Eases, Dies, Leaves
Specters move like pilot flames,
Their widow's toast at St. Angel.
A Widow's Toast, Neko Case
The dirt is clumped, clogged to the brim with the rains, and smacks into the cherry-veined wood in doughy formations. At this late season, it seems unwise to surrender flesh to the earth—surely it will reject. Surely the weight of her trespass will keep the casket above the ground, will burn her fingers as she touches the last will and testament of the husband she never knew, hidden deep in the smooth lining of her coat. Alma squints her eyes at the wind, striking against her face in cold sheets, harbinger of the rains to come. But even the rains cannot wash away a past that has carved the weary lines in her face or rinse the lye-tinted taste of regret from her mouth. The hole gaping in front of her is a maw, opened and ready to receive what the four men, grunting and heaving, are about to commit to it.
A man in a charcoal gray suit approaches her from the side, reaches out a hand and hovers it over her shoulder, wets his lips before he inquires, "Are you the widow, Miss?"
The rain drizzles in a fine mist around her eyes, and a sob that sounds like a laugh cuts across the cemetery.
She shakes her head, barely sees him. "Not me," she says, and thinking that, perhaps, she was widowed the day Jack Twist came to their door.
Alma strung the yarn up, around, pushed the needle through, repeated, locked on the task at hand, no-nonsense, shoulders pulled up high and wrists carved into held tight and sure.
"When's dinner?" Ennis asked, taking a swig from his bottle, neck gulping hard as he sucked down at the tepid liquid.
Strung up, pushed through, glanced briefly. "Be out a the oven in twenty minutes."
"I guess," he said, putting the bottle on the coffee table, adjusted his ankles, sunk a little deeper into the faded brown fabric, and crossed his arms over his chest, closing his eyes.
"Weren't a question," she muttered, strung up, took a breath, pushed through, and bit her lip.
Wasn't anything obvious, nothing screamed to be noticed, he looked the same, sounded the same, even spoke the same. But all she could think when she stabbed that needle, when she strung that thread, was that when he closed his eyes like that, ever since he'd come back from the first vacation she'd ever seen him take, well, it wasn't their place he was seeing. It was some other place, smelled like the resin and liquor on his clothes, looked like the quirk in his mouth when he said that man's name.
Turning her body whole, she faces straight into the wind, pulls her hands out of her pockets, steps towards the morbid sequence of events that she single-handedly set into motion. She reaches out her arm, a statue caught in time, one word, one truth.
"Stop."
A thunderclap breaks the air like a hammer brought upon stone and the rain falls down her face, but underneath the roaring passage of the storm, the wind eases, dies, leaves.