The next time he woke he put his hands to his face and groaned and sat up. Today was his mother’s funeral. He dressed slowly in the same clothes he’d worn to Paul’s funeral. That had been a warm spring day as well. It occurred to him that his dad had died in the spring, and he wondered if this was some characteristic of his family to die when the days were getting longer and the grass and the flowers and the trees and the birds were all returning to life.
Father Shevchenko delivered his eulogy. “Our dear friend Helen’s life was a testament to faith and fortitude. Her early years were often an ordeal, but she never stopped believing …”
Cyril stared at his feet. His shoes were shiny and his toes pinched, and he was wondering just what his mother had believed in. For all her Virgins and candles it was certainly no God Shevchenko would approve of, more like some grim trickster with bells on his toes and a slippery glint in his eye. Cyril raised his face and looked up into the canopy of maple leaves. They glowed as translucent as a mosaic of tinted glass. He shifted his head and stared straight into the sun. When he shut his eyes yellow spots lingered and he thought of his father and kept his eyes shut until the spots faded. When he opened them he blinked in confusion, for something was up there—a charcoal coloured cat lying full length along a branch like some sort of panther, and it was staring straight at Cyril as though studying him. For a moment he expected it to start talking, to stand up on its hind legs and do a bit of soft-shoe with a cane and top hat, a Cheshire cat with a message for him. He flashed on the notion that it was a message from his mother, her spirit already having reincarnated, yet his mother had hated cats, and it seemed a most unlikely form for her to take.
He was diverted by the casket being lowered into the hole. Then Gilbert’s hand settled on his shoulder while with his other hand he presented the shovel which had a black ribbon tied around the shaft and a brightly polished blade. Cyril stabbed the blade into the heap of soil and poured it slowly, as though fearful of disturbing her, onto the casket battering the roses. The earthy smell of the grave was spiced by the scent of sap and grass. Steve took the shovel and did the same, then it was Chuckie’s turn. Cyril peered up into the tree again but saw only leaves.
Later, he walked between the gravestones and across the lane and entered the backyard. For her sake he’d done his best to keep up the garden and now the roses and hydrangeas were in bloom, the rhubarb was spreading vast primordial leaves, and the grass was up to his ankles. He felt besieged. As for the root vegetables, the beets and turnips and parsnips and cabbage, they were on their own.
He entered the slammed-door silence of the kitchen. His mother hadn’t acknowledged much less admitted that she was dying. There had been no final words, no noble last days, no truths passed on or secrets unveiled, instead she’d devoted her remaining strength to maintaining a facade of normalcy. She was bedridden, sure, but in control, as if it was her choice to lie there all morning and afternoon and evening like a lady of leisure, and if Cyril ever dared look troubled or tearful her eyes silently commanded him to control himself; after all, wasn’t she? He recalled a poem about a tiger that Connie used to recite, how the animal paced its cage yet didn’t turn because of the bars but because that was when and where it decided to turn, and he envied the animal—and his mother—their unbreakable spirits.
Staring out the kitchen window he watched the maples brood over the graves. Was the cat still up there? He got the opera glasses his mother used to watch funerals. He’d bought them for her at the St. Vincent de Paul as a joke, one that to his surprise and relief she liked. In fact it became an ongoing bit of comedy, a rare thing for them to share, her assuming a haughty pose and gazing upon the funerals like Madame La de Dah. He studied the tree but saw no cat. There were now three Andrachuks in the cemetery: his father, Paul, and now his mother, their graves side by side.
He went into the living room, poured himself a Ballantyne’s and found himself looking at his mother’s Virgin Marys. There were all kinds, plastic, metal, wood, glass, wax, stone, the one he’d brought back from Mexico which was surrounded by a halo of sea shells, and others that had haloes of crinkled plastic. He recalled Typhoon Freda back in 1962 when the power went out and the storm sent garbage cans banging down the street and the Madonnas had seemed to come alive, gleaming serenely in the writhing candlelight while the house shook and his mother prayed.
The scotch went down with a welcome burn. He refilled his glass. Steve had put the obituary in the paper, but Cyril hadn’t read it, he never read obituaries, regarding it as slightly obscene and certainly bad luck. Gilbert believed the opposite, savouring obituaries, examining the deceased’s picture, seeking out the cause of death, delighting in the maudlin phrasing as though it was immortal prose, laughing at Cyril’s squeamishness after having grown up next to a death yard. Gilbert had even suggested Cyril do a series of drawings, maybe turn it into a coffee table book, of graves and obituaries, insisting that it would become a cult classic and sell millions. Decanting the whisky slowly into his mouth, Cyril let it seethe over his tongue.
Returning to the kitchen he looked out the back recalling the time just after the Cuban Missile Crisis that he came home from school to find a backhoe digging a massive hole in their yard. The machine operator saw Cyril’s expression and jerked his thumb indicating Cyril’s mother watching from the window. Cyril went up the steps and into the kitchen and demanded to know what was going on? She said don’t be a simpleton, it’s a bomb shelter. Apparently it didn’t matter that the Soviets had withdrawn their missiles, she believed what she believed, and began explaining in a quiet tone, as if Cyril was still a child and not to be alarmed, that it was a reasonable precaution—that one could never be too cautious—because the world had gone mad before and madness was like bacteria that lived on all around them, in the soil, in the air, in their very bodies, and could erupt at any moment. She put her hand on his as she spoke and her eyes pleaded with him to believe and Cyril had nodded and said quietly, soothingly, “Okay mama, okay.”
Paul had not been as indulgent. When he dropped by that evening and nearly fell in the pit he was angry. He and his mother argued and Cyril could see Paul was not only frustrated by her paranoia but humiliated by what the neighbours must be thinking. Paul took her face between his palms and forced her to look into his eyes. “We’re safe,” he told her, and thumbed the tears from her face. The next day he paid the backhoe driver to refill the hole.
For the wake Steve had prepared roast pork with apple sauce, duck with an orange glaze, garlic meatballs, an assortment of veal, pork, and liver sausage, potato dumplings, cabbage rolls, sausage rolls, poppyseed cake, walnut cake. An impressive achievement in such a small kitchen. Steve and Marlene had recently made the sudden and unexplained move of selling their five-bedroom house and downsizing into a two-bedroom apartment, an act that neither Cyril or his mother had understood.
Yet she would have certainly approved of all the meat on the table dominating the small dining room. There could never be enough meat. In her mind animals looked like butcher’s posters, sectioned into quarters and shanks and briskets. Side bacon, back bacon, all the varieties of sausage, all the organs, liver, kidney, heart, brain, tongue, tripe. Along with beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish, duck, goose, squab, she was happy to eat goat and horse, all in compensation for the starvation years of the 1930s and 1940s.