Dirt drops onto the pine coffin, softly, but Coop's ears ring with it. Hours later, after the grave is filled, it continues playing on a loop in his mind. Shovelful after shovelful, each one closing a little more of the distance between them, making their separation permanent.
He never believed it was possible to hate the dirt any more than he already did, but now it chokes him. He can't swallow a bite of the potluck meal friends and neighbors brought to the funeral along with their condolences. Just pushes at the hodgepodge of casseroles and canned vegetables around on his plate, like she was always after the kids not to.
It's what Erin would've wanted, he tries to convince himself. Not dying suddenly, too young, but being buried out back, next to her mother, at the edge of the burnt-out wheat field where Donald bravely says, "Next year we'll plant corn, and it'll be a good crop."
Coop's issues with the land were never her own, though she understood him; knew that though this is, and was, and always will be her home, it's not where his heart is.
"Dad?"
Tom's voice fills his ears, muffles the echo in his head of the dirt. Coop looks at him, dark hair combed, still dressed in the only good clothes he owns, eyes rimmed in red, the plate of food in front of him untouched, too.
Murph's not eating, either, but that's not all that unusual for her, being three and in one of those picky phases. Nevertheless, it won't do. They've got to eat.
They've especially got to know their one remaining parent's here with them.
"Yeah, son?" he says, and spears a few pieces of fried okra with his fork.
Tom does the same, takes it a step further, asks with his mouth full: "Why'd the preacher say ashes to ashes, dust to dust? What's that mean?"
Lines read to her from that goddamn poem whisper through Coop's mind:
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
He chews, turns to Murph with another bite ready on his fork. "Missy Roberts fried up some yummy okra."
She slumps onto her elbows, the left one landing smack in the middle of the creamed corn on her plate. "I don't want okra. I want Mommy."
For a moment Coop's too overwhelmed to say or do anything. How can a little girl, even a whip smart one like Murph, be made to understand her mama's gone forever?
How can he?
"I know, Murph," Donald says in a weary voice, looking visibly older than he did a few days ago, when Erin was still with them and the doctors gave them no reason to believe she imminently wouldn't be. "We all do. And your mommy would want you to eat your okra."
He reaches toward his granddaughter with a napkin, but before he Murph resists. As her pout escalates into a full-blown fit, Coop comes out of his stupor.
"Hey, Murph," he says, calmly. He may not have a clue how to help kids grieve, but he knows a thing or two about how to diffuse a temper tantrum. "Lick that cream corn off your elbow."
Donald regards him dubiously from across the table, but thankfully doesn't pass comment on Coop's laid-back approach to behavior modification and leaves him to handle his own daughter. Sure enough, the fit that brewed like a summer thunderstorm vanishes just as quickly as Murph blinks at the silly command.
"You can't lick your own elbow," Tom says. "No one can, it's impossible."
"Nuh-uh!" Murph shoots back at him, puffing out her chest. "I can too lick my elbow! Watch this!"
The three males watch her contortions as she tries to do the impossible. When she starts to giggle at the unexpected difficulty, Tom darts Coop a glance that seems to ask whether it's really alright to laugh when they just buried his mother. Only when Donald starts to chuckle, and Coop follows, does the boy join in.
…in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet…
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth…
Like he did when Murph was in a high chair refusing baby food, and he resorted to playing airplane to ensure she got some nutrition in her, Coop takes advantage of her open mouth to feed her a bite of okra, then wipes the cream corn off her elbow with his own napkin. Over her little red head, bobbing as she eats with enthusiasm now, Donald gives him a nod.
Coop takes a long drink of water and, feeling a little more confident of his parenting abilities, turns back to Tom. "You know about Adam and Eve?"
"The first people."
"According to the Abrahamic creation myths," Coop clarifies, "God formed Adam from the dust, then Eve from one of Adam's ribs. When they sinned, God banished them from the Garden of Eden and cursed them with a life of hard labor farming the land-" That part, Coop has no difficulty believing. "-and eventually, death. Up till then, see, they'd had eternal life. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return."
Tom's fork clatters to his plate. "Mom died because…she did something bad?"
The story's so familiar to Coop, and he got so caught up in the telling of it that he never stopped to think how Tom might process it in this context.
If Donald approved of the way he handled Murph, the look he shoots him now is anything but, though he says, "That's not what your father meant, Tom."
The legs of Coop's chair scrape on the floorboards as he pushes back from the table, stands, lays a hand on Tom's shoulder. His wedding band catches the low sunlight coming in through the window, makes his eyes sting.
