『 13 | Dear John 』 ❝ Death is inside the folding cots. ❞
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"Grace, you're back." Josie said, giving me a hug. "I heard about your knee, are you okay?" Jane asks. "Yeah, my knee is totally fine now." "Come sit with us. We are making snowflakes." I nod and sit down on the table.
"You're not gonna believe what I heard. So the bank manager, who happens to be my uncle, he said that the Cuthberts are poor." I farrow my eyebrows and look at Josie. "Anne is poor?" Diana says with a surprised look on her face. "What do you mean 'poor'?" Jane asks.
"Poor as in 'penniless old fellow with no head for finances.'" "That's not very nice." Me and Ruby say in sync. We look at each other and give a warm smile to the other, and then we head back to the others. "That can't be true."
"The Cuthberts had to mortgage their farm. Isn't that sad?" "Josie Pye, you take that back!" I jump a little of Anne's reaction. "Why are you upset? It's only true. You're poor." I mentally face palm myself. "Wait, you didn't know? Do you at least know if they're going to keep you?"
"Keep me?" This time Josie went to far. I don't even know why she hates Anne so much. She is the nicest girl I met, here in Avonlea. "Next." The teacher says. "Come along. 'In Excelsis Deo.' That's right children, come along now. Take your places please."
I watch all the others go stand up and make their way to their places. When they begin to sing, I get the feeling that something is wrong with Anne. Is it the words of Josie? The next thing I see is Anne running away with Diana after her.
➸
I knock on the door, but no one answers. "Gilbert?" I say, hoping that he'll come out. "I got something for you. To show my understand about the death of your father. What I said in our last conversation, aren't the words that I was meant. It all came out wrong. I'm sorry." A tear escapes the corner of my eye. "All I want to give you is, this poem that I wrote."
When I felt that I was talking to a wall, I saw that I was really talking to a wall. He wasn't home, and I think that he isn't planning to come home. The inside of the house is almost empty. The furniture is still there but it's covered. I rip my poem out of my book and I put it on the door. If he does come back, he'll see the poem, and hopefully read it.
➸
There are cemeteries that are lonely, graves full of bones that do not make a sound, the heart moving through a tunnel, in it darkness, darkness, darkness, like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves, as though we were drowning inside our hearts, as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses, feet made of cold and sticky clay, death is inside the bones, like a barking where there are no dogs, coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere, growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone coffins under sail, embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair, with bakers who are as white as angels, and pensive young girls married to notary publics, caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead, the river of dark purple, moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death, filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat. Nevertheless its steps can be heard and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see, but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets, of violets that are at home in the earth, because the face of death is green, and the look death gives is green, with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom, lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies, death is inside the broom, the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses, it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots: it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses, in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out: it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets, and the beds go sailing toward a port where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
