Dressing The Dead
David Grubb
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When they had all left the cottage, when good friends had helped her to tidy up, Ruth was simply too tired to worry about being there alone, about not being able to face the hours of silence, the shards of memory, the bed that he had died in, the smell of him, the absence of his being, his silence.
“Are you sure you will be content to be alone? Why not let one of us stay with you? Why not come over and stay with Annie for the night?
Are you sure? Are you sure?”
And she was sure as she had been about all the arrangements and the chapel service and the prayers and the hymns and the words and the small number of letters from those who could not come to the funeral and the small gathering of those who were closest afterwards. She was right to have it in the cottage and not in the village hall. In some way she knew that he would like this.
And now, after all the tenderness of the rituals and the comfort of the words and the offers of help the tiredness almost drenched her and she needed to sit in the small back garden and let the early evening light dissolve into stars and feel the whisper of the July wind on her face.
And once again she was thinking of children they never had. Another person to sit in the garden with her and go upstairs with her and talk about the old things with her. It was this that bent her down the most.
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For the next two weeks there are almost too many voices and so much to be seen to and once or twice she almost regretted that she had so many friends with so much advice.
When she walked along the cliff path they wanted to join her and they knocked on the door and left some biscuits or home made pasties and they asked her to tea and they got their husbands to deliver home -grown vegetables and fresh flowers; as if she didn’t have a garden of her own.
When the vicar called to see her he told her that this would go on for weeks and that it was the way of things, reminding her that she had done the same for others in the past.
So the days in the cottage were not lonely and increasingly she longed for the arrival of early evening and for the protection of the back garden.
When she was dealing with letters and accounts and mundane matters she was steady. There were other things to face however, other noises, and she was not so good at this.
When the warmth of July collapsed and August became days of rain and the nights were dense green she had more time to herself, more hours to sort things out, more time to prepare for a changed life. For the first time she began to think of days without Paul. Or was it days and nights with a different Paul because he was still there in so many ways; in the cottage and the garden and far off along the cliff path and on Sundays in particular? Was this how it was going to be?
She gave up setting the table for him and then began laying his place again. She started to sort out his clothes but after cleaning and ironing she placed them back in the wardrobe and in the drawers and did not pack them in boxes to dispose of. She did not speak to him as yet but the last thing she did before sleep each night was pat the pillow beside her pillow. And when she woke up some mornings she found herself staring at where the back of Paul’s head would have been.
The neck. The shoulders. Torso. Other beginnings to the day. Greetings.
Later, much later, she heard herself say “Is that you, Paul? Is that you?”
It seemed natural.
There was no grave. The ashes had been scattered at Pentire. The wind and the sea took care of this. There was no place to lay flowers. She did this in her heart, more and more as the months went past and the winter blew sleet and snow and the startingly bright mornings came one after another and each field began to grow. Crows aggressive and gulls strutting and awkward and the coastline with burning bushes of gorse.
Paul was there when she began collecting driftwood from the beach and when she picked blackberries. He was there when a voice in the church proclaimed the changing seasons. He was there when snowdrops came. In their silence. In their frailty. In their greeting.
He was there when she dropped things and in dream after dream and when she began to paint the kitchen. Reassuring. Kindly. There were sometimes even signals that seemed like words.
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Easter came late. She was beginning to come to terms with this new life. She found herself talking to Paul more and more. She wanted this.
And it was time to sort some things out in the bedroom that perhaps should have been done weeks before. But she knew that the first autumn and the first Christmas had to be lived through and the earliest part of the year before decisions about change could be made. And now she stood in their bedroom and stared at his shirts and ties and socks as if they were old friends.
It was a bright morning but she pulled the curtains across to create comfort and then carefully removed her clothes and began dressing in his shirt and pullover and trousers and tie and jacket. And she put on the brown shoes that he wore on Sundays and she walked up and down for a while before going downstairs and walking about the cottage. Before she put on his overcoat and cap and went out into the garden. Before she perched on the bench that was quite damp and pulled the overcoat tight against her to embrace its odours. Then she went back into the cottage and upstairs to the bedroom and tried on other shirts and ties and began to move about the room as if dancing, as if she was Paul, dancing.
And she did this day after day until it was Easter day when she left the cottage and went down the short street and up Church Street and into the church like this, like Paul, like dancing in the mind.
The church was crowded. She sat in a back pew. She could see people she knew but they didn’t approach this stranger.
As she left the vicar shook her hand. Looking her in the eyes he could find no special words for this but he knew.
Time to steal the loss. Time to disguise. Transformations that were beyond the day to day. Requiems becoming resurrections. Life lies bright and frail as snowdrops.
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She stood at Pentire one year after his death. She stood there as his wife, his widow. She stared out at sea and sky and saw three swans and wondered where they were heading for.
“We don’t seem to see you in church anymore.”
“How do you fill your days?”
“Why are you hiding from us?”
“It’s about time you came back to life.”
What did they mean?
“Is it something we said?”
“Is it something we’ve done?”
“Are you up to something?”
“Is there another man?”
All the clichés of conformity, words to disguise unease; her former friends genuine but out of sorts and struggling. Missing her. Noticing a gap.
