Northern Forest, cont.

Mary Beth thought it would be harder to touch her dead grandmother’s hand than it was. She spent most of that evening, back at the Fraser house by the fireplace, stocking feet tucked beneath her on a stiff, high-back loveseat with Jack, tuning out relatives telling stories about Alice and thinking about that journal. While Elizabeth laughed, remembering the first time she’d tried to make Alice’s pot roast for Arthur, after they’d married, and she’d filled the house with smoke and called Alice in tears, only to find out her mother-in-law already had a backup pot roast prepared, just in case, Mary Beth wondered whether or not they’d covered the coffin with dirt yet. She watched relatives shuffle around the large Fraser formal dining table, picking at finger sandwiches and fruit salad on small plastic plates, basket of cloth napkins in the corner, and tried to imagine how cold the hands she’d have to move would be. Once, she and Jack had had a pet rat that died while Jack was out of state, looking at the site for their place in Wyoming and Mary’d had to take it out of the cage to bury it in the backyard by the sycamore tree. She’d jumped when she wrapped her head around its tiny furry body, at how cold it was, just hours after death. Mary Beth didn’t know why she wanted to dig up her grandmother: it seemed to her a horrible thing to want. She couldn’t get away from the desperate, consuming wanting-to-know. She’d never had a problem with getting her hands in the dirt, with digging or heavy physical labor that strained her lower back until sweat beads burst onto the back of her slender neck. She’d helped Jack put up the drywall in their new house and install the porcelain sink in the bathroom and had planted her own expansive vegetable garden and built her own worktable for the art studio out back. But she knew that digging up a grave, however little dirt had already been laid on top of that dark, oak coffin, would be harder than any of that.

There hadn’t been much dirt, yet, not packed in with whatever monstrous piece of equipment they used to pound people back below the surface of the earth, just loose clods of it dumped on, as if by the back legs of a horse. When she smeared the loose soil off the lid of the coffin in the yellow glow of that moon, she felt calmer than she had at the wake, staring at creamy pink walls and folded hands poked out of suit coats too formal for the men of Berlin and trying to avoid looking at those brown, mannequin hands. Mary Beth felt the sweat mingle with the dry dirt into muddy trails running down her cheeks as she bent to creak open the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, heavier than the dirt in the shovel. In the darkness, Alice looked like the woman Mary Beth remembered from childhood, the women who kneaded and punched sourdough loaves and had flour permanently in the creases of her face and neck, who would gather her grandchildren up in her thick arms and whisper the Celtic prayers her mother’d taught her young. She looked asleep, peaceful, praying some Hail Mary from the center of her rosary and silently resting beside her long-dead husband. Mary Beth shook, reaching out toward the softly wrinkled fingers of the left hand. They were cold, colder than she could have imagined, but it didn’t startle her: instead she ran her own fingers tenderly along the soft pillows of the undersides, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own as if they were praying the Our Father, lifting it and slowly removing the bulging black notebook from underneath. She lowered her grandmother’s hand back to her chest with a pang of guilt. Would Grammy notice the absence of the journal? Miss it? Mary Beth shook her head. Catholic or no, she knew that nothing of her grandmother was left in this body, that she wasn’t sleeping but slowly beginning the process of decay. And if she did believe in heaven or any of it, she knew her grandmother would want Mary Beth to understand her own grandfather, would want her to read their shared history and would want to teach Mary Beth, in any way she could, the heart of the father Mary’d long since given up on understanding. If Grampy had been connected, somehow, to the Gorham Pulp Mill, Mary Beth had to know.