Being Dead

9

They were not the first of their generation to die, of course. But they were early. Being middle-aged and cautious is no defence against Mondazy’s Fish. Its bite does not discriminate. None of its deaths is premature.

Seven months before, one of Joseph’s many cousins, on a business trip in Ottawa, had stepped off a pavement in too great a dash and was struck across the kneecaps by the swerving cab that he was hailing. The Licensed Taxi Owners of Ontario sent him home Refrigerated Air Freight, with their best apologies. Another cousin that Joseph hadn’t seen for twenty years and had never liked anyway, had died that spring. So had a neighbour’s son, Celice’s age, a bachelor, a cyclist. A heart-attack while he was out training. He hadn’t smoked or drunk since he was a teenager. He was birch thin and muscular. He’d not deserved to die. It was too soon, his mother said, as if death was like a pension, a rebuff that you had to earn.

The worst death-undeserved had been Celice’s lisping colleague at the university, the Academic Mentor of the Natural Science Faculty. He was the sort of man she liked, now that she was in her fifties. Unmarried, self-sustained, a reader and a concert-goer, always happy to discuss with her the news, the arts, the world beyond their work. She most admired his eagerness, the unjudgemental, solitary pleasure that he’d learned to take from simple things, his small and lively voice. It always thrilled her when he spoke her name. He was, she would have said, a man contented with himself. Except, three Saturdays before, he’d driven up to Broadcast Hill (an elevation most preferred by suicides) and parked out of the rain beneath the grey-black canopy of sea pines, which could be seen in spidery silhouette even from the port. They gave a high quiff to the sloping forehead of the town. He’d fixed a hose-pipe, borrowed from the bio lab, to his exhaust and into the car. When he was found next morning by the first Sunday jogger the windscreen wipers were still hand-jiving to the jazz tunes on the radio.

Celice should not have been so shocked or taken it so personally. The Mentor’s suicide was not a judgement on the world, on life, on her. It might have been nothing more than chemistry and genes. He was disposed to it, perhaps. This was his programmed death. A better death, she’d thought, despite her desperation, than the one that she was hoping for: a death doled out in microscopic instalments by senility, her tent repitched each day, a footstep nearer home. His suicide had saved him from old age. He’d stopped the stitches fraying in his life. He had departed from this earth intact, before his final fevers came and the lingering was over, the last weekend of snow or sun, the thinning blood, the trembling touch of strangers pulling down his lids. He’d died with all his futures still in place. His will. His might. His could. There were still concert tickets on his mantelshelf. His winter holiday was booked. He still had debts. The Mentor’s suicide, she could persuade herself, was neo-Darwinist.

But it was hard to take a coldly scientific view of sudden death when it concerned a friend, particularly when that friend was someone she could have loved. ‘Such bad luck,’ Celice had said to the Mentor’s sister at the funeral. Though luck, the bad and good, did not belong to natural history, and suicide was not a game of chance.

Nevertheless, somebody should have briefed the Speaker at the funeral that he was lecturing a congress of biologists and that he should avoid such words as paradise, eternity and God. ‘You might consider the spiritual reputation of the sea pine under which our departed brother parked his car and sheltered from the rain,’ the Speaker had told the mourners, including both the author of a standard text on tree classification and a Chetze Prize-winning botanist. ‘We know it as the Slumber Tree. In the scriptures it was called Death’s Ladder. Because its seeds are poisonous. But also because its branches touch the heavens and its roots are deep. They reach into the underworld. And so it is the tree of choice. Choose sin or virtue. Descend into the eternal darkness. Or ascend into the presence of Almighty God. Anyone who knew our brother, for whom we have gathered here to commemorate and celebrate, also knows which choice he made throughout his life. He scaled the highest branches of the pine.’

That night, both irritated and intrigued by such absurdity — a pine is shallow-rooted and not poisonous, there is no underworld — Celice had taken down the book their daughter, Syl, had sent her father for his irritable amusement on his birthday. The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom. Page 68, ‘A Sorcery of Trees’. She found, to her surprise, that she was partly wrong about the pine.

The Goatherd’s wisdom was, she read, that ‘Travellers who could not find the money for a bed and had to pass their nights outdoors should prefer the blanket of the thorn before all other trees, And so stay free from harm.’ Those ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who slept below an olive branch would wake up with a headache, ‘lasting for a week’. To nap beneath a fig was to risk hot dreams. Curl up in the roots of oak — and be rewarded with diarrhoea. And, yes, the Speaker’s prejudice, you’d have eternal slumbers if you lay down underneath the pine.

She read out the passage to Joseph, but he was less affected by the Mentor’s death. Indifferent and dismissive, she’d have said. ‘Goatherds should know about such things,’ was all that he could summon. ‘They’ve nothing else to do all day but sleep under trees.’ But, as Celice was to discover when she read on in bed that night, there was some pleasing science buried in the lore. A lengthy footnote by the Goatherd’s modem editor showed why the ancient prejudices were not absurd or idle. ‘The acid nature of the thorn is not hospitable to fungi,’ he observed, “but mushroom pickers should be warned of other trees.’ The migraines and the dreams, it seemed, the never-ending slumbers and the shits were what they’d get from symbiotic fungi growing trader olives, figs and oaks, or from the rings of coffin fungus living under pines. ‘ ‘‘Come to the pines, you suicides,” ’ he quoted, ‘ ‘‘and dine on these grey buttons in the earth. They’ll box you up and bury you. New pines will grow where blood is spilt; though it be human, animal or from the wounds of clashing skies, their thirsts are never satisfied.” ’

Not strictly true. Not scientific on the whole. But this was wisdom widely honest in a way that Celice found comforting. As she imagined it, there was no hose-pipe and no car. There was just the Mentor on his back, awaiting her, the wispy canopy of pines, the deadly buttons on the ground, a ladder leading to his underworld and hers, and everlasting sin.

