THE SEXTON
A parish groundskeeper has spent years composing an anthology of poems for the local dead--a private undertaking, until he sends his crew and a disgraced English teacher on reconnaissance of the living.
Don’t call me.
Spare me your texts, your posts, the chats, the tweets. Forward no selfies. Embed no links.
Do not Like.
Do not Follow.
Neither Nudge nor Wink.
Summon some warden, rather, or send round a priest.
But delete the profiles.
Tear down the message walls.
Let all access be revoked.
❧
The waitress led a man in a gray mackintosh to my table and planted the lowball. He ordered another before she had gone and brought his hand down on the empty chair, a salesman’s bluff. “I took the liberty.”
We looked at the glass.
“The liberty of ice?”
“You,” he smiled, “are the man I ought to talk to. From what they say.”
I looked over my shoulder. The Ship was filling. I tugged the coaster with my scribbled finances on it from under the drink and slipped it into my courier with my class planner and the knotted plastic sack. Some extra pens lolled at the bottom. My toothbrush.
He was watching my hands as I buckled the straps. “That bag looks like it could tell some stories.”
I had been a day without a computer and an afternoon without a phone. My head was struggling to hold any one idea for long and my patience was short. When this satchel he thought could tell stories on its own tipped over, he bent beneath the table to right it.
“Please don’t.”
The waitress returned.
I covered this second drink to forgo standing a whole round, and we were squared and I was safely broke. No matter what he was selling, I couldn’t buy it now. What was he selling? I dragged his pawn off the table. Scotch.
“To health.” He draped his coat and sat. “Good and otherwise.” Hair he could brush. Bright teeth. The drink notwithstanding, whatever they had told him, it didn’t seem he knew sin one about me. He had just moved to town. He said he was in assisted living.
“You mean as a line of work.”
“I’ll get to it. Have you ever considered yourself in sales?”
“Myself, no. Merchandise?”
“Not so much."
“I’m a teacher.”
“Services. Assisted living," he said. "Death care." A twitch of his canthus. “Urns.”
“Urns?”
“Yes!” He leaned back, delighted. “Urns. Cremation is coming to these necks of the woods. Did you know, last year, for the first time, there were more cremations in the United States than burials?” He whirled his drink. “It’s part of a larger program, of course. There are packages. Tiers. The commissions are good.”
My hesitancy was apparent.
Dark suits had crowded around us, ordering drinks, loosening ties. Tissue purses and modest jewelry. Black tights against the cold. Here and there flashed church bulletins rolled like batons, one of the last local periodicals making it into print.
It was early Saturday evening. They had come from Lily Kallenbach’s visitation.
MacIntosh flicked the parish paper across the table when I asked for it, and I went right to the obituary column. Her portrait, a tinted black and white. Beneath it, her full name and dates. Then the obit proper. A ragged right, it wasn’t paragraphed.
And it wasn't proper. First person. Free verse.
He nodded at people and sipped as I read. There was a carriage in the poem. It wasn't like Emily Dickinson's. I raised the page to keep her words more to myself. A sharp terror formed in me.
“Look at all these people,” MacIntosh said. “It’s going to be a big service. Did you know her?”
“Have you read this?”
The poem was sensual. In context, sordid.
A persona poem, presenting as a public confession, en lieu of an obituary. It didn’t include her memberships and pastimes, her brighter qualities. It didn’t list the names of her survivors. But by its end, it rather clearly alluded to me.
I felt squeezed by my own ribs and was compelled to stand. I apologized for having to go. Mac shrugged and winked and took his gray coat to a cluster dressed for the parlor, as if to demonstrate his trade right then and there. The smile amiable. The solemn handshakes. Death care.
I scanned the poem once more, mortified. Lily hadn't actually written this, had she? Certainly not her family.
Someone had it in for me.
I folded the bulletin into my pocket and made for the exit. As I went, I felt all eyes sweep away and draw down to their gazettes. There was no telling who had read what yet. By now surely someone. And by then surely the grapevine.
I bumbled around a jock gone to paunch, a local legend--call him GloryDaze_91—braying about the upcoming referendum, the new sports center, arriving more or less at the expense of the library. Blazer and crimson ballcap. Tasseled shoes.
