Read Online The Covenant by Jeff Crook - Free Book Online

“Maybe it was her.”
    It was my turn to look a little surprised.
    He smiled. “Jacqueline, it’s just like you to think you’re the only person in the world who ever saw a ghost.”
    â€œHave you seen Mom?”
    I think I hoped he had, but he shook his head no. “Now, your grandfather is a different matter. He’s still hanging around.”
    â€œYou know about him?”
    He chuckled at my surprise, then waved his hand vaguely at the ceiling. “You can still smell him sometimes. He had a distinctive smell, something you never forget.”
    â€œLike coffee and cigarettes,” I said.
    â€œAnd hair tonic and wool and body odor. Your grandfather only bathed on Saturdays.”
    â€œSean and I tried to tell you.” A light shone suddenly in the window. A car had pulled into the driveway. Dad leaned back in his chair and parted the curtain to see who it was. “But you didn’t believe us.”
    â€œYou were just kids, scared to death. What was I supposed to say? Yes, your grandfather’s ghost lives in the attic, now go back to bed ?”
    He walked to the door, opened it, stepped outside and closed it behind him. I finished my drink and left the glass on the table while I fetched a slice of chess pie from the fridge. When I returned, Dad was still outside. I peeped through the curtains and saw him talking to the redhead from the funeral. I sat down and ate the slice of pie, then made another drink. While I was pouring, the car backed out of the driveway. Dad waited until it was gone before he returned.
    He didn’t tell me about his visitor and I didn’t ask. He just said, “Did you make your old man one of those?” So I made him a toddy and got another slice of pie from the fridge and watched him eat it.
    â€œSo who picked out Mom’s dress?” They had buried her in a hideous black fringed thing with tiny white flowers, sequins, and pearl snap buttons, something she’d have never worn while she was alive.
    â€œDeedee Mills took care of everything for me.”
    â€œI wish they had done a better job with her face.” I don’t know why I was bringing this up. I knew I sounded like some grumpy old maiden aunt complaining about the fecklessness of the mortician. I don’t know why I wanted my mother to look like the woman I knew instead of some wax effigy poured by someone working from a bad photograph.
    I liked the way they did things back in my grandfather’s day. People used to keep their dead at home until it was time to bury them, instead of sending them off to be powdered and puffed up with facial prosthetics by medical school dropouts. Because when you lived with the dead taking up the dining room table or the parlor or the bed, with the smell of them getting a little riper every hour, you got used to the idea they were dead and after a few days of having them around, you were finally ready to put them in the ground. Glad to put them in the ground, glad to be rid of them so you could move on. Because they were only meat, and rotting meat at that, and the funeral was a release from grief, a thing to be welcomed, realized, and got through and put behind you, rather than dreaded and avoided. Because the funeral is just the beginning of grief, and because we tidied it up and perfumed and preserved it, people could go on pretending their loved ones weren’t dead for a couple more days, until the day we laid her in the ground and pushed the dirt in the hole, and stood a rock up over her and carved into it her name, a couple of ultimately meaningless dates, and maybe a lie or two, until even the names and dates and lies were erased, until even the meaning of the rock itself was forgotten and it was pulled up and used as a doorstop and the field was plowed over and planted, until some day someone decided to put a highway through and they unearthed her bones with a backhoe and called in some college professor to bend