Under One Roof

 [This is the next installation of my book. In this short section, Worth, who has just returned to the family home after news of his mother's passing, wakes up the next morning.]

I woke up dreaming about the death of a duck named Paddlefoot. This is a familiar scene to me. I’ve returned to it countless times in my life, so many times that it feels as real to me as the events of the previous day or my toes wiggling at the bottom of my bed. I’m in my old bed, so close to the ceiling I can reach right up and touch it. I run my hand along the cool, elephant-hide plaster, following a hairline crack with the tip of my index finger as far as I can reach. My bed here is a triple-decker bunk bed, a crazy idea Had and I came up with when we were eight, which unexpectedly reached fruition when Reggie, our step-dad (new to the house and keen to please) championed the cause. So when the crew of three carpenters were finishing trimming out the third floor of our house – which is where I’m currently residing – they built the bed as a Saturday side-job, allowing me to help, holding pieces in place, straightening nails, pre-drilling holes, and so on. It was my first construction project and the first time I worked side-by-side with Walter, the carpenter in charge and a man who would have the greatest impact on my life of anyone I’ve ever known, short of my mom and, maybe, my grandfather.

Lying here in my twin-sized bed with my eyes closed, I can see my family gathered about me as we sing the praises of the recently departed Paddlefoot. I’m seven years old and we’ve been living in the suburbs for two seasons now; fall and winter have passed, and it’s springtime. The smell of the lilac bushes is so overwhelming that it leaches into the present, triggering a sneeze as I caress the ceiling above. Snow is already a distant memory and the trees are insane with birds, mostly robins and finches, all vying for a spot at mom’s hodge-podge assortment of bird feeders. It’s as chaotic as kindergarten recess. The birds swoop, they dive, and they screech in a riotous and shameless display, their pecking order at the feeders not defined by species as much as by their gluttony, their vernal audacity. Crows ca-caw in the distance and squirrels dash madly around and around the large oak trees that rim our property. In the warped perception of time within which a young child resides, it already seems like I’ve lived in this house for eternity, that these trees and shrubs here and the exuberant fauna that flourish within have been our family backdrop since the dawn of time, our previous life in the city already a fading memory, as unreal as a book I’d read over the winter or a bedtime story told to me in the indefinite past.

We’re huddled together in a small clearing, just within a stand of juvenile birch and maple trees on the edge of the half-acre lawn in our back yard. There are seven of us mourners gathered around a fresh excavation in the moist, peaty earth. This is suburban soil here, loamy and as pure as a breeze off Lake Michigan, not the gritty, sandy clay you find in the city, tainted with shards of broken glass, bottle caps, and bits of rusty metal. I dug the hole myself. Because I’m already addicted to tools of any variety, I’m the family's designated gravedigger. It’s a job I always volunteer for, for the simple reason that I like piercing the earth and visiting a place that I suspect has never been seen by another human. Transported by the delicious earth, I’ve already dug the grave too deep, laboring in a hole up to my thighs. Then mom arrives.

“Ease off, Worth. You’re already half-way to China.” She laid her hand on the top of my shovel.

“But if it’s too shallow, won’t the wolves dig up Paddlefoot?” To a former city kid with an active imagination, the northern suburbs of Chicago are a vast and untamed wilderness, where, unlike the streetlamp lit city, nighttime is actually dark and wild creatures roam free under the protective cloak of the night. Mom smiled and lightly and gently touched the tip of my nose with her forefinger, her signature gesture.

“I don’t think a bulldozer could dig it up at this depth, sweetie.”

Standing there, our heads bowed, we each bear a fistful of wilted dandelions, plucked from the lawn minutes before. We each wear black armbands that my mom has made out of crepe paper, left over from last Halloween. Mom and grandpa stand at the head of the procession. Her arm is looped around his, and he holds a cane in his other hand. There’s a cigarette in his mouth, which he doesn’t even seem to notice is there, the two-inch ash cantilevered off the end. Bridge, the youngest of us kids, is just an infant in mom’s other arm, wide-eyed, fidgety and curious as hell about this wonderful new thing called springtime. Had and I, or “The Twins,” as we’re often called, are seven and, unconsciously, we’re both dressed in identical outfits as we often are: blue jeans, button-down shirts with the tails hanging out and black Keds high-tops. To a stranger, perhaps the only distinguishing feature is a scar that bisects my left eyebrow, which I got jumping off the garage roof just days after we moved in.

Jules, my older sister, who has a tendency to take charge, has organized this entire event and seems to spend more time fussing and directing the proceedings than focusing on the actual funeral. She’s already taken me to task about the depth of the grave and she stands opposite me, glowering with disapproval.

Mason, the oldest, who grandpa has been calling “little preacher man” all day, has been tasked with delivering the eulogy. Although he’s a trouble-maker and perhaps the most mischievous of us kids, he takes matters of the heart seriously. He speaks, his voice measured and flat, a caricature of what a twelve-year old believes graveside sermonizing should sound like. I’ve heard this all before and I’m trying to remember where. A TV show, no doubt. Gunsmoke? Westerns are chock-full of death and funerals, the predictable consequences of reckless heroism and one of their great appeals to a young boy like me.

 “Paddlefoot, we hardly knew thee,” Mason says, I believe for the tenth time.

“Amen,” we all dutifully respond, a tic we’ve acquired from church.

“You are in a better place now, your place is now with . . .” – Mason pauses for emphasis and looks up expansively into the sky – “God.” He pronounces “God” with two syllables like the Reverend Masters at our church – Gee-ODD – which I notice makes mom smile. She sees me watching her and winks. I wink back and this unexceptional exchange we share, literally a wink of an eye, enters the mental catalog of favorite moment I’ve shared with my mother in my lifetime. I glance next to her and see that Grandpa, who is so immobile that his cigarette ash is three inches long, is weeping.

“Amen,” he says a moment later, causing his ashes to tumble into the grave.

After several minutes, Mason starts to ramble, his sermon disintegrating into a string of pauses, half-completed observations and spurious remembrances of Paddlefoot. As internecine quarrels and chatter have grown too widespread to contain amongst us kids, mom decides that the service is over and, with her prompting, we ceremoniously toss our dandelions on top of the shoebox, which lies at the bottom of the grave. Grandpa goes last and he says, “I love you,” a little louder than expected, which makes me smile. Mason slugs my shoulder. Then it’s over. As I fill the hole, back there in the woods, life goes on around me. Mason and Had throw a baseball back and forth in the grass and Jules is playing with Bridge in the sandbox as mom patiently maneuvers grandpa back into the house.