The Land

By David Allan Barker

George Barnes is a salt-of-the-earth man with a practical approach to life. And so he doesn’t think twice about looking on as the undertaker prepares his mother’s body. But once the body is lowered into the ground, the old woman haunts George in his dreams, not as she was in life, but as he saw her in death, with cotton balls in her eye sockets and her jaws wired shut. George is convinced that, with the mute movements of her jaws, she is accusing him. He should never have allowed his mother to be embalmed; it was an indignity to her body.

The following spring, as the dreams are subsiding, a farming accident shatters the Barnes family. While Emily Barnes is walking through the drive shed, Ford, the eldest son, throws the tractor into reverse and pins her to the wall. Faced with his wife’s body, George can’t help but remember his mother’s accusation, and so, with the help of his boys, he wraps his wife in a shroud and buries her beneath her favourite maple tree.

George has no choice but to keep the burial a secret, but this decision results in fresh hauntings which draw him into a paranoid anti-government jag. He and his sons tumble into a confrontation with the law that proves as twisted and as dark as George’s dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Allan Barker
• Release date: May 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986941207

David Allan Barker

Shit happens

Book preview

THE LAND

By David Allan Barker

Copyright 2011 David Allan Barker

ISBN: 978-0-9869412-0-7

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: George

Chapter 2: Justin

Chapter 3: Ford

Chapter 4: Jack

Chapter 5: Leonard Winter II

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed ...

- 1 Cor. 15:51

Chapter 1: George

I tramp through the field behind the house, a gentle slope to a spongy patch of ground where the water settles after a steady rain, then a long rise past the old maple to the barn. There's that sucking sound of my boots pulling out from the mud, like the earth is breathing, but with raspy emphysema lungs. Em watches me from the kitchen window. I can feel her gaze. It was her as prodded me to visit Beamsworth's. I gotta make the trip, I know, but I'd rather put it off 'til tomorrow, what with all the chores I have to do, getting ready for market on Saturday. Em says I should take a bin to Beamsworth's as a thank-you—a nice touch—not the sort of thing I'd think up all on my own. I haven't got a bin ready, so I'll have to make one up over at the barn. I been lugging two shopping bags full of turnips, butternut squashes and gourds which I'll dump into one of our thirty litre blue plastic bins. The squashes is heavy buggers and they sink me further into the mud than I'd like to go. My boots is damp enough already because they been sitting outside in the rain—not directly in the rain, mind—I got more sense'n that—but under the shelter of the side porch, outside nonetheless so's to attract the damp.

The barn's old, but I been through it beam by beam and know it's sound. It don't look it on the outside because all the boards is weathered to a bare bone grey, but on the inside things look different. Take the posts for example: big pillars the width of a man's waist, cut from trees the likes of which they don't grow no more, and the wood as blond and as fresh as the day it was milled. Then there's the floor down below, where my dad used to keep pigs, poured concrete, a pristine lime, all of it sloping to the south end of the barn and a drain. We used to hose it down every day, and all the water and all the pig shit would slue its way to the south and, in the end I guess, go back into the land it come from. No money in pigs no more so I don't follow that routine nowadays, though out of habit I still like to hose down the floor from time to time. There's no cause for it to get dirty except as we sometimes kill a deer crossing the property and hang the carcass above the drain. I ain't a hunter but deer's a bloody nuisance trampling through the gardens, besides which a little venison don't hurt none in the diet.

When we got out of the pig business and into the organics, market gardening and such, I built myself a room on the south side of the barn where some of the sties used to be, a refrigeration unit the size of a bedroom, walls made of plywood and lots and lots of insulation. That way we can pick lettuce and such on a Monday and keep it fresh for market the next Saturday. I got it set up to manage the humidity, too, since there ain't much point keeping vegetables cool through the week if they're gonna turn soggy on you in the meantime. After I dump the squash and whatnot into a blue bin, I haul open the big door to the cooler and flick on the light. Not much left this late in the season, but I still manage to force some arugula in the greenhouse out back. Tubers do well. We still dig up hills of potatoes, and there's rows of beets, though the tops can turn to mush if there's a frost, and we grow all different colours of carrots—orange and purple and white and red. I throw in a bag of potatoes, a bunch of beets and a variety of carrots, and top off the bin with a plastic baggy of mixed greens. It's a good offering. I snap on the lid and haul the bin out to the truck parked in the lane beside the barn.

The truck's a Ford, a pickup truck. Seems inevitable we'd own a Ford. Our first-born came into this world in the cab of a Ford pick-up truck some thirteen years ago—a son, and healthy despite the ruckus at his arrival. We named him Ford so's no one, least of all him, would ever forget the circumstances of his coming into the world. What we didn't figure on was how that would lock us into a brand of truck. Can't very well name your boy Ford then go out two years later and buy a GM, now can you? And now that we've gone organic, things have only got worse. We feel the pressure to go all green and ditch the big trucks and gas-guzzling equipment. But it's hard. The farm's pretty remote from things and it's a rough land—hilly, and dirt roads that's none too kind to a suspension. So far, they ain't built the hybrid that could take the land around here. Which means, at least for now, we'll keep buying Ford pick-up trucks, and our oldest can rest easy knowing that we haven't abandoned his namesake. Or is he the truck's namesake? I can never keep that one straight.

