D.C. Chester
Up in the Oregon Coast’s mountains, there are lost little cemeteries and graves – a lot of them – lost, forgotten way up in forested, nowhere places like Ten Mile, Death Ridge, Desolation Saddle – places nobody knows – except Loggers – where probably living Loggers buried Loggers mashed by logs.
Since I got served, I seek those cemeteries, because there, I don’t have to talk to anybody. Days, at work, I stumble along. Nights, I just wander dark streets crying. I seek lost cemeteries because everything there is the truth – birth, death, the creaky old grave markers. In those remote cemeteries, nobody is screwing with me. Good places to get away from life. Besides, the Fall rain brings with it Halloween.
On a Friday, I was at work when the Sheriff served me the papers. My wife is suing me for divorce, taking everything. I’m telling you – the knucklehead shit you pull on someone to whom you’ve proclaimed love catches up!
When I got home, the house was empty – of her, of our four-year-old son – but full – of hot hell-heat. So much heat, it got me sweating before I had everything shut off. Every light on, the furnace turned all the way up, every burner on the stove glowing bright red – even the flopped-open super-over-heated oven – the washer, the dryer, the TV, the stereo repeating over-and-over again Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”. And up in the master bath – her stupid, plug-in, helmet-hair curler set – hot – and, too, the cranked-up-full space heater in there – all of it burn-down-the-house hot! The whole house like full blast ninety inside. The wall paper cooked. It really shook me all up.
But it wasn’t like her.
I told Dick, my Lawyer, whose pointed nose and short legs reminded me of a Dachshund, how it all felt – the Sheriff at the office – the crematorium house. Dick said he knew Mildred’s Lawyer, somebody named Graydon Jensen, was “just a crummy flat-lander” from over in Eugene – and that the ruthless terms of the divorce suit were “right up the guy’s alley”, probably instigated by Jensen himself.
Then Dick said, “You don’t know it yet, Joe, but you hired a gut-fighter, and we’re going to formal hearing!”
* * *
Just a week since I got served, I called in sick. It’s raining and I can’t face this second Friday because a realtor who uses a black cigarette holder with pearl inlays is showing our house today. But for me, it’s the Chitwood Cemetery. I’ve been there one other time in twenty years. Nearly forgot about it. You get it just off Highway 20, up the Yaquina River, just east of the covered, artifact Chitwood Bridge. Bit of barbed wire fence is all that perimeters the jumbled graves. Years ago, a big windfall hemlock crushed the whole north section of the fence.
People worry about logging and things like habitat and the carbon cycle, but the jungle of the western woods will always reclaim everything; it’s reclaiming the Chitwood Cemetery.
Rain. I tell myself I don’t need any rain gear. Won’t take long.
The rusted hinges of Chitwood’s cold, live-stock gate stop me. I realize with a kind of shock, how much the western woods’ jungle thickens in just twenty years, how much I wish I had brought along my machete.
First trespasser in years and years, I lean against the steel gate. The rusted hinges break loose. I force in. Instantly, the tall, wet grass soaks cold right through my levis to the skin of both my shins.
Face-to-face with the soggy tanga-tanga of vine maple, huckleberry and salal, I stumble and try to step over a big moss-covered log, but my left foot drops into space. As I fall left-ways, all the clinging rainwater hanging in the jungle canopy above me pours down my neck.
I can’t move. My left leg, clear to the hip, is stuck straight down in a rotting pit between the log I tried to step over and a tangled root-ball. I breathe. I feel my lungs being invaded by the acrid stink of rot and infecting clouds of fungal spores. The Chitwood cemetery. Everybody there is dead.
High above me in the trees, a slap of rain squalls in with our first October storm.
My left leg stuck down in that hole, a giant, four-foot-tall sword fern bushes right in my face. Right-handed, I grab onto a bunch of the cold, wet blades and, hard as I can, I haul myself up onto my right knee and pull my left leg out of the hole. I end up in the exact same position as an altar boy at Mass – bent at the waist, my face a foot from the first grave marker I spot – it lying flat.
