Pallbearing Read online

  Praise for Michael Melgaard

  and Pallbearing

  “Michael Melgaard’s stories are deceptively still on their surfaces, but just below run cross-currents of the darkest human emotions: fear, rage, and love. Melgaard’s debut collection features characters in desperate situations, attempting to wrangle a drop of sense out of things while accepting or standing up to their fates. The stories in Pallbearing are crisp, ruefully funny, and unsentimental, each one a portrait on a grain of rice. A wonderful debut.” — Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of Bellevue Square

  “These powerful, empathetic stories are about the burdens people carry and the debts they owe — at work and at home, to their friends and family, and sometimes, heaviest of all, to themselves. With remarkable compression and insight, Michael Melgaard cuts straight to the heart of people’s lives — in just a few pages I came to know these characters so well they felt like my own neighbours, and I’ll remember them for a long time. This is a striking debut by a writer to watch.” — Alix Ohlin, Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of Dual Citizens

  “With DNA traces of Raymond Carver and Kent Haruf, Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing conjures up a wallop of small-town pathos and dead-end desperation that will leave you shattered. These stories may be deceptively spare in their construction, but they are rich and abundant in their impact.” — Michael Christie, Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author of Greenwood

  “Michael Melgaard does the hardest of things: the poetry of the everyday. Tough, heartbreaking, and astute, these stories move with grace through the margins of society, never condescending, never inauthentic. Pallbearing gives voice to the ignored, the invisible, the forgotten, and charges their lives with significance.” — Tamas Dobozy, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize–winning author of Siege 13

  “In spare, muscular prose, Melgaard illuminates the moments, big and small, that make us human. But don’t be fooled by this deceptive simplicity — these stories will sneak up on you and knock the breath from your lungs. Pallbearing is a stunning debut.” — Amy Jones, author of Every Little Piece of Me

  “Each of the stories in Pallbearing is its own universe, orbiting around the exquisite edges of joy and sorrow. In prose at once searing and gentle, Michael Melgaard takes us through the infinitely tiny, infinitely vast moments that make up his characters’ lives. In this collection, whole worlds live in the span of a gesture, a deep and riveting kind of magic.” — Amanda Leduc, author of The Miracles of Ordinary Men

  Copyright © 2020 Michael Melgaard

  Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Pallbearing : stories / Michael Melgaard.

  Names: Melgaard, Michael, 1981– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190104376 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190104392 | ISBN 9781487006150 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487006167 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781487006174 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8626.E4253 P35 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940909

  Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  For Daniella

  Contents

  Contents

  Pallbearing

  Fun Centre

  A Pregnancy

  Rob and Jane

  Coming and Going

  Little to Lose

  Harold

  Auction

  Low Risk

  “We Can All Be Happy”

  How Nice It Would Be

  Fernando’s

  Drive

  The Money

  When Things Wear Away Other Things

  What She’d Remember

  Unpacking

  Stewart and Rose

  Acknowledgements

  Pallbearing

  Jonathan asked if this was where they should park. No one knew. It was a parking area with six spots just off the one-lane road that ran through the cemetery. They’d driven by three others like it, but this one was the first with a car in it. He slowed down and asked, “Do we know those people?”

  Laura looked into the parked car and said, “I don’t know. Maybe they were at the thing last night?” Anne and Matt agreed that they looked familiar.

  “Good enough.” Jonathan pulled in beside them.

  He got out and tried to put the car keys in his pocket, which he found was sewn shut. The suit was new, bought after he’d been warned it would be needed, and he’d forgotten to pull out the tack stitching in the blazer, and, it turned out, in the pants too. He tried to pull open a pocket, but the stitching wouldn’t give. He tried harder and it still held. He slipped the keys under the driver-side floor mat and took it on faith that people didn’t steal cars at funerals.

  Laura was talking to a woman from the other car. They were there for the same reason, but no one in that car knew where to go either. They all agreed it should be obvious, and everyone looked in different directions. The cemetery was all gentle rolling hills and little copses of trees — beautiful, but with no good sightlines. Anne pointed out that it was a natural burial, so probably not in the main graveyard; maybe somewhere near the back?

  Jonathan saw a car driving slowly down a road on the other side of the graveyard. It stopped in one of the parking areas Jonathan had driven by. Laura was pretty sure that one of the people who got out was Rob. Jonathan squinted and agreed. They set out as a group across the grass, careful not to step on any graves. Jonathan wondered if he should introduce himself to the others, but he was pretty sure they’d met the night before; the details were hazy. Best to leave it.

  It was Rob who had gotten out of the other car, but he’d been hoping Jonathan and his group knew where they were going. They talked it over and decided no one knew what to do, so they all just walked, spreading out across the cemetery, looking for something that would show them where they were supposed to be.

