Burying
Angel O’Malley
This was originally published in The Sun magazine. It's an excerpt from an
unpublished novel, All the Home I Have. It was included
in The Best Short Stories of 2007. Stephen King is the
editor. (My kids had a argument about whether or not
this meant that Stephen King himself had read one of my
stories.) This piece is written in memory of my friend,
Tom Smith, who was buried in the woods in back of his
home at Ten Mile Creek and a ten year old girl named
Mer-lyn.
We
buried Angel in November. She was laid out in the living
room of her house, in a casket her father had made of
cedar. She was wearing a blue dress, and she was barefoot.
I walked inside the house, and the only thing I could see
was the casket, with her in it. I walked right over and
stood there. I made myself look. Not looking wouldn’t make
it any less than what it was. It was just Angel, dead, in a
blue dress I’d seen her wear a dozen times.
Sometimes people will say of a dead body, oh she looks so
alive. She looks like she’s sleeping. She looks like any
minute she might open her eyes— but these things weren’t
true of Angel O’Malley. Maybe it’s something funeral
parlors do that makes it possible for people to say such
things. Maybe if she had been embalmed, if someone had put
make-up on her face, and lipstick, she would have looked
like that, but she didn’t. Angel looked like a dead person.
She looked like a little bird you find lying on the
highway. She looked like somebody’s discarded clothes.
I felt other people pressed up against me, still in their
coats, wet, in their black rubber boots. I could hear their
breath next to me, someone whispering across the room,
someone crying in the kitchen.
The coffin was set on a table where we used to play cards,
her and me, Go Fish! or Old Maid. Her mother stood there,
at Angel’s head. She had on an orange dress, and her hair
was pulled back, and she was not crying. I thought, I wish
I had a religion. I wished I believed in God and could
think optimistic, hopeful thoughts and not about Angel
laying in the ground in her blue dress. I turned to her
mother. “You brushed her hair real nice,” I said.
When you go to a funeral home, you don’t have to be
reminded of how things are normally, when someone isn’t
dead. You don’t look around and see the door she walked
through or the chair she sat on, the cushion with the
imprint of her back still there. In a funeral home you
don’t have to look up and see her red coat on a hook by the
door. You sit on a bench in a funeral home, and somebody
has done everything for you, and you know what to expect
more or less, and you almost have a feeling like what
happened is about this place, this funeral home place, like
some of it might be contained here, might be kept here,
might not follow you out and leak into everything else.
I went to the doorway and looked into the kitchen. The
O’Malleys had a long table that ran from one side of the
room to the other. Angel had only died the night before,
and from the look of things, everybody must have gone right
home and started cooking, as soon as they got the news.
Every flat surface was filled with food. The women made
pies. They made blueberry and blackberry and raspberry.
Huckleberries are so small you need at least a thousand of
them for pie, but there were two huckleberry pies anyway.
People brought tuna from their freezers. Must have set it
out to thaw as soon as they heard. And the men brought crab
they caught in the Alsea Bay and salmon from the creek.
There were pictures she had drawn, spread out on the table.
Angel drew pictures of her dog, and she drew cats and
horses and houses with smoke coming out the window. She
drew all of us, her neighbors. She drew sunflowers, and
maybe it was because of her name, I don’t know, she drew
angels. She drew angels with blue wings and pink wings and
purple wings. She drew every color of wing. She drew dog
angels. She drew angels holding the hands of a little girl,
flying up to the sky.
After a while her father came in, and he picked up the lid
and set it on the casket, and then he and a neighbor man
picked it up, one on each side, and carried it. Someone
held the door open for them.
The men carried her out into the rain. They carried her
past where she used to sit in her red cowboy boots and
play. She had a box full of little, plastic cows and
horses, a farm set, and she had a white stallion that stood
on its hind legs and an orange deer and several Indians
with arrows, one squatting and the other standing, and she
had a lamb and some other things. Most of them were the
same size, but the orange deer wasn’t to scale, and it
towered over the rest, even the stallion when he was reared
up. And Angel would make places for the animals in the dirt
there by the front door. They carried her past that. They
took her over the sidewalk where she’d jumped rope. They
took her out, and they took her into the woods, with the
rest of us following.
