Leave Us In Death With Ease And Plenty

Carl knows Tim is gone when his skin takes on the texture and color of a terracotta planter.  He knows the shade well, having spent the last several days wandering through the living room,  stopping at the display case with pieces of Tim’s parents and grandparents, shards of their skin mounted like butterflies pinned into a specimen box. When Carl sets his hand on his husband’s chest, it feels hollow, not just still, as though he is one of those hundreds—maybe it was thousands?—of clay-fired soldiers discovered years ago in a far eastern country. The mystery of where everything inside has disappeared is not a mystery he cares to solve. 

Family descends, and Carl is surrounded by his two children and their broods of three and four, respectively. The noise and body odors set his teeth on edge. He imagines his children explaining what has happened, the soft tones, the careful way they are always talking to the many grandchildren, explaining as if these little babes are simply little adults, tiny in voice and stature but fully-formed in mental understanding. A part of him appreciates this approach, this even-keeled peeling back of the world’s impossible mysteries. Another part wishes they wouldn’t worry if the little boys and girls understand or not. It’s not as if adults usually do.

His children bring food, casseroles waiting for the warmth of the oven, heaping trays of fresh cut fruit. His son holds up a case of cheap beer, Carl’s favorite. They spread everything out in  the kitchen, pulling plates and forks and knives. No one hugs until after this feast is organized. No one mentions Tim or asks to see him. The grandchildren hustle down to the basement as if  nothing is amiss, and Carl listens to the sound of pool balls clacking against one another, a series of miniature toasts, a sequence of jarringly celebratory sounds.  

“They should be up here,” his daughter says.  

Carl shakes his head. “Let them be comfortable.”  

His son opens a beer, passes it to Carl, then opens another. “Where is he?”  He takes them to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Carl has left the lights off and the blinds drawn, so the room is gloomy, the robin’s egg blue paint on the walls making him feel like he’s underwater. His eyes go immediately to the bed, where he has pulled back the blankets so that Tim is on full display. Garish, maybe, ghoulish even, but he doesn’t want his children to foster any misguided, deluded hopes that Carl is wrong. And a single look at Tim’s body, transformed into its clay cask, is quick to dash any such dreams. His daughter sucks in a tight, billowy breath. His son slurps long from his beer. Usually, he’s careful and slow with his drinking except when he’s nervous or upset, unsure of what else to do with his body, his mouth. 

Carl goes to the bed, but when he turns, he sees that his children are still near the doorway. He winces. They are like fawns, thrown back into their childhood, delicate and fearful.

“Come,” he says. “It’s okay.” He winces again. Of course, it isn’t okay.

But his children listen. They have always been good listeners, keen to commands, although neither Tim nor Carl was ever truly commanding. They were deeply lax parents, for better or worse: no real bedtimes, which spun into a lack of curfews, minimal organized chores, barely a demand that they keep their bedrooms clean. After all, they were not Carl or Tim’s living spaces. What did it matter if the floors were littered with toys and sullied laundry, if the bedsheets were  twisted, pillows askew? As long as nothing fungal began growing, what did it matter?

And now, Carl thinks, looking at Tim’s body: here they are regardless. Surely a more structured system of who was to take out the trash or sweep the living room or empty the dishwasher would not have made a difference to this boy and girl, mysteriously and suddenly a grown man and woman with their own coteries of children whom they treat with a similar ease and relaxation, these siblings staring at the body of their father.  

“He looks—” his son starts, but then stops.  

“It’s okay,” Carl says. “You can say whatever you need to.” But when his son doesn’t say a word, Carl adds, “But it’s also okay if you don’t know what to say.” He realizes he’s talking to them like they are small. He clears his throat.  

His daughter approaches first. She’s slow, but then she gains momentum, taking long strides —she’s tall, with the same lank limbs as Tim—and soon enough she’s sitting on the side of the bed opposite Tim’s body. She’s still wearing her shoes, the one thing Tim could never abide, but this, too, he never castigated the children for, because, he would say to Carl in the privacy of this very room, who was he to impose his peregrinations on others? Carl was never sure if that word was right, peregrinations, but he always forgot to look it up. Something that, now, he’s ready to simply let flutter away forever.  

Up close, near her dead father, Carl’s daughter hesitates. She lifts a hand to reach out to him, but then stops, fingers hovering. They’re not frozen: there’s the tiniest movement, like she is carefully, delicately, brushing the keys of an instrument, perhaps plucking the strings of a harp held horizontal. Neither Carl nor his son nor the daughter says a word. Carl closes his eyes and imagines a song, a dirge, an elegy, a remembrance. When he opens them, her hand is on Tim’s transformed chest.  

