ANNA

By Gerald Sticker

This body in a coffin was not the man I thought it would be. Instead a young woman occupied that propped-up box before me. The woman’s mother came up to me, some stranger who happened upon the right funeral home but the wrong viewing, and insisted I join her at the funeral. She said her dear daughter looked exactly like me. Which admittedly was true. I did not intend on going, thinking my presence might only extend the mother’s suffering. Plus, I already had plans, which were to miss the other funeral. The next day, I found myself standing in a cemetery and wearing, by the mother’s request, a dress matching the green the young woman in the coffin wore. The preacher said Anna swam and swam until she reached the shores of heaven where she continues to swim along its rivers and across its oceans and where no disease will ever catch her and take her away from us.

All that swimming made me swoon. I pictured Anna backstroking across the watery sky while we stood sweating down here in the heat. I looked upon her sky pool with envy and let out a sigh. More than a few people glanced back at me. For a moment, I felt myself rising above the grey gravetop angel on whose stone feet my hands firmly grasped. Imagining myself to be an angel, I unfolded the entire span of my wings and told Anna to let me join her on her swim around the hot sun shining down on those leaflets blazoned on the front with her face and filled with prayers and songs beating frantically below. Yes, there was a strong, unsettling resemblance. Besides this picture on the leaflet, all those pictures at the viewing, the ones of her eating cantaloupe with the swim team, stirring something on a stove, hugging a large pecan trunk, poking a jellyfish with a piece of driftwood on the beach, wearing camouflage and standing next to a horse, could have been me. 

After the funeral, I drove outside the city and down long country roads to where the mother lived, where I saw her figure in a black dress and long, cape-like sweater atop a horse that resembled the one from the picture. The mother was looking up at the darkening sky of a late winter afternoon while the horse had a front leg lifted and frozen in place, both stock-still, like some equestrian statue placed commemoratively in front of a large stable and near the dirt drive that led back to an older house, ivy-marbled and built on a bend in the river. Upon seeing me, she pointed out one of the large oak trees along the bank, which were the vestiges of vantage points for the early settlers. She said her daughter had climbed up on one of them once and fell and wore a full leg cast for the first couple of months of the second grade. They called her Peggy Leggy Annie. Sally, the mother, told me that Anna loved to go camping with her brother on the property and that the French had once set up a small colony here. Jean Lafitte slept in a tent right here--there would be the emphatic horse’s stomp at the spot she pointed--and a couple of Lafitte’s men were eaten by the Karankawa who, she said, did not dislike the taste of French. You sometimes heard their talk floating in the air, she said, as I followed beside her and the horse, a mare with a charcoal mane and a base coat the color of a light-polluted night sky with a large swath of Milky Way splashed along the flank and a scattering of what looked like tiny child-drawn stars sparkling from the croup all the way down to the back hooves.

“They’re real,” she said, as we made our way to the water. 

“What’s that?” I said.

“The voices,” she said. “We hear them right before bed or early in the morning. Comes through the windows.”

She lifted her head up and seemed to be sniffing the air. Her pale face showed a dutiful expression, lighter than before. She had blondish white hair and the same green eyes as the daughter. As me. She could be my mother. Which, if you asked my mother, she might have said, jokingly, you can have her. 

“What are they saying, these voices?” I said.

“I don’t speak French,” she said. 

“I do. What’s it sound like?”

“Mippy Pete. Luka Fashi,” she said with a whispering hiss, sucking the words into her mouth.

“Like names,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “They repeat them. You have any ideas, Natalie?”

Nonsense I thought. Mippy Pete was nothing the dead would say, and they don’t sound like a song played backwards. This was just nonsense, all of it, my being here in the first place, with the horse now snorting at me, while others from the funeral were arriving, driving by behind us, calling out from their cars, asking questions disregarded by the woman as she eagerly awaited my answer. Here was my chance to run the other way. But maybe there was some French to be had if you twisted the phrases some, and if you allowed that she must have misheard this air talk.             

“Ma pepite. Louisiane vas-y,” I said. 

“Means?” she said.

“Let’s go to Louisiana, my nugget.”

She dismounted the horse and led it by the reins to the edge of the water. She stopped near a wooden pier and spent a good bit of time staring out. A boat motored slowly by. The man gripped the brim of his cap and tugged down on it, while the other toggled the rudder of the flatbed’s small engine. She watched the boat head upriver then twitched the reins.

“Come girl,” she said.

In her face you could see the powerful struggle to keep up this small respite from the sorrow, to uphold some ritual of keeping it all together at a post-funeral dinner, to regain control over it all--and this, her house, was the most comfortable place to do such a thing. At least until they’ve all gone. Then her expression could fall soon enough into the well-worn, sorrowful grooves through which it had coursed over the last several days.

“Sorry if I’m keeping you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. 

“But you have another funeral to go to.”

“I’m avoiding it.”

“But don’t you have to go?”

“It’s my ex-husband.”

