Needles

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” asked Calandra.  Her father was watching a commercial that she knew he hated, with a bunch of happy sick people on some funny-sounding medicine, and then a list of the horrible side-effects that could happen if you took it.  He said these commercials only made people sicker by getting them to worry all the time, and he’d always change the channel when one of them came on.  But maybe he wasn’t watching it.  Maybe he was looking at the reflection of Christmas tree bulbs on the TV screen.  When it was off they were really pretty—like colorful, blinking snowballs in a big black picture frame, but when it was on they were fainter and stranger looking, like angels or aliens, floating in the background.

            “He got fired from the funeral home,” her brother whispered.  The twins were sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, between their parents in the twin armchairs.

“Now, Kyril,” said Deborah, “don’t you start spreading rumors like that.  Your father and Uncle Felix just had a little disagreement, is all.”

            “I got fired,” said Gaston, still staring at the television.  His wife let out a sigh.

            “I told you,” hissed Kyril. 

“Why’d you get fired, Daddy?”

“Uncle Felix and I had a little disagreement.”

            Deborah clapped her hands.  “So.  Who wants popcorn?”  

“I do, I do!” came a chorus.

Kyril wanted to know if they could put salt on it.

“Of course not,” said Calandra.  “Salt will kill you.”

Her brother giggled.  “Then Dad’ll have to bomb us!”

“The word’s embalmed,” said Deborah.  “And it’s salty enough as it is.  Now you two come to the kitchen and be my assistants.” 

The kids were up in a jiffy, though Calandra paused in the doorway to observe her father.  She noticed that the lights of the Christmas tree were reflecting off his bald spot, just like the TV screen.  “You come too, Daddy, and help.”

      “Now, Cally,” said her mother, brushing her own dark hair back with her fingers, though both of her children were towheads (a recessive trait, according to Gaston).  “Let your father relax.  He’s had a rough day.”  But a moment later they heard him coming.  While Kyril grabbed the popcorn, Calandra the special bowl, and Deborah a pitcher of Koolaid from the refrigerator, he passed them by for the liquor cabinet and a bottle of Old Grand-Dad. 

His wife gave him a look.  “Go easy on that, Gas,” she said.  “You hardly touched your dinner.”

*   *   *

            With their ten-year-olds tucked away in bed, Deborah decided it was time to broach the subject.  She carried her diet Pepsi into the living room and set it down beside her husband’s glass on the coffee table.  Far from drinking to excess as she’d feared, he’d been nursing the same Bourbon-and-water for over an hour now.  He was standing behind the couch at the Christmas tree, tinkering with the ornaments.  “Tell me what happened.”

            “I flunked out of medical school, that’s what happened.  Then I switched to mortuary science.  That was my second mistake.  We’d go into business together, my father said.  He and his brother and son.  A family dynasty, he called it.  We’d be rich.  Then his heart exploded, and I ended up with Felix.”  He paused here to remove an ornament, shift it about an inch and re-hang it. 

            Deborah kept her voice down.  Right now, she wanted nothing more than to keep her husband calm.  Everything else would fall into place eventually.  “But we are rich, dear.  I mean, by most standards.  We have a three-bedroom house, our children go to a nice school, and we have a good jump on their college fund.  Or at least, we did…”  She could have slapped herself.  How could she be so stupid?  But he didn’t seem to have heard her.  He was unscrewing one of the light bulbs, and switching it with another one: red for blue.

            “I love this tree,” he said, a catch in his voice.  “The whole concept of it.  Imagine, bringing a real pine tree into your home, and adorning it with all these beautiful objects.  A tradition dating back centuries.  Just smell it, Debbie.  Drink in that scent!”  (It made her a little nauseous, actually.  Especially now when it was dying…) 

            “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing to a decoration.  Of course she did: the tiny bottle, banded in silver, held one of Calandra’s baby teeth.  Or maybe Kyril’s; the two  of them were identical, other than the initial etched in the glass.  “It’s Cally’s baby tooth.  There’s an ornament from the year they were born, and another one from every year after that that we picked out together, as a family.  This giraffe is from our trip to the Bronx zoo, and that anchor’s from Mystic Seaport.  There’s even a miniature tennis racket from our lessons at the club.  It’s all here, Debbie, our entire lives, on this one organic monument.” 