Looking down at it close-up, I see the marker is hand-knapped out of a piece of the dark grey basalt of the Pacific Northwest. Cheap, common rock, but way back in 1938, somebody chiseled-out the initials “M.E.F.”, and below the death date, “Feller”. I can’t tell if Feller is a last name or the job he was doing when he got killed.
I’m already soaked. I start to chill.
I spot a concrete headstone shoved-over to the right like sixty degrees out of the vertical by a spruce maybe thirty years old. Leaning against the cement headstone’s front like it was used as a vase five years ago, stands – I can see a child leaving it – a little, screw-top Starbuck’s bottle.
My whole grave crawl goes that way: I find eighteen. But then I start to really shiver in the wet. Up in the trees above me now, the power of the wind is a constant, loud rush and clunk of trunks and branches. I think about the forty, fifty-year-old hemlock that blew down long time ago and flattened the north section of the cemetery fence. I could get myself chilled and killed both, right here in Chitwood Cemetery. She’d get everything – probably even my Social Security. Deserves it. I need to get out of here.
But I don’t.
What do I really have to lose? Lightening-strike Mildred is at last divorcing me.
And when I see the level spot and the dinky, cast-iron fence and the carpet of little spring-green, two-inch-tall plants – each with a single, sweet little heart-shaped leaf – when I see the rusted, long ago love-lavish of the little fence...
There’re actual flowers carved into the little diaper-white marble headstone. There’re actual little five-petaled pink flowers growing in amongst the tiny green hearts. The plot isn’t over four feet square. I can still read the date easily – in detail – “August 19th, 1914”. Only that one date. I realize with a thud that, oh man! It’s a little baby’s grave – born/died same day. It makes sense – except...over and over, I keep reading it. The initials don’t really work on a new-born’s grave. The little headstone reads “D.C. Chester”.
All I can figure is, what the hell kind of a parent could’ve been so coldly impersonal as to cap off such wrenching, sudden loss – the loss of their little, bald-headed baby and its tiny little pink finger tips that never lived long enough to even get sucked on - with just initials?
I spend another hour systematically combing the Chitwood Cemetery. I don’t find anybody else with the last name Chester buried there. I feel slightly better. D.C. Chester. At least D.C.’s mother survived the birth. Her poor little baby’s death was heart-break harsh enough! It’s cold enough. I’m cold enough. To hell with it. I get out of there and I limp back to a cold, empty, Friday-night house.
And I just step out of a hot shower when the realtor calls. How soon can I move out? When can I sign the Earnest Money? I can hear it in his voice – the way he talks – teeth clenched on his mother-of-pearl-in-laid black cigarette holder and chrome-grinning like the grill work on a ’56 Oldsmobile. Standing there, damp towel over my shoulders, I’m getting chilled again. I feel bad for poor baby D.C. Chester again.
He shows-up in thirty-seven minutes – the in-laid cigarette holder does. I sign away our house. The realtor exits. I have thirty days to get out. I shiver. I feel like hell. I get myself a beer. I hammer it down.
I obsess over Chitwood Cemetery. Burping beer, I think about all those neglected graves. I puzzle. I head-butt the everlasting mystery of D.C. Chester. During my second beer, I get really frustrated and pad barefoot into the bathroom to drain my lizard. Sudden anger bursts up and I kick at her little embossed, underwater-scene, tin garbage can under the bathroom sink. Instead, my foot hits the edge of the bathroom door - which rattles stupidly on its hinge pins and my big toe starts to bleed and my red blood gets to staining the white grout on the tiled floor, and on my hands and knees, I use beer and my dirty underwear and tears of frustration and heartbreak to clean up the blood. I tape-up my toe. I cry myself to sleep.
