Read Online Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories by Thomas Lynch - Free Book Online Page A

at the convention in Grand Rapids. Her booth for Barber Music Systems was next to Clarksville’s on the exhibit floor. By the last day of the convention he worked up the nerve to ask her to dinner. She was younger, plain-faced, smarter and more pleasant than anyone he’d been out with in years. Her father had started the business, which sold background music systems for mortuaries—hours of hymns or new age music to “Break the Terrible Silence of Grief.” Under Helen’s guidance the company was marketing video memorial tributes.
    They dated for six months, then got engaged, then got married. They honeymooned at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic. He golfed, she sunbathed. It was good but brief.They divorced soon after Angela’s death. Helen had the marriage annulled and was soon enough remarried to a man from Forethought Preneed who didn’t drink as Harold had begun to and didn’t sleep around, the way Harold did in the months following his daughter’s death. Helen wasn’t bitter. She just wanted out. She wished him well, but wouldn’t hang around for his “self-destruction.”
    He saw her at conventions after that. She’d always smile sweetly and keep her distance. He’d readied the little speech to make amends and ask forgiveness, to say it had all been his fault and bad timing and the drink, of course, but when he approached her in her booth the year before he retired, her eyes looked panicky, she put one hand over her mouth and the other out straight as if to warn him off. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I just wanted to say…” but she looked frightened and her eyes were filling with tears and she was backing away as if from some peril or contagion, so he stopped and turned away and said nothing. He thought maybe he’d write it all in a letter, to let her know he knew how bad he’d been to her. But he never got around to it and thought now, sitting by the lake, watching the moon rise, that he likely never would.
    He stood and sighed heavily and stretched and, dropping his pants, pissed in the sand and, after hitching up again, walked back from the water’s edge to the trail along the railway bed he’d been on. It was here he’d seen an indigo bunting once, perched on the head of a cattail by the water, a blueness he had never seen before or since. He felt a chill in the evening air. Looking down the long tunnel between the trees, Harold watched for deer crossing, or porcupine, or beaver. He looked back the way he’d come for signs of Larry Ordway’s dog. Nothing moved. Once years back he had seen what he swore was a black bearpausing in the clearing with its nose in the air. He knew that the woods held red fox and gray wolf but he had never seen them. Signs of life in the deep interior, seen and unseen, quickened in him the kind of gladness he remembered having as a boy. The emergency flight of pheasant and wild turkey, the passing shadows of osprey and vulture and gull, the trees fed on by nuthatch and pileated woodpecker, felled by beaver, scraped by whitetail bucks, mauled he imagined by bear and raccoon—these apparitions of the world’s natural order were a comfort to him for reasons he could not articulate.
    It was Harold Keehn who had convinced Clarksville to market wooden caskets, the rich grains, the homey cabinetry warmth of it all. And Harold who came up with the idea of planting trees, saplings only, pennies only by way of expense, in cahoots with the forestry department, for every Clarksville casket sold. The Memory Tree Program had been a huge success. It assuaged the baby boomers’ natural concerns about ecology and conservation and renewable resources. He’d pitched the whole market shift at a sales conference in a presentation he called “Don’t Let Your Business Go Up in Smoke” in which he noted the growing popularity of cremation and the natural consumer preference for boxes that would burn. “Permanence” and “Protection” had given way to “Natural Beauty”