  Just as Jonathan was starting to get nervous about them missing something, Laura pointed out a large group of people who appeared to be moving with purpose on the side of the cemetery they’d just come from. Jonathan’s group, now scattered all over the manicured grass, turned around and headed back, converging on a path that led them over a wooded hill and down the other side where the trees gave way to a small open field bordered by a creek. Just along the tree line, there was a pile of dirt and a dark, rectangular hole.

  Jonathan was surprised at how unprepared he was to see that hole. He looked away and tried not to think about how, in anywhere between five and thirty minutes, he would be carrying Alana there.

  He collected himself and walked down the hill to join the others. No one was near the grave. They’d all stopped at the edge of the path and were milling around in small groups, waiting, Jonathan realized, for the arrival of the hearse. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do — Alana’s sister wasn’t there and there was no one who looked like a funeral director. He stood near some people who weren’t really talking and focused, instead, on the field itself.

  What made this a natural graveyard, it seemed, was a lack of lawn-mowing. Where the main cemetery had
been tended to with golf course–like perfection, this was just a weedy lot with flattened grass paths to the more popular graves. Jonathan had been told that there were no fertilizers or chemicals on the ground, or in the ground. There had been no embalming, which is why the burial was rushed. Alana had died just the day before.

  While Jonathan tried not to think about rates of decomposition, a light aqua-coloured van came over the hill, followed by two cars. The crowd cleared off the road to let it pass. The van stopped beside Jonathan, who saw through the tinted windows that there were no seats in the back, just a coffin. The sudden closeness of the body hit him. He looked away and wondered why the hearse was a light aqua-coloured van and not the usual black station wagon. He thought it might have something to do with it being a natural burial, but couldn’t figure out how.

  Alana’s mother and sister got out of one of the cars, and another group — Jonathan thought they were maybe friends from her hometown — got out of the second. The driver of the van went over and talked to Alana’s sister, who pointed at Jonathan. The driver walked back and offered Jonathan his hand with practised solemnity. He was, as it turned out, also the funeral director.

  The other pallbearers realized their time was coming. They headed over to where Jonathan and the director stood behind the van, all of them shaking hands and nodding to each other. John was the only one Jonathan knew well; they’d been friends since before Jonathan had met Alana. Another was Alana’s high-school boyfriend, who Jonathan remembered from the thing the night before. Two others were exes from before she got sick, and the last was someone she’d been seeing on and off for the last year or so. Mostly off, toward the end.

  Nothing happened after the introductions were done. Jonathan figured they were waiting for stragglers. He looked at his watch, then thought that might be rude and turned the gesture into a stretch, which also seemed rude. He let his arms drop. No one was looking at him.

  Jonathan wondered about the choice of pallbearers. All but John, he realized, had slept with Alana. She would have thought that was funny. Then he remembered that she had chosen the pallbearers herself, and that she would have had a chance to find it funny, and then he was holding back tears until he was cut off by the thought: Why only five of six?

  He looked at John. He and Alana should not have had a chance to sleep with each other, since John had already been married when they met. But then, Jonathan thought, maybe they had. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for either of them. Or maybe Alana knew people would do the same math Jonathan had just done and wonder at the choice as well; maybe she had picked one person who she hadn’t slept with just to mess with everyone. That was the sort of thing she would have found hilarious. Jonathan turned away and looked into the trees.

  The funeral director called the pallbearers together. He gave them brief instructions that seemed obvious — they were to pick up the coffin and bring it to the grave. Then he opened the back door and it was all happening.

  The coffin slid out. Jonathan was surprised by it. He’d been told it was going to be natural, which had made him imagine a rough-hewn, balsa wood apple crate or something. Instead, it was a plain, unvarnished coffin. There was no metal, just simple, well-made woodworked clasps and handles.

  The coffin was at waist level. The proper grip to use hadn’t been discussed. Jonathan started with overhand before he realized that would be awkward when he lifted, so switched to underhand. The pallbearers picked up the coffin. He waited for someone to give the word to lift it higher, but no one did and then they were moving. Jonathan thought they had missed a step. Didn’t coffins normally go up on people’s shoulders?

  The coffin was awkward to carry. The weight threw off the pallbearers’ balance, and their closeness to each other caused them to walk in a short shuffle step. Jonathan was surprised by the weight. It seemed heavy, at first, but a few steps later, he wondered if maybe it was actually lighter than it should be. The wood was, after all, quite dense. But by the end Alana had been so thin, something he then tried not to think about. He decided that he had no basis for comparison. There was no reason to think the coffin was either heavy or light; experientially, it was exactly the weight all coffins he had ever handled weighed.