“Oh, that’s a tough one,” she said.

“His mother informed me. Right before she called, I was hoping he’d die. Feel kind of bad about it.”

“Oh honey, if we died every time someone had a thought, none of us would be here.”

As she said this, a large pickup truck pulling an old red horse trailer came around the drive and stopped at the stable. Two men got out and leaned against the truck.

“I’m afraid we’ve sold Cecile down the river,” she said to me.

The horse started to grunt as we moved closer to the men. She let out a shrill trumpet-like sound and then backed up a few steps when one of them approached. The woman pulled down on the reins to stop her.

“Don’t you worry, she’s gonna be well taken care of,” she said. “You can pet her.”

She took my hand and put it on the neck of the horse and dragged it downward across the coat. Here there were also the child stars, more faded than those on the hind legs, like strange hieroglyphs drawn on a smooth cave wall, one that responded to the touch, the animal lowering her head and sniffing around my hair, my face, my neck, while the two men took the reins and led the horse up a ramp and into the trailer.

She told me as we walked to the house that Anna had met the men a few weeks before and sold the horse and that she was only acting on her daughter’s behalf. Having me there would have fulfilled, to some degree, the finer terms of the transaction, namely that Anna would have wanted to give up her animal in person. 

“Talking about bad thoughts, we got into a fight the night Anna died. I feel like it’s my fault,” she said. “Her body was seen not far from the bank where the neighbor’s daughter found her. She was floating on her back, arms outstretched as if she were still alive. No way it was the water. She became a good swimmer because she was afraid of drowning. One of my sisters drowned during a flood. Anna never lost a swim meet. She had to stop when, you know, that’s a wig she’s wearing in the coffin. The chemo was too much, and…she asked me for a seahorse and a saltwater aquarium, but I can’t stand anything boxed in like that. I got her a real horse instead. She loved that horse, but it also seemed to watch her with those big eyes, which disturbed Anna. I guess one night she wanted to take Cecile out for a ride. But I told her no. Off she went in my car instead. No, she didn’t drown, they said. She swam the last of her life out.”

She stopped and took a deep breath and looked down the drive. Her hands shook as she took a pack of cigarettes out of a small pocket of her sweater. I picked up a cigarette that fell on the ground and reached out to give it to her. She clasped my hand tightly with both of her hands. 

It was the same way she had taken her daughter’s hand and held it at the viewing. I wasn't even aware you could do that to a body in a coffin, that you could lift an arm as high as the mother did, that a hand and fingers could be made this supple. This was the hand of a swimmer that seemed still very much full of life, that body and its arms moving freely about in a higher, deeper pool somewhere, and stopping only long enough for the mother to bend over and press her lips lightly on the mouth and pause there, like a kiss at bedtime.

I remembered waking up that morning I was supposed to go my ex-husband’s viewing and thinking that no body in its right mind would want to be buried where that funeral home and cemetery were. A body would do whatever it could to get out, even if it meant calling upon the gods to help. Which you could tell driving down the roads that led through the sunken parts of town, that some deity sent his or her great flood every now and then to claim a lucky few and carry them off. You could see high-water marks in the wavy chalk lines left along the lower sides of houses, some with boats or motorhomes or trucks, wrecked and left to rot in the front yard, where people with the weary and weathered look of sailors, coveting a drier world than this, stalked through, often flanked by a muddy toddler and a shabby wolf-colored cur that circled and howled at the edges. My ex-husband had grown up on one of these sloppy backwater streets and was not in his right mind when he died, or at any other point for that matter, so these parts enshrouded as they were in thick riparian mist must have been exactly where he always wanted to be.

His viewing I found out had been the day before I walked into that small chapel with its windows of harlequin-patterned stained glass and entered Anna’s world. Only the front pews had anyone sitting in them, with a few people surrounding the coffin. No one noticed me as I sat down in a back pew and picked up a blank index card next to me. I found a small pew pencil and wrote this: Please don't take my dead body here. When I looked up, it was Sally walking toward me, her mouth wide open as if she were going to swallow me.

What Anna’s mother was swallowing now was gobs of wine in her kitchen. She was introducing me to relatives and friends of Anna.

“We met because she came later…what happened, Natalie?”

“My ex-husband was the warm-up act,” I said. 

“Aren’t they all,” someone said.

“I guess I missed his viewing seems like on purpose.”

“And that’s why you’re here,” Sally said. 

“Do I look like…her?”

Everyone said yes.

“It's happened before,” I told them.

“What do you mean?” Sally said.

“Once I was on the subway train in New York. The opposite train came by and stopped. We stopped, too. There I was looking out, looking at my train, at my car, at me. So I thought, until I realized it wasn’t my reflection. This person who was me was waving at me.”