She stood at Pentire and could not get their faces and whispers and body language out of her mind. Old coots. Old owls. Lost without her.
The three swans were there again and the sea like linen folds of lapis.
Where had they come from?
She wondered at the phrase “seem to see”; what sort of concoction was that? And “filling a day”; an expression from a lonely mind. And “hiding” when she was in fact finding. And “coming back to life”; ah yes;
that was precisely it, that was the radiance of it.
And on another day she was there again, watching out for the three swans. Dressed in Paul’s clothes, observing rain, standing with its coldness lashing her face, embracing the light of it, the leaning of it.
Where were the swans going?
And the only way she knew she would stop this nonsense, these questions, was to write a note to them all; to Annie and Hilda, to Mary and Hannah, to every one of them. To the friends of the past telling them that she had left the past and that now she had a new life and that she wished them well but the old days were over. Like old Christmas cards, like old letters, like old skipping songs.
Each note would need to be the same. And delivered to their letter boxes late the same evening. And her telephone out of action.
She would have liked to write them all a poem but she did not know how to do this. There was no poem she knew of that could in any way express this. There were no words up to this task.
She had left Pentire and returned to the cottage to attempt the first note as the sky dipped into a deeper shade and the three swans came again and one of them appeared to fall out of the sky.
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So; they had been told. And she ignored them. And they were not always sure who this person now was.
If they saw her out walking, if she was shopping at the end of the day, if she was on the bus. If she was observing birds or school children or was that her coming off the beach with some driftwood? Or was it the figure of the man?
So; whatever the written word had done not one of them wrote back or phoned or approached her.
So; they would not know about the new life, the comfort, the person Paul as she now for most of each day became.
His clothes. A man’s haircut. Even a different way of walking.
And now this person spending more and more time on the beach. Bringing back wood and rope and sea-smoothed glass. Placing them about the back garden. Bringing back bits of cork and a doll’s leg. Bringing back a picture frame and the lower section of a Captain’s Chair and a violin case. And the remains of birds.
Cormorant, lustrous sleek black. Puffin with that large head and bright bill. Gulls with such white bodies and pearl eyes. And now a swan.
And as she picked it up and carried it in her arms to the wheelbarrow to take it to the garden it felt like carrying a child. And when she laid it out on the grass she could see how immense it was, how the wings were wonders, how it belonged in myths and poems and ancient songs. How it flew in and out of stories for children. Its call. Its flame. Its noble territory.
As she lifted it from the wheelbarrow it was again like lifting a child and as she lowered it into the deep hold she had carefully dug she was aware of the silence of the hole, this grave secret beneath her garden. And as she spaded in the first cuts of earth it was like burying light.
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Easter came early. It arrived with big winds and stern seas and high tides delivering plastic bottles and tin cans and garden rubbish and bits of still sharp glass and a white wooden gate and bits of birds and piles of free newspapers and a horses eye and sacking. The beach had its own whine and rattle and on some days the debris was hurled out of the ocean as if a green giant were spring cleaning.
When she found the remains of another swan it was twisted torso, warped, a wound, there was nothing left of beauty or the idea of design; it was ravaged remains and stiff and she struggled to load it into the wheelbarrow.
And it was Annie who saw her and came to her side and began helping her.
There were no words for a while, even as they hauled the wreck of the bird out of the barrow and the wind persisted and the rain now falling was more like sleet and the garden was rapidly dressed in white. When they had filled in the dark hole the garden was transformed and the clusters of snowdrops were no longer visible and the five arum lilies by the wall had lost their majesty. It was like a bit of winter refusing to let go.
At the back door both figures halted and it was Annie who spoke. “What do I call you?” she asked.
Both women stared at each other. There was no immediate reply.
“Some call you Paul. Some daft old bat or Bird Man. Some have given you up.”
“Why not call me Paula,” Ruth said. “Just for a while. Come in now and see what I have become.”
The light in the back garden was like the wild grass you see in old church yards, dressing the dead in something beyond words.
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More By David Grubb in Geometer:
I Want to Tell You Some Things – Powerful short fiction following the fallout of war and revolution.
Four Poems by David Grubb – Red moons, painting God, and places devoid of miracle
Interview with David Grubb – Geometer talks to David Grubb
DAVID H W GRUBB was born 1941. His poetry collections include The Memory of Rooms, Selected (Stride 2001), The Elephant In The Room (Driftwood 2004), Out Of The Marvellous (Oleander 2006). He has also published three novels and an autobiography. Hullabaloo, his collection of short stories, is to be published in 2009 by Salt, who also published his last collection It Comes With A Bit Of Song. A new collection of his poetry is due from Shearsman in May 2009. He was a prize winner in the 2007 Bridport short story competition, and is the editor of Sounding Heaven and Earth (Canterbury Press 2004). He is also tutor of Creative Writing at University of Reading, the River and Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, Norden Farm Arts Centre. He also runs a mentoring scheme for individual writers. Much of his writing had been influenced by working in places of extreme poverty and civil conflict.
David Grubb
25 Belle Vue Road
Henley on Thames
Oxon
RG9 1JQ
01491 575528