The notification on my phone wasn’t even a ring, just a flat, heavy vibration against the oilcloth of the kitchen table at 4:14 in the morning. Arthur didn’t die quietly in his sleep like the doctors in Des Moines said he might, fading out on some soft cloud of morphine and weak broth. He went out the way he lived his entire ninety-eight years on this earth, choking on a piece of cold toast and swearing at the linoleum floor because the butter was too hard to spread.
I didn’t rush to the phone to call the county coroner right away. I sat there for a long minute watching the grey light crawl across the grease-spotted wallpaper near the flour bin, listening to the old grandfather clock in the hall wheeze its rusty gears. Sixty-three years of marriage gets built out of things like cold toast and stubborn silences, and when the noise finally stops, the quiet doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like an empty room where someone left the water running.
Arthur liked to say we had a marriage forged in iron and tempered in coal dust, though most folks around our township just called it a public nuisance. Our yard was three acres of crabgrass and overgrown lilac bushes, sitting right on the gravel county road three miles outside of Boone. Whenever we had a disagreement, which happened about as regular as the mail delivery, the windows stayed shut because the screens rusted out back in the seventies, but the yelling still carried right across the ditch to the neighbors.
They could hear Arthur’s voice rattling the siding like a tractor backfire, sharp and mean-spirited and loud enough to scare the nesting robins right out of the boxwood. He was a small man who weighed barely one hundred and twenty pounds by the time he hit his nineties, but he possessed the lungs of a steam whistle and the stubbornness of a mule stuck in a cattle guard. He spent every single winter of our life together complaining that the wood stove was eating up his pension, and every summer complaining that the electric fan sounded like a threshing machine. I usually just let him talk until his face turned the color of a ripe plum, then I’d go out to the back porch and shell peas until he ran out of steam.
The neighbors always pretended they didn’t hear it when we passed them at the post office or the church suppers, but everyone in the county knew the routine.
Arthur loved being feared more than he loved being right, and he worked at it like a man tending a prize-winning tomato patch. Whenever a fight reached its absolute loudest pitch, right when the kitchen table was shaking from his fist coming down, he always hit us with the same old line he thought was the funniest joke God ever invented. He would lean right across the oilcloth, his false teeth clicking against his lower lip, and shout until the spit flew. “When I die, I’ll dig my way out of the grave and come back to haunt you for the rest of your life!” He would throw his head back and cackle then, a dry, rattling sound like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute, proud of how the very thought of him made the folks down the road pull their curtains a little tighter at night. He liked the idea of his bones being more trouble than his company.
The trouble started long before the grey hair and the arthritis, back when we first moved onto the acreage in the spring of 1961 with forty dollars in a Prince Albert tobacco tin and a mortgage that cost more than the bottomland was worth. Arthur had this notion that he was the king of the county just because his grandfather had cleared thirty acres of oak stumps with an ox and a chain. But he wasn’t a farmer, not really; he was a man who liked to stand on the porch in clean overalls and yell at the hired help while I did the milking and tended the garden behind the hog shed. I remember the night he sold our second heifer behind my back to buy a rusted-out McCormick reaper that didn’t have half its teeth. I stood right where the kitchen table sits now, holding a tin cup of chicory coffee, and asked him how we were going to pay the feed store.
He didn’t even look up from his ledger. “You’ll figure something out, Clara, that’s what you’re here for,” he said, and walked right out to the shed to smoke a cheap cigar in the dark. That was the first time I felt that cold little knot settle right behind my ribs, the one that never quite went away for the next six decades.
It wasn’t that I was some kind of saint putting up with a monster, because I made my own mistakes and I carried my own small, spiteful habits into the dark corners of that house. By the time we hit our golden wedding anniversary, we didn’t talk to each other so much as we took turns issuing reports from opposite sides of the living room rug. If he wanted the salt, he wouldn’t ask for it; he would just stare at the cellar door until I slid the heavy grey shaker across the oilcloth hard enough to make the tin rattle. We lived like two stray dogs chained to the same post in different directions, close enough to snarl but too tired to bite. The neighbors brought over a casserole of scalloped potatoes with crushed cornflakes on top when he turned ninety-five, and Mrs. Gable leaned over my screen door to ask if Arthur was still making his usual threats about the afterlife. I just nodded and told her he was keeping his strength up for it, and she looked at me with those sad, pitying eyes that city people save for old widows who don’t know any better. They didn’t understand that Arthur wasn’t a ghost story to me; he was just a very loud chore that finally needed finishing.
When the heart attack came, it didn’t even have the decency to be dramatic. He was sitting in his green vinyl recliner, the one with the stuffing coming out of the armrests like sheep’s wool, watching a television preacher talk about the fires of hell while he ate a bowl of salted crackers. His head just tilted sideways at an awkward angle, his mouth staying open in that half-chewed way he had when he was getting ready to complain about the weather. I didn’t scream or drop the bowl. I walked over, checked his pulse against the dry, parchment skin of his wrist, and waited three full minutes just to make sure he wasn’t playing possum like he did back in ’84 when he stayed out in the root cellar all night just to see if I’d come looking. When his skin turned that dull, greasy grey that doesn’t ever come back to pink, I went to the wall phone and called the funeral home in town. The young fellow who came out with the stretcher was sweating through his white shirt even though the air conditioning was rattling away on high, and he kept looking at Arthur like he expected the old man to sit up and start cussing about the price of gasoline.
The funeral was held on a Tuesday under a sky the color of a wet slate shingle, right down at the little Methodist church where we hadn’t sat in the same pew since the Carter administration. A half dozen neighbors showed up, mostly out of a sense of civic duty to make sure the lid was really going down on him once and for all, standing by the gravel path with their hands jammed deep into their coat pockets. After the preacher finished reading out of the book about dust to dust and ashes to ashes, the men stepped forward with their shovels to fill in the red clay of the cemetery plot behind the machine shed. Mrs. Gable caught me by the elbow while the sexton was still tamping down the first mound of dirt with the flat of his spade, her face pinched up tight with that nervous little twitch she gets when she’s worried about ghosts or neighborhood property values. She looked over at the fresh hole, then back at me, her voice dropping down to a shaky whisper. “Aren’t you even a little bit afraid he might actually come back to haunt you like he always promised, Clara?”
I didn’t blink, and I didn’t look down at my shoes the way women my age are supposed to when they’re standing over an open hole with thirty years of widowhood staring them in the face. I smoothed out the front of my black wool coat, feeling the crisp October wind bite right through the cloth against my collarbone. I looked right past her shoulder at the distant line of telephone poles marching off toward the river, steady and straight against the grey horizon. I smiled a little, just enough to let her see the small lines around my eyes, and kept my voice level and dry as corn husks in November. “Let him dig,” I told her, and watched the way her eyebrows went up like two startled caterpillars. “I had him buried upside down… and I know he won’t stop to ask for directions.”