She says nothing. She barely moves. Her head is tilted toward Tim. Then she retracts her hand, stands, and turns to Carl, eyes wide, mouth a thin line. All she does is nod. She looks past him to her brother, who moves into the room. Carl feels like a ghost himself, but when his children trade places, he doesn’t mind that he has faded away. That they are so focused on Tim brings him some ease.  

 Soon enough, they are back in the living room. Carl is keenly aware that neither his son nor  daughter will look toward the mantel, where the display is located. They have always been wary of these relics, these icons of their forebears. As children, they both wondered whether they would end up the same, suffer the same fate (though they did not use those words). Carl had  watched as Tim explained that it was unlikely; he did his best to explain how although Tim was  their biological father, their mother was a woman who had donated “a part of her”—his words;  they were too young to understand anything more specific—and in her family, those who were  moving on (also Tim’s phrase) did not change the way they did in his.

Their daughter, nine, had asked, blankets tucked up against her chin, why people changed in different ways. Tim had looked toward Carl, who had done nothing more than blink.

“It’s just how people are,” Tim said.  

“But why?” she said, as if still a toddler trapped in that terrible inquisitive phase, digging for  reason, rationale, explanation, even in the fuzziest, most impossible of places. 

“We don’t really know,” Tim said. He leaned in and kissed her forehead. “But you shouldn’t  worry about it. We won’t have to think about that for a very long time. About any of us.”  

This had seemed to assuage her. She slept through that night, and the next, and the one after that, and the existential crisis seemed to have passed.  

The only noise in the house is the squealing play of the grandchildren. Carl wants to ask his  son and daughter what they’ve told their kids. He wants to ask where their respective partners  are—his daughter is married, his son is not, but both live with the other parent of their children in, as far as Carl can tell, romantic satisfaction—but he knows the answer: neither of these  beloveds is of a line like theirs. They are buriers of their dead; death is nothing but a sorrow. It  does not grant what Tim’s body will shortly grant.  

Carl goes to the kitchen, and his children follow. He’s suddenly absorbed by a gnawing  hunger, every branch of his body yearning for nutrition. He plucks fruit from the tray without  bothering with a plate. The melon is tangy, the watermelon juicy. His daughter has chosen his favorites. Carl lets pineapple juice slick down between his knuckles and dry, a sealant, an extra shell protecting tiny slivers of his skin. We can all, he thinks, use some kind of protectant, a  shield, right now.  

The casserole is really a shepherd’s pie, the aromatics meaty and thick; when his son unfurls  the aluminum on top, the smell rolls off with the steam. Cracks abound in the top layer of  mashed potatoes and make Carl think of the near future, when Tim will shatter apart. His  stomach drops momentarily, but then his insides settle. His pause is long enough that his son slips up next to him, sets his beer can down on the island, and gently asks if he can make Carl a plate. Carl’s stomach chooses this moment to growl, and all three of them laugh, a minor break.  He nods. He wonders where his own beer can has gone. 

At the sound of plates shifting and the drawer of cutlery opening, the grandchildren end their  play and come shooting upstairs like cats hearing a can of food being popped open. They gather around the island, the oldest—two boys, one from each family, nearly teenagers—grabbing pieces of fruit and popping them in their mouths like bar peanuts. The younger ones pout, too diminutive to gather their own foods. Soon enough Carl’s children are setting up their children with heaps of the shepherd’s pie or, for the pickier, smaller eaters, a helping from the dish of boxed macaroni and cheese Carl’s daughter thought to make in advance. Meltdowns avoided.  

They sit around the large dining room table, space enough for eight, though so often it was  just Tim and Carl, cramming themselves at a single end so they didn’t seem like a pair of lunatic richies staring at one another from a great distance, a feast between them. Carl, as he sits down next to one of the grandchildren poking at their mound of macaroni with a fork, feels a strike of guilt: to be doing something as normal and innocuous-looking as eating a meal while Tim calcifies not thirty feet away.  

When he is finished, Carl clears his throat in such a way that makes his children’s heads snap  in his direction. Their eyes widen. They must have known this part was coming, had known. It  should bring comfort, really, but Carl understands: finality is at its worst when it is most near.   Settled next to the display case on the mantel is a small hammer, the handle unvarnished  wood, six inches long. It bites into Carl’s hand as he lifts it. To their credit, his children say  nothing when he turns and passes them, walking into the bedroom. He can hear their footfalls as they follow, and the patter of the grandkids, the shuffle of their little bodies. Carl doesn’t look back as he goes around to Tim’s side of the bed and looks down at him.  

