What
passed for the funeral is now done, ache1 and Brother Skunk both sit
upon the spread of her black coat in uncharacteristically good weather, the
sunshine made ominous, portentous in its context. Above them, the sky’s intense
and absolute blue is a perfect complement to the horizon’s golden fields of cut
corn. Below them, his mother, the soil’s fresh disturbance.
ache1
kneels with her arms around him, this man now cut fully adrift from any
concrete sense of personal history, separated finally from anything to which he
can go as family, though the actual separation having long since passed for any
practical purpose.
She
is chattering, but mostly for herself, hyperpathic to the degree of his
abstraction.
ache1:
really wasn’t the case, I don’t, I don’t... I used to think that she preferred
Judas, you know, that way that the dog was, he was, he had a... hey
She
gently strokes back some lengths of hair blown across his face, tucking them
behind his ear, continuing
ache1:
That wasn’t really it at all though. I think my sister
smiling
a little, holding him a little tighter
ache1:
my sister told me that Mum had, the reason she’d... She hadn’t wanted kids really, but... and she told my sister this, that she hadn’t
wanted kids, but then one of the little kids she’d been teaching had called her
Mommy by mistake, you know that way when you’re really young and you don’t get
that idea of anyone being, not a, not on a conscious, in a way that you really know it, but you don’t understand the...
the biology of it, so almost anyone
that’s older and looks the same or smells the same can be your mum... and that
was when she decided to have kids herself, or that was when she knew she was ready, anyway.
They
sit now in silence a while, Skunk in his own embrace inside hers, his arms
crossing over his chest so that his left hand clutches at his right shoulder,
and the fingers of his right worry at the tiny silver skunk hanging from his
left lobe.
ache1
is conscious of a near unbearable sense of relief, buoyed further by the sun’s calming
and penetrating warmth. Looking round, she notices several of the headstones
bear the word “Mother”, some in upper
case only, but some in upper and
lower and these evoking in her something gentle and quiet and composed,
something she herself remembers, something she knows not to be universal, and
still:
ache1:
Hey. Hey Skunk? Do you think that mother is the most, not... don’t you think
it’s the most, potent’s not the word, what, not just evocative, but... you know
what I mean? If there’s one word that
could ah, that could capture
Brother
Skunk slowly shakes his head, answering this question as if it had been
answered before now, before mother as a word ever obliged consideration.
Skunk
(still moving his head back and forth): Uh-uh…
and
his own answer
Skunk:
cowboy.
