Eating Ashes
B.J. wasn't old, he was seventy-four. That wasn't old, but old enough to die. He'd smoked all his life and he always had liked to get drunk—if those habits had killed him they didn't say. They said his heart stopped, which meant they didn't know, probably. They asked Josephine if she wanted an autopsy but she didn't. He was dead, suddenly. What good would it do to take his heart out and look for the reason?
From the phone in the hospital lobby she called her granddaughter, because her son was in Reno pulling the one-armed bandits and her nearest daughter never had a car that would run. "Grampa is dead," she said without her teeth: she had gone in the ambulance without the time to put her teeth in. The granddaughter came with her husband, in their big, cold van, and picked her up from in front of the hospital. "Gramma," the girl said, and put her arms around Josephine and cried. "His heart quit," Josephine said.
It had been late, ten o'clock or eleven, she'd been asleep a while, when B.J. had come into her bedroom and told her he had a pain; now it was two o'clock. She had used to stay up all night when she did the cannery work, she went on shift after supper and off at five with the sunrise, but she'd been retired from that for eight years, and needed her sleep at night, now. She wanted to go on home and lie down the rest of the night on her own bed, but the granddaughter said, "Oh, gramma, you can't sleep there alone," and took her on to their own house, where they put her on a daveno bed in their extra room. They went to bed too, the granddaughter and her husband. It was Josephine who saw no point in calling people in the middle of the night—what could they do about it but wait for the daylight, to start life without B.J. Lambuehl? If she had used her head, she'd have called a taxi to take her home, and let her granddaughter keep on sleeping too.
She lay restlessly on the unfamiliar bed and thought about things. Her insides sounded, and finally she had to get up and find their bathroom in the darkness. It was a wet, sour stool, which didn't surprise her. Nerves made her bowels loose. Sitting on the toilet, she heard the granddaughter and her husband whispering. She couldn't remember when she and B.J. had ever whispered to each other, though surely they must have, early in their marriage when they'd shared the same bed. After their fourth child was born with two thumbs on each hand, Josephine had moved her things out of his room, and B.J., when he was drunk-angry and full of his sex, sometimes had flaunted to her that he used prostitutes, which was a thing between him and God. Between her and God there was peace, because she had had enough children—that was all there was to it. From the other side of the bathroom door, the granddaughter called to her, "Gramma are you okay?" and she answered truthfully, "Yes I am, I've just got the runs."
She never did sleep, and as soon as there was some light through the curtains she went in to her granddaughter's telephone and called B.J.'s sister-in-law, Doris, the only number she could think of right now without her little address book. "B.J. passed away last night," she told Doris, who had been married to B.J.'s brother until that brother had been killed by cancer of the throat. Doris said, "Oh, Josie, my God, they're all dying!" which was true, there was only Fred left now, of that family of six boys.
The granddaughter came out of the bedroom while Josephine was still on the phone, and stood there in her nightie with her eyes puffy, her hair a wild crown. She didn't look a bit like Margaret, her mother, Josephine's daughter. She was Margaret's only child, but had her father's falling-away chin and long build. Margaret had divorced that husband after twenty-two years, and now she lived in Arizona with a new husband. Josephine never had liked Margaret's first husband—he had a loud mouth and he thought he knew everything. But if you made a mistake in your marriage you ought to just live with it, that was what Josephine believed. It hadn't been any surprise to her when Margaret married a man no better than the first one: God had his own justice.
She had more strength for arguing, now that it was daylight, and when she hung up the phone from Doris, she said to her granddaughter, "I want you to take me on home now."
Her house was cold and shadowy, but the firemen had picked up after themselves so the only evidence B.J. had died on the living room rug the night before was his undershirt lying where it had fallen. Josephine picked that up and put it in the hamper, opened the draperies and turned up the furnace. Then she put in her teeth and got out her little address book and sat down at the kitchen table.
She called everybody in the book, telling each one, "B.J. passed away last night." The first two or three times, her voice broke a little on the words, but after that she got used to saying it, and heard herself sound mournful and steady.