Beamsworth's is on the edge of town, kitty-corner to the old stone church and the cemetery behind. Dad's buried there, and Mom soon enough. I guess it's a nice place to rest. We all used to go to the church there, parking on a Sunday morning in the gravel by the road running alongside, and we'd walk past all the headstones, me in my scuffed black shoes and dress pants that never stayed straightways on my hips more'n five minutes, and Mom and Dad in their good outfits. So I guess it's a familiar place. It's comfortable. I never visited Dad's gravesite all on my own. Only when Mom wanted me to take her there, wanted a strong arm to lean on, knowing one day she'd end up in that ground too. The soil in the cemetery ain't as good as the soil on my land. I got a blacker soil, richer. They say it was dumped there by glaciers in the last ice age. I wouldn't know. But in the cemetery it's a sandier soil, well-drained, which means it's drier. Better for cedar hedges and simple shrubberies. Mom always said she'd like some kind of evergreen near her headstone. I'm thinking maybe a juniper.

It's noon, too early in the day for anything to be going on at Beamsworth's. I lug the plastic bin up the front steps and past the sign that says Beamsworth's is now a proud member of the Winter Family. Since when did that sign go up? I'll have to ask Chester about it. All's quiet in the foyer and there ain't no one in the office or the visiting room or the chapel. Chester must be downstairs in the embalming room. I take the elevator down. No one ever rides the elevator except to move bodies to or from the basement, but I don't feel like hauling a heavy bin of vegetables down the stairs.

When I poke my head into the embalming room, sure enough, there's Chester, decked out in his white coat. Even though Chester and I went to school together, he looks at least ten years older‘n me. Emily once joked that for a guy who embalms people, he's not very well-preserved. He has a full head of hair, but it went prematurely grey and now has the look of ash to it. While I spend most of my time doing physical kinds of work, Chester's life has turned out more sedentary-like, blessing him with a tidy gut that oozes over the top of his belt and with arms that waggle like an old woman's when he wears short-sleeved shirts. The only time he spends on his feet is times like now when he's down in the embalming room handling a corpse. There's some heavy lifting, too, like when he's transporting a body from the hospital or the coroner's office. Otherwise, his life as an undertaker is no different than any other pencil-pusher's. He has a business to run and so he has to do all those bean-counting kinds of things you'd expect of any business.

Brought you some fresh veggies, I says. I set the bin on the floor by the nearest embalming table.

You didn't have to trouble yourself with that.

Now, now, Em and I wanted to show our appreciation.

Well it sure is good of you.

Chester pulls open the stainless steel door to the cooler. It looks like the door to an oversized fridge, one of those European fridges with a modern design and dull reflective surface. When the door swings wide I'm relieved to see that the cooler is empty except for a six-pack of beer and Chester's lunchbox on the top shelf. He motions for me to hoist the bin onto the bottom shelf and he shuts the door. There's a thermometer on the wall beside the cooler says it's four degrees centigrade inside—a little too frosty for vegetables but perfect for a cold beer.

Chester and I don't have a whole lot to do with one another. We both go to the Rotary Club so we see each other there and sometimes at church, too, though I ain't so religious these days. Em says I should go more often, says it'll be a comfort, especially now that Mom's gone and I need to adjust to life being the oldest generation—no one before me and all that. She thinks one of these days I'm gonna come face to face with my own mortality, the way I come face to face with a coyote the other night, only with mortality, a little pop-gun of a .22 won't be any help; what I need is a clear shot of religion. That's what she says. Chester's like that too, maybe because he sees all sorts drifting through his establishment haven't got a notion which end is right-way up in this life of ours. People anchor themselves to other people, which is fine until those other people die, then what? But when people anchor themselves to religion, other people die but the ones left behind stay anchored. Chester's all about a personal relationship with Jesus. That's his anchor. The way he talks about Jesus, you'd swear they're next door neighbours. Hell, you'd swear they swap wives every other month. Except for the small detail about Chester's not having a wife. I just lost my mom yesterday and that don't upset my universe half as much as I know it would if I heard that Chester was getting married. That would be a tear in the cosmic order of everything. Mountains would crumble to the sea and volcanoes would spew the devil's bile. Poor Chester still lives with his mom and I think that's made him a bit soft. I think that goes a long way to explaining his personal relationship with Jesus. When he asks me what's my anchor if not Jesus, I tell him it's my work on the farm, the smell of the soil after a summer's rain, it's knowing I bring something good from the land. He scowls at me, but I don't recall him ever refusing any of the food I drop off on my way through town.

