Grave Goods

“He looks as comfortable in his own skin as he ever did,” the tall mourner observed, slowly sweeping his gaze over the casket’s occupant, the cramped quarters of the simple pine box seeming to belie this assessment.

“At least they didn’t wrap him in that fuckin’ mushroom suit” the fat mourner responded, running a tentative thumb along the beveled lip of the coffin, expecting the sharp jab of a splinter at any moment. “That would put me off foraging big time. Probably would have given him a kick, though, imagining he might end up in somebody’s salad or gravy.”

“Yeah, a whole new meaning for ‘Eat Me!’ He’d love it!”

“They didn’t leave him much room in there. That his idea, or theirs?”

“Guess they wanted him to be ready to pick up where he left off.”

“Like they need the Spanish Inquisition where he’s goin’.”

The body was dressed in the style its previous owner had favored. No style. Campus casual. A pair of boot cut Levi’s, a Woolrich Henley, scuffed Doc Maartens with steel toe caps. His head was cradled by a creased and worn Territory Ahead leather jacket, folded like a pillow. Cabled Kazuo Kawasaki rimless spectacles spanned the bridge of his nose. A Tilley hat, battered, and stained, rested on his chest. Clipped inside the right pocket of his jeans, a Spyderco Hundred Pacer rode almost unnoticed. They imagined he had a wallet and a mini Moleskine in one back pocket, and a handkerchief and a Sanford Uni-Ball in the other. At his side lay an old blackthorn walking stick, the shaft nicked and dented from years of aimless swinging. At his feet rested a Versipack field bag, crammed with an ancient notebook, a state-of-the-art Sony videocam and an Olympus voice recorder.

“I’ll betcha there’s no IRB forms in that bag,” the fat mourner wagered. “Remember how he’d bitch about Mirandizing everyone he talked to?”

“What’s the book under his feet, do you suppose?” the tall mourner wondered aloud.

No longer making any pretense of prayerful contemplation, his companion lifted one stout leg off the kneeler, craning over the casket as he strained to read the spine. “Finnegan’s Wake!” he blurted, breathlessly, rocking the kneeler with his redistributed weight.

“The one book left on the planet that sum’bitch never managed to read cover to cover! I’ll bet his kids had a good laugh loading that one in!”

The tall mourner levered his elbows off of the kneeler, knees cracking as he struggled to his feet, whispering on the way up in his partner’s ear, “C’mon, let’s make room for someone else to take an inventory.”

Looking furtively over his shoulder, the fat mourner reached into his own pocket, and, balancing on the kneeler with one hand, stealthily used the other to clip a CRKT mini-spork to the occupant’s back belt loop.

“Wherever that bastard ends up, he’s gonna need to eat,” he whispered to himself.

****

Inhaling the fumes of the last brushstroke of varnish he applied to the cherry gunwales, he stepped back from the canoe, smiling and admiring the beauty and sheer effort of his years-long handiwork, rooting under his spattered glasses to rub his tired eyes until the ultimate destination revealed itself: Viking funeral.

Ever since reading McPhee’s The Survival of the Bark Canoe way back in the 1970s, he’d dreamed of building his own boat. It seems the dream of white cedar ribs and planking, red cedar accent strips and cherry gunwales had become entangled in his love of Norse mythology, the impulse terminus bubbling up with this last fragrant sweep of soft bristles. In his mind’s eye he imagined something slightly less dramatic than a cloudy frame from Curtis’s old silent film In the Land of the Headhunters, his canoe drifting through a mist bank rising slowly off the lake at dusk, until the craft pulled clear and was engulfed in flame with the sudden whumph, like the of a flash powder lamp of an antique camera. A vision of his soul ascending skyward on the embers of his raging corporal remains was interrupted by a burst of insight.

“I’ll need a figurehead,” he realized aloud, as he gazed at the suddenly small-seeming deck of the bow.

Before he could even begin to contemplate the options, the image loomed large in imagination.

Raven.