Her father had dug a hole back there. He still had on his
dirty T-shirt, like he hadn’t thought to change it, and his
face was streaked with mud where he’d wiped his arm against
it. He had dug the hole, and now he helped set her coffin
on the ground next to it, and he stood there, not noticing
the rain, with his hands at his sides.
Nobody had thought to bring umbrellas. It was only
November, but it had been raining for weeks. Everything was
so wet it hardly seemed to matter if the rain fell or not.
The water came in the air we breathed. It came through the
ground we stood on. It came through our skin and through
our breath.
Somebody held a tarp over the casket while they took off
the lid, and her mother put something in it, next to Angel.
A poem someone said later, her mother had written for her.
A little girl from up the road set her doll in the casket,
and Angel’s aunt put flowers, and someone else put a rock,
and someone put a toy. I’d never been to a funeral where
you put things in with someone, so I didn’t have anything,
and anyhow what would it be.
I had thought that taking Angel through the doors and
outside for the last time would be the hardest thing of
all, but then they picked up the lid and put it over her.
Her father reached in his pocket and pulled out a nail, set
it on the top and began to hammer it in. I never saw where
the hammer came from, but someone would have thought of it.
Usually hammering was a good sound. It was the sound of
houses being built. It was the sound of a fence going up or
a roof being fixed. At the end of the nail you always give
it an extra hard whack, and that’s what her father did, and
then he got another nail and started it again. Then another
man was beside him with a hammer, and they worked together
hammering fast now, the sound ringing out in the woods.
When it was quiet again, the men lowered her into the hole,
trying to keep the casket even, trying not to think of her
in there, getting tilted from one side to the other and not
being able to right herself.
The hammering: now that has to be the worst of it, I had
thought. That terrible noise. The idea of shutting her up
forever, nailing her in, sealing her off, has to be
hardest, and after that things ease up, is what I thought.
But when I saw her going down into the ground I almost
turned and ran. I thought, now I’ll run until I’m too tired
to think of Angel and everything else you can’t do anything
about. I’ll run like an animal but not a deer or something
that’s eaten. I’ll run until I’m far away from this, and
I’ll be so tired all I’ll want is sleep. I’ll eat a big
meal first, with meat, and then I’ll fall asleep. Maybe
I’ll be at a motel, and there will be a pool, and I’ll go
swimming. Or at least there will be cable TV.
But I didn’t go anywhere.
The casket had ropes strung under it, and when it was
finally in the hole, the men pulled the ropes free, and
there it sat. We didn’t know what do to and stood,
stupidly, looking into the hole. I saw cows once when one
of them died, how they looked at it, curious and not
knowing what to think, and that’s what I thought of then.
How we don’t know any more than those cows did.
Her mother threw a handful of dahlias into the hole. And
then I noticed that there were baskets everywhere filled up
with flowers, and everybody went up, one or two at a time,
and they got handfuls of flowers and tossed them in:
gladiolas, peonies, delphiniums, campenellas, hundreds of
kinds of flowers every shape, size and color because this
is the Northwest after all, and we may suffer from the rain
that doesn’t stop and the sunless sky, but we get flowers,
anyhow. And if you live in the Northwest, and you’re lucky
enough to die in the summer, you can have a beautiful
funeral.
At regular funerals, you watch the casket as its lowered,
and then you go eat a casserole, but the O’Malleys weren’t
letting us off that easy. The folks around here are real
do-it-yourself types, and they weren’t having anybody else
do anything, as far as I could see.
Her mother threw in the first handful of dirt. She didn’t
lean on anyone when she did it, the way you might imagine.