I stopped. I could see the door ahead but couldn’t refrain. “No,” I said.
His mouth shut. He turned to me.
As I explained it, they looked like they also had plenty to say but were deciding whether to bring themselves to say it. Clearly they’d rather I disappeared. Been done away with. Piecemeal. “And not least of all,” I said, “because sports are repetitious and pandering...”
Glory scanned me, boots to forehead. He gassed up the sort of comment they’d all been withholding. A smug pause. They told him to let it go for the night.
“Let him go? The Love Letter Predator?" he said. "Tell me. Who else?”
“What do you mean who else?”
Every bottle in the house seemed canted my way, another knife for the rumble.
He waved the page with Lily's picture on it. “It sounds like she wasn’t the only one."
I raised my hands flat and stepped back. I hung my clumsy bag on a pillar hook and draped my coat over it, and I brushed my vest and faced him. I sensed myself tipping his way, as if listing toward my due.
“What?” he nearly laughed. “You want to fight me?”
At that, phones lit the pub in a pentecost. The whole of the barroom was glowing. This one clicking in burst mode. That with the bright light video on. We looked around at the spectacle we'd become.
As Glory appealed to them with his arms, trying to pat their white sparks out, I reached over and flipped the chowderhead’s cap off.
And I marched. Through the funereal wardrobe around the bar and into the booths’ cahoot of laypeople, the regular crowd. Sweatshirts and denim, khakis and fleece. Puffy coats, yoga pants, shearling boots. Every soul watching me.
There, SallieMae69. Here, LivingtheDream, whose icon changed daily, and 88FunStuff, boxed in a booth behind her husband’s dolphin smile and shiny football jacket. Faces half-hidden by phones, thumbs deep in messages, I imagined myself passing across their screens. Their tapped-out barbs swirled like pests about me, everyone watching for my flinch at the first sting.
The Calberts were just now stepping into The Ship’s glow, well-dressed, unawares. There were snowflakes on Gary’s overcoat. Lily’s prayer card was curled in Susan’s mitten. Not neighbors now.
I leaned upon the door and pushed into the parking lot, where crystals tinkled and billowed like blossoms over the local fleet, these cars and trucks at harbor, brined with ice melt. I took the cold air deep. Bumper stickers--red or green--bleeding their allegiance to the one high school team or the other. My fists clutched in rhythm to the pulse of the jukebox inside, where discussion re my circumstances was stacking up beneath my picture in their machines, comment after comment in that world where we at safer distance, if not total anonymity, congregate and vent.
Had I come to The Ship looking for a fight?
No.
Maybe.
It wasn’t punishment I had been seeking so much as peace. The absolution of disappearance.
I unfolded the bulletin once again. The temerity... abusing an obituary like this. The audacity of making it a poem. Our cab with blinds shut… Close on the gloved hand bare… Nobody's business, it transgressed decorum.
I was smacked by a new wave of anxiety over my wife, Erica, already aggrieved, catching wind of it all, and so soon. Everything seemed to collapse at once, and it didn't matter what culprit had done me in. The entirety of my misfortune--Lily's death, Erica sending me out, the stupid altercation I had just escaped inside--seemed the work of a collection of malefactors, a cabal to bring upon me that which I, myself, hadn’t the courage, to myself, to do.
You fathom my meaning.
Today's dreadful hours had been filled with the vague notion of taking my frustration out on someone precisely my own size. Now, here, in The Ship's snowy lot, I was standing alone, wishing I could just say I were someone else, the avatar of a more even mind, when a yelp of air brakes brought me back on guard.
Beneath a streetlamp a long truck gargled. I could smell its diesel. On its open trailer, polished granite gleamed through pine slats, each piece about a yard high, and I could see the rocks were lettered and numerated in gold crayon, a quarryman’s hieroglyphs. The crated slabs stood in file one after another down the length of the bed like oversized slips of yesteryear’s card catalog.
Tombstones.
The light changed. The rig rattled on into the night and the signal went to yellow and back to red, and in this interim the many voices I had taken leave of inside, where surely at least one was now further defaming me out loud, in person and in real time, grew distinct over the muffled bump of the juke.
