THE CEMETERY

The last chapter of this little tale, set three decades after the previous episode....

I held my mother’s hands and squeezed her fingers gently. She still looked as pretty as she must have looked all those years ago when she’d manipulated my father into becoming her husband. Not that he’d minded; it had been a good manipulation. He’d lived a truly joyful life, until, that is, the bloody cancer came along and grew with obscene malevolence in his brain.

My mother had been a huge strength, to him and to everyone, and she still was. After their wedding dad had returned to the paper mill and as Cyril’s son-in-law had learned the ins and outs of the industry until eventually he had taken over the reigns of the business. He was good at it and before his own death Cyril had been heard to say his empire couldn’t be in better and safer hands.

But dad had fallen with lightning speed to the wretched disease, and now I was at the head of Hunt’s Paper Mill. I had a lot to live up to, and knew it.

The funeral was over and we two were the only ones still standing by the grave. There were sandwiches and tea back at home, and everyone else had gone there, but we wanted to spend this last few minutes with dad.

“It wasn’t fair,” whispered Teresa, my mum. “He should have had longer with us because everyone who knew him loved him, and no man can hope for a better epitaph than that!”

“It’s been said that his cancer was a last trick played by the coma he was in when he was a child,” I murmured, “and I reckon it might have been.”

“They also say probably not,” reminded my mum, “they say it’s most likely just one of those cruel cards dealt out by fate to damn us all. But a brain tumour as vicious as the one that carried my poor dear Oliver off might come from anywhere, I suppose. Maybe it could have been a shadow of a long past, or maybe not. We’re not qualified to say, neither of us.”

“We’re all going to die sooner or later, mum,” I said, trying to comfort her and knowing I wasn’t succeeding. “That was what dad said often enough when he knew his time was limited.”

“But I sometimes get to wonder why my lovely Oliver had to be taken when creatures like the Rodgers man is hale and hearty and still wife-beating whenever the drink takes him,” sniffed my mum. “Only last week Edna said she was leaving him this time, two black eyes she had, and yet the bruises faded and she went nowhere. She said he promised never to do it again, that he truly loved her and everything was going to be perfect from then on, and I reminded her he’d promised the same before and didn’t know how to stick to his word, and she had the cheek to tell me to mind my own business, it was nothing to do with me and he was a good man really.”

“And when she came today she sat at the back of the church so nobody would see her new set of bruises,” I said. “And Rodgers is still alive and well and I guess it’ll only end when he kills her. There are lots of cases like that, men who don’t deserve what they get from life, men who abuse the women they once declared undying love for...”

“Your dad declared undying love for me once he’d got his head round the fact that I really meant it when I said I wanted to marry him,” smiled Teresa.

“It was the weirdest courtship I’ve ever heard of,” I told her.

She giggled: there at the graveside, she giggled.

“He didn’t have a clue!” she told me. “I set my sights on him when he first worked at the paper mill. I don’t know why I felt like that about him because he was a shy and lonely boy, but I must have liked something about him. Even then I didn’t know what, and still don’t, not really. He was kind, generous, loving, and … very good, physically.”

“Mum!”

“Don’t you go mumming me, Peter! Physical love is the most natural sort there is and nothing to be shy about!

“There was absolutely nothing about your dad that wasn’t practically perfect, yet when I first decided I wanted him I knew nothing about him. I did know, though, about some men and how I didn’t want anything to do with that sort. Like the Rodgers beast, they think that because they’re male with male equipment in their trousers they’re somehow superior, and they’re not. I knew that back then, back when I pushed the tea trolley round the factory and cleaned the toilets with a peg on my nose! Your dad, the lad Oliver, had a kind of haunted atmosphere about him, one that I only came to understand later, after I told him I was marrying him!”

“And now we’ve buried him, mum.”

“Now we’ve buried him.”

She turned to me and I could see that she was crying. “I wish he was still alive, Peter,” she said between sobs that made her shoulders heave and her voice shake. “I would have given my own life to save his, I really would have. But that’s one thing we can’t do … challenge the gods into putting right one of their worst blunders.”

“If there were any gods then maybe we could,” I said.

“Come on, let’s get back to the house before they send out a search party.” She took my hand and tugged me gently away. “Mamie and little Jane will be wondering where you’ve got to,” she added.

“Mamie will understand, and Jane’s too young to,” I told her, “Mamie felt just as cut up when we found out that dad was dying. She said that if he’d been a few years younger you’d have had to fight her for him!”

“Mamie’s a good lass,” my mother told me, “You’re lucky to have her. You really are.”

I paused by a gravestone, one that had been there for several years and was already showing signs of the mildew of time.

“Bert and Jocelyn Anchovy,” I said, “dad used to come here from time to time and spend a few minutes talking to Bert. I wonder if he was struck by the unusual surname? And I wonder who he was?”

Mum shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, “perhaps someone he knew, I suppose, once upon a time.”

“Yes,” I sighed, “probably someone he knew.”

Then we left the cemetery behind and climbed into the car.

Mum was going to drive. Of course she was. That’s what mum usually did, drive while this old world spins round and people, the lives they live, and moments come and go.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 20.01.17

Author's Note

I wrote a short story with the same title, and someone thought it might be a little too skeletal, so I've filled it out and changed the ending...