* * *
By my second Saturday morning, all I have left in the world is coffee. I shod myself. I’m going. I’m getting out of here – out of this sold damn house. Not our house any more anyhow. I can start packing tomorrow or the next day or the next week as far as it goes.
Thinking about really good coffee, I feel my heart take a little leap of relief. I’ll even get to feel fifty-cent magnanimous and tip the kids working there. I jump back in my van and feeling really pretty hopeful, I drive to Newport to a place called Panini, my coffee fave.
Like usual, it smells wonderful in there, and the heat of the all-night-long baking that goes on in the back keeps it homey warm. I hug my molasses-thick Sumatra and let the warmth and the personalness of Panini osmose through my skin. Perfect coffee again. Perfect heat again. Ahhh.
Many times, I’ve studied the cedar-shingled buildings out Panini’s front windows across the street. Once more, I marvel to myself that the shingle installer screwed up right there at the front door. The building is really quite nicely trimmed-out turn-of-the-century style – pale green, fluted side-casing on the front door – wide, crowned casing over the top – but all the shingle courses are about an inch lower to the right of the front door than the left.
I know that mistake: my own shingle courses had been out by the same amount and where it showed was right smack at the front door!
And so – I’m steeping in Panini’s warmth and I’m sipping my perfect coffee and I’m commiserating with the long gone installer’s downer when suddenly, D.C. Chester is back and for a moment, I think about that little cast-iron-fenced plot again and all I feel is oh, good grief! Do I really have to go over it all again? Now? I actually think it – that D.C. Chester is nothing but a cat-in-the-hat joke. But D.C. Chester was a name carved into a tiny white headstone, set in a cemetery plot, fenced in ornate cast-iron. How could such a life be a joke?
Worse, when I’d arrived at Panini, I hadn’t had the sense to power-off my phone and it rings right in my perfect coffee. It’s the realtor. He wants to know who D.C. Chester is. He says that’s how I signed the Earnest Money Agreement. He’s pretty jacked. He’s actually yelling he can really sympathize with my divorcing-me wife. I find myself smiling and hoping, as I talk to him, the smile isn’t coming through in my voice. It’s ridiculous. All of it. Just stupid. I tell him I’ll be at the house in ten minutes; wanting to get him over with, I do it in eight.
After we get the Earnest Money Agreement all squared away, I sit there in the house just smiling at the realtor, him scowling and frowning over his delayed commission and stuffing another cig into his holder.
“What are you smirking about, Joe?” he wants to know. “Ree-ahl-tee,” he insists, “It’s called Ree-ahl-tee because it’s REAL!”
Then, he puffs a cloud and asks me how I feel. It’s a shock that he’d even ask. I want to know why. He says, “You look like shit. You must feel like shit.”
I know I deserve some abuse. I’d been self-absorbed. When we got married, I told Millie I was writing a novel. Like it was equivalent, she said, “I have Eczema.” She accepted my novel. She said, “Take ten years and see where it goes.” At nine years, it hadn’t – gone - and I was desperate to produce more income than my part-time liquor store job, and behind her back, I’d day-traded Millie’s astute, shell-game household savings and I didn’t pay attention and I lost it all. I’d been sloppy and careless with the Earnest Money Agreement, too.
I realize with a stab the realtor isn’t really the jerk. I am.
But I relapse. I don’t care. I don’t care if the deal gets to Closing or not. I don’t care what my angry, divorcing-me wife thinks. I don’t care what anybody thinks. All I can think about is everlasting D.C. Chester. D.C. Chester. D.C. Chester. I realize with a kind of crazy elation right in that moment that I’m gripped by D.C. Chester – just like the obsession I once had, Millie or not, of owning a chick-magnet sports car. I loved my wife. She and I stuck together like magnets. It wasn’t the chicks. It was the stupid car I wanted – bad.
