roses on the casket quivered and slid precipitously to one side, finally cause enough that the gravedigger stopped for an adjustment. High time. But, wait, shouldn’t the flowers have been lifted off before the lowering, laid to one side, and later placed as a cover for the bald mound of earth? He clenched his jaw. This was just the kind of foiled solemnity Melanie might have found hilarious, back at home after someone else’s interment, as she tossed off her solemn clothes in the warmth of the bedroom, out of the wind and the biting snow. How he ached to dive skin-on-skin into bed with her, relive this welter of impressions, sort things out. Whomever would he talk to now? Who would answer and encourage him to improve his attitude? In his bright orange jacket the gravedigger looked like an ice fisherman or hunter hauled in from the wilds for cemetery duty. Todd had glimpsed him earlier, lounging against a backhoe some distance from the site, partially hidden by an oak tree.

There was a thud at the bottom of the hole, and the whole apparatus shuddered. Had Sylvie, too, shuddered beside him? Melanie couldn’t possibly be amused by this absurd theater. On the other hand who knew what she might be finding out while he remained stupefied here? You must be devastated, someone had said to him earlier, and benumbed he’d repeated, devastated, the word opening up into a vastness of forever-dispersing parts. He’d had to shake himself. Such things people uttered. The language! He frowned downward onto the still-pristine oak roof—so small, what a damn small house for a...