A story before editing, by Arthur Yuwiler

My father died when I was five. It changed my life, and my mother's life and my sister's. Below is recounting of it.

It rained that day. The tears of angels should have drowned the land. Instead it drizzled a slow, steady, soul-damping, gray. My mother held myhand entering the room, yellow lights, soft music, big red and whiteflowers. He wet hand held mine more tightly when we walked past the box.Then she stopped and tears gushed down her face. I looked up. I didn'tunderstand. She squeezed my hand still tighter. It hurt. I looked into thebox, its sides held by wooden peg, but the face inside had cherry red-lipand shone like the wax fruit in the bowl in Aunt Mary's parlor. Though itsort of looked sort like my fathers, it did not move when my mother cried.My mother too looked different now, her face long and gray, the mouthsunken, colorless except for the wet eyes rimmed in red, the red of sores,of skinned knees, raw and bleeding.

But she held me, rocking back and forth, pressed against her, the warmtears turning cold as they ran down my neck. She squeezed me into her warmbody smelling like fresh bread. "Now you must act like the man of thehouse," she whispered.

Everything turned gray when the doctor took my father away. Each dayAunt Mary came to watch me until mother returned and each day she returnedto hold me, to bath me with her tears. I remember the time mother and daddygave me a blue tricycle with a bell on the handlebars that took my bothhands to ring. But after that gray first day I didn't ride the tricyclemuch. The swishing wheels sounded sad in the silent house and mother andAunt Mary seemed sad too. Mostly then I sat on my bed and looked at thepictures in the big books. The quiet pictures that didn't change.

Before then, everything seemed brighter, different. Then I'd go to thebasement to watch father make things. Once he made a little car for me outof wood and we ran it down the driveway. And he always smiled. Not like thatface in the box. Even asleep he smiled. I watched him from my crib when Iwas little. He slept with mother in the bed across the room, smiling, eyesclosed, one arm over mother's shoulder.

When I got my own bed and my own room sometime I had a bad dreams orsometimes the darkness became scary. Then I would crawl into their bed,slipping between them where I felt warn and safe. But all that was before.

A door to the yellow room opened and a man came in to stand by the box.I had never seen the man before but he started speaking about my father,about his goodness. My mother began to cry. I didn't like the man to makemother cry like that. But no one seemed to stop him and pretty soon he saidthings I didn't understand. I tried to see what was underneath our benchuntil my uncle pulled me up. "Walking through a valley of death", the mansaid. What is a valley? And what is death?

And the man kept on talking. I lay back on the hard bench and stared atthe ceiling thinking of the funny tool father used to drill holes for thewheels of my car. At last the man stopped and everyone stood up. Red linedmy Mother's wet eyes as she took my arm. Her hand was wet too but Ipretended not to notice. We walked together out of the warm little house andinto the cold drizzle. Pulling me away from the puddles I wanted to walkthrough, we moved down a gravel path between big grey stones, a forest ofstones.

Only the slosh slosh of shoes on the wet ground and the soft sound of therain broke the silence. No birds sang. The wet air felt heavy. It smelled ofdead flowers, of mold. It made me feel bad, the grey stones, the slow movingfeet, the muddy stones. Only my mother's hand kept me from slipping when weturned off the path towards the rows of chairs and brown mud rimmed my shinyblack shoes. Mother did not notice but she pulled me back when I wanted tolook in the big hole near the chairs. Aunt Mary put an arm around her andshe began to cry again. From the back of a car, my uncles and some other menlifted a big box like the one with the wax dummy in it, walking towards us.My mother began to cry even harder when they put it on the straps over thehole. Then she seemed to fall down. Aunt Mary turned to help her. I slid offmy seat and walked to the side. The tombstone beside me was dark grey andwet. Rain? Tears? Somehow I wanted to hide behind them.

In front, between the legs of the people, I could see the squared sidesof the hole under the plain, long, light brown box. Dark brown dirt stoodbeside the hole, still darker at the top near the wet grass. The box hung onthe straps above the hole.

Then the man from the yellow room came and began to sing a sad song. Icould not understand the words. My mother cried harder and the cries turnedinto a wail as the straps shifted and the box began to slowly descend intothe hole. Then, biting her handkerchief, my mother stood up. He legswobbled but she walked towards me and scooped me up so my faced pressedagainst her wet coat. Only her tears felt warm. I could not see but I hearda great wailing around me and felt the heavy weight of great sadness. And Icould smell the rain, and the musty, freshly dug earth, and in my mind Icould feel the sadness and the terror as the casket descended, descended,descended. And where is my father?