And we bought it and one day, driving by myself on Highway 34, in a hairpin turn up on the east side of Mary’s Peak, the back end of my red sports car passed me and I stuffed the beautiful front end into a dirt bank. The other side of the road was a canyon. That car was a widow-maker. Probably should have, but she never made me eat any crow at all.
* * *
Two weeks after Millie leaves me, I just can’t stand it any more. Back at my Panini sanctuary, right from my perfect coffee, before my mind starts sniffing the D.C. Chester trail again, I try once more to call my wife. This time, she makes the mistake of picking up.
“Millie?” I say.
“Wut?”
“I need help, Millie.”
“I know. So get some.”
“Millie? I’ve been spending too much time in cemeteries. I feel nuts.”
“At least you’re planning ahead THERE.”
“Millie?”
“Wut?”
I don’t dare tell her how I really feel. She doesn’t owe me anything. Instead, I start to blabber. I describe the whole scene at Chitwood. I tell her about D.C. Chester. I tell her it’s nuts, but that I can’t stop thinking about it, that I’m researching it, but getting nowhere. She just lets some exasperated steam out her ears like she does and tells me in her practical voice, “Oh, Joe. Somebody from the Siletz Res probably just buried their dog in there as a joke.” I say back that she wouldn’t think so if she could see the place – the tipped-over head stones, the underbrush.
I tell Millie I love her. I say I’ve been a fool and I’m sorry as hell and that the house sold already. She just says, “I know.”
Then, recklessly, I ask her to “please” meet me at the Chitwood Cemetery. I say, “Remember the red sports car and how it got ahold of me and I nearly got killed? This D.C. Chester’s got me the same.” I tell her where the cemetery is and ask her if ten is OK. Over the phone, I can tell she’s crying. It’s exactly like when I was a kid when just
looking and listening around, I figured out once you get involved with a girl there’ll be a lot of crying. Back in the 6th Grade, though, I just never figured I’d be the cause.
She doesn’t say no to Chitwood. She doesn’t say anything at all. She just snuffles and I think I can hear a cough drop clicking on her teeth as her tongue shifts it around. Probably, she caught cold since she left me; it tells me how stressed she is. Over the phone, in the back ground, I hear a scrap of our son’s voice. We’d worked hard for that kid. Something was wrong with my out-put, so we really worked hard to get Millie pregnant – if you can call obsessive-compulsive sometimes-nearly-public sex work.
Listening to Millie snuffle over the phone, I feel like a creep. Our separation is real rough on her.
She never says another word. She just hangs up.
Only place Millie shows up is about a month later at Gut-fighter Dick’s formal hearing. By then, I’m out of the house and basically living in my rusted-out seventy-three Ford van. It wasn’t mentioned in the papers the Sheriff served me. It’s only worth about two hundred bucks – but it’d been handy – back in our really-wanna-get-Millie-pregnant days. It’s real tough, sleeping again in that tin can without her wrapped around me.
But the hearing.
I show up, too, but I can’t really even focus on the proceedings. During the month, I researched D.C. Chester at the Lincoln County Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Waldport Historical Museum. I have a scratched-off list of a hundred key-word combinations I Googled. Odd thing I ran across was a full-blood Salish from clear up in northern Washington somewhere used to live in Chitwood way back. I couldn’t figure out if his name was Smack Billy or that’s just what people called him. Reason it stuck in my mind was what Millie had said once about how the justice of the Indian-land casinos and somebody from the Res burying a dog in white man’s cemetery as a joke were the same thing.
Which brings this confounded story back around to Millie.
At the hearing, it’s real obvious she’s over her cold. She glows. She looks so hot in a tight gold on black she hasn’t worn in ten years. That outfit isn’t about cleavage; it’s about her erectness; the high Manchu collar lifts her tractor-beam persona up on top of a tower.