The story was true but what was the point of my bringing it up? No one there took it as anything special. They only nodded and politely smiled. That girl on the subway was not Anna. In their eyes, there were only two, Anna and me. Or one, Anna herself. I started to feel uncomfortable. Maybe that was the point, that it did not feel great having some long-lost twin who had cancer and had to swim the life out of herself or drown or whatever it was. I began to wonder whether the resemblance made me susceptible. I wondered if we were the types to have this happen to ourselves, to do something like this. 

“Are you okay?” someone next to me said, her hand on my shoulder.

“Yes, yes, where’s Anna’s mother?” 

“Does anyone know where Sally went off to?” 

A small group, each with expressions of concern, surrounded me. One of them took my hand and led me out of the kitchen and into the large living room where people were mingling in front of the back windows looking out along the river winding and hugging the house. Others were shifting around a large banquet table with pound cakes and finger foods and fried chicken, brisket, beans, gumbo. We found Sally standing near the table, her gaze sweeping across the room. When she saw me, she picked up a picture frame that was on a nearby credenza.

“She was about ten here,” she said, handing me the frame and pointing to the photo in it.

“My hair cut was cut the same,” I said.

Someone began to play the piano in the living room. 

“You look pale, Natalie,” she said. “Come with me.”

She led me upstairs and opened a door at the end of the hallway and turned on the lights. Everything in this room was neatly in place, no loose papers or paper clips or pennies on desk. No loose socks or shoes or clothing on the floor. The other thing you couldn’t help but notice was the bright green walls, a color too young for Anna, a recent project since it smelled of fresh paint. There was nothing hanging on the walls except a big wooden clock, a slice of a tree trunk with sticks for hands. Sally pointed to the bed and told me it had clean sheets.

There was an old dresser with a polished mirror, a velvet green chair, a large oak desk, and an old lamp with a light brown shade. I walked over to the window, which was opened but screened to keep the bugs out. The tan curtains were drawn and framing the dark silvery river. There again. You could not get away from the river or its faint smell of mud and clay and the vapors of boat engine gas that floated above it until a good gust came. I could see the tiny light from a boat passing downriver, the same people we’d seen earlier, this time without hats.

“You can stay here any time you like,” I heard her say behind me. 

“Thanks, I’m feeling better,” I said. 

I turned and took a step to leave the room. The sickly green walls and green bedspread and all this brown furniture began to swirl about me. The smells of wood polish and paint took grew stronger while the sounds of a piano played very badly downstairs grew louder. 

“Stay here and I’ll be right back,” she said. 

“Oh yes,” I said and sat down on the bed. 

When she came back, we talked about my ex-husband. We talked about how he very nearly shot me. He had taken me quail hunting and the little spaniel scared up a covey out of some mesquite bushes. He shot and feathers flew in my face. I screamed and, yes, it seemed like attempted murder. We did not have a tranquil relationship. But he said the angle and trajectory of his gun were way off. He drew this down on paper and showed me that he had another six or seven inches he could have swiveled before shaving the side of my head with a bullet. 

David would take me on these apocalyptic night hunts for hogs and rabbits at the end of a long ranch road where the land had old oil tanks not used in years, squeaky oil derricks, land not far from the earliest oil wells in America. David told me there was the ghost of an oil driller, one-armed and still mad about not getting his fair share of money for the discovery, wandering around the land. My ex-husband also had this theory that these wild pigs we hunted were the reincarnations of all the unquiet dead who got a raw deal in life, ghosts of people who died too soon, who died without fulfilling whatever.

The conversation stopped. Sally looked at me and then out the window. The implication that Anna could have become one of these unfulfilled pigs seemed to pervade the space. If I were implying this about her, then was I also saying because of our resemblance that I was one of these lost souls scraping about and tearing up the land? Was I pointing the gun at myself? Had my ex-husband really shot me as a pig in disguise? The room seemed to grow tinier by the second as if to contain all that squealing going on in my head.

“There’s…yeah…no, I mean…,” I said. 

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

I’m not sure how long I looked at her before leaning back on the bed. When my eyes opened, the room was full of sunlight and the windows were open. I could hear boats racing by. The small lamp was turned on and Sally was sitting in a chair near the bed. She did not have the weariness of someone who had sat all night if that’s what she did. She was delighted to see me wake up.

“What happened?” I said.

“You needed to sleep,” she said.

“Was I telling you about--” I said. 

“Yes, about the quails,” she said. “And the pigs.”

“That was not my theory,” I said. “I never shot any of them.”

This was a lie. Truth was I never wanted to shoot a thing after hearing this wacky theory. I stopped eating pork.

“It’s okay whether you did or didn’t,” she said. 

“I was wondering,” I said. “If we could take a drive somewhere?”

“To…where?”

“Where the ghosts are going,” I said.

“The French ones? You heard them?”

“Yes, I think so,” I told her. “They’re on their way to Louisiana.”

That same day we took her car. After a couple of hours, we crossed into that swampy state. We drove from town to town and crossed many bridges. On one long bridge, we looked out over the heavenly waters and spotted in the distance not far from the shore what looked like the tiny figure of someone swimming.