He felt her essence and turned to see Polly standing at the end of the lilac hedge looking at him. For once he did not first consider and respond to the why of her silent stance. She would have had the time to observe and understand his uncharacteristically humped posture in the chair in the garden room and his nearness to the soothing sounds of the water over the rocks.
Something in him reached out to her in a need, and for once she also did not respond. She came toward him, her arms wrapped around her own body. Her expression was unreadable but her words were clear. “This is insufferable.”
He did not know what to say. She spoke to the plea in his silence. “I need you to be here for me,” she was saying and as she spoke he stood up. She was a large woman but even so he normally adapted to her height in a comfortable slouch but he could, as now, allow himself full stature, not menacing, but protective. As he had when they lost the baby. As he had… He held out his arms as she unfolded hers and they held each other.
“I know you could have died and in that event you would have had – you have - my full sympathy,” she was saying into his neck. “But you didn’t and so I am dealing with all the other issues.”
A luxury, he thought, to have the main event averted. He needed to travel into speculation to get by the purely emotional wish to be comforted like an infant, to instead play the role of the grown up male whose woman needed him. The therapist in him advised he let her talk, set forth her fears. The husband in him wanted to guide her along lines he felt he could cope with, suggest reasonable concerns. Polly had too many times surprised him across the years with totally unexpected thoughts, situations in which he felt at a loss. At the moment he felt too vulnerable himself to deal with depth. She solved the dilemma of to speak or not by speaking herself.
“Do you know who she is? Was?” She didn’t wait on his reply. “I recognized her. She’s the head of the agency that does grief counselling. She’s traveled all over the world helping others.”
When she said nothing else Harold asked, “And you’re wondering why she didn’t help herself?” He had given her a thumbnail sketch of the visit as they waited for the police to arrive.
“No!” she said, pushing back from him, staring at him. “I’m damned angry she didn’t take care of her own issues.”
“She did,” he replied, mildly.
Polly pushed away from him, completely, and hugged herself again.
“You’re allowed to be angry,” he told her.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, slightly sarcastic, but tears were in her eyes. “Come on out, Sera,” she called and the child stepped out from where she had been concealed in the lilac hedge. Polly really did have eyes in the back of her head.
Sera stared solemnly at both her grandparents and then her eyes slid toward the cottage and the doorway. Polly had described to her what had occurred. She had been confined to the house during the lengthy police procedure.
“It’s okay, chickadee.” She started to open her arms but revised it to an action more suggestive to the child’s need and held out her hand. Sera came toward her and took it.
“Where’s the blood?” she whispered.
Harold shook his head and gave a hand as well; the adults and the child formed a threesome and stared across the expanse of ground to the porch.
“I’m glad I wasn’t here but in a way I wish I had been.”
Harold nodded but Polly sighed as she said, “Yes,” understanding, but not agreeing. Her greatest fear was that one of the children might have been harmed.
Harold suddenly, again, felt the blackness of the moment as the gun had pointed at him. He wondered how long it would haunt his waking dreams. He needed his own therapist. He looked across at Polly and when she turned to his eyes he asked a silent question and she gave a small shrug. They both knew they would talk later when it was dark and they could shut out the world.
“Let’s go and finish those brownies, mucoshala,” she told Sera leading her away.
Sera was thinking she could tell Penny when she saw her but she was saying, “I didn’t know they put a body in a bag…” and at this Polly turned and looked hard at Harold and they both realized Sera had been watching and this was part of the insufferable.
“A traveling salesman,” he said just loud enough so Polly could hear. It was a byword between them, something that had been effective across the years when situations to do with his livelihood had been “insufferable”. He did not overuse it so that it lost its power to amuse, a major tool in healing. The first time he had said it – he could remember clearly when and where and why – he had been serious. He would become a traveling salesman, something respectable and harmless, something that would get him away from Polly for periods of time. She had leaped ahead of him, then, at that time, as she was always so capable of doing, slid down from her angst, embraced the solution, countered with a shouted “But what about the farmer’s daughter?” And he had finally gotten it and laughed. Oh, they had been young then.