And she has her dancing violet eyes all sparkled up so bright, she has her own Counsel all screwed up and in his opening arguments, he loses track of what he’s trying to say and has to go back to the table where Millie’s sitting and check his notes and when he does, he makes the mistake of looking in her eyes again and he flusters and drops his notes on the courtroom floor among the chairs and there’s a glass of water on the table and that falls, too, and gets his notes all wet and – well - the whole thing just carves my guts out, because it’s was so killingly obvious to me how easy it had been for Millie to replace me.
Millie had unbolted me from herself like a bad-order starter motor nicking-up the teeth of the flywheel of her super-charged, big-block, V-8 girlness that long time ago she had used to pull me off my foundation. I’m scrap metal to her now.
In the courtroom, I can’t stand that she never looks at me once, so I watch her lawyer. Even red-faced from embarrassment and bending after his dropped notes, he’s magnificent: tall, chiseled, tailored suit a color nobody could name, but even I can tell, perfectly matches his super-healthy skin tone. Anybody can see Graydon Jensen’s a full partner in his Firm.
But Dick’s exactly what he called himself. When Jensen fumbles his papers, Dick tears right at Jensen’s throat. Dick jumps up, requests “respectfully” to be allowed to “approach the bench” where I can just barely hear him start in on some deal about a mistrial on account of the prosecuting attorney’s “apparent lack of familiarity with the facts in the ‘Mildred vs Joe case’”, and how Dick can’t stand to let his fine client be “fired from the Philharmonic of his life” over “notes he didn’t even drop.”
No kidding. Dick says that. I see the Judge’s eyes twinkle.
But which only gives Jensen a chance to recover himself and so our two lawyers go at it, and yakityak yak yak, and in the middle of a hot legalese exchange, Dick just turns away from Jensen, and about me, he says directly to the Judge, “Look at my client, your Honor. Just look at him!”
That’s when I realize that, for the first time during that entire hearing, Millie’s eyes are on me.
We always could. Millie and I always could look fearlessly at each other – I mean, not staring – just gazing – I mean, speaking at least for myself. Millie is more like a Sphinx – always making me wonder what the hell a girl like her’s doing with me.
Like the first time we had sex. At first, we just laid there on her bed in her apartment in our clothes – I guess, gazing. A few minutes later, in the middle of it, I asked her directly, “What are we doing? Just getting our share?” The way she answered, I was never the same. From way down in her chest, she just said, “Oh, how can you even say that!”
There during that trial, facing the sphinx again, I remember that whole thing and realize with another saw-cut downbeat, that after all the years, I don’t really understand Millie one bit.
She just sphinxes me about two minutes and then she uses her eyes to beckon Jensen and she takes ahold of the lapel of his tailored suit and she pulls his face real close to hers and she whispers something in his left ear – or maybe kisses it – I can’t tell. With a smug, satisfied look, Jensen just stands up and requests a “lunch recess”. It was early, so the Judge gives us a coupla hours. Jensen shuffles my life back into his briefcase. Then, Jensen and Millie stand up and leave – just like a couple.
Outside, right away, in fit of depression, I nearly get hit by a bus. Only reason I don’t is it was really trucking and I felt it shake the street and I looked up in time.
Coupla blocks away, I find a dive bar called the “Wishing Well”. It’s before-lunch-empty - just me and the tatt-necked bartender - who says, “Hi. My mom calls me
‘The-odor’, but I go by Toxic Teddy.” For myself, I say, “Hi, I’m - ‘In-Need-of-Whiskey’.” Toxic Teddy says he has “a supply of that”. Toxic Teddy still has a juke box, too – with nothing on it but Fleetwood Mac, and “Gold Dust Woman” forces me to think about Millie’s gypsy magic – the magic she’ll never ever again work on me.
I get back to the Courtroom early. Dick the gut-fighter is ahead of me. Pacing fast, back and forth, like a caged wolf I once saw alongside a highway in Arizona, he grabs the cuff of his right jacket sleeve with his left hand and yanks, snapping the sleeve straight. Fast, he does the same with his right hand. He repeats. He just paces and yanks. Paces and yanks.