Tim had always been beautiful. When they met, Carl had been struck by the flight of his  cheekbones, the perfection of his aquiline nose, the unobtrusive size of his forehead. He had, upon first sight, actually let out a small gasp, which had entertained his entourage of friends, five men from his college youth. They goaded him toward Tim, who was standing by himself at the end of the counter at their favorite bar. Carl, slightly drunk from earlier bar-hopping, had stumbled up to Tim and muttered some greeting that he can no longer remember, something ridiculous and terrible, but Tim, to Carl’s relief and life-changing benefit, liked ridiculous and terrible, and he laughed, asking if he could buy Carl a drink, then scanned him and said, “But only if you drink some water first.” Carl did, dutifully, trying to look seductive as he eyed Tim while gulping from a large glass.  

They didn’t sleep together on that occasion, although Tim was conspicuous in how he let his  body bump against Carl’s like they were two ships moored together on unsteady waters; he  behaved as if they were packed into the bar and their bodies couldn’t help but meet at the elbow and shoulder and hip even though in reality the night was practically dead. Carl’s friends gave him no grief when Tim eventually departed, slipping away into the night but not before making sure Carl knew how to reach him, his phone number tucked into the pocket of Carl’s shorts, where he kept reaching to make sure that the piece of paper was safely stored.

He yearned to call, but Carl made himself be the kind of idiot with interest who tried not to show it, thinking that playing hard to get, not seeming over-eager, or eager at all, was the way to go. He waited  three days, and then Tim didn’t answer—this was the age of landlines and voicemail—and something spoiled in Carl, like he had let a precious treasure drop to the ocean floor. But then Tim called back while Carl was in class, and then Carl called again, left another message, laughing stupidly, making a joke about playing tag, and then right as he set the phone in its cradle it rang, and he felt a leap in his throat, and he could barely breathe as he answered, and it was Tim, and he was filled with a comforting warmth, an ease that he had never felt and, really, over forty years, wouldn’t quite ever feel in the exact same way again.  

Until, perhaps, moments from now.

Tim, even in death, is still beautiful. Even as he’d wasted away in the final throes of his life  Carl had been able to see that beauty. The high brow, the straight-arrow nose with nostrils  curved like tiny arches. And his chin: a map of bones, the jaw hinging forward with unobtrusive masculine power. Not that these were things Carl demanded in a person, in love: Tim could have been redrawn in any number of ways over the years, could have lost any of the many things that made him who he was, and Carl would have remained, steadfast. The tether is—was—too tight.  

He runs a finger over Tim’s face, feeling at the crags. In his free hand, the hammer is heavy.  Carl moves his hand down over Tim’s clavicle, the bone prominent and wide, a cliffside. He lets his fingers tumble over.  

The cave of Tim’s sternum between the lean muscles of his chest. The lake of his abdomen,  buoyed down against his ribs. His belly button, a tiny bowl of now-stone: all landmarks that  Carl has traversed many times. One of his grandchildren lets out a coltish whine. Carl glances up. They’re all nine of them standing in a solemn row on the other side of the bed. His son cups the youngest’s cheek. His daughter’s fingers play with her daughter’s vaporous, sunshine-light  hair. 

Carl hits Tim with the hammer.  

His daughter gasps. His son twitches. The hammer blow has struck right at Tim’s sternum,  the blow powerful, enough force to burst Tim’s chest inward. Pieces of hardened clay tumble  into the cavity where his heart and lungs belong, but all that is inside is a hot, black cave.  

Well, not quite.  

They can all feel it immediately: the escape of something warm and pleasant, filling the room  with the scent of fresh-baked bread. Carl can feel, rather than see, the way his family relaxes, the tension and sorrow in their shoulders easing, their jaws unclenching. He feels it too. He gives Tim another whack, this time in the lower abdomen, shattering the round of his belly button and the curves of his pelvis. Now the scents are more familiar, expected: the cedar of Tim’s favorite cologne, the icicle antiseptic of his deodorant, the sweet-sour of his underarm musk, the clove like hint of his sweat during sex. Carl closes his eyes.  

