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{sati} kevin keating -1- The cemetery came with the house, that was part of the deal, but the old woman assured me that there wasn’t much in the way of maintenance--“Mow the grass before it gets completely out of hand, pick the weeds if that suits you, put the headstones back in place whenever a storm blows through the valley or if those goddamn teenagers wander down the road and knock them over”--and she also told me, between long sips of Irish coffee and drags on her cigarette, that I had no obligation to provide guided tours should any visitors show up, not that I had to worry much about visitors since the old covered bridge that spanned the rapids had been washed away in a flashflood last summer and now there was no direct connection with the main highway, only a narrow ribbon of gravel road that zigzagged its way along steep cliffs of mudrock and shale to the valley floor and skirted the pestilential fens and bogs until it reached the vast meadow and the forlorn stone house that sat atop a low hill like an oracle waiting for a wizened seer to make grim pronouncements. “Sometimes,” she said, leaning heavily on the porch railing, “a lone bike rider comes along and stops for a few minutes to decipher the inscriptions on the oldest headstones. And once a month the deputy comes out and pays a visit but he never bothers to inspect the cemetery.” She sniffed. “He knows better than to give me any grief about that. No, mostly he comes for the conversation. And a drop of whiskey.” She tapped her glass with a finger and winked. The old woman wasn’t a believer in sobriety or in high-minded ideals so I didn’t take this as a judgment of any kind on her part. She was a poet with a modest but dedicated readership and like most poets she spent her later years drinking herself into oblivion. By noon she was slurring her words. It made no difference to me. Sobriety was a myth and we all lived at various levels of intoxication. “Maybe one day,” she said, “when the county has enough money to repair the bridge they’ll send a preservationist from the university to fix up the cemetery. But until then the owner of this house is in charge. Says so in the town charter. Truth is, no one cares if the cemetery goes to hell, but I take it kind of personal, think keeping it tidy is more important than leaving an ostentatious monument to posterity. I suspect no one even knows who that fella is underneath there.” She indicated the immense marble slab near a row of white oaks. “What was his family was thinking, erecting a giant thing like that over his bones? What’s the purpose? After a hundred years of being blasted by wind and rain you can hardly make out the name. Total anonymity, that’s our destiny. Takes courage to admit that to yourself.” I nodded, wondering, and as I stared at the wrinkled flesh on her small, animated hands and noticed the long spirals of silver hair protruding from under her straw hat, I wished that this woman had been my teacher while I was growing up, a person with few illusions about the world, instead of those Catholic nuns with their severe and virginal frowns and all of their silly moralizing and hysterical sermons about Abraham and Isaac and Saint Peter hanging upside down from the cross. Despite the goriness of their tales, the nuns would have shuddered with revulsion had they known the finale to my own story, would have branded me a heretic, condemned me to the inferno even though, strictly speaking, my story was just as deeply religious as their own, religious because of its moral necessity and because it bestowed upon the believer a sense of validation. Such stories cast a powerful spell over us and we can’t help but dedicate our lives to them until, over the slow course of time, our minds become monstrous and misshapen, transforming the beatific into the grotesque. I’d lived with my own story for so long now that the metamorphosis was irreversible and final. The old woman seemed to suspect as much. She held the bottle of whiskey out to me, and when I declined she said, “You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s Longmourn. From the Highlands of Scotland. Absolutely sublime. Like a magic potion. I think I might throw in a case or two of the stuff. As a kind of signing bonus.” The thick film of intoxication that once covered her eyes seemed to vanish, and when she spoke she did so without the least bit of irony. “It may come in handy one day.” I had a fondness for whiskey, it left me weak in the knees like sex after many months of celibacy, hot and sinewy and cathartic beyond all reason, but after my wife vanished in the night with my best friend and didn’t bother to send me the terms of our divorce until several months later, only after she was certain that the uninhibited sucking and fucking had a real shot at long term success and respectable domesticity, I learned to abstain from anything that might compromise my goals, but now at long last, having signed all of the necessary paperwork in triplicate, it seemed that I was one step closer to fulfilling them. -2- I took possession of the house and the adjacent cemetery on the first of June and was both pleased and distressed to find that the valley was actually more isolated than I anticipated. For weeks at a time I saw not a soul, and with no shopping plazas, no restaurants, no movie theaters, no bored and curious neighbors to happen along and ask the usual questions--“So where you from, what brought you to this corner of the state?”