He set to work the following weekend with his carving tools, knives and chisels spread out on his bench and soon covered with sawdust and shavings, as he fashioned the trickster’s component parts. Unlike Michelangelo, he couldn’t envision the figure entombed in the block and waiting to be set free, so he assembled his creation over two days from what looked like dissected pieces he had arranged on the floor. Beak slotted into head jutting out beyond the bow, wings slotted into body spread in majestic sweep, legs and talons slotted into belly to be anchored to the deck. He wiped the figure with an ebony Minwax stain, just one coat to give it a weathered appearance, and let it dry. Fastened to a small slide mount later that evening, the bird looked as if it were launching from the deck, drawing the canoe along with it into flight. “The stuff that dreams are made of,” the old man whispered, then headed off to bed.

****

Switching out the coffins was the diciest stage of the plan they had yet attempted. Not so much logistically as interpersonally. Shifting pine boxes out of and into the old Tacoma pickup idling in the hearse bay required just four sets of willing hands.

The fourth set belonged to the middle son’s childhood friend, a principal in DiAngelo and Sons, the mortuary that would handle the cremation. The two had been tight for decades, and while the trust involved in the deception stretched the bond to its elastic limit, the middle son’s plea had eventually been honored. “Fuck it, I’m in,” his buddy relented, “but you’re gonna owe me some picks in the next draft.”

“Thank God for fantasy football,” the eldest son and youngest son had thought simultaneously upon hearing the news. “Finally, a purpose for sports.”

The brothers had wrapped ballistic dummy parts in an elongated package to simulate the approximate distributed weight of the old man and had loaded it into the second coffin. They also brought along a five pound bag of sand. The friend would transfer the decoy to the mortuary’s retort, incinerate the box and its contents, and return the sand to the brothers in a canister, to mimic the cremains. All the bases covered, they all fervently prayed.

“See you in a week,” said the friend, sending the brothers out into the night on a round of handshakes. “Don’t look back.”

****

The old man regarded the second, smaller figurehead he had created. “An heir and a spare,” he quipped to himself as he hefted the bird. He had used his drill press to hollow the core just enough to admit a small Ball jar, so the totem jacketed the container like a tea cozy. “No mean feat for a ‘measure-once-cut-twice’ kinda guy,” he had thought, having gotten lucky on his first try. This carving was much simpler than the one that graced the deck. A raven in repose, beak on breast, wings pulled close, smug after stealing the sun. The old man had stained it a deep red mahogany, and given it a light satin varnish. “She’ll like it,” he decided, and set it aside for the time being on a shelf.

He was able to paddle his labor of love for a few more years than it had taken him to build it. It centered him in the wilderness in a way he hadn’t imagined possible. He became more a part of water and woods than ever before. At the end of his last trip, he had felt the need to carve his own paddle. On the way out to his workshop to sketch some designs, he felt the current buzzing in his jaw, the deep tingling in his left arm, the sudden pressure in his chest, and nothing else.

****

“Good thing we brought a full quiver” needled the youngest brother, as the third shaft loosed from the eldest son’s newly inherited Bear fiberglass recurve struck the forward thwart bag, igniting the gorgeous cedar canoe now well out on the placid water.

The black smoke from earlier errant arrows diffused above the wake, their tendrils curling around the stern and making the pyre difficult to see, until, with, a dampened whumph, the vessel erupted in flame.

In his best Dennis Farina accent, the eldest brother rasped, “Don’t Dad make a nice fire? Don’t Dad make a nice fire?”

The middle brother, eying the other two with a gaze somewhere between malevolence and guilty complicity, offered a rushed suggestion: “We better get our asses out on the water toot-sweet, before some Ranger finds him first. Then we’re toast.”

“Speaking of toast,” groaned the eldest brother, “I’m tired of feeding the mosquitoes.”

“He never seemed to mind that much,” the middle brother observed. He said ‘Bugs gotta eat, too.’”

“At least the old man’s not gonna wind up a melted lump of Kevlar, Cordura and bone congealed on the bottom of the lake, like he joked some marine archaeologist would find him a hundred years from now,” the youngest brother quipped.