She called her daughters as she came to them in the little book, Margaret in Arizona, and Barbara in Eugene one hundred twenty miles away, and finally the last-born, Betty, who lived on forty-fourth street not more than fifteen blocks from this house, though it was just the coincidental, alphabetic nature of their husband's names that caused her to call her daughters from farthest to nearest, oldest to youngest. She tried her son's number too, when she came to it, and let it ring and ring, knowing he was in Reno. He wouldn't be home until Friday, at least, and later than that if his wife held on to her notion of seeing the Grand Canyon.
Josephine and B.J. when they went to Reno always stayed at the Sands, it was their lucky casino. B.J. had won on keno there, a thousand dollar pot, and he had split it with her—she'd bought a solid maple china hutch. So when she got to the S's she called the Sands and asked if Donald Lambuehl was staying there but he wasn't. The house had begun to fill up by that time, and she said, "He isn't at the Sands," to the five or six women standing around her in the kitchen.
"Call the state police," Mary Tulare said. "Won't they look for him, in a case like this, a death? I believe they'll check with the hotels, and if you know his car license they'll look for the plate, on the highway." They talked about this possibility. How many hotels were in Reno? What highway ran between there and the Grand Canyon? Jack Amato would know Donnie's car license: they were friends from the old St. Ignatius parish, Jack had Donnie's insurance, the car and house both. Josephine's granddaughter said, "Gramma, you should eat something, let me call Jack Amato and the Nevada Police," and took the phone out of her hands.
She wouldn't eat, her bowels still weren't settled, but she got up and worked in the kitchen, she and Opal Breese and Dorothy Haines, scrubbing potatotes and putting them on to boil, chopping up onions and celery. She put the dry skins of the onions and the empty paper sack in the little trash-burning stove that stood alongside the electric range. It was old as the house, that stove, she'd kept it when they'd remodeled the kitchen in 1955, though B.J. had wanted to take it out. Their children liked to poke around in the stove when they were little and lick the cold ashes from their fingers, that was what B.J. kept bringing up. But they were big kids by 1955, through with eating ashes, and anyway the ashes satisfied some lack in their bodies—this was what she'd been told by that old doctor they all were seeing in those days. So she had dug in her heels about keeping the stove. The kitchen was her territory—the kitchen and the laundry—and B.J. knew it.
She got hamburger out of the freezer and set it on the drainboard so when it thawed they'd be able to make up some meatballs to have with the potato salad. Dorothy made radish roses and Josephine and Opal snapped up the late beans B.J. had picked the day before from the garden they grew in the sideyard. She dug some bacon out of the meatkeeper in the icebox, because B.J. always liked bacon on his green beans, and then she stood up straight and said "Tuh," in annoyance at herself, when she remembered he was dead.
Her daughter Betty came into the house with her eyes red, her husband and their youngest child trailing her. She put her arms around Josephine heavily and said, "Mom, oh God, Pop is dead." Betty was a cross Josephine carried, for sins only God knew about, she'd been a slow baby, her talking hard to get, tongue-twisted still today, and she was an ugly girl besides, even with the extra thumbs taken off, her mouth small and lopsided, her teeth too big and prone to rot. Dewey wasn't a prize, with his little eyes and a consumptive look to him, he never had held a steady job, he wasn't Catholic. But he was better than none, and Betty had come home pregnant when she was fourteen. Dewey was already thirty then, and B.J. had privately sworn to Josephine that he'd throw Dewey's ass in jail if he didn't make right by his mistake. Josephine had to say this much for Dewey, he had married Betty without a whimper and they were still married twenty years later. Betty (and Dewey too) drank worse than B.J. ever had; her red eyes might have been from that. The three grandchildren had grown up badly, no fault of their own. The oldest girl took welfare for her fatherless babies, it was the heartbreak of Josephine's life.
About the time the potatoes reached a boil, Barbara came. She had driven up from Eugene the two hours, but without her husband, without their three children. They would come for the funeral, she said. The children had cried for their Poppy, Paul was sorry too. Paul was the husband, he owned a hardware business. Josephine had approved of the marriage when it first happened, but the business was in Eugene and Barbara and her husband came up to Portland only two or three times a year. They would stay at the house an hour or two and then go on to the husband's mother's house. Those grandchildren called Josephine "Nanny", B.J. "Poppy," it was the husband's mother who was Gramma, the husband's father who was Grampa. B.J., more so than Josephine, had blamed Paul for taking those three grandchildren away from him. "Well I guess it's too much trouble for them to come, even now that he's dead," she said to Barbara, and people got between them with a lot of words and smoothed it over.