--I learned, or at least forced myself to endure, the complete solitude of the place, the sound of cicadas during the hot afternoons, the gentle scratching of crickets at dusk, the rustle of nocturnal creatures in the underbrush as they foraged for food late at night. Sometimes I sat on the porch and listened to an evening raga and immersed myself in the Upanishads, trying to elucidate their cryptic poetry. I considered setting fire to my wedding albums just for the pleasure of watching the duplicitous smiles of my wife and best man shrivel and turn to ash, their remains carried off by a gust of wind, but I thought such a gesture would be too melodramatic. Above all else I prized self-control and despised sentimentality. Routine may have saved me from falling off the edge completely. I spent the long summer mornings maintaining the cemetery, giving it the manicured look of a professional baseball diamond. I mowed the grass in precise diagonal patterns and planted hostas and azalias and rose bushes around the rusting wrought iron fence. I dug up the weeds and soon I was able to identify several species of crabgrass, nutsedge, giant hogweed, even common ragweed, the scientific name for which was ambrosia artemisiifolia, a notion I found utterly preposterous. Imagine the Olympian gods deserting the battlefield outside the walls of Troy to feast on the ambrosia in such a place as this, a remote valley in the Midwest where strange people exiled themselves for fear of what they might do back in the city. It occurred to me that once, long ago, there had been plenty to feast on here. The oldest graves dated from the early 1800’s though by now there wasn’t enough bone meal to appease the voracious appetites of the immortals. Even the ancient white oaks looked famished, judging from their gnarled and contorted trunks. The roots went deep, spread across the graveyard like tentacles, searching in desperation for sustenance, exploring each pine box for calcified skulls with a kind of mindless perversity. The roots were so dense that I had trouble digging the new hole, and I wondered how the homesteaders who were buried here managed to clear this land using their simple plows and pickaxes. According to the headstones many fought in the Revolutionary War and then made the arduous journey across the Appalachians to settle the vast Ohio wilderness for Christendom, undoubtedly killing off any heathen Iroquois that stood in their way or didn’t convert under the spiritual guidance of those dour Jesuits in their billowing black robes. A simplistic enough explanation for the things that happened here, I suppose, but then it’s fashionable to dismiss the universality of human fervor, criticizing one particular group for clinging to an outrageous and murderous ideology while seeing another as blameless. At some point all people get caught up in pure lunacy, and surely the Iroquois, with their shamans and witch doctors and totems, had their own manias and delusions and twisted ideologies to contend with. In the late afternoons, just before twilight, I ceased my labors and rested for a while on the porch, and usually as the colors in the sky deepened and the winds died down, a pack of big stately bucks emerged from the woods and made their way to the meadow just beyond the cemetery with its jumble of headstones and there grazed on the tall yellow grasses and stared up at sky as if searching for meaningful patterns. They sometimes turned to glare at me, maybe because they sensed something odd about the new caretaker, the little man with the foul and infectious air swirling about him who now lived in the house among ruinous books of myth and legend and who sat at a little desk and made his plans late into the night. The deer always bounded away whenever I descended the creaking porch steps with my lamp and shovel and went back to work in the cemetery where I continued hacking away at the ossified roots, endeavoring to make the new grave wide and perfect in its proportions in preparation for what would be its most magnificent internment in over a century. At the edge of the forest the werewolves gathered to watch me work and to howl their awful cadenzas into the night. The branches of the trees groaned as though with the weight of a hanged man. Insects scuttled over the upturned soil and burrowed deeper into earth. In time I came to understand that here in this remote valley every animal and plant and insidious black bug interacted in ways that could only be described as harmonious, so much so that to think of them as separate things was an illusion, they were all one in the same thing, each with a slightly different function, but all working with a single purpose, like a family, indissoluble and complete. -3- I decided to execute my plan in late summer. For my wife, money was the lure, the promise of a single cash payout that would clear me of all financial obligations to her. Why she believed such a preposterous story I do not know since she and my Nemesis had conspired to ruin me and had in fact banished me to this remote corner of the state where squalid trailers and meth labs dotted the mist-strangled hills and where alcohol was strictly prohibited since it gave offense to God. It had been months since I’d heard another human voice and my wife’s screams sounded simultaneously beautiful and chaotic like a delirious raga, alternating between harmony and dissonance, a war between the melodic and the cacophonous. I will not recount the details of how I disposed of my wife, I will not describe the terrible struggle or how I obtained the angry scratches on my cheeks and neck, the busted lip, the chipped tooth; suffice it to say that the methods I used to snuff out her little life were humane, that she did not suffer, or at any rate did not suffer for very long, and that I harbored no