Reader, I heard them all.
No longer prolusion. Not even chorus. A hundred separate arias, each bewailing its brevity on this earth. What mattered such shenanigans, I thought, at the rims of our graves? One of those stones rolling into the night might soon be assigned to Lilith “LilyGo” Kallenbach. Or bear the names of any number of this evening’s characters passed coming out. KrzyKatAllie. TrootherDare. The always enchanting HotBookLover, whose impatient husband, Tim, never let her read more than a page or two at a time. Even GloryDaze, his ballcap knocked to the floor by my insolent hand, I now sensed trembling at the void of precipitous caesura, his smarm reduced to a full rest of quiet desperation before a last measure’s cascade into infernal misery...
Such is empathy.
But hold on.
Please wait.
Lest you find me obnoxious or spiteful, lest you leave before this is done, there on the wind blew my song, too. It whipped past The Lighthouse and along the train tracks, a banshee’s keening--that reckoning hum from the interstate, artery to a world larger than these precincts and where death stalked all at once.
Again I said the word.
Tombstones.
Are not we, the dead, best counsel to us, the living?
Disconnected, digitally and elsewise--Erica maybe in an instant and forever lost--it would not be a bad idea to reinvent myself, repurpose myself, I thought. Cry ye not nix.
My fingers seemed readier to hold a spade handle than to push a red pen through a life of remedial marginalia or tack up unread comment balloons to the low ceiling of an eleventh-grade essay. I looked upon these hands as upon the palms of miserable Orlac. Put them to a corporal work. For be it a far sight better to humbly pull the weeds of the disappeared, say, than to pop some beefy philistine that I might in turn feel his vengeful sting.
I turned to The Ship again, a man who could take a ribbing for the sake of his convictions. Had I really wanted death?
No.
And but perchance I did, had this been any way to go about it?
Let them scorn what I have done, sure.
Let them meet me with cries of execration.
But I would administer mine own penance.
My cheeks warmed. Redeem thyself.
Through the fogged glass, pale heads bobbed in the ruckus, skulls clacking each to each. What a pointless argument I had made to Glory and his team. It wasn’t athletics or libraries that fetched the rope. Such pettiness would only prolong our misery.
I clutched the doorhandle, partly entertaining the proposition MacIntosh had floated, but more to the point, I had forgotten my coat and pack.
Now, you might worry this was ill-decided. Worry what hellish try-pot stoked moments ago lay crackling within. I certainly couldn’t expect the protection of cameras forever, and soon it would be more than Glory who had it in for me. And The Ship, frankly, with its flat-paneled screens and co-branded neon, was no place to die.
But I had been brightened by epiphany and was charged with pomp.
The cloud of mourners parted as I stepped into them again, opened for me as one day would their own holes in the ground--this riptide relaxing left and right with its flotsam of prayer cards and beer bottles and smart phones. I saw my peacoat bulging over my courier on the pillar where Glory waited, his red hat replaced up top. He was chatting with our newcome scotch drinker.
I drew up short.
Beside them was the widower in his suit. A fob laced Kallenbach’s vest. His look for me was steely and those in our orbit stopped talking. He raised a bulletin creased in quarters, as I had mine. “I suppose you know about this.”
I offered my condolences regarding Lily. Clearly they were not apology.
His nod was small. “Should I tell you how I found her?” His shoulders quaked. They slid him a chair. A woman released a breath of pity before a louder voice rang out and a man in a jacket zippered to the throat hastened toward me, bearing his phone outward as if to stab me with what was on it. He threw it with a curse at the wall.
“Jimmy…” But Glory’s extended arms only barred the crowd to make way for what I had coming.
It was an elasticized shot.
It evidenced a lifetime of clubs and rackets and bent me to my knees.
They shuffled my assailant away.
From the floor, I was scratching for my coat and satchel on the post when Glory’s tasseled loafer hooked my diaphragm and I fell in a heap upon the tiles. I thought if I could ever breathe again I would have to vomit.
Their murmur was a burbling. The jukebox switched songs and was instantly shut off.
Kallenbach’s shined boots stopped near my ear. The only doctor in the house. He spoke a few words, simple instructions, and they tossed my black coat over me.