Ashes

And, the daughter, on her way out of the hospital, having collected what there was of his journals, laboring with the large red lawyer’s boxes to stuff them in the trunk of her Hyundai,  was stopped by a voice saying, “Hey, you.” And, at first, she didn’t turn, certain that in a place like this people were forever calling out in just such a way, but lord only knew who they meant. “You, lady in the red shirt,” the voice said, and she looked down to confirm what she was wearing before turning. An old black man with white hair and the wiry build of the still active older person was striding towards her across the pavers. “I heard you were wondering what your father…It was your father right?”  She nodded. “I heard you were wondering what your father spent his time doing every morning underneath that tree.”

“Yes,” she answered, noting the steel grey eyes, hooded by a furrowed brow. He stood with almost all his weight on his right leg, the left one being made of wood. “Well, I can tell you that both of those stories I heard the nurses tell you was right.”

“How do you know what they told me,” she asked, hunting his eyes for some cunning, some hint that it was a trick or a weird way of gaining power, for a man who was clearly powerless, a wooden legged janitor at a home for the dying. She found nothing.

“I have my ways,” he said, which really just meant that he was nosy and had a tendency of mopping outside the door when people came to collect the things of their deceased relatives, because the job got pretty damn boring and monotonous, even the crazy people tend to follow routines, and that the little opportunities of conversation provided him with a rare glimpse into the world outside the building, for he himself was blind, and had to operate by feel around the building, and use his acute sense of smell to identify things like a new visitor, and so, he slept on site, no longer capable of making it in the outside world, but hating the place he was trapped in.

“They were both right,” he said, clouds passing over his eyes. “Both of them.” There were morning that he prayed and mornings that he cursed. And, truth be told, I asked him straight out, I said, Mr. Dan, what the hell are you doing out there by the tree every morning waiting for the sun to rise?”

“And do you know what he told me?” he said, leaning conspiratorally toward her, and she, in turn, leaned toward him, the whisper implying a sort of felt intimacy. “I’m waiting for him to come back so we can wrestle more.”

On her slow drive back from the outskirts of town, past bare wires populated by crows, and old graveyards dotted with grey slabs of stone detailing the lives of people she’d never known, couldn’t even have imagined, she reflected on the three stories that she’d been told about her father, about how he’d spent his mornings beneath the grey scrim of sky, waiting for bits of light to appear in the dark, and she concluded that it had been the second woman who had been right; he was still gone; knowing didn’t help at all. And she drove down the old road and stopped at a gas station for apple juice, and walked by an old vendor to pick up some popcorn that she ate absentmindedly as she drove halfway back up towards the old manor where he’d spent the last few years of his life, pulling off onto the shoulder of the road, near a dry culver, ringed by a thick ream of wasted elms. And, without thinking twice, she’d dumped the ashes of her father into a pile of leaves along the side of the road, tapping the urn to make sure that no part of him remained, and then she drove back to her home, listening to pop music on the radio and thinking about all the things she’d have to do at work on Monday.