Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

176 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Debra Gwartney
The funeral home and its adjacent cemetery were out on the
edge of Boise on a road where rabbits lived and alfalfa grew. I drove there
in my blue VW bug at twilight; it was raining hard, water splashing off
the bare branches of the cottonwood trees towering over the graves.
The next day a hearse would transport my grandfather’s body to the
Southern Idaho cemetery a hundred miles away where the babies were
buried. We’d meet it there. But this late afternoon of the viewing day
his body was still in this building. I pulled into the parking lot, turned
off the car, and sat in front of the Cloverdale Funeral Home.
The large front door swung open and a woman made a quick
sweep of the porch with a long-handled broom. After she went in, I
dashed to the entrance myself. She looked up, frightened, when I came
through the door she’d just shut. When the fright fell from her face,
she just looked exhausted, wondering what a wet teenage girl would
want at this time of the evening.
I asked her if I could see my grandfather.
“Of course,” she said then, a little too fast, standing up to lead me
to the dim room at the front of the building where a casket was set up
on a shiny metal perch and surrounded by folding chairs. “Take your
time. Take all the time you need.”
I wished she hadn’t given me so much permission. I’d hoped,
instead, that she’d say there was time for a quick glance and no more;
or better yet, would remind me that my other family members had
left hours ago and that I was too late. But she swept a curtain closed
behind me, and left me alone. The scent from two sprays of flowers at
the head of Grandpa’s wood casket wafted across the room. I picked
up a chair and moved it closer. I didn’t sit, but held the chair’s metal
back. I had to look in soon, to examine the space for what my mother
had wanted me to see, even while I realized I’d never tell her I’d seen
it. I wouldn’t tell her so she could keep on being furious with me if
she needed to. I had my own reasons, too: I had changed my mind
abruptly about seeing my grandfather’s body, and I wanted to make
this last moment with him about me and not about her—not about
the ache and hurt in my mother that was suffocating and scaring me
more than I’d ever been scared where she was concerned.
I’d thought I wanted to remember him alive, with whiskey and
sharp cheese on his breath. The small grunt he’d make when he lifted
the heavy apron over his head. The way he’d hold my hand when we
walked down the street to Wally’s Cafe, where he’d buy me a cake
donut and a frothy glass of milk. Yet something more powerful than