Undead. John Russo
fifteen miles per hour, listening to a nerve-wracking staccato spray of gravel against the fenders and sweltering in a swirl of hot, yellow dust.
They had to come to place a wreath on their father’s grave.
Johnny parked the car just off the road at the foot of a grassy terrace while his sister, Barbara, looked over at him and breathed a sigh intended to convey a mixture of both tiredness and relief.
Johnny said nothing. He merely tugged angrily at the knot of his already loosened tie and stared straight ahead at the windshield, which was nearly opaque with dust.
He had not turned off the engine yet, and Barbara immediately guessed why. He wanted her to suffer a while longer in the heat of the car, to impress upon her the fact that he had not wanted to make this trip in the first place and he held her responsible for all their discomfort. He was tired and disgusted and in a mood of frozen silence now, though during the two hours that they were lost he had taken his anger and resentment out on her by snapping at her continuously and refusing to be at all cheerful, while the car bounced over the ruts and he worked hard to restrain himself from ramming the gas pedal to the floor.
He was twenty-six years old and Barbara only nineteen, but she was in many ways more mature than he was—and through their growing-up years she had pretty much learned how to deal with his moods.
She merely got out of the car without a word, and left him staring at the windshield.
Suddenly the radio, which had been turned on but was not working, blurted a few words that Johnny could not understand and then was silent again. Johnny stared at the radio, then pounded on it and frantically worked the tuning knob back and forth, but he could not get another word out of it. It was strange, he thought, and just as puzzling and frustrating and tormenting as everything else that had happened to him in this totally disgusting day. It made his blood boil. If the radio was dead, then why did it blurt a few words every once in a while? It ought to be either dead or not dead, instead of being erratic or half-crazy.
He pounded the radio a few more times, and worked with the tuning knob. He thought he had heard the word “emergency” in the jumble of half-words that had come across in a squawk of static. But his pounding had no effect. The radio remained silent.
“Damn it!” Johnny said, out loud, as he yanked the keys out of the ignition and put them in his pocket and got out of the car and slammed the door.
He looked around for Barbara. Then he remembered the wreath they had brought with them to place on their father’s grave, and he opened the car trunk and got it out. It was in a brown paper bag, and he tucked it under his arm as he let the trunk bang shut—and he looked for Barbara once more and experienced a burst of fresh anger at the realization that she had not bothered to wait for him.
She had scrambled up the terrace to take in a view of the church, which was tucked back into a hollow among the trees where a place had been carved for it out of the surrounding forest.
Taking his time so he wouldn’t get mud on his shoes, he climbed the grassy terrace and caught up with her.
“It’s a nice church,” she said. “With the trees and all. It’s a beautiful place.”
It was a typical rural church; a wooden structure, painted white, with a red steeple and tall, narrow, old-fashioned stained-glass windows.
“Let’s do what we have to do and be on our way,” Johnny said, in a disgruntled tone. “It’s almost dark, and we still have a three-hour drive to get home.”
She shrugged at him, to show her annoyance, and he followed her around the side of the church.
There was no lawn, no gate—just tombstones, sticking up in the tall grass, under the trees, where a few scattered dead leaves crackled under their feet as they walked. The tombstones began in the grass just a few yards from the church and spread out, among trees and foliage, toward the edge of the surrounding woods.
The stones ranged in size from small identifying slates to large monuments of carefully executed design—an occasional Franciscan crucifix or a carved image of a defending angel. The oldest tombstones, grayed and browned and worn with age, almost seemed not to be tombstones at all; instead, they were like stones in the forest, blurred by the darkening silence engulfing the small rural church.
The gray sky contained a soft glow from the recent sun, so that trees and long blades of grass seemed to shimmer in the gathering night. And over it all reigned a peaceful silence, enhanced rather than disturbed by the constant rasp of crickets and the rustle of dead leaves swirling in an occasional whispering breeze.
Johnny stopped, and watched Barbara moving among the graves. She was taking her time, being careful not to step on anybody’s grave, as she hunted for the one belonging to her father. Johnny had a hunch that the idea of being in the cemetery after dark had her frightened, and the thought amused him because he was still angry with her and he wanted her to suffer just a little for making him drive two hundred miles to place a wreath on a grave—an act he considered stupid and meaningless.
“Do you remember which row it’s in?” his sister called out hopefully.
But he neglected to answer her. Instead, he smiled to himself and merely watched. She continued going from stone to stone, stopping at each one that bore a hint of familiarity long enough to read the name of the deceased. She knew what her father’s tombstone looked like, and she could remember also some of the names of the people buried nearby. But with the approaching darkness, she was having trouble finding her way.
“I think I’m in the wrong row,” she said, finally.
“There’s nobody around here,” Johnny said, purposely emphasizing their aloneness. Then, he added, “If it wasn’t so dark, we could find it without any trouble.”
“Well, if you’d gotten up earlier…” Barbara said, and she let her voice trail off as she began moving down another row of graves.
“This is the last time I blow a Sunday on a gig like this,” Johnny said. “We’re either gonna have to move Mother out here or move the grave closer to home.”
“Sometimes I think you complain just to hear yourself talk,” Barbara told him. “Besides, you’re just being silly. You know darned well Mother’s too sick to make a drive like this all by herself.”
Suddenly a familiar tombstone caught John’s eye. He scrutinized it, recognized that it was their father’s, and considered not telling Barbara so she would have to hunt a while longer; but his drive to get started toward home won out over his urge to torment her.
“I think that’s it over there,” he said, in a flat, detached tone, and he watched while Barbara crossed over to check it out, taking care not to step on any graves as she did so.
“Yes, this is it,” Barbara called out. “You ought to be glad, Johnny—now we’ll soon be on our way.”
He came over to their father’s grave and stared at the inscription briefly before taking the wreath out of the brown paper bag.
“I don’t even remember what Dad looked like,” he said. “Twenty-five bucks for this thing, and I don’t even remember the guy very much.”
“Well, I remember him,” Barbara said, chastisingly, “and I was a lot younger than you were when he died.”
They both looked at the wreath, which was made out of plastic and adorned with plastic flowers. At the bottom, on a piece of red plastic shaped like a ribbon tied in a large bow, the following words were inscribed in gold: “We Still Remember.”
Johnny snickered.
“Mother wants to remember—so we have to drive two hundred miles to plant a wreath on a grave. As if he’s staring up through the ground to check out the decorations and make sure they’re satisfactory.”
“Johnny, it takes you five minutes,” Barbara said angrily, and she knelt at the grave and began to pray while Johnny took the wreath and, stepping close to the headstone, squatted