There’s going to be blood on the court room floor, and I’m tanked-up enough to be seeing two gut-fighters.
Watching the Dicks, I begin to fear they’ll get ruthless and pull some muddy personal stuff on Millie. I have to admit, though, I didn’t oppose very hard, but I never did want to go to formal hearing – for Millie’s sake – but then I’d remembered the hell-heat in the house, and the lop-sided terms of the summons I’d been served, and I re-realized that I was the possessor of faulty judgment and decided to just ‘let ‘er rip’ – as my dad would’ve said.
The hearing wraps up quick.
Millie comes back through the court room double-doors all by herself. I expected and looked, but no Jensen. From up in her tower, she swings into the court room not looking at anyone. She sort of curtsies to Dick and smiles at him. Then, she walks straight over to me, and clutches at my right hand, but misses and stumbles and almost
falls off her high heels. She looks in my face and I don’t know what she’s seeing, but I see only anguish in hers. On the second try, she gets my hand and says, “Let’s get out of here, Joe.”
Outside, her only comment is, “I suppose you parked the van your usual mile away.” Besides walk fast, the only thing she does is squeeze my hand like she wants it to graft onto hers.
It wasn’t a mile. Sometimes Millie exaggerates. I’d parked in one of those spots that’s right at the out-bound end of a busy bus stop and I guess there was some kind of bus service interruption because there were about twenty impatient people bunched right there close and stupidly fiddling with their smart phones and re-touching their make-up or trying to read or escape conversations absolute strangers are victimizing them with.
I let Millie in on the curb side. I go around, but by the time I get in, Millie’s on the other side of the green and white-striped curtain that I have hung behind the two front bucket seats.
She’s out of her gold-on-black.
I see a meteorite shower. I see planets and galaxies. And somewhere in what Millie does to me next, I hear a coupla buses thunder in and take the world away. Somewhere else, I get all stupid bold and I ask her the same question I had so many years before.
Millie answers different. She says after I’d invested twenty thousand bucks without telling her and then never paid any attention and lost it all, she was really mad
and I say, “Yeah. I got that.” Thoughtfully, she traces my lips with a finger tip and she says back, “So I decided I had to blow the lid off everything and see where it all landed and find out all over again how I felt.”
I don’t ask Millie any more questions. I can feel how Millie feels. Even obtuse me. I can tell.
We just lay there for a while, listening to passing downtown traffic and more buses booming in and blasting off from our van’s back bumper. Out on the sidewalk, a loud guy tells whoever’s out there that, “The wind might be alive!”
To Millie and me, the familiar patterned rust on the sheet-metal ceiling of our van’s like constellations in a starry starry night sky we’d watched a lotta times years before and laying there right in the middle of downtown, we find out we both remember it – real well - all of it.
But then, Millie jumps up, yanks on my sweats. She bends over and kisses me in her tender way. Last, she pokes me in the chest with a finger and tells me, “Chitwood Cemetery. Midnight.” Then, though, she seems to re-think. Two-handed, she cradles my face and her eyes search mine. From down in her chest, she adds, “Trust me.”
She leaves me her gold-on-black.
* * *
When the Highway 20 by-pass was finally completed, the section of coast highway past the Chitwood Cemetery was abandoned.
Now, it’s a closed-casket-dark midnight along the road at deserted Chitwood. No traffic. There’re no houses or lights – no Millie – nothing near where I know I’ll have to climb the bank from the highway and find the cemetery gate. A ground fog a coupla feet deep muffles the stillness.
That’s when, suddenly, I see a white phantom appear from the other side of the empty highway, float across the pavement and ascend the bank just about where I’m expecting to find the cemetery gate. Ridiculous. But the apparition shakes me. I shiver.
As I approach the gate, inside my skin, I jump when from directly on my right in the dark, I hear Millie say, “There he is, Danny. Your dad!” and all I can think is, “Good God. Now she’s involving our innocent son. But then, I remember her ‘Trust me’.”