"Now you listen to me," he tells Tom, quietly, bending to meet his son's eyes. "Your mama was never nothing but good. Everybody dies. It's got nothing to do with whether we deserve it or not. Mom didn't. It just…happened. You understand?"
It didn't have to happen. The thought makes his heart pound, breaths come shallower. If they'd had the right tools, they could've found out about that cyst months ago. Never mind that the doctors he confronted after the autopsy tried to absolve themselves by claiming it was inoperable. That even if they'd known about it, there still wouldn't have been a damned thing they could do to save her. Only thing different would be they'd have known she was dying, rather than being blindsided the morning she went to bed with a headache and never woke up.
"I said I understand, Dad," comes Tom's pinched voice.
Realizing his grip tightened on Tom's shoulder, Coop relaxes his fingers, pulls his son against him.
"She loved you more than anything," he says, not hiding the break of his voice, or stopping the slide of tears down his face. "You and Murph."
Tom cries against him, quietly. Manly at eight, his sobs are felt rather than heard, tremors in his bony shoulders, but Coop strokes his hair as he did when Tom was a baby. At the table, Murph goes on eating her okra, polishing off hers, then leaning over to steal from Coop's plate. He's got no appetite left for it anyway, after this near-disastrous talk with Tom; he's thankful Murph's too little to ask questions like these.
For now.
The questions do come, as Murph gets older, her bright young mind grappling to grieve for a mother she can barely remember. Unlike her big brother, who's mainly interested in the literal, the here and now, from an early age Murph's curiosity and imagination tend toward the mysterious, even the supernatural. It's a comfort to Cooper as he mourns his wife to discover one of their kids' minds works a lot like his-better, he thinks, though he keeps that to himself because it just feels like a dumb parenting move to tell your kid you suspect she's a hell of a lot smarter than you-but that also comes with its challenges. Like the stubbornness she inherited from him, although Coop prefers to call it tenacity.
One of the ideas she digs her heels into is ghosts-he's got Donald to thank for that. Although Coop can't quite manage to disabuse her of the notion of their existence, he doesn't think her insistence that they do has much to do with Erin. It shouldn't come as a surprise to him when they're driving back to the farm from town one day when she's around the age Tom was when their mother died, and Murph asks from the rear of the cab:
"Is heaven real?"
Flexing his fingers on the steering wheel, Coop glances sideways at Donald in the passenger seat, as if to ask, This come from you? His father-in-law's not exactly a religious man, but he is something of a spiritual one. Generally he keeps such thoughts to himself, with the exception of ghosts. Now, Donald only looks back at Coop with a look of innocence-and interest as to whether he'll strike out with this latest curve ball thrown by his precocious little girl.
"Heaven?" Coop repeats, glancing at her in the rearview mirror, full aware he sounds like he's stalling.
"Where people go after they die."
"I know what heaven is, Murph."
A grin tugs at the corner of Coop's mouth. Even if you make a conscious decision not to tell your kids they're smarter than you, they still manage to acquire the idea that their parents are dumbasses. He thought he had a little longer before Murph felt this way about him.
"Least, I know what people say it is. Who's saying?"
She hesitates, as if he's asked her to rat on a friend. She looks down. "Bobby Nelson. He said Mom's there." Her eyes meet his again in the mirror, narrowing slightly. "Is she?"
I am here
Or there, or elsewhere.
"Well," Coop rubs at the batch of stubble beneath his bottom lip. "I suppose that partly depends on what you mean by heaven. If you're talking about a place where all the good people go after they die, while all the bad people are sent to…"
He trails off. Although he's always been of the opinion of answering his kids' questions honestly, eternal damnation's not a subject he's easy about introducing, recalling how his off-hand reference to Adam and Eve's curse made Tom react all those years ago. He checks the mirror again, sees one of his son's earbuds dangle, listening with one ear to the conversation now instead of his music, expression unreadable.
"Hell," Murph finishes Coop's sentence for him.
"No. I don't hold to the concepts of eternal punishment or reward."
"So you think once we're dead, we're just...gone? There's no afterlife?"
"Now I say didn't say that. I said I don't believe in heaven in the way kids like Bobby Nelson mean it."
Or his parents, Coop mentally adds, looking out across the cornfields, in the direction of the Nelson farm. Unlike Donald, Robert and Judy Nelson are absolutely the type of people who talk about their religious beliefs, especially to their impressionable children.