According to the Goatherd’s wisdoms, then, it should have been entirely safe for Joseph and Celice to lie down on the lissom grass amongst the salt dunes of Baritone Bay. The nearest pine was a kilometre away, but there were sufficient sea thorns there to make their slumbers ‘free from harm’. Had Celice read on, amongst the Goatherd’s later observations (page 121, ‘Green Favours’) she would have found good news about the lissom grass itself. The Goatherd listed all its common names, sweet thumbs, angel bed, pintongue, pillow grass, sand hair, repose, and then the luck that it could bring to fishermen and lovers if they tied a snatch of it to their bonnets or their nets. Good fishing with the lissom grass was guaranteed. There was no ancient promise of misfortune for any ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who rested on its cushions, no ladders to the under or the upper world to tempt Celice and Joseph from their second day of grace.

Their tenant crabs dispersed once it was dark. Their flies stayed put, lodging in the damp recesses of the wounds, until the early hours of the Wednesday when an undramatic storm ran down the coast to chase the starlit sky away and flush the warmth out of the night. No noise or gusts or lightning, just relentless water smudging ocean into land, and steady wind. Even the gnawing rodents that had crossed the dunes to feed on the unusual prize of human carrion could not endure the beating rain or the chilling blocks of air that squeezed it from the sky. They fled back to their burrows. The three sets of footprints leading from the coastal path into the dunes, the one set leading out, were quickly washed away. The Entomology was soaked. The flattened grass where they had walked, resuscitated by the rain, sprang straight again.

The storm cleaned out their bodies. Much of the blood that had coagulated around their wounds was now reliquefied and thinned to pinkish grey. The rain loosened and washed off most of these weaker stains. It dislodged, dissolved, the clots. Celice’s jacket was saturated. Her shirt was black with rain. The water and the cold wind of the storm had some benefits, though. The rotting of the bodies was retarded for an hour or two during night. Bodies decompose most quickly when they’re dry and warm, and when insects are at work, taking off the waste. But even the weather and the night could not delay the progress of death by much. Their lives were irretrievable, despite the optimistic labours of the nails and hair to add their final millimetres. Joseph, normally so meticulous, was stubble-faced.

He and his wife were also waterlogged, two flooded chambers, two leather water-bags. Nothing in the world concerned them any more. They’d never crave a song or cigarette or making love again. At least their deaths had coincided. There can be nothing lonelier than to outlive someone you are used to loving. For them, the comedy of marriage would not translate into the tragedy of death. One of them would never have to become accustomed to the absence of the other, or need to fix themselves on someone new. No one would have to change their ways.

This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better place; a journey through the calm of afterlife into the realms of instinct and desire. The persons had not gone elsewhere, to blink and wake, to sleep and salivate in some place distinctly other than this world, in No-reality. They were, instead, insensible as stones, imprisoned by the viewless wind. This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology.

By Wednesday noon, a gloomy day, their bodies were as stiff as wood. A full day dead. They had discoloured, too. The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides. What blood remained had gravitated downwards to suffuse their lower vessels with all its darker wastes. Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard.

Joseph, dead on his back, was white-faced and purple-shouldered. His lips, though, were drawn and blue, his gums had shrunk, so that his teeth appeared to have grown a centimetre overnight. His nose had sunk into his face. His tongue was also blue — the child in him had sucked its pen. Already he was losing form, though not enough, just yet, to make him animal or alien. Had anybody stumbled through the dunes and half glimpsed the bodies there, they might still have thought the couple were only sleeping, as lovers do, and hurry on, not wanting to look back on such a private place.

The light of day had thinned the rain, though there was almost uninterrupted drizzle until the afternoon. The storm had shifted sand during the night and banked it up against the bodies on one side. Already they were sinking in. Celice’s discarded shoes and Joseph’s remaining clothes were soaked and almost buried. The wind had lifted his shirt and carried it along the dune gully and into the stretched branches of a sea thorn. It was their flag.

By four the rain had stopped, although the sky stayed overcast and dull. Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.

So far no one had even missed Joseph and Celice. They were not expected back at work till Thursday. Their daughter, Syl, would not phone until the weekend, if she remembered. The neighbours were used to silence from the doctors’ house. So their bodies were still secret, as were their deaths. No one was sorry yet. No one had said, ‘It’s such bad luck.’ They’d perished without ceremony. There’d been no one to rub their skin with oils or bathe and dress the bodies as they stiffened. They would have benefited from the soft and herby caresses of an undertaker’s sponge, the cotton wool soaked in alcohol to close the open pores. No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair. The murderer, that good mortician, though, had carried out one duty well. He had removed their watches and their jewellery. There was a chance, depending on the wind and sand, that even their bones might not be found or ever subjected to the standard rituals and farewells, the lamentations, the funeral, the head-stones and obituaries. Then they’d not be listed with the dead, reduced by memory and legacies. They’d just be ‘missing’, unaccounted for, absent without leave. His hand could hold her leg for good.