They pushed the remaining canoe, an Old Town Malecite, off the shore, the fiberglass bottom grinding on small rocks, the grating sound of an antique belt sander echoing across the water. They paddled noiselessly from then on, in the direction of the crackling glow on the horizon. Gliding on a glassy surface that reflected the night sky, they felt as if they were paddling among the stars, the moon shimmering in their wake. More like Coyote and less like Charon. Each recalled an incident—spouting midnight haikus about Hakuin’s monkey, watching an eagle lustily rend a bass on a branch just above the boat, catching more fish with greater speed, finesse and false modesty than other brothers combined—shared with the old man on some distant lake, as they propelled the canoe ever closer to the flickering pyre.

****

Having driven an anal 3 miles above the speed limit on posted roads for the last 3 days so as to avoid attention from authorities who might object to their cargo of corpse and explosives, and wending their way carefully over backroads that would deliver them unannounced across the northern border, they pulled their car off-road onto an emerging deer path, the desire line just beginning to suggest itself to the practiced eye.

Each had a practiced eye. About 30 yards in, no longer visible from the road, they turned off the path for another thirty and three-pointed the car into position. The middle son estimated they were about three quarters of a mile from the remote chain of lakes that was their destination. The easy part was now over.

It had been an uncharacteristically silent trip. No fighting over radio stations or playlists, no running lines from favorite movies, no teasing about women or jobs, no concocting alibis for their inevitable arrest. Just quiet. Contemplative quiet. Almost prayerfully quiet. As if the slightest sound might bump their time traveling from its Bronze Age port of call back to a disappointing present.

After months of experimenting, the eldest son had finally perfected a formula that enabled him to amass a batch of bathtub thermate of sufficient quality to do the job. The middle son had used some of the mixture to impregnate the winding sheets. The youngest son had built and perforated a scaffold hammock of PVC tubes and had packed it tight with thermate, to serve as a slower burning bier for the pyre. Thwart bags fore and aft were stuffed with thermate. They had anchored the bier to the thwarts and filled the canoe with seasoned hardwood logs, leaving enough room at the waterline for a top layer of the remaining thermate. They had studded the entire ensemble with hundreds of sparklers, insuring that the composite would ignite wherever a flaming arrow might strike.

All of which ensured a solid round of bitching and moaning on the long portage in, the weight of the boat requiring many rest pauses and strenuous resumptions as they staggered down to the lake.

****

Their initial trip, a quieter more reverential packing in, had added an emotional toll to the second one. The eldest son had borne their return canoe on his shoulders, the weight of the yoke against his neck reminding him of all the times he’d let the old man carry the brunt of the load on his own, cursing the feasting mosquitoes that took advantage of occupied hands as he himself had mimed the carry while mostly free riding through the forest, swatting the whining invaders at will. Smiling at the memory, he had felt the merest twinge of guilt, marveling at the old man’s can-do attitude. His brothers had carried the cadaver in a makeshift nylon stretcher behind him, the load swaying unevenly as they picked their way across the roots, rocks and rotting ground cover of the forest floor. How weird, each thought in his own way, to be carrying him for a change. Neither had the kind of “old man strength” they had teased him about developing in his later years. And now they felt self-conscious about the kind of jostling they were giving him today. Depositing and concealing their delivery and what would become both their chase and escape vehicle, all three had hiked silently back through the woods for the main event.

The banter resumed shortly after the three had cleared the car with the loaded canoe and gotten deeper into the woods

“We shoulda brought another set of hands,” the youngest son grunted. “This fucker’s heavvvy.”

“Good point, Captain Obvious,” the middle son hissed through gritted teeth.

“Captain!” shouted the eldest son.

“Captain!” shouted the middle son.

“Captain my ass!” shouted the youngest son. “Quit dickin’ around and carry your own weight!”

“Oh Captain, my Captain,” intoned the eldest son.

That shut them all up for a few hundred yards.

They switched from shoulder wobble to suit case trundle to sledge drag and back again, never finding quite the right purchase to balance the weight equitably. Or humor to balance the grief effectively. They took turns backtracking to erase whatever sign of their passage they could manage. The old man had scorned portage wheels and had none in his gear loft. He had passed this stubbornness onto his sons, and they hadn’t the time or inclination to pick up a set before they left. Each was now kicking himself mentally for this misplaced pride.