"I'm no physicist or philosopher," Coop goes on, "but even I know enough to know that kind of afterlife's an oversimplification. On the other hand, who am I to say there's not one at all? The universe is far more vast and complex than our minds can even begin to comprehend. These are the kinds of questions the space program tried to find answers to."
"Is that why you wanted to be an astronaut?" Tom joins in the conversation.
Coop feels Donald's eyes on him. He's never sure if it's his imagination or not, but he senses a slight disapproval from Erin's dad whenever he talks about his past as a NASA pilot. As if he's a kid whose head's in the clouds when his feet ought to be planted firmly on the ground.
"Not specifically to find out all the answers to life and the universe," he replies.
"And everything?" Murph cuts in, grinning at him in the mirror; she's been reading Douglas Adams, courtesy of her mama's bookshelves.
Coop grins back, goes on, "I wanted to explore. There's so much we've never seen with our own eyes, even right here in this solar system."
For a few minutes they drive in silence. As Coop turns the truck down the road between the cornfields to their farm, churning up a fresh cloud of dust to coat it, Murph asks:
"So if there is a heaven, it could be somewhere in outer space?"
O dark dark dark.
They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces.
"Or time," Coop says.
In the backseat, Tom grumbles about sci-fi, starts to put his headphones back on.
"Or maybe there isn't life after death," Coop goes on, impulsively, wanting to engage his son a little longer. Tom stops, meets his eye in the mirror. "Maybe we only live on in a figurative sense. Our bodies decaying in the ground, becoming a part of the earth, making the plants grow. Feeding another generation."
"Like fertilizer?" Tom says.
Donald snorts. "Sounds like your dad took a course on philosophy from The Lion King."
"What's that?" Tom asks.
"Some old cartoon from when your grandpa was a kid," Coop replies.
"That was a little before my time," Donald grumbles, slightly affronted by the knock on his age.
"T.S. Eliot was, too," says Coop. "Yeah, I've read a poem."
He fixes Donald with a pointed look before glancing back at the kids again.
"There was this poem your mom liked…" He stops, throat suddenly aching, swallows. It's still hard, after five years, to talk about Erin in the past tense. "It has a line in it, Mirth of those long since under earth, nourishing the corn."
"I like that, too," says Tom.
They're home now, and Coop parks in front of the farmhouse. As he helps Murph down from the truck, she looks up at him, forehead furrowed with a frown.
"I don't."
"To tell you the truth, Murph," he says, putting an arm around her as they follow Donald and Tom up to the house, "me neither. I hope there is a heaven."
"So you can see Mom again?"
Coop nods, his gaze drifting upwards, over the faded grey shingles to the sky.
And 'cause it's likely the closest he'll ever get to finding a place among the stars.
There isn't a speck of dust on the porch, nor on the toes of Coop's boots. He glowers down at them as the last swig of beer rolls down his throat, studying the grain of the boards, imagining some of the lines in the old wood were made by the stuff straw bristles of a broom, pushed across the porch a million times by him, Donald, the kids...Erin. Never clean for more than a few minutes before the next gust of wind brought a fresh dusting of dirt.
It's not that he misses the dust, 'cause he sure as hell doesn't; it's what the dust represents. Not just the struggle they had just to put food on the table, which is recorded in the documentary that was playing on the TVs when that NASA admin who seemed too young to grow facial hair, let alone to hold that title, brought him to the farmhouse earlier today. But that they were here at all.
Oh, there are traces of them everywhere. All their old stuff's here-furniture and books, even clothes-artefacts of Dr. Murphy Cooper's family, kept just out of reach by velvet museum ropes swagged between gleaming brass poles. Their faces, the generations that came before and after, whom Coop never knew, smile from the walls and pages of photograph albums. It's more mausoleum than museum. To him, it's like he felt looking at Erin's body before they buried her: a hollowed out shell, the essence of her gone.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
Porch still creaks, though, he discovers when he pushes to his feet. He lets out a groan himself, which prompts his companion to say, "Careful, Cooper. People might think you're starting to show signs of your age."
"People might?" Coop retorts as he straightens up, rolls his shoulders. "I am an antique, though. Like this old rocking chair."
He runs his hand over its back as he shambles toward the door, inspects the pads of his fingertips for traces of dust. Of course they come away clean.
"Gonna get me another beer. You want anything?"
"I'll take a whiskey, if you've got one."
