Berneice’s Ashes

                                                      Because I could not
                                                      Stop for death. . . .
                                                               --Emily Dickinson


My wife and I worked at a rehabilitation center in central Illinois in those days.  Young clients, old clients, a lot of them died.  And most of them got buried—eventually.

Berneice was an exception.  She’d come to live in the local nursing home and work at the rehab center sometime in the sixties when Illinois closed down most of its massive state hospitals. No one knew just how long Berneice had been in the system, nor really where she’d come from originally.  So by the late eighties when she died, no one knew of next-of-kin to inform so they could come and claim the body. 

In Illinois they keep you on ice for a while just in case someone turns up.  Then after a time, they cremate you, and store the canister, again, just in case.  Once or twice a year, they collect all the stored canisters, fire up the dozer, and bury all the unclaimed ones in a common grave at the far edge of the municipal cemetery.

Berneice got stored in a closet at the courthouse, and someone from the state’s attorney’s picked up her canister and took it upstairs to the office.  Berneice had been serving as a bookend in the state’s attorney’s office for a while when my wife came in for a meeting. 

“What is that, that bookend thing?” my wife asked the clerk.

He glanced over at the masking tape label, “Uh, Berneice, Berneice Kazlowski,” he read from the masking tape label.

“You got Berneice in there?  Gross!” And she went into her meeting with the state’s attorney.

Berneice had worked in my wife’s program at the rehab center, and it bothered her that her old employee was, months after the quitting time whistle blew, still on the job, albeit with a good deal more effectiveness and regularity than in her previous employment.

My wife complained vociferously to the SA who was outraged. The state’s attorney had worked her way through law school by playing harp in a funeral home; she liked this sort of thing.  But it always comes down to this in politics:  somebody wants something; somebody needs something.  So soon a deal was struck.  My wife would buy the state attorney’s office a pair of metal bookends.  In return, my wife would get Berneice’s canister, and could dispose of the ashes in an appropriate manner.

We talked it over for quite a while.  Berneice had liked trees.  And plastic pinwheels, and frogs.  We’d take up a collection from her co-workers and the staff at the rehab center and from people at the nursing home, buy a tree, and plant it and Berneice at the same time.

She’d be at rest.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

By mid-December, we’d raised enough money to get a nice Silver Maple, even had enough left over for a couple of pinwheels and a ceramic tree frog.  We made arrangements with the home, the tree nursery, and a local preacher.  We’d have the ceremony on Saturday afternoon, plant Berneice’s tree in the courtyard, the residents watching from the dining room.  The preacher would say a few words, and we could all watch the sun set over Berneice’s tree.

The preacher had probably never had such a captive audience before.  Most of Berneice’s friends from the home were quadriplegic, or strongly restrained, or heavily sedated.  The preacher seized the moment.  And the quarter hour.  The half hour as well.  After an hour, it seemed that his audience had worn him down.  He was sweating, stammering, red-faced.  But the residents were, most of them, still looking out the window, fascinated.

We turned and discovered why.  The nursery people, less tolerant of boredom, and more mobile than the inside audience, had planted the tree and gone away.

My wife, Berneice’s vocational instructors, the preacher and I stumbled out into the courtyard. The deal had been to leave a trench around the rootball so we could pour and mix Berneice with the dirt.  We didn’t have that.  Rather, what we had was sticky, moist, black prairie earth quickly turning icy under the setting sun.

We all hit our knees at the same time, scrabbling in the freezing December sunset earth to make a hole large enough to fit Berneice.

After about ten minutes we had it. I don’t know why it fell to me to open the can, but I did.  It turned out to be nothing more than a three pound coffee can spray painted gold.  I popped the plastic lid just as the sun set; I popped the lid just as one of those freakish, freezing winds blow up out of nowhere on the Illinois flatlands.  Berneice flew up with it, spreading herself on the preacher’s black coat, on the rest of us, on our best funeral garb, flying into our noses our eyes, our mouths.

Doesn’t taste like chicken.

 

 

© Kevin Jones