Burial of the Dead

MIDWINTER SPRING

MIDWINTER SPRING

Midwinter spring is its own season

- T.S. Eliot

Early that year when the sun was warm enough to melt the snow that had fallen all winter, Manny and Mathew lived in a house near the road that ran behind Punter’s Pond, about seven miles from the town where there was nothing but a store, a post-office, a diner and a movie theater. No one traveled on the road except the couple who lived in the farm house on the other side of the pond and the guy with the beard who drove his truck by their house every morning heading west and returned every night heading east. They didn’t know where he lived and even though they’d waved to him a few times, he’d never waved back. It was different with the couple in the farmhouse. They seemed friendly. Both waved back. She had spaces between her teeth. He was missing one hand.

The house Manny and Matt lived in was bigger than they needed. Mr. O’Neal, the late widow’s late husband had built it in the early Sixties because he wanted a place in the country where he and his friends could hunt, fish and drink. Mr. O’Neal had read a little Hemingway at Yale and that had been enough to get things started, and appetite had been enough to keep things going. Mrs. O’Neal’s family owned the property on Punter’s Pond, and she gave her husband the land and the money to hire a firm from Avon to build a lodge like Hemingway’s home in Idaho.

Didn’t he shoot himself in Idaho? Mrs. O’Neal once asked her husband, and Tommy O’Neal had grumbled some kind of answer, unintelligible but for the message hidden within the words to forget about Hemingway because he wanted his lodge and Hemingway’s late-life psychosis wasn’t about to screw it up.

The place had a big kitchen with a mud room and pantry for dry goods, canned goods, and a second pantry with two refrigerators and a freezer. There was a huge room with a bar, a piano and a fireplace and a TV room with an old hi-fi and shelves for books from Mrs. O’Neal’s library. There were smaller rooms in the front, one with bay windows, two oversized bedrooms in the back and stairs to more rooms on the second floor.

Manny slept downstairs and Matthew slept upstairs.

This was new for them. They’d been lovers - sweethearts made dewy with that film of sentiment and diamond-fury particular to early romance, noting dates, times of day, out-of-the-way places, affording them a significance happenstance and coincidence rarely confer.

And then it happened. Mrs. O’Neal died and Manny changed. Bobby Sullivan pulled one of his tricks and Manny and Matt moved to Punter’s Pond to wait out the storm in separate beds. Matt wrote it off to grief or preoccupation with Bobby Sullivan trying to take over the family business. Stress can do many things to people – let alone lovers - and Matt felt some grief too. Mrs. O’Neal had been good to him. He’d miss her, but he missed Manny more. Even though they lived under the same roof, even though they brushed arms passing one another in the pantry or by the kitchen sink, even though they sat within a whisper’s breath of one another before the fireplace, they weren’t close, and when he watched her move about, eyes down, intent, dour, acknowledging him with a nod and busy eyes, he felt like he was lost in black space watching a satellite pass by - an impossible proximate in an infinite field, so close that proximity itself argued for joinder, even after it had moved on, leaving a shadow of false anticipation and then a grudge, a tear in the worldly fabric, another one of God’s small cruelties.

One night, sitting before the fire, Matthew told Manny he missed her.

I’m right here, she said too quickly, flippant, defensive.

I know, he said and would have said more, but he didn’t know how to whisper and shout at the same time.

The week before it happened, an unseasonably mild day, Matthew was walking by the edge of the pond and stepped in a patch of loose soil covered by yellow grass. His foot sank until the mud rose over the top of his boot. The mud was cold and thick and hardened as he tried to free himself. In the distance the sound of an engine shook the movement of geese flying over water. He turned to the sound of the engine and sank deeper in the soil and marsh as gelid as peat and became wedged between two objects, one of which was sharp and hard.