The white ghost from the road reappears and floats toward me and latches onto my right leg and hugs it hard. Then, the little goblin giggles and tells me, “We’re tricking.” Danny talks like his mouth is full. I can smell chocolate.
Millie comes up and kisses me and says, “OK, Joe. Can you find the grave?”
I know what she means.
Millie has an LED headlamp for each of us. She takes Danny by the hand and he giggles again. A few steps inside the gate, we lamp-up. Millie smells like chocolate, too.
But it’s inky out and the bright LED light bounces off the ground fog and right back in our faces. Because of the big sword fern I’d mangled before, it’s easy to find the hole my left leg went down into and I show Millie “M.E.F.” chiseled in block lettering. With a chuckle in her voice, she tells Danny, “We already got our candy from everybody earlier, but we still get to trick. Are you ready, hon’?
He wants to know what the trick is. His mother just says, “Trust me.” Then she asks him if he’s having fun and he says, “Mommy, I’m stuck!” and she hands me a short – shovel! - she’s carrying, and picks Danny up and tells him, “Almost there, hon’”
But me! Millie and I lived Dracula. Only a coupla months after I read the novel, and felt the dread in Doctor Van Helsing’s “Mein Gott!”, I woke up on a warm, windows-open summer night, to hear the exact same Castle Dracula bat-wing-fluttering sound right in our own bedroom. I freaked. No question what it was. We listened to the Count circle around our dark room. After I dithered a while, Millie just got up and caught the bat with her bath robe.
So now, I’m in a burial ground with my wife who I now know I don’t know near as well as I thought and she has just handed me a shovel. Mein Gott!
But I’m in no position to tell Millie anything.
Then, Danny wants to know if we’re at “daddy’s house.” Millie pipes one of her short, high-pitched laughs and answers, “Ha! You’re pretty smart!”
Danny just giggles again and says, “We’re going to pull a trick on daddy, aren’t we.”
Millie just says, “If you weren’t a ghost right now, you’d get a big kiss from me.”
Scares me, the way I feel my heart hammer. Hefting the shovel, I bend and reach down through the ground fog with my other hand and find the little cast iron fence. All I can think is Mein Gott! What have I done!
When I just stand there paralyzed, Millie gets impatient and yanks up two sections of the little cast iron fence. She takes the shovel from me. She starts to dig. While she’s digging, she asks Danny if he remembers what a skull is. He giggles and raps his own head with the knuckles of his right hand and says, “Dad told me what a knucklehead is.” And then, out from under his white ghost costume, he produces his own little spade. Millie says, “Let’s find one.”
Their shovels chuff, chuff, chuffing, I realize they’re actually exhuming poor little baby D.C. Chester.
Just like in the court room, it’s over quick. The grave is shallow. I hear Millie’s shovel clunk and Danny exclaim, “Mommy! Big te-e-e-th!” and Millie adds, “And what big eyes this cat’s got to see you with!” I see Millie pull a plastic bag out of somewhere and reach down into the dark hole, lift something out, place it in the bag and start to scrape the dirt back in the hole. She hands me back the shovel and replaces the little fence and just like at the hearing, she says, “Let’s get out of here.” Then with a smile in her voice, she tells Danny , “A trick isn’t a very good trick if you get caught, though, is it.”
So we turn out our LEDs and I hear Millie whisper to Danny about how we should stay and stand still a few minutes so we’ll be able to see in the dark and nobody will see us and he asks, “Like ghosts?” and she says “Yes.”
But after only about five minutes of standing there, out of nowhere, he says, “Mommy. I gotta drain my lizard.”
Millie absolutely hates that phrase. She had. She’d tried on several occasions to save Danny from me and lizards. But when I hear it on my own little son’s voice right then, right there – just like an audio lighthouse - in the blackness of that lost, forlorn cemetery, I can’t stop my throat from suddenly closing up. I feel my eyes flood hot – and sting. It’s all so obvious to me in that gold-on-black moment, that Millie will never be able to differentiate Danny from me, nor me from herself.