She didn’t shout or laugh now. She didn’t need to. She continued on to the house with Sera. He went into his cottage and got keys, cell phone, hat etc.
The Judas trees on St. Charles were in their summer habit but Harold could never drive or walk by them without recalling their autumn scent, the fragrance of their sun-warmed crispness. Each year he collected a bag or two of them and Polly put them in napkins, tied them like hobo bags, put them around the house to unexpectedly delight. Sometimes they startled the uninitiated. Cass’s husband had leaped up from a chair once when he sat and encountered the sound and feel of leaves crushing under him.
He turned along Fairfield and parked at the plaza. It was crowded with cars and he had to wait on a spot but he liked it for this and preferred it to the lots in the large shopping plazas on the edge of town. Two young girls eyed the yellow convertible as he nosed into a place poking under trees and he smiled. He would have liked to distract himself with wondering what caused him to smile but he was too much burdened by the recent trauma. He needed his mother.
She was in the Ross Bay Cemetery. Beside his father. He supposed he should replace her with a proper therapist but somehow his visits to her grave over the years had served him well and he had never got around to seeking out someone in his own profession for counseling, for comfort. Come to think of it, it wasn’t exactly what he got from her, something always seemed to –
This time it was that Harold caught in the act a man putting flowers in a pickle jar on his mother’s grave. These wildflower type of bouquets in happenstance vases had appeared regularly over the years to the consternation of Harold, the annoyance of his brothers when he told them so he stopped telling them, the puzzlement of his family.
He stood quietly by until the man looked up and noticed him. For a moment Harold thought the man was crying, his eyes were all watery, but when the old gent sniffed and wiped away the wet with his wrist, an expression of nuisance not embarrassment on his sagged pouch of a face, Harold decided it was a condition of ageing or an allergy.
“Well, hi. I’ve been sharing your mother, kind of. Hope you don’t mind.”
He stood up straight. He didn’t come much past Harold’s waist. Looking down on an adult who was having to crane neck to such an extent to make eye contact unnerved Harold and he immediately sat down on the curb around the grave site. The man eased himself down as well and seated they were more of a height.
There were many things Harold could have said, questions he might have asked, reassurance he perhaps should have given. But he was near his mother’s lap, so to speak, and this took over.
“I need to talk to my mother today,” he said instead of anything else.
The man gave a gracious nod and turned a palm up toward the grave beside them.
Harold was never at a loss to follow someone else’s music. “I’m wondering if becoming a traveling salesman would have made the road less bumpy across my life,” he said, turning his head toward the grave.
The man seemed to consider this, or maybe he was waiting on Harold’s mother to reply. He sat with his legs in old fine-wooled pants angled close to his body, his corded hands laced around his knobbled knees. He had on a white shirt buttoned neatly at the cuffs and a pair of working suspenders gripped frail shoulders. His sneakers looked brand new. He gave the impression of having shrunk, perhaps recently, likely rapidly and Harold wondered if he were ill. Harold was fascinated to watch the man blinking. He seemed to do so in a peculiar rhythm, rapidly, more slowly, almost in a Morse code. With such watery eyes Harold wouldn’t have thought such a multitude of closures were necessary. It wasn’t a repetition Harold couldn’t wait to experiment with once again alone: thinking to blink made him uncomfortable, something he preferred not to pay attention to. What if blinking suddenly became conscious motivated? What if he suddenly had to remember to blink? The thought alarmed him.
“You have a nice family,” the man was saying as they both turned eyes to watch a crow exploring the contents of a yogurt container and coming up with a pink stained beak.
“How do you know?” Harold asked. It wasn’t as if they all visited grandma and gramps as a family, if ever.
“Saw you when she got buried.” He nodded his head with the wispy hair toward the grave.
Harold was astonished. That was long ago. The kids had been small.
“And one of your girls, the one with the dark hair, she comes regular.”
Harold stared. Josephine? He had no idea. Then he frowned. The man responded to the look. “Oh, no, it’s not that I’m a pervert or anything. You know, I mean…” He couldn’t go on; he looked terribly embarrassed. His blinking went into high gear and Harold had to look away.