hatred for her and did not experience any kind of euphoria when she finally stopped trashing and her body went limp. I carried her corpse, already stinking and bloated it seemed to me, over to the cemetery where I lowered her into the large box I’d fashioned from particleboard and nails. I rested her head on a decorative pillow, and because there were no flowers at hand I made a hasty bouquet of ambrosia artemisiifolia and tossed it on her shriveling corpse. It was still bright daylight, hot and unbearably humid, and as I looked down I noticed how her clothes seemed drab, faded, wrinkled, lacking her usual sense of style. Her shoes were knockoffs, her diamonds cubic zirconium. Having squandered our savings, maybe she’d deluded herself that by coming here all of her problems would be solved. I am no longer a believer, indeed had been shunned by my pious wife as an apostate, but I said a prayer anyway, something in Latin that I vaguely recalled hearing from the nuns as they plodded through the ghastly gray light filtering through the narrow halls of the school. A, te meae si patem animae rapit maturior sis, quid morar altera, nec carus aeque nec superstes integer, words as brittle as a medieval manuscript or the bones stacked high in a forgotten catacomb. When I finished with this perfunctory ritual I returned to the house and made the necessary phone call. I knew that with my Nemesis there would need to be something more than money, and since we hadn’t spoken in over a year it took a great deal of convincing to get him to drive the fifty miles to the valley to see me, his oldest and dearest friend, to sit with me on my porch and enjoy a cocktail as in the old days when my wife would join us on the patio of our suburban cape cod and we’d laugh together, the three of us, and tell stories and sometimes, if the drinks were strong enough and the mood struck us, we’d undress in the moonlight and slip into the hot tub and after much panting and groaning we’d finally emerge from the water, bodies glistening, and go to bed together where our arms and legs twisted in mysterious configurations to provide and obtain maximal pleasure. We always left the windows open, better for the neighbors to hear our obscene caterwauling. Perhaps I should have suspected something when my Nemesis began holding out a little longer each time, continuing to pleasure my wife even while I, exhausted and spent and insensible with drink, drifted off to sleep beside them, their rhythmic humping and the squeaking of bedsprings transformed into a gruesome lullaby. -4- As I waited for my Nemesis to arrive I made all of the necessary preparations, placed the hammer and nails beside the hole, the flashlight, the shovel, and after double checking everything I returned to the house where I dimmed the lights so he wouldn’t see my bruised face. I sat down on the porch with a bottle of whiskey at the ready and watched the deer grazing in the meadow and the werewolves salivating at the edge of the forest and the sulfurous fumes rising from the bog. As twilight deepened into true dark and the red moon hovered just above the treetops my Nemesis arrived in his purring Japanese coup. I could tell by the way he stumbled out of his car and staggered toward the house that he’d been drinking. “You got electricity out here or what?” He brushed gravel from his knee. “I can’t see a goddamn thing. It’s a miracle I found this place.” His sharp tone did not deter me from behaving in the most obsequious way imaginable. I embraced him, choked back tears, apologized profusely for any regrettable remarks I may have made in the past, but before he could push me away or take a swing at me I handed him a glass of whiskey. “Is this it?” he asked. “You take it neat I hope.” “Is this it?” “Judge for yourself.” He held the glass close to his nose, breathed deeply, and after puckering his lips and barring his teeth and darting his tongue around the rim he drank the whiskey down in one long sip. “Well?” I asked. He extended his arm and shook the glass. “Pour.” I obliged him, and once again he performed his little ritual, grunting, slurping, swishing, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He pinched his chin, nodded his head. “It’s excellent whiskey. No question about it. But I’m still not convinced its Longmourn. You did say Longmourn, didn’t you?” “Indeed. From the Highlands.” “Fifty-year old?” “Seventy. I think. You would know.” “Where’d you say you got it?” There was an accusatory note in his voice as though he suspected me of theft, but of course he knew my financial situation well. “The previous owner. She left me a case. As a kind of signing bonus.” “Is that right?” “I’m glad you agreed to take it off my hands. I don’t drink any more. Not since the divorce. Andrea must have told you.” “You never could hold your liquor.” I waited for him to say more, to describe his new life, how we had in essence switched roles, but he didn’t dare discuss that, not yet at least, he wasn’t drunk enough for a straightforward conversation, perhaps he never would be, men can’t easily express their feelings, so I poured him a third glass of whiskey, hoping it might loosen his tongue, but when he finished it he belched a green cloud from those thick fish lips of his, chapped and cracked and chewed, and he wiped his mouth with his clumsy simian fists, and as I stared at him I wondered how it was possible that my wife found this stooped and foul-smelling oaf attractive. Tufts of black hair sprouted from his nostrils, his skin glistened with sweat, his clothes reeked like they hadn’t been washed in days. He buried a finger into his ear, into his nose, into the roll of flesh beneath his slobbering jaw. “Does Andrea know where you are?” I asked. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to her,” he said. “I worked late at the office tonight. Been putting in long hours. I’m a busy man. Lots of responsibility.” “Of course. But maybe you should call her.” “I don’t think so.” “It’s getting late. I’m sure she’s worried about you.” “It’s not important.” “Please. Feel free to use my phone.” “Later. First the whiskey.” I stood up. “Fine. I’ll show you where I keep it.” He hesitated, shifted his eyes toward the car, probably knew that something was amiss, but ultimately the prospect of having an entire case of Longmourn to himself proved to be too much for him and he followed me into the darkness. As we walked across the yard toward the iron gates of the cemetery I said, “With so much time on my hands I’ve finally been able to do some reading.” “Reading what?” “Books on scotch, for instance. Our old love, hmmm? Other things, too. The history of religion. It never ceases to amaze me how simultaneously wretched and beautiful some religious practices can be.” He laughed. “You? Religion? Well, it does seem awfully lonely here. But I guess that’s the price you pay for serenity.” “Yes, there’s always a price to pay for the truly fine things in life.” When he didn’t say anything I continued. “I went to a little novelty shop in town and found a book of Hindu lore written by some Kipling type. You know, a racist colonial with a weak stomach. While he was serving in the British army in India he witnessed the most extraordinary ritual. It seems that a man, a great sage in a remote village, died after a prolonged illness, and during the funeral rites his widow appeared dressed in dark robes and presented herself for burial with her husband’s corpse.” “Eh? How’s that?” “The British officer was horrified by what he saw, but the villagers insisted that it was the most natural thing in the world, that it was simply the widow’s way of showing her devotion to her husband. So they placed the woman inside the coffin and buried her alive. Those people certainly had a firm grasp of the eternal. But something troubles me about the whole thing. I’ve always felt that the ritual was rather sexist. I wonder, do you think a man would be willing to follow the woman he loves to the grave?” “Very funny.” “Yes, funny.” We continued past the creaking iron gates. “What is this?” he asked. “A cemetery?” I detected the tremor of fear in his voice, and I tried to assure him. “Yes, I keep the whiskey hidden away here. I’ve always been a little superstitious, as you know, and I never come to the graveyard at night. Helps me to fight off the temptation. Ah, here we are.” I pointed to the hole. “Do you see it?” “What the hell is that?” When he leaned over to peer into the grave I picked up the shovel and hit him on the back of the head, but not so hard as to render him unconscious, no, just hard enough to momentarily scatter his brains and make him see more stars than were really there. I wanted him to know exactly what was happening and why, wanted him to understand the seriousness of the situation. When he toppled into the abyss he let out a ridiculous squeal of dismay, and I worried he might scare off the werewolves that waited to dig up his putrid flesh and scatter his bones. “What are you doing?” he moaned. “Consider yourself the first person in over one hundred years to partake in this sacred and ancient ritual.” Then I jumped into the hole and, before slamming the lid down on his uncomprehending face and pressing my weight against the coffin, I said, “You may need this,” and tossed a flashlight into the box. A moment later he began kicking and beating at the lid with his fists. I knew I had to hurry. The darkness made the work difficult but somehow I managed to seal the corners and then make my way around the perimeter, pounding in the nails two at a time until I was satisfied that there was no escape. “This has to be a joke,” he said. “Tell me this is a joke.” “Yes, a joke.” Apparently he hadn’t switched on the flashlight. To my amazement I had the hole nearly filled before the screams started, screams so shrill and unrelenting in their madness that not even the earth could silence them, and I must confess that for a moment my faith wavered, but gradually, over the course of perhaps an hour or more, the screams metamorphosed into the wedding toast delivered by the drunken sot now scratching wildly at the wooden casket, a toast not simply to my bride but to her singular beauty, to her cheekbones, to her lips, to her generous and accommodating mouth, a toast so gruesome in its vulgarity that it drowned out the gasps of the scandalized guests and my own impotent laughter, but now, as I tapped on the last shovelful of dirt, I applauded the lucky devil who for all eternity could make toasts to my wife’s decomposing flesh and foul evacuations. It must have been after midnight when I retrieved some old blankets from the house and, returning to the cemetery, placed them on top of the new grave where I stretched out and marveled at the ghostly apparitions hovering above the bog and felt the warmth of the circling werewolves delirious with hunger. I drank straight from the bottle of whiskey as my best man continued making lunatic toasts to my wife, and I thought, How touching, the three of us reunited at last, like in the old days when we found ourselves luxuriating in the warmth and wetness of the anonymous dark, the comforts of drunken debauchery, our pitiful excuse. But sooner or later a wicked bacchanalia gives way to its opposite, to the sublime pleasures of retribution and, with god’s mercy, the gift of total annihilation. |