“Tell me again why we didn’t pack all this shit in separately?,” whined the youngest son, now bowed under the center of the hull, using his back instead of a bruised shoulder.

“Too many trips would take too much time and up our chances of getting caught,” chanted the eldest son.

“Especially after getting this far with the old man,” chimed the middle son.

“Let’s hope we’re not too tired to get it done,” the youngest son relented.

“Git ‘er done!” drawled the eldest son.

That earned him more groans and another round of silence.

And so it had gone for the better part of 2 hours, until they were able to drop the boat beside the put-in. Flopping on their backs on the bank like so many fish dumped from a creel, and straining for breath almost as futilely, they watched through the boughs as clouds moved with increasing speed through a darkening sky.

“He’d hate it if it rained,” the youngest son sighed.

“Rain’s no match for thermate,” quipped the eldest son.

“One more bad joke and you’re riding the boat with him,” decreed the middle son.

****

The widow had spent the first days aimlessly roaming floors, from basement to attic, surrounded by the stuff he’d left, a jumble of scents stirred and released as she brushed her hand against surfaces as if running a stick in slow motion along a picket fence.

“Where are Zorba’s harpies when you really need them?” she wondered, almost wishing that the boys had picked her clean before they’d set out on their labors. And yet, she was somehow comforted by the presence of these reminders, his passing not quite tangible as long as they remained. “At least,” she thought, “they’d made a head start with the gear closet.”

Yard upon yard of book shelves mocked her with their volume, their weight, and their sheer variety. Tchotchkes of all description littered the shelves, some dusty, some worn by constant handling. She smiled, remembering his tendency to cluster books by writing project, to shift them around as projects morphed and intersected, until the volumes resembled nothing so much as a well-shuffled deck of cards, until he was driven to purchase the same book over and over again, never able to tell if the original were hiding in plain sight or remember if it had been lifted by or gifted to some colleague or student. Lamenting all the while the loss of vibrantly colored and minutely annotated Post-It page markers that studded these books and anchored their meaning in his memory. Her recollection jumped quickly to an image of the old man scolding one of their dogs, the border collie, for joyfully but systematically plucking such markers from the stacks of books surrounding the desk at writing time.

The hallway to the back door ended in a set of angled louvre doors, forming a large elbow of a closet at the rear of the mudroom. Each set of doors was sprung from its track, pivots and guide wheels stripped and cracked, another neglected honeydew project she’d likely never fix. Propping the doors open, she leaned in, then back, strumming the many jackets like she might the warp of an old backstrap loom, fanning the many hands and smiling ruefully. She noted how the metal garment rods bowed slightly from the weight of all those coats. “My concession to our shitty weather runs to indulgence,” she’d heard him say a thousand times, trying to excuse his thing for jackets. He had several for every fluctuation and nuance of every season, and hats as well. For all her vegan missionary work (which he’d grudgingly obliged at many mealtimes), his taste ran to leather, only periodically to fleece. Nothing ever wore out completely. It just accumulated, and was rotated on the rod like a ritual.

And then there were the knives. Hundreds of them. Fixed blades. Folders. Flippers. Automatics. Machetes. Kukris. Balisongs. Wakizashis. Karambits. Throwers. Clip points. Drop points. Tantos. Wharncliffes. Daggers. Hollow grinds. Flat grinds. Swedges. Some 30 brands, before she quit counting, from Al Mar to Zero Tolerance. Axes, too. His “steel addiction.” He’d claimed to be an “accumulator” rather than a “collector.” All of the knives were well-used, some hard used. From specialized backwoods applications to generalized mundane tasks, and, every once in a while, for self-defense, he must have had a blade for every purpose under heaven. Some he seemed to wield for the sheer joy of wielding. In his study, he’d often handled blades like Freud fondled fetishes during sessions (entertaining her at length with psychoanalytic interpretations of the attraction they held for him), as an aid to deep concentration. She’d zipped him to the ER a number of times for random punctures and slashes he’d earned through inattention. “You don’t really own it until you’ve cut yourself with it,” was his standard excuse. That’s probably why she never carried the ones he’d given her, even the ones with pink handles he’d joke would ‘take the edge off’ the bite, banishing most of them to a junk drawer in her office. He’d lost a few of his own over the years, given a few away, and had some confiscated. He’d rotated his everyday carries for almost 70 years, the clip-worn pockets of all his jeans testifying to the traffic. He stored most of the blades in canvas cases around the house. He’d begun earmarking the bags for his sons a few years back. Still, many of the knives sat out in the open, in their customary places, on desks, on shelves, on tables, causing her to wonder if he’d left her an unused bag to ease her foraging.

