Tiny Death

• Fiction

								
     My navy summer suit hit me in all the wrong places. I had bought it for my twenty-fifth birthday celebration years before, and had worn it exactly twice. With the more recent addition of a white blouse, it had become my funeral outfit, and I had last struggled into the jacket and skirt for my parents’ joint service. Now I pulled at my lapels and fidgeted as I waited to sign papers as part of the procedure for transporting the remains of my infant brother from Springfield, Illinois to Indianapolis, Indiana.
	I was the only member of the family still “standing on topsoil” as my father had been fond of saying. For my own convenience, I had decided to gather everybody together in the same cemetery. Mr. Lloyd Cranfield had been put in charge of the arrangements, and had organized the disinterment of Daniel’s casket and remains, and their subsequent transport and reburial in Indiana. I had written him a sizable check for his services; therefore, his demeanor was understandably cordial. 
	I wanted to reunite the Howards. I didn’t want Daniel to be by himself any longer. He’d spent years in Illinois, and now that our parents were permanent residents of Indiana soil, I wanted him to join them. I looked forward to visiting them all on Sunday afternoons, and I had already put in a standing order for a monthly arrangement to be delivered to the gravesites. For Christmas, I planned to switch to a large wreath with a bow.
	I thought about Daniel, and wondered how he must have felt waiting for somebody to come back for him. We’d left him behind when we moved when I was still a little girl. I wondered if he thought I’d forgotten about him.
	We’d left Daniel when my father took a position as a professor of English at a small college, and my mother always talked about moving the baby someday. In fact, right before they left on their thirtieth anniversary trip to Europe, she had mentioned it again. “I’d sure like to have him with us again,” she’d said. 
	The discussion remained unfinished, however. The cab returning my parents from the airport after their trip had been hit broadside by a Mayflower moving van while I waited with the neighbors for my parents to walk through the door so we could all yell “surprise!” and turn on the lights. When the police arrived, I was wearing a paper hat and holding a sign that said, “welcome home.”
	I remember eating bakery cake for days, cutting carefully around the little plastic airplane on top of the icing map of France. Two days later, a card came telling me that Mrs. Franklin Howard had named me the beneficiary of her flight insurance for her trip from Paris, France to Indianapolis, Indiana.
	Mayflower and the cab company settled out of court. I sent a bouquet to the taxi driver who lay in the hospital with both legs in traction. The truck driver had not been injured.
	My parents’ life insurance company sent their condolences in the form of a check, and I arranged for my attorney to make a donation to the Humane Society. I handed the rest of my finances over to the family accountant, and turned my attention to the house.
	It was a perfectly usable, comfortable home and it was now all paid for. I sold the furniture from my apartment, and moved in. My childhood bedroom became a studio, and I set up a drawing board and easel, and began working on an assignment to illustrate a book for children. I kept busy to fight the loneliness that made me remember things the way they had been. I’d find myself staring out the window, my pen or brush in hand, thinking about my parents, thinking about Daniel.
	A half a year later, I had decided that it was time for Daniel to change his address, and I made phone calls that eventually led to him riding in his box in the back of a van at a cost that was approximately half as much as it would have been to send him to college for his first semester.
	I had also made up my mind to accompany the van from Illinois to Indiana. I eased my father’s Dodge onto the interstate and hesitated slightly before I changed the radio station from the classical station he preferred. I settled on a noisy one, and made the drive to Springfield.
	Despite making three wrong turns before I located the correct exit, I made it to Springfield. Honest Abe was evident everywhere I looked, from Railsplitter Bank to the Lincoln Motel. I checked my map, and found my way to the cemetery, where I heard the riding mower before I saw the statue of the angel with the outstretched concrete hands. She held a sign: Babyland.
	The grave markers were flat bronze plaques of varying sizes and inscriptions. Golden Memory Gardens advocated the lawn concept in cemeteries, and except for the occasional pot of flowers, it looked more golf course than funereal. The riding mower passed easily over the graves, and the driver gave me a cheery wave. 
	I looked for Daniel, and found him easily. Near the Babyland angel were several rows of bronze markers. His name appeared in a line of markers that had grown longer than I remembered it. The date June 30, 1958 was under the name Daniel William Howard.
	It was a name that belonged on the door of a lawyer’s office or a doctor’s clinic. Daniel W. Howard, Attorney at Law. Daniel W. Howard, M.D.
	Daniel, Daniel, Danny. I brushed aside the grass clippings, and leaned down to touch the bronze letters. “Hi, baby. Remember me?”
	He had been the only son in a family blessed sparsely with children, none of them boys. When the announcements had gone out to the relatives in Iowa and Nebraska, little blue clothes had arrived in a deluge. Daniel William Howard took his place among us with all the fanfare of a crown prince.
	Thousands of feet of home movies were developed. The man at the drugstore kidded my father about the small fortune he’d invested in film. He’s said, “Jesus, Frank. Why don’t you just get the kid’s portrait painted?”
	My dad had smiled, but I knew he had no intention of letting Daniel’s activities go unchronicled. There were shots of Daniel coming home from the hospital dressed in blue, his face and fists red against my mother’s coat. His eyes were shut tight, and my mother looked tired but proud. She brushed an invisible piece of lint from his blanket before she held him up for the camera.
	There were miles of film of Daniel in our grandmother’s arms; Daniel on a pillow in my lap, me propped up in the easy chair; Daniel at his baptism wearing a long white dress. I had complained about the dress. “It makes him look like a girl.”
	“It’s a tradition,” my mother had told me. “Your father wore one, too.”
	I had not believed her until my grandmother nodded. I was amazed at the thought, and could not picture my father’s stern face on a baby’s body clothed in a dress. I entertained myself for awhile trying to imagine it.
	There were scenes of Daniel in his bathtub, little penis bobbing in the water, too tiny to be offensive. There was an entire collection of Christmas movies, immortalizing both of us in matching red velveteen outfits with holly leaves embroidered on the front. Dad had coaxed Mom into letting him pose us before the fireplace in November in our Christmas clothes, and he’d had Christmas cards printed with us on the front. The two stockings hanging from the mantle had our names knitted in angora yarn – “Danny” and “Kitty.”

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes