ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE

On the Saturday morning I was to drive from Calgary to Unity, Saskatchewan I discovered someone had thrown a rock through the rear window on the driver’s side of my car. I was to be a pallbearer at my grandmother’s funeral that afternoon and had a long drive ahead. Outside, low pink winter light pushed back the edges of night. I looked into the Volvo 245 station wagon and could see a spray of glass bits on the seats and the floor. Then I noticed in the rear foot well a rock about the size of a five-pin bowling ball.

There was nothing missing from the car that I could see. I guessed this was the handiwork of a couple of yahoos out for kicks on a Friday night. I thought this odd. It was January and buggerly cold, as they like to say on the prairies. Who goes out hurling rocks through car windows when the mercury is dropping below -30C?

There wasn’t enough time for me to get the window replaced without arriving late for the funeral. Unity was about six hours away if the roads were agreeable. This would give me about an hour to check into the local motor hotel, change into a suit, and make it to the Roman Catholic church for the memorial service. If I was going to drive for that many hours in these conditions, I thought, I really ought to try some sort of makeshift repair of the gaping hole in my car. My first idea was to duct-tape a sheet of cardboard into the space, but, as I realized when I returned to my apartment nearby, I had no tape or cardboard. The only thing that seemed remotely plausible was the idea of using a towel to keep the wind, if not the cold, out. Visibility be damned. I took a large beach towel from the linen closet uncertain how I was going to fix it in place. There’d be much drag with a car moving at speed, much stress on the cloth. It occurred to me also that the pathetic heater in the Volvo would be no match for the air that would come roaring inside, towel or no. It occurred to me that I had to dress for the long frigid drive. With a building dread I put on a pair of muk-luks, a toque, mitts and down-filled parka — a suit designed for driving a dog team, not a Volvo.

I set to work making a new window from the terry cloth. There was no way to tape or staple the material into place. The towel was large enough to cover the entire rear door. I opened it, draped and tucked the towel around the perimeter of the door, and slammed it all shut creating something like a seal. The towel was stretched taut across the open maw of the window frame, although I had no real confidence this would last.

Even with the heater blasting at maximum throttle and temperature I could see my breath surging over the steering wheel in gouts of steam. I drove slowly out of the city. There were few pedestrians out at this early hour, but I was aware of heads turning to look. They saw a forest-green station wagon with an apple-green beach towel for a rear door. On the towel was the image of a pink seashell.  The towel flapped like a flag from some alien land. Onlookers must have found bizarre the sight of the car’s driver dressed for a polar expedition.

I passed the city’s outskirts on the highway to the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. It was clear the once-tight seal of the towel around the doorframe was weakening. The flimsy window yawed and billowed like a schooner’s sails. The heater bellowed at the top of its voice. Air buffeted the car outside and in. The noise in the cabin was deafening. There was also the matter, I soon saw, of frost forming on the inside of the windscreen and side windows. I switched the warm airflow of the heater from my feet to the defrost mode. The sad stream of tepid air blowing onto the inside of the windscreen melted a small porthole of clear glass which I had to slide down in my seat to see through. With the full attention of the heater on the windscreen and not on my feet the first tingle of frostbite took hold. Back went the direction of the heater flow onto my feet causing the porthole above to ice over.

I pulled into a gas station somewhere near Drumheller to scrape the inside of the car’s windows, and to reseal the towel around the door. A man came out from his booth, stared at me for a while, said nothing, and returned inside to the comfort of his station. This became the pattern of my long, numb journey over the next several hours: heater on the dead appendages I knew as feet then redirect the heater on the windscreen; stop the car every half hour, reseal the towel, scrape the inside of the windows, drive.

I eased into the parking lot of the Unity Motor Hotel in a near-frozen state and almost an hour behind plan. I could hardly move to get out of the car. The receptionist at the front desk craned her neck to look at my car through a large window in the office of the motel. The Michelin man, crusted in frost, nose burning florid, got out of the Volvo with the towel on its door and ambled towards her. 

“Long drive?” she said. 

“Yes, Calgary.” 

“That’s quite a set-up you got going there.” 

I turned to see the pink seashell flutter a little in the bitterly cold wind. 

“No heater?” 

“No side window.” 

It was as if my lips were wooden. They could barely form the syllables to utter words. 

“Heater useless.” 

“I expect you’ll be wanting a room?” 

“Yes, I’m late for a funeral.” 

“Not your own, I hope?”

“Not sure. Must change.” 

She handed me the key to room 10. I pulled off the mitt to take it. My fingers, dead as nails, fumbled to grasp it, and it fell to the floor. In the room, after what felt like forever trying to unlock the door, I unpacked

hurriedly. The digital clock radio beside the sagging bed said I had 15 minutes until the funeral service began. A hot shower was now out of the question. I shed layer after layer of my Arctic gear letting them drop around my feet. I slipped on a white dress shirt and the pants to my navy suit, then knee-high dress socks. I tried to slide my feet into the black Oxford shoes, polished to a high sheen. I struggled to use my finger as a shoehorn. This chewed up precious time. My feet had no feeling. I had to look at them to be sure they were actually inside the shoes.

Tying my polka-dot tie took longer. By the time I put on my suit jacket and charcoal-grey overcoat I had about a minute to make the drive from the motel to the church in the centre of town.

Unity was a town of almost three thousand people. As a little boy I had visited there often and even now, after some ten years away, knew the layout of the place. Getting to the church on time was not my fear. It was more what I’d look like pulling up in front, apple-green towel with its pink seashell waving to the sombre funeral party filing in. I parked the car in front of the church and was relieved to see no one was outside. I ran as best I could on concrete feet in slippery, leather-soled shoes up the walkway and into the chapel. The entire assembly was seated and soon they were all staring at me. The sound of heads turning and bodies pivoting on creaky oak pews drowned out the low tones of the moaning organ. My cousin, a fellow pallbearer, waved frantically at me. I was to sit with the principal party at the front hard by the altar where the open casket and wax-faced body of my grandmother rested. I had not seen her in years. She was once the matriarch of that side of my family — my first father’s side. She looked like a little alabaster doll. Her thin lips were smeared with red beyond their natural perimeter. My Protestant eyes were unused to the Roman Catholic custom of the open casket. I shuddered a little.

“Where the hell have you been,” said the cousin. 

He looked around to see if anyone had heard him. 

“You can’t have five pall-bearers,” he said. “Everything would be off kilter. We didn’t think you would show.”

“It’s a long story and you wouldn’t believe it. I’m sorry.”

The priest led the congregation through prayer after tedious incantation. I wanted to get a sense of the room. I turned a little trying not to draw too much attention to me.  People, mostly old couples, dirt-poor and German, would greet me with their eyes, some would smile a little and nod. That’s Jacob and Doris’s son, they thought. What a shame about the accident.  The accident took him and his brother away from us. He’d be one of us now were it not for that awful day — a day just like this one. Seventeen years ago. A raw day with its cutting wind and blowing snow.

I looked past familiar faces to a row of nuns seated along the side of the nave. They looked at me, too, as they had looked at me through the eyes of ghosts in that gloomy hospital room. Covetous eyes. I was the one that slipped away. And now I, the interloper, was among them. In the face of their glare I began to thaw. My hands and feet regained feeling. 

The service ended. The priest closed and secured the lid of grandmother’s casket. The pallbearers were instructed to take our positions alongside the casket, three to a side. I was assigned to the rear right position. I joined the others all much larger than me – beefy farm boys or salt miners at the Sifto plant just out of town. 

I prepared for the signal to hoist the casket up onto our shoulders as in a military service. The signal never came. We carried the casket at our sides like a piece of luggage. Given my relative shortness this was a potential catastrophe averted. The casket had tremendous heft, even with its weight distributed among six men. We proceeded carefully down the centre aisle of the nave and out into the dry, crackling air.  