Calling it a day, she pulled a document from the old man’s overstuffed wooden file cabinet, filled her tea mug from a kettle she’d set boiling earlier, and flopped down on a couch now piled with dogs, nestling into the pack for some much needed solace. Unfolding the deed, she could only imagine how surprised the boys would be to learn that they now owned the lake at which they hopefully had arrived. She had debated traveling with them, to see the old man off this one last time, and had been touched both by the warmth of their invitation and by the compassion that greeted her refusal. She’d resisted him for too many years to start canoe tripping with his cortege. She knew he’d agree. Looking at the mantle above her fireplace, she fixed on the small memorial boxes that housed the ashes of four beloved dogs, remembering the running joke their contemplation always provoked. “Put me right up here,” he used to say. “Right next to Gracie. I’ll help them keep an eye on you.” Tearfully, she wondered if there’d be enough left to keep her word.

****

They scavenged the cremains from the last remnant of the old man’s canoe, a listing section of chine about 3 feet in length, toiling like gleaners bent on salvaging a last morsel of meaning to put up against the long winter of his absence. Working quickly in the silos of their erratic Petzl beams that raked the meagre flotsam, they salted a few small Mason jars with wet ash halfway to the base of the Ball logo embossed on the glass. Sifting through the residue, they plucked whatever solid matter their fingers encountered—a zipper pull, an eyeglass temple, a boot eyelet, a folder clip, a partial dental bridge, a clump of fused coins, shards of unidentifiable material, and the like—and plunked them into the jars in roughly equal measure. The eldest son shaved some slivers from the chine into the jars held by his brothers, then scampered up the bank and into the dark forest while they torqued the lids down tight.

Returning momentarily with some kindling and an armload of small branches, he laid a teepee fire, and fanned it ablaze with his faded ball cap. The middle son fractured the chine into a few small chunks, and the youngest son layered them onto the fire. The eldest son added the remaining branches, poking the embers now and then to ensure that every bit of wood would be consumed. Immolation now complete, they swept warm ashes off the bank and into the lake. Dousing the burn scar, then troweling it with a downed bough to erase the old man’s presence, they completed their ritual. The eldest son carefully packed their tiny homespun urns into a thwart bag. With his brothers hastily settled in the Malecite, the youngest son pushed off, jumped into the stern, and j-stroked through dark water toward the distant shoreline.

“How d’you suppose he picked this lake?” the middle son asked as he rested his paddle on the gunwale, catching a quick break on their way back to the portage.

“He said he had to keep moving farther north to avoid people on a ten-day solo trip,” declared the eldest son. I didn’t realize he’d gotten all the way up here. I’m amazed he ever found his way back home. He was unfuckin’ real in the woods or on the water, always seemed to know where he was, but he’d get lost in town even if he had GPS!”

“I’ll bet it was the name,” ventured the youngest son.

“Coude?” inquired the middle son. “Lake Coude?”

“Lac Coude,” the youngest son corrected him. “It’s French.”

“Means ‘Bend,’ doesn’t it?” the eldest son responded.

“I think the idiom is closer,” declared the youngest son. I’d call it ‘Dogleg.’”

“Dogleg,” smiled the middle son.

“Dogleg,” smiled the eldest son.

“Dogleg,” smiled the youngest son.

“AAARRRROOOOO!” bayed the middle son, the howl echoing over the water and startling a loon into voice.

“Cool it,” urged the eldest son, “we’re not out of the woods yet!”

“Swear to God, one more bad joke like that and you’ll be pickin’ pieces of my paddle outta your ass on the ride home!”

“We are home, Junior,” replied the eldest son. “We are home.”

****