She just walked up and opened her hand over the hole where
her daughter was, and the dirt fell out from her palm onto
the top of the smooth cedar casket, on top of the flowers
we had grown in our gardens on other days when everyone was
alive, and then she stepped back.
We followed her. The dirt was wet and cold, and we threw it
down. It takes a lot of dirt to fill a hole six feet deep.
It takes a lot of time, even though later we used shovels.
You fill it all in. It’s slow and everything about it, all
the sounds and smells and the movement, has one message:
she’s dead.
At first I didn’t think we’d be able to stand it. We didn’t
talk. Nobody said how it was too hard, and we were going to
have to give up, we can’t take it, we’ll never get through
it, but I know that’s what we all thought.
Filling the hole took a long time and, as we went along, we
started to calm down. It took such a long time that our
minds started to catch up. And it was hard work, so even if
you wanted to give in to grief, to roll on the ground or
collapse or whatever giving in would be, you were too busy.
You had too much to do, and the fact is you couldn’t stop
until you were finished.
We wiped our hands on our muddy clothes. Someone smoked a
cigarette.
I looked around at my neighbors, and every bad thing I ever
thought of them, every complaint, seemed small and not
worth noticing. And I thought, I’ll always remember that we
die. I’ll live like I believe in our mortality, I’ll live
like I believe in death, I thought, but of course it isn’t
that easy. Our own mortality is like a bad experience we
kindly let ourselves forget, and every now and then
something reminds us, but then we forget again.
“The last picture she drew was a little girl being carried
to Heaven by angels,” someone said, and we already knew it.
Everyone had mentioned it by now, but we didn’t mind
hearing it again.
Then her mother turned to leave. We were all finished. It
was done. Her mother had a sister there, from Portland, and
some girlfriends, and they walked with her through the
woods back to the house, but the rest of us stayed there.
Her father sat down next to the mound of dirt, and he
pulled a pint of bourbon out of his pocket and took a
drink. He sat on the ground, on the wet dirt, but somebody
else spread out a blue tarp, and the rest of us sat on
that. The women pulled their skirts around their legs. The
pint was passed around, and we all took drinks of it. A man
from Five Rivers had a guitar, and he played a song, and
then it was quiet again. The guitar was wet, but he didn’t
wipe it off or put it away when he was done.
“I had to bury a ram one time, and it took me a backhoe to
do it,” said one man. He wiped his hands against each
other.
Overhead three crows flew in circles. Caw, caw, caw.
`”I had to buy a horse once, after rigor mortis had set
in,” said someone else.
“That old grey horse you used to have?”
But he didn’t say.
“Danged if I didn’t have to saw her legs off, to get her to
fit.” And he lit a cigarette.
“Remember the Presley cow,” said a woman.
The Presleys were two old brothers who lived alone, and
they tell a story about a cow of theirs that died. One of
the brothers decided to dynamite her. And the oldest
brother liked to tell the story to show what a big fool his
brother was, and what he’d had put up with, all these
years, living with him, but the other brother, he told the
same story, said it was his brother that did it. And
everybody loved to tell that story, especially the part
about the puzzlement of each Presley man, not being able to
understand how his brother could be such a danged fool, and
everybody could do an imitation, but nobody felt like it
today.
So we
sat next to Angel and talked about the Presley cow and the
grey horse with rigor mortis and burying sheep with a
backhoe. We sat on the ground in our regular clothes with
our regular face, and we talked, using the same words we
had always used. And as we talked, the extraordinary,
shocking, outrageous death of the child, Angel, started to
become part of what we understood as the mystery and
banality of normal life.
We sat in front of the mound we had made, drinking a little
bourbon from a pint bottle. Sometimes someone sang a song,
Swing Low Sweet Chariot or May the Circle Be Unbroken, old
Gospel songs, and sometimes one of us would think of
something to say. The mound that covered Angel stood up
maybe four feet above the ground, but eventually the dirt
would settle in and move down.