Someone met Margaret at the airport, she came in while people were eating meatballs and potato salad in the living room. Margaret had always been B.J.'s favorite. He would get her to rub his neck for him, or walk up and down his back when he had a kink from bending over the tables all day. He'd been a pattern cutter until he'd retired, guiding the heavy cutting machinery around pieces of work shirts, overalls, uniforms, five dozen thick. B.J. had taken Margaret's side of it in her divorce, and whenever Margaret came up from Arizona to see them, at Mass he would give Margaret a little nudge, trying to get her to go up and take Communion, as if he wanted her to spite the Church. Margaret cried on Josephine's neck, her mouth in Josephine's hair, "Oh Pop, oh Pop," and Josephine patted her and said, "He loved you girls."
Josephine and her granddaughter and Marvell Johnston did up the dirty dishes. It was nine o'clock by then and Josephine was tired, she wanted to go to bed, but she set her feet solidly before the sink when other women tried to take over the work from her. "She likes to keep busy," someone said. "Let her go ahead, it's better if she stays busy." "It's got nothing to do with staying busy," Josephine said angrily, but what did it have to do with? People touched her arms, her back. "Oh now, Josie," someone said.
The house emptied out swiftly around ten o'clock. Margaret and Barbara sat on in the living room, they put on the tv and talked low enough so Josephine couldn't hear their words from the bathroom, where she put her teeth in a glass and unpinned her hair, brushing slow through it from the scalp. When the phone rang she stayed in the bathroom—she was washing her face, the creases of her neck, with a soapy washcloth. After a while Barbara came and said through the bathroom door, "Mother." Josephine didn't care about Barbara's husband but she wished the three children had come. She couldn't remember the last time they had slept overnight in this house. "They've found Donnie," Barbara said. "He and Linda and the boys will be here in the morning."
Donnie and his wife had two sons Josephine used to get along with. They were fourteen and sixteen now, they'd become sullen. She didn't know who they were any more. On New Year's Day, B.J. had slapped the older one for his smart-mouth, in front of Donnie and Linda, and there'd been a terrible explosion of yelling and tears. Josephine had yelled too, at B.J., at Donnie. It had blown over slowly. That grandson, when they came in the house, still wouldn't talk to B.J., hadn't spoken to him in almost ten months. Never would.
She rinsed her teeth off and put them in her mouth again and went out in the hall for the phone book. She sat down in the kitchen to call The Doves Mortuary, the night number. "We've got hold of my son now," she said into the phone. "I want to go ahead and set a day for the rosary and the funeral." The girls came into the kitchen while she was still on the phone. Barbara stood behind Josephine and kneaded her neck with her long strong fingers. Josephine couldn't hear the tv any more, they might have turned it off when the phone rang. They were good girls, both of them, she didn't blame them for having husbands she couldn't love. "They want me to bring Pop's clothes over tomorrow, to bury him in," Josephine said when she hung up the phone.
B.J.'s bedroom smelled like cigarettes. She opened a drawer of his dresser and got out a pair of socks, an undershirt, boxer shorts. They were stiff and clean. Even in this stinking room, they smelled of hot water and soap, because Josephine still used a Monkey Wards wringer washer and hung her laundry on a line. She got out his navy blue suit. He wore it to Mass, to funerals and weddings, it was twenty years old. She put it on the bed and stood and looked at it. All his children had finished taller than him, Josephine stood over him an inch, herself, but she never had thought he was little. He was wiry, strong, even in his seventies, he always dug up the garden himself with a heavy fork and he still mowed his own lawn, even the front which was so damn steep. She never had thought he was little. She looked at the small blue suit, the narrow shoulders, the trousers no bigger than Barbara's twelve year old son's. On her tongue, she found a dry flake of something, not ash, tooth powder, she brought it back into her throat and swallowed, and her eyes burned suddenly with tears. When she had washed his clothes—all these years, fifty-two years, wringing his pants through the washer and pinning his shirts, his underwear on the line—why hadn't she seen how little he was, small as a boy, she never had noticed it until this moment.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Number 11, November, 2002.