I grew up in the interior of Maine, in the sort of house that’s never finished. In the bedrooms, exposed insulation waits for drywall; for twenty years there have been rolls of linoleum stacked in a corner of the kitchen. Outdoor chores wait until the brief summer: July and August are for staining and roofing, fixing leaks and pouring concrete. When I visit my family I pack jeans and work boots, but not this year. This time I take a dress to wear to my father’s funeral.
Last July he kept me busy for two weeks straight. We dredged the brook and hammered fence posts into the hard dirt out back. We replaced the kitchen windows and installed a new shower in the bathroom. Even as we drank coffee on my last morning, my duffel bag packed and waiting at the door, I could see he wasn’t done with me.
”Martha,” he said. “I need you to help me with Oldfella.”
Oldfella was one of my mother’s twenty-odd cats. She acquired them from strangers, neighbors, volunteer firemen who’d rescued them from trees; but most came of their own volition, as though checking into a hotel. Oldfella had been around for a decade, a cantankerous yellow-eyed tabby with a head the size of a softball.
”Didn’t he die last winter?” The cats came and went like weather; it was hard to keep track.
“He did,” said Pop. “But we had a foot of snow in November. You couldn’t of dug a hole with a backhoe.”
I frowned. “So where did Oldfella spend the winter?”
“By Jesus, he’s in the freezer.”
I put down my mug. “You’re joking.”
”You think so? Come and have a look.”
I followed him downstairs to the basement, past the shelves of pickles my mother had put up that fall. The freezer took up half the room. He’d bought it secondhand from the First Congregational Church, where they used to hold fish suppers for a hundred people. Since then it’s been used for my father’s beef cow. Every fall he’d split one with the O’Shanes down the road. My father had an eye for beef. Charlie O’Shane was always happy to go in on Pop’s cow, sight unseen.
It being July, the beef was half gone. The freezer contained no more meat than the A & P in town.
”Where’d you put him, Pop?” I rooted through the neat packages, wrapped in butcher’s paper and labeled Round Steak, Sirloin Tip or simply Nice Roast.
Pop scratched his head. “By Jesus, he must be on the bottom. He died the week before I got the cow.”
”He’s under all this?” I shoved aside a package of Liver and Kidneys.
”Don’t you worry. We put him in a Tupperware.”
I stared.
”Don’t give me that look,” he said. “It’s a sealed container, after all.”
The Tupperware, when I found it, was capacious, a handy size for military mess halls. I hefted it out of the freezer.
”He put on some weight last year,” said Pop. “He was eating good for us.”
We stepped carefully around the cats that lolled on the stairs, preening and licking their paws. A pregnant calico purred atop the washing machine. The house resembled wildlife preserve, a strange one: cats warming themselves on exposed pipes and Kenmore appliances, dozing in sunny spots between giant boxes of Rinso.
Upstairs, my mother stood at the sink in her housecoat. Two black cats curled around her ankles like fancy slippers.
”Good-bye, Oldfella,” she said, patting the box. She opened the freezer and pulled out a package.
”Take this along,” she said. “He always loved salmon.”
We rode to the burying place in Pop’s pickup, the Tupperware on the seat between us. We didn’t try to talk over the rumble of the engine. My father’s truck has a certain smell inside, peppermints and Brylcreem and the oily musk of the motor, which from inside the cab sounds like a lawnmower. The odometer stopped years ago, at three hundred thousand miles. The truck runs loudly but reliably, with only occasional triage on blocks in the front yard.
I dug. Pop could have made a better hole in half the time, but since his heart attack my mother wouldn’t let him do anything.
”Hold on there,” said Pop, just as I was about to slide the box into the hole. “That’s a perfectly fine Tupperware you’re burying. We wrapped him up good. There’s nothing in there a little Oxydol won’t fix.” He took the container and popped it open. Oldfella was wrapped in layers of grocery bags.
”No sense putting plastic in the ground.” His hands shook as he peeled away the bags — not from emotion, but from early Parkinson’s, and maybe the years of drinking. He was ten years sober; but as he often said, the damage was done. His hands were large and strong, and I thought of a hundred other things I’d watched them do, all they had built and fixed, and a few things they had broken.
I turned away, afraid to look. I needn’t have been. Oldfella was shrouded in a kitchen towel, what my mother would call a tea towel, printed with happy pilgrims dancing around a calendar of 1977. It had once hung on the kitchen wall next to the wood stove.
You’re not going to take off the towel,” I protested.
“It’s still good.”
“You’re kidding.” The towel was paper-thin, the design barely discernible. It was only my memory that filled in the pilgrims’ hats and simpering faces.
”Suit yourself,” said Pop. He placed the bundle in the hole, filling it in with dead leaves. I covered it with a mound of dirt. We found a stone to mark the grave, a nice flat one that could have been engraved with Oldfella’s name, had my mother been just a hair crazier.
Rest in peace, Oldfella,” said Pop, nodding solemnly. “We don’t know where you’re going, but it has to be a damn sight better than this. By Jesus, you were a good cat.” He nodded again, as if that finished it.
Wen we climbed inside the pickup, he began to laugh.
”I forgot the goddamned fish,” he said.
He reached under the seat for the frozen salmon and hurled it into the forest. It was a powerful throw, faster and farther than I could have done; and each time I remember it, it becomes more spectacular. It probably wasn’t the last throw of my father’s life, but it was the last one I got to see.
We laughed the whole way home, thinking how stunned some bear would be to find a salmon, already cleaned and gutted, in the middle of Maine, a hundred miles from the ocean. We were still laughing when we pulled up to the house.
My mother came out onto the porch.
”What’s so funny?” she called.
”Nothing, my dear,” said my father. “We gave the old boy a fine send-off.”