Well, Chester'n' me, we may not see eye to eye on some things, but the two of us, we go back before memory, and that counts for something. He was the brother I never had. We played hockey together as kids and we camped out in the north wood lot and we went to 4H in our teens. Now there was a puzzle. Chester, the son of an undertaker, going to 4H. The kids didn't mind none because everybody knew him from school, but some of the parents raised an eyebrow when they heard how the Beamsworth boy was in 4H. That took some rationalizing, usually with the help of St. Paul, something about undertaking being a lot like farming. I guess putting people in the ground is supposed to be a lot like planting seeds. Personally, I think it's a lot more like fertilizing the seeds, but I'm not half as clever as St. Paul so what do I know? In any event, Jesus notwithstanding, and the lack of a wife and the presence of flab, I like Chester enough to find myself once a month or so in the basement of his establishment sharing a beer and shooting the shit.

Over the years, I got to know a thing or two about the undertaking business, or at least the part about embalming because it's in the embalming room where we spend all our time. It's a quiet, out-of-the-way place and perfect for a visit. Chester has two porcelain tables, each set with one end near a big sink like the laundry tub back home. Surgical tools sit on a counter, laid out in a row beside a machine that looks like it could have been assembled by a drunken technician who mixed up the parts of an old-style stereo, a slushie-maker, and a ham radio. This is the pump Chester uses to force embalming fluids into the carotid artery and to push all the blood out the jugular vein and through a hose into the sink. There's a poisonous antiseptic smell to everything and it don't matter what Chester do to sweeten things up in the room, that smell hangs over everything. In a matter-of-fact way, I come to accept it as the smell of death. The smell of death ain't rot and it ain't putrescence or decomp, it's this formaldehyde frog-in-a-bottle smell that gets pumped into the corpse's circulatory system and into its body cavity. I think Chester's got so used to it he don't notice the strangeness of it. Even now, he's standing there with his latex gloves and munching on a roast beef sandwich.

Chester hands me a beer and takes one for himself. I twist off the cap and throw it into a garbage can filled with reddish balls of cotton batting. One of the tables is occupied. A vaguely female form lies underneath a white cloth.

Wanna see how it's coming?

I wave him off, then check myself. It hadn't occurred to me until this instant that the form under the white cloth is my mom. I must seem acutely thick to Chester. Or is this normal? I feel like all my senses work, but maybe I'm missing great gobs of information. You'd think when there's a body in a room, that would be the first thing you notice when you go in, but here I am, stuffing a bin full of vegetables into a mortuary cooler, cracking open a beer, and only then noticing the shroud laid over the form on the embalming table.

That my mom?

Chester nods. I've finished the embalming. Sutured. Washed down. But there's still the cosmetic work to do. Maybe later's best.

No, no. I can look now.

You know, why don't we leave it 'til Marge has—

It's fine, Ches.

You sure now?

Sure.

We stand to either side of the table at about the level of Mom's shoulders. Chester reaches over the end of the table where the sheet hangs almost to the sink, and taking hold of the end, draws it up and over the head and down far enough that I can see the bare shoulders and clavicles and the very tops of the Y incision from the autopsy. Chester apologizes for revealing that bit, but I wave my hands. It's not like he's dealing with some pansy-assed fruitcake who's gonna turn all blubbery because his mom's laid out on a slab. It is what it is.

Here's what it is:

In front of me is an old woman, barely recognizable, skin almost translucent, like brittle paper, slender, no meat on her bones, not in life, not in death, grey hair gathered in a ball behind her head and held in place with a mess of net and pins, hawkish nose pointing down to a gaping mouth. Chester says sorry about the mouth. Hasn't had time to seal it shut. Says that was next on his list. I tell him not to worry about it. If I'm going to drop in unannounced like this, I can't very well expect him to apologize for not being finished, now can I? Then I get curious and ask how he plans to seal the mouth shut. Chester turns to the counter where he's lined up all his surgical instruments and searches out a tool that looks like a glue gun.

This here's an injector needle gun. He waves it in the air and smiles.

Show me.

What. Now? On your mom?

No, on you.

Chester don't get sarcasm, or can't think of nothing to do with it except scowl. He loads up the gun with ammo—needles and wire—and taking hold of mom's jaw, fires two rounds, one above, one below, leaving two tails of wire which he winds around each other like the ends of a twist-tie, tighter and tighter until the teeth almost come together. He pushes the wires inside the mouth and adjusts the lips so the mouth is closed.

Marge will get it right when she does the make up.

It looks like Mom is smiling in her sleep, but it's more a sly grin, as if she's been dreaming something lewd and it's come out in her look.

I've gotta put in the eye caps too. Chester sets what looks like two oversized contact lenses on the sheet. You know what? I'll do this later.

I'm the sort who wants to know how everything works, like when I was a kid and pulled apart Dad's gas-powered mower. And more'n that, if I'm gonna be the one paying the bill, then I think I'm entitled to know what Chester's doing