I passed twenty-eight of them along the interstate on my way to the airport. Descansos. Resting places. Engraved metal crosses pressed into harsh red clay. Plastic flowers covered in brown highway spit. A bright blue teddy bear, damp and withered. A carved wooden shadow box filled with photographs I couldn't identify at seventy-five miles per hour. A balanced rock cairn next to an empty porcelain vase.
I passed them four weeks ago on my way to my father's house. He died that morning, died clutching a spiral-wired phone to his chest. He dialed 9-1-1, couldn't speak. The last thing he heard was an operator named Christine telling him to wait, to breathe, to wait, to wait. Help was on the way. Please breathe.
Christine is my middle name.
My dad liked to tell the story of the day I was born. I slid outside my mom's body, a corporal treasure of blood and transfered pain. He held my mom's hand, one of the first men to stand beside his wife in his generation. He forgot to tell my mom to inhale. He watched the doctor grab my head, turn me right, left, twist my shoulders free, let my body fade from perfect darkness to chaotic light. I breathed.
"It's a boy! It's a boy!"
The doctor raised one eyebrow above a woven baby blue mask.
"Uh, Mr. Jaworski, that's the umbilical cord."
My dad never got that boy. He birthed four more girls. He birthed a pink quintet, a collection too petite for football, a basketball team without space for injury, recovery. He treated us like sons, like his Catholic saints, like fallen angels. As the oldest, I was crucified, I was misunderstood, left to suffer the eternal punishment of the five, left to echo the unfinished business he couldn't clamp. I never made him smile.
He died clutching a phone. He died of cardiac arrest. He died eleven months, eight days after my mom. He died a few weeks after open heart surgery. He died not knowing I wrote, not knowing I unloaded that birth pain on paper, ignorant of my calling, of the one thing that bound us together.
My father wrote. He wrote. He spent his blood on story, on charred paper. He told one book, then another. He wanted to make it big, make it Oprah, best seller, New York Times' worthy. He didn't. The words he spilled in his field took root, found home, echoed in paid print. But the words he tended, the ones he wanted to leave his nest never took flight. They sit on my computer now, six Mafia thrillers, six adventure stories with heroes so much like my dad I can't read them without seeing his head of spiked grey hair, his chiseled chin.
I drove to the airport, passed twenty-eight descansos. Twenty-eight locations of death, of automobile failure, crash, burn, failure. Twenty-eight. When I returned, the number was thirty-three. Thirty-three crosses, bears, flowers, shadow boxes, balanced cairns, roadside memorials.
My sisters couldn't deal with my dad's body. They wanted it reduced to ash, captured in an urn, sanitary, removed. They didn't gaze upon his face one last time, didn't wipe his stray hair off his forehead. I did. I followed the white hearse to the crematorium, the lone mourner, the eldest, the most forgotten, most unloved, most mixed-up, most black in a sheep field of gray. I drove my dad's car, let it follow its master on roads so Kansas straight it seemed silly to follow.
An echo. That's what I am. An echo.
The hearse turned right, then left, passed through a hedge so narrow, lush, I knew I birthed again, felt the pain of loss and chaotic light as we dove into a clearing, a patch of dried cold Wichita prairie surrounding the house of fire. I parked my dad's car. It sputtered as I pocketed the key. It knew. It said goodbye.
I met the Fire Man in his chambers. Two funeral home men lifted a long cardboard box onto a slick black table. They left, left me alone with fire, with death, with a man who tended the gateway to heaven, to hades. Fire Man didn't meet my eyes. He lifted the lid of the cardboard box, dropped it on the ground at our feet, let me peer inside, identify my dad.
"Yes. It's him. Thank you."
I let the tears fall. I couldn't stop them. They filled my cheeks, the scalloped edge of my cotton blouse. I wiped a shock of hair from my dad's forehead. He wore the clothes I chose - hiking shorts, hiking boots, a hemp shirt I gave him one birthday. His face looked odd, looked skewed, uneven, as if he were contemplating a great truth, contemplating yet another punishment for me.
"Thank you."
I looked at Fire Man. He wore tortoise shell glasses with large frames. He wore a maroon Polo shirt. He wore three decades of fire silence. I knew his age, knew his long association with the transference of matter without his saying a word. He carried himself like a soldier, like a firefly, like someone who guards and lights and fusses just a bit, knows he has to shine his ass so that the living can see, can understand.
"I never visited a crematorium before. What happens next?"
I whispered my question, didn't want my dad to hear, even though his cheeks didn't rise and fall like mine.
"Here. Let me show you. Let me show you."
Fire Man repeated himself once, twice, three times. He kept saying the same words over and over as if it would seep into my dad's dead skin, into my own skin near dead with fatigue and fear. He pointed to a pine door and I followed him inside.
Fire Man showed me the oven, the place of transference, showed me the buckets of metal hip joints and skull plates and tiny screws that doctors use to extend our planet time.
"The recycle man takes them away every other week. They don't reduce to ash, Birdie. I don't know what else to do with them."
Fire Man treated me like his wife, like his daughter, like a treasured bit of protoplasm just born into his family, umbilical cord fresh and red and so much like the promise of new life. Fire Man knew me, knew my path, my desire to see my dad consumed, collected, cooled, encapsulated.
"Birdie, I have done this for twenty-eight years."
I flinched. Descansos filled my mind, the space of the unliving, the undecided.
"And in all these years I discovered something important. Maybe I shouldn't tell you. You're father hasn't gone through the change yet. I feel like I must tell you this, though. Whenever someone burns, I watch the smoke. It's like watching for the new Pope to be chosen. If someone's smoke is dark, I know that person didn't lead a clean life. You know what I mean? They weren't good. But white smoke, oh Birdie, that's someone who's done good."
I nodded. I expected my dad to exude the smoke of my family, the gray smoke of Maybe, of Kinda Good, Kinda Crappy. I expected gray or black or something altogether unidentifiable. I shook Fire Man's hand, thanked him for his kindness.
I sat in my dad's car outside the crematorium for an hour, two hours. I didn't know when Fire Man would pitch my dad's body into the oven. I waited. The sky stayed blue, stayed clear, knew my intention. I watched the chimney, watched with fear and trepidation, watched worried that my dad would burn black, burn evil. I remembered the bad times, the night times, the dad who couldn't grab my extended hand.
Smoke belched from the careful brick. Smoke. A hiccup of smoke, of white, clear smoke. The smoke of the just, of the beautified, of the sainted. I didn't smile, didn't feel anything but relief. I drove. A mile from the crematorium a small naked cross lay against the wind-swept ground. My hands moved in a motion I thought I forgot, the sign of the Catholic cross, the sign for rest, for peace, for resurrection.