The slate steps were strewn with rock salt. This gave my slick-bottomed shoes some purchase. The sidewalk had been freshly shovelled. A black hearse idled at the curb just behind my Volvo. Mercifully, only the right side of my car, its doors and windows intact, was visible to the mass of mourners streaming from the church.

The cadre of pallbearers loaded its cargo into the back of the hearse, setting it on steel rollers. The casket rumbled out of view. I was invited to join the other pallbearers for the ride to the cemetery in a limo provided by the funeral home. By now someone had noticed the other side of my station wagon. I could overhear people muttering and tsk-tsking about the towel flapping in the north wind.

“Look, it’s got Alberta plates.” “Daddy, what is that?” “Well, it looks like a towel.” “Why is there a towel on a car, Daddy?” “I don’t really know. Seems kind of stupid, if you ask me.” 

The drive to the burial site outside of town was not long. The motorcade made its way over unpaved streets leading to Unity Cemetery. I remembered playing on these streets during summer holidays in the years following the accident. There were the horse-drawn ice wagons delivering milk and eggs to sun-bleached bungalows, even as late as 1964. And I remembered the graveyard itself. Or, at least, I remembered the memory of others talking about it, for I had never been here. This was where my mother and father were buried. My brother and I never attended their funeral. Our injuries confined us to hospital in Saskatoon. Bill’s coma and broken bones were so severe family members held off having our parents’ funeral. They thought he might not pull through. The funeral went ahead on a January day in 1961. 

As the motorcade drove past gravestones and bunches of dead flowers I hoped that, if time allowed following the burial of my grandmother, I could visit these other graves for the first time. Cars parked as close as possible to the open grave without violating sacred ground. No one wanted a long walk over crusty snow. It was getting dark and as the car lights were turned off it seemed darker still. The back of the hearse was open now and the pallbearers took position in two rows of three as the big box rolled out into our grasp. We walked carefully towards the hole in the ground about twenty yards away. The hole ran north and south. It was deep and long. Two green canvas straps used for lowering the casket were laid across the open mouth of the grave. About fifty people were gathered on the west side. On the east side a large mound of dirt was piled higher than my head. The gravediggers left very little walking room between the yawning hole and the dirt mound for us pallbearers on the right side, a foot at most. This narrow ledge had iced over. I could see the waning light of the prairie sky reflect off the slick surface. I was grateful that, being at the rear, I had less ice to traverse than the two men ahead of me.

We inched along trying to guide the casket into position over the pit and then it happened. My left foot, my leather-soled foot, the one nearest the grave, slipped. I yelped.  

The huddle of mourners on the other side issued a collective gasp. The nose of the casket lurched upward like a boat’s prow tossed by a wave. My end sank and the casket rolled, my weight pulling everything in that direction. In an instant my foot lost its purchase on the slim ledge and I dropped to my knee hard. I had one foot in the grave. And in the slow-motion sequence that followed, as I dangled, I imagined the unthinkable horror of the casket going belly up, the lid opening, and the cold body of my grandmother falling onto me.

My blessed fellow pallbearers were strong, each weighing more than two-hundred pounds. Together, as one, they bore down and held the casket from falling. I scrambled to my feet desperate to restore a shred of dignity. Time resumed its normal pace, and I heard what I first thought was birdsong, then realized it was tittering from somewhere in the back of the group opposite. I was panting heavily, but quietly, as the priest droned on. And after what felt like a lifetime we lowered the casket into the ground.

After I asked an aunt if she’d stay behind for a while so I could visit the graves of mother and father. She agreed and pointed to two modest white headstones about sixty feet beyond. She left to wait in the car.

I walked delicately across the hard ground towards the graves and stopped at the foot of them. The last of the light was slipping away. Orange and grey lichen clung to the white marble of the low stones and in some patches obscured the two inscriptions:

Jacob Arthur Wagner 1927 − 1961

Doris Edna McLeod Wagner 1924-1961

I looked down at their graves. I looked at the bare branches of a tree bending in the wind. I looked at the toes of my well-polished shoes. Then I heard the dull thud of dirt hitting the top of the sunken casket in my grandmother’s grave as the cemetery workers filled in the hole.