A home at the end of the world - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,131
a private citizen to just have his father’s ashes in a box.”
“Do you want to take them out to the desert together?” I said. “We could go right now.”
“Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?”
“Yes. Now listen. This isn’t the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn’t our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it’s where we ended up, and we weren’t unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I’ve been very happy.”
“He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home.”
“Jonathan, honey. Don’t you think there’s something a little… kitschy about all this yearning for a home?”
He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. “Mother,” he said. “Are you telling me to get hip?”
“I’m telling you to stop worrying so much,” I said. “Your father’s dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave.”
He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, “Mom, if anything happened to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said quickly.
“But if something did.”
I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I’d lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan’s simple bachelorhood, his sexual disenfranchisement. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I’d never met, giving me the name of a hospital.
“All right,” I said. “If something did.”
“If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don’t want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?”
I didn’t speak. I got up and poured coffee.
“Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?” I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“It’s up to you,” I said. “This is strictly your decision.”
“I know. I’ll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?”
“How about a game of Scrabble instead?”
“Fine,” he said. “Great. You’re on.”
The following day we drove to the airport with Ned’s ashes tucked inside Jonathan’s black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I’d claimed the driver’s position, and Jonathan didn’t protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky filled with clouds that had bumped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.
Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.
“Hey,” he said. “Is this a shortcut?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just hang on.”
“I’ll miss my plane,” he said.
“No you won’t. If you do, you can get another one.”
The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert’s small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush grasses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which shimmered as if in perpetual surprise.
I stopped the car in that ravine. It looked especially beautiful in the cloudy light. The white trunks and pale green leaves of the aspens were luminous, and a spoke of sunlight, breaking through, set fire to a single facet of the rough red mountainside beyond.
“Jonathan,” I said. “Let’s scatter the ashes here. Let’s be done with it.”