  Jonathan tried to counterbalance by throwing one arm out to the side, but then thought having one arm flapping might look disrespectful. Instead, he put it across his body and used it to help with the weight. The others struggled too. The natural burial field was riddled with little holes and clods of dirt. He wondered again why they hadn’t lifted the coffin up on their shoulders. He was sure that’s what they should have done, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  Then they were coming up on the hole. There were wide canvas straps across it, which were wrapped around a metal frame so the coffin could rest over the grave. The pallbearers walked on either side and stopped. A pallbearer opposite Jonathan shifted his grip, the coffin rocked, and when it stopped, something inside kept moving for a moment. Jonathan tried not to think about that while they lowered the coffin into place.

  None of the pallbearers knew what to do now that their job was done. The ones on the far side walked around to the crowd that had followed them and now ringed the grave in a semicircle. Jonathan stepped back and then John shook his hand again for some reason. Behind, Jonathan could sense people shifting to see around him. He thought of walking farther back into the crowd, but then a woman Jonathan recognized as a friend of Alana’s stepped forward and thanked everyone for coming. He thought she must be running the ceremony because then she talked about their shared experiences and the loss. Jonathan looked past her.

  A creek cut through a field, then took a hard turn at the graveyard, separating it from what looked like a golf course on the other side. Jonathan turned his head away from the ceremony and saw a clubhouse. Definitely a golf course. He wondered at the creek’s sudden turn; there must be some reinforcement to keep it from wearing into the dirt of the graveyard. The ground, he could see from the pile of dirt, was just sandy loam. It would only be a matter of time before the creek eroded the ground of the graveyard. By then Alana would be part of the earth and would go out to the lake and then to sea. Jonathan figured that was the point of these organic burials — to return the body to nature. He felt tears coming again and focused on the woman running the ceremony.

  She’d asked if anyone wanted to say a few words. There was a very long pause before Alana’s high-school boyfriend stepped forward and told a story about how they’d met. After, a woman from Alana’s book club read a children’s story she said was a favourite of Alana’s. Five pages in, Jonathan looked over the crowd. There were about forty people. Little groups of Alana’s friends who weren’t necessarily friends with each other. He tried to pick out who were people from high school and who were people from work or family.

  Jonathan was thinking about how corny the story was and how there was no way Alana had a favourite kid’s book when he realized that the woman had not only stopped talking but was now walking around the edge of the crowd handing out magic markers. The idea was for people to write messages on the coffin. There weren’t enough markers to go around, so everyone would have to take turns. He watched a few people begin to write. Then a woman walked back from the coffin and held out a marker to him. Jonathan couldn’t think of a way to say no that didn’t make him seem like a monster, so he took the marker and immediately tried to pass it to John, who held up his hands and shook his head. Anne did the same.

  By then there were no new message writers, so Jonathan tried to put the marker in his pocket. They were still stitched shut. Once again, he tried to rip open the pocket, but there was no give. He wondered what sort of fishing line the suit people had used. He clasped his hands behind his back and tried to listen to the woman running the ceremony but instead found himself reading what had been written on the coffin. There were X’s and O’s, some I love you’s, and a couple of You were an i
nspiration and showed me how to live my life’s. Jonathan thought again how corny it all was and then he was trying, again, not to cry.

  A short silence followed, and then the funeral director asked the pallbearers to step forward. Jonathan was surprised to learn, just then, that they were now going to lower the coffin into the hole. At the last funeral he’d attended, this job had been done by a button attached to some sort of mechanical thing. But this was a natural funeral so he maybe should have expected an analog lowering, but he really wished someone had let him know in advance. Not that he would have said no; it just would have been nice to have been prepared.

  And then he was at the grave and the funeral director was whispering instructions, explaining how they’d lower the canvas straps slowly and evenly as Alana went finally and definitively into the ground.

  So, Jonathan thought, here goes. And then they were lifting the straps while the funeral director untied them from the anchors. Jonathan found the marker was still in his hand. He rolled it up between his thumb and index finger so it would be out of the way of the strap and then tried not to think that this weight, transferred from the body in the coffin up the canvas straps, was the last time he would have any human connection to Alana. The coffin lowered slowly into the ground.

  It came to a rest on the dirt below. Under the guidance of the funeral director, the pallbearers on the far side let their straps down, and the pallbearers on Jonathan’s side began to pull them up under the coffin.

  Jonathan’s strap was stuck. He wasn’t sure what to do. If he pulled harder, he worried that whatever it was caught on wouldn’t unstick and instead pull the coffin onto its side. He briefly had a vision of the coffin flipping open and everyone screaming and horrified, and him trying to explain that it wasn’t his fault that this was a stupid hippie funeral with no button to lower the coffin and that he had no idea he had to do anything but show up and everyone would think he was the biggest asshole in the world and never talk to him again.