Harold sighed. He guessed he was working… “It sounds as if you rather adopted my family.”
The man looked relieved, as Harold had expected he would. Give a person a ladder on which to climb out of their own dilemma and the results were wonderful.
“Well, that’s exactly it. I never really had a family. Except for a sister who I lost touch with many years ago. No idea where she is. And I kind of latched onto yours when I saw you all here after your mother’s funeral. I just live over there. This is kind of like my backyard. Sometimes I pick up the litter. Darned kids buy stuff at the plaza and walk through here and drop the wrappings. I collect the twigs too that the wind tears from the trees. Oooeee, that ocean wind can get ferocious.” His blinking had returned to normal, or, at least, normal for him.
“I see,” said Harold. He glanced at his mother’s headstone and gave a slight wink.
“No, actually you don’t,” the old man said. “I saw you coming today. I may be old but I’m as cagey as I ever was. I coulda not let you see me. But I wanted you to.” He wiped his eyes on the back of his wrist again.
Harold waited.
“I’m dying.”
Harold waited. He wasn’t sure what was expected of him. He felt it better to wait on a hint of a direction than to intrude inappropriately.
“I am going to be cremated and I would like you to scatter my ashes on your mother’s grave.”
This was not at all what Harold had expected. The part of him that at times feared there was nothing new in life gave a great start of appreciation and silent applause. He was speechless, a rare experience for him, and into the silence the old man worried, “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s an unusual request,” Harold said honestly.
“Well, I don’t like to think of being buried all by myself somewhere else and I couldn’t be buried here – “ he dismissed Harold’s father’s position beside his wife with a wave of his hand – “so I thought next best thing would be to get myself as inconspicuous as possible and have my ashes here.”
He bent his head suddenly and stared at Harold. “They’d likely blow away soon enough, if that’s what’s troubling you.”
Harold laughed. He couldn’t help it. “No, no, that’s not it. It’s fine. I wasn’t even wondering what my father would say – “ Grinning, he invited the old man to share the joke with him and was gratified at a wheezy chuckle in response.
“What are you dying from?”
“Cancer. Should be quick. I’ve made all the arrangements for – for afterwards.” He stopped and wiped his eyes again and this time Harold felt he was crying. He reached out a hand and simply placed it on the man’s arm. The man slid his arm along until his hand touched Harold’s and they sat together, holding hands.
When, after a time, Harold moved to ease a cramp in his leg, the man let go of his hand, wiped his eyes again, and stood up. He helped Harold to his feet. It took some manoeuvering.
“I’ll give you my name and number – for when you need it.” Harold said. It was not time for a business type of card. He found a piece of paper in his wallet, some now meaningless phone number written on it which he crossed out, turned the paper over and wrote the information. The man did not tell him he already knew who he was and where to get in touch. It was unseemly to have this knowledge even if Harold was rather a public figure.
They shook hands and Harold did not watch as the man walked away. Instead he turned toward the grave, toward the headstone. Toward the pickle jar with the hand picked flowers. Harold did not bring flowers. He had a ritual of bringing some found object. There was quite a collection of stones from beach and forest and garden starred across his mother’s grave. Today he took a leaf that had fallen directly onto the spot where the woman who had shot herself on his doorstep had fallen. He had noticed it when he went in to collect his key and hat. It was a red leaf, a sumac leaf, early autumn tinged.
He tossed it onto the grave but was dissatisfied with how and where it had fallen so he picked it up and put it on the headstone. It immediately blew off.
“What do you think about scattering his ashes?” he asked his mother.
“What is his name?” he heard his mother ask in return.
He rolled his eyes. “I have no idea.”
He stood for a bit by the grave prodding at the former distress, rubbing the memory of the earlier horror. But once again it had – indirectly – been eased, lightened.
Leaning over he patted the end of the grave where he imagined her feet were, gave a nod to his father, walked away with hands behind back.
Many months ago I put out a piece of food on the deck that I knew was of a size to attract BIG birds but was just too 