Coop turns to see TARS' light blinking, as if he might not otherwise catch the joke himself. Actually Coop hadn't meant to be funny, but made the offer out of habit. He wonders if this is how Dr. Mann slowly lost his marbles, all alone in that ice world with only a robot to keep him company-until he dismembered it, of course. That doesn't stop him from bantering with TARS.
"Me'n Donald," he says, "we distilled a bit of moonshine back in the day."
What else did you do with an overabundance of corn? Is there any still stashed in the pantry? Doubtful. If Donald and Tom didn't finish it off, the museum people probably cleared it out. It's a strange thought, Tom with that heavy dark beard, taking his place out here on the porch with Donald. Though not nearly as much as that he'll soon meet Murph as an old woman.
"Glad to know you're not a lightweight," Coop says.
"That would be CASE."
Chuckling at the accurate assessment of the two robots' personalities and what kind of drinking buddies they'd make, Coop goes inside. The slap of the screen door behind him cuts off his laugh abruptly.
For some time he stands in the front hall, the only sound the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the living room. In his chest his heart seems to slows to keep time with it, though ever since he left, the steady beat of his pulse for them has been out of time. Tom's whole life...One moment in Murph's bedroom.
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment…
Lurching into motion, Coop makes his way straight through the house, not breaking stride when he sets the empty bottle on the kitchen table, nor turning when the sound of shattered glass signifies that he didn't quite set it on the table after all. He pushes through the back door, clatters down the porch steps, finally stopping at the edge of the cornfield. The tall stalks, untouched by blight or drought, cast bent shadows beneath the simulated moonlight.
Grandpa died last week. He'll never forget the last words of Tom's last message, heard years too late. We buried him out in the back plot next to mom, and Jesse. Which is where we would've buried you if you'd ever...come back.
The tears flow, just as they did when he saw Tom's heart break: Grandpa gone, Dad gone, son-Jesse- gone. The boy's face still present in the man's, so near on the video screen, but years and galaxies between, stopping him from reaching out to stroke the dark hair in the instinctive gesture of comfort. Coop kneels on the ground, grasps hold of clumps of grass, digs his fingers down till he clutches handfuls of dirt. Well-he's come back now.
But they're not here.
"Cooper? I heard glass inside the house."
"Looks like I'm the lightweight, TARS." Coop wipes his eyes, turns to face the robot. "One beer, and I'm breaking shit and bawling like a baby."
It ain't 95% honesty, not even close, but TARS lets it go.
"You have dirt on your face."
Coop touches his cheek. Sure enough, his fingers come away smudged.
"I used to hate the dirt, TARS. More than anything" He presses thumb, middle and forefingers together, rolls the grit between them. "The thought of being dead and buried…" Nourishing the corn. "Now I think…least I'd be with 'em. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return. Maybe that's part of it. 'Cept this ain't the dust I came from. Where they're buried."
He's never related to a fictional character so much as he does now to Dorothy Gale, opening her front door and realizing she and her farmhouse have been picked up and set down again very far from Kansas and Uncle Henry and Auntie Em.
"But Cooper, humans weren't made from the dust of Earth. Did you forget Sagan in your old age?"
Coop catches his breath, releases it again.
"We are star stuff."
He looks up-up, always up, to the sky and not this imitation Earth-through the curving windows of Cooper Station. Eternal black, glittering with seventy billion trillion stars. And among them, a scant two-year flight away, reflecting starlight, sunlight, moonlight, is Earth.
Coop remembers how it felt to see his home planet for the first time from space, at the start of the journey that brought him here. How his only regret was not that he was seeing it, but that he couldn't share it with his children.
He remembers Erin, too, sharing that poem with him, not long before she died. How's it go? A line about how old men ought to be explorers. He hassled her about the old part, but now it fits.
"A hundred and twenty-four, babe," he murmurs as he starts back to the house-pristine white with its fresh paint job, yet almost dusty-looking beneath the stars-certain that somewhere, sometime she hears him.
In Murph's room he goes straight to the bookshelves, searches for T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems, and a message meant for him. It takes a while, due to the lack of organization-his fault, for pushing them off the shelves. Finally he finds it, lying on its side at the bottom of the stack, a pretty clear indication that it's one of the ones he used to spell out his crude Morse Code. Smiling through tears at the thought, he flips through the pages, quickly at first, then more carefully when he feels they're brittle with age.
On first pass he doesn't find what he's looking for, thinks he's in for a night of reading through the Four Quartets from their beginning, when his eye is drawn by the printed words on the final page of the poem:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.
~Fin~