We just stand there, a family, in that absolute blackness and listen to our little son whizz in the brush.
* * *
Six months later, we bought a dinky, six hundred square foot house in Newport up on Lucky Gap above Agate Beach. D.C. Chester’s skull is back where it belongs. Turned out, way back when I called her from Panini, Millie pretty much knew what D.C. was. You probably figured out I’m still trying to write.
You probably figured out, too, that Millie found out something more about D.C. Chester. She said she talked it around over on the Siletz Reservation. Millie talks to people, but they have no idea how she’s listening. She’d make a hot-shot homicide detective. Somehow, what gets said to Millie chunks into little logical slots in her mind and when something is said that doesn’t fit, it sticks out and she asks more questions.
Over in Siletz, on the Res, she started out telling them about people her parents knew over on the other side of the State at the Warm Springs Res. She told them what she found in the Chitwood Cemetery. In the Siletz Tribal Office, they listened to her and they finally started talking. Millie said that sure, they knew the name Smack Billy, but when she tried to dig, their faces got flat and they said, “If you really want to know, come to the Siletz Pow Wow next Summer. Don’t ask who you’re talking to. Just ask about Smack Billy.”
That’s as far as she got.
* * *
The following year, by the time we drive over to Siletz to the Pow Wow, Millie’s huge pregnant again. It doesn’t take Millie long before she spots the same woman who she had talked to at the Tribal Office the previous fall. The woman motions reluctantly in a general direction and says, “Go to the cemetery. It’s over there on Government Hill. Someone will meet you.”
At the cemetery, waiting quite a while, we don’t see anyone, but we feel watched. Then, a wraith of a dark old woman not over five feet tall, her long black hair heavily greyed is just – there. We don’t see where she comes from. Instantly, we know not to ask her name. The front of her ball cap’s white. All in big rain-bow-colored cartoon lettering, her hat yells, “YEAH!
After she studies us coupla minutes, she just shrugs and tells us that, “My great grand father abandoned Puget Sound when the Seattle died. Not long after he got here, everybody was herded onto this reservation. But Smack Billy and his pet bob cat were renegades like Paulina. But, when Chester died, he came back here.”
Last, the old woman steps back into the brush behind her and is gone. But not before I read on the back of her t-shirt, “It’s Supposed to Hurt.”
Frustrated, we want more. We sit on a bench and wait, but nobody else comes. We walk back to the Pow Wow, but Millie won’t quit. Even though she’s due in only a month, she leaves me and Danny, and he and I shop the vendors and eat. Danny and I watching the drummers, I see a coupla more copies of the old woman’s t-shirt walk by.
Coupla hours later, Millie’s back. Walking down the hill, back to the car, she tells me,
“When I ask around about D.C. Chester, they just smile. She tried to dodge me, but I told the woman at the Tribal Office I was having contractions. She was so sweet to me! I didn’t even have to ask. In a back room, where there was a couch, she admitted, ‘The story goes that, smiling, Smack Billy buried Chester at Chitwood, and then about a month later, he disappeared forever – from right in front of his great granddaughter’s eyes.’”
I listen to Millie, but all I can think to reply is, “Hunh?”
But then, I ask Millie what Smack Billy’s joke was - exactly.
Like I said, in Millie’s mind, things chunk into logical slots. She just looks at me and rolls her eyes, and lets some exasperated steam out of her ears like she does, and then...well, you know how you might be standing real early on a fresh Summer morning by a big, still pond? And way out in the horizontal sun that glows the glassy water you spot a little, lone ripple? And you know it’s a fish just lazing? Just touching the surface with its back? And your wondering mind fastens to the mysterious bigness of the fish? That’s what I see Millie’s promise do – just bump the surface of her face and, she kisses me.