For a moment, he is twenty-five again, he and Tim together for three years, shot through  graduation and Tim’s acceptance into a writing program on the other side of Missouri. They are  driving down the I-70 corridor with the windows open, one sedan hitched perilously to the other, Carl’s car filled with their meager possessions. Tim will spend the next two years studying poetry while Carl works at a bar not that different from the one they met in, heaping his tips in a jar on the kitchen counter and adding them up every week, just enough for them to eat beans and cheap pasta and drink terrible beer and bottom-shelf whiskey. Carl doesn’t know that, at Christmas, Tim will propose, even though their marriage won’t be legal yet. But Carl will say  yes anyway because that’s the right answer, the easy answer, the answer Tim wants to hear, the  one Carl wishes to give. And then seven years later, they’ll hear about Massachusetts and Tim will propose a cross-country trip. They’ll have moved to St. Louis, where Tim will have gone into publishing. Carl will have gotten his turn, graduating with a law degree that he uses to defend teachers in conflicts with their administrators in higher education. A few years after that, the birth of their son, the sleepless nights, the brutally long days with shifting schedules and  screwy sleep, their life of bars and parties turned on its head. Their house, bought and filled and feeling way too expansive compared to their chain of tiny apartments, the realization that they can afford a larger space, nicer food, better beer, high-quality diapers and toys. Then their daughter.

It all comes fast. Carl crushes Tim’s knees.

The room is filled with abundance. With each smash, the heady smells grow sweeter, more  intoxicating, the heaviness of the occasion dissipating like mist. It’s the thing that keeps Carl  going, the thing that keeps sobs at bay. A part of him wants to cry, wants to hesitate, but another is filled with joy and thanks and knowing, and it is the latter that wins, for now, at least; Carl knows that the acute, immediate, and overwhelming pleasantry of what Tim has left behind will soon enough simmer, and though the ease and joy and plenty he has given in death will always be present, it will eventually fade to the background. 

The last step is Tim’s face.  

The rest of him, from toe to throat, is a crumbled mess. For the first time, Carl hesitates. Tim’s eyes are closed, but his lips are pursed in the familiar shape of preparation for a kiss. Carl runs his fingers over Tim’s features, each curve and dip, every line carved as if turreted by a chisel. His jaw, strong and square, still. His eye sockets, deep finger bowls. His hairline, always lush and full and now a wall of dried clay. 

For a second, Carl thinks that he cannot do it. This final thing. That he may leave Tim in  shambles, in cratered ruin, his bits and pieces scattered in their bed to fleck against his legs and dig into his chest, shards cutting and scraping and sinking, every pinch and poke a reminder, a hurt that he’s earned by virtue of being the one to live. But then Carl glances up at his family. His children and grandchildren are awash in the comforts coming from Tim, and he knows he cannot withhold this. 

He plunges the hammer’s claw through Tim’s nose. The sound is no different from the cracking of the rest of his body, even though Carl thinks that’s unfair, that the cratering of his lips and eye sockets and forehead, the disintegration of his hairline and ears and jaw, should carry some alternative music, another, more powerful chord.  

Carl clubs Tim’s left temple, and it is done.  

He knows, because the room is filled with light. Not sunshine, but ease. Depressurization.  Carl realizes that a tightness has sat fat and thick around his chest because his body is suddenly relaxed, at ease. All will be alright. 

Through this satisfied haze, he has the wherewithal to pluck up a single large chunk of Tim’s smashed self, a diamond-shaped slab the size of Carl’s palm. He holds it with both hands, raises it for the rest of his family to see. Clearly unsure of what else to do, his son and daughter nod. The youngest grandchild sucks on a thumb. The eldest leans forward. He looks at Tim’s ruined body. Carl says nothing, watches his grandson’s eyes rove over the rubble that will sustain them, bring them comfort. 

 “Let’s give him some space,” Carl says, words coming out twisty, not quite right, not exactly  the thing to say, but it doesn’t matter. His children understand him, and they guide their children out into the living room, heading toward the display above the fireplace, even though they don’t like it. Carl appreciates this and follows.  

As he approaches the glass display, Carl knows he should feel sorrow, that this ritual of  departure should crater him: it is, after all, a final, thorough acknowledgement that Tim is gone. But of course, he is full of calm, the wake of Tim’s death a quiet, shimmering pool of water warmed by the sun. He knows this will not last, not exactly: eventually his hurt will come crowding in, that lake churned to torment. But with it will be a long stretch of familial  contentment, an untouchable ease, a glorious plenty.  

Setting the scrap of Tim on the mantel, Carl opens the display case. There is space, more than enough, for this piece of Tim. Carl tries to think of something to say, but no words come. There are not enough, and there never will be, to extol what is being left behind or what is being gained. Instead, in the hearty silence of his house, the only sounds the scuffing of familial feet behind him, Carl sets his bit of Tim to rest next to the others. He closes the display, closes his eyes, then turns to greet his glorious family. 

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About the Author

Joe Baumann is the author of six collections of short fiction and the novels "I Know You’re Out There Somewhere" and "Lake, Drive." His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others.