He turned to her cheerfully.  But even as she watched, the expression slid from his face like melting candle wax, and something else took hold.  Something frightening.  He looked at her blankly for a moment, but it wasn’t her that he was seeing, she was sure of it.  Then he walked around the end of the couch, picked up his highball, drank it off, and contemplated the glass in his hand before winging it into the fireplace.

            “Gaston!  Control yourself!  You’ll wake the children!”

            He dropped into a chair.  “Sorry.  I was thinking of my uncle.  The swine.”

            “You still haven’t told me what happened.”

            His gaze arose to the Christmas tree bulb light-show on the blackened television.  “He’s the polar opposite of my father, Debbie.  The man has no conscience.  No scruples.  He’s colder than one of the stiffs.  And he cheats our customers.  Poor people.  Old people.  People who can’t afford it, who’re weak and confused in a time of loss.  Talks them into things.  Floral arrangements fit for a king.  Caskets made of teak and mahogany that cost as much as a triple bypass.  Then, after the ceremony comes the coup de grâce.  He covers the box with a velvet shroud.  Free of charge, he tells them.  Only it’s rayon, and the coffin’s become a cheap pine veneer.

            “And that’s not the worst of it.  Do you remember Major Armstrong, the war hero?  The one who got the police escort out to Oakwood Cemetery?”  He looked over to catch her nod. “The family had stipulated that we bury him in uniform with all of his medals.  A common request for veterans.  Anyway, Felix botched it.  Put the uniform on Flannagan, the barber.  I was away on a house call, or I would have stopped him.  He was drunk, Debbie.  He drinks every day now in the afternoons.  Gin.  You can smell it on him when he forgets his Altoids.  Anyhow, I was checking up on things before the service, like I always do, and it was only by chance that I noticed.  The major had a deformity, a pinky that angled sharply inward.  I happened to glance at it while I was making my adjustments, and it was straight as a pin.  Then, on a hunch, I went over to Flannagan.  And there it was.  The finger.  It took me a minute to figure it out.  He’d switched their heads, Debbie.  The man had taken a bone saw, and… 

“Well, the ceremony was minutes away.  I hid the pinky under the other hand, that was easy enough, but then I noticed how the neck was—well, I don’t want to be gruesome, here.  Let’s just say that it didn’t look natural.  And we were out of time, you understand; the bereaved would be arriving any second.  Then it struck me.  There was a hankie, a big silk thing with his regimental insignia on it that we’d tucked into a pocket.  I managed to get it wrapped around him like an aviator’s scarf.  It worked like a charm.  During the service, the son told me discreetly that it wasn’t supposed to be like that, but that he approved anyway.  Said it gave him a kind of swagger, and he thanked me.

            “When it was over, I had it out with Felix.  It got pretty heated.  He reminded me that even though the Dubonnet brothers had founded the home together, he was now its sole proprietor.  Then I got the heave-ho.”

            “Did you slug him, Dad?”  Kyrils’s voice jerked their heads around.  The children were in their pajamas, watching from the foot of the staircase.

            “Kyril, Calandra,” their mother said sternly.  “What are you two doing there?”

            “We heard a bang.  It woke us up.”

            Their father approached the archway.  “I’m afraid I lost my temper.  I apologize.  Everything’s fine now.  And to answer your question, Son, no, I didn’t slug him.  That’s not how we solve our problems.  Now, you go back to bed, please.  There won’t be any more banging tonight.  I promise.”

*   *   *

            Normally, they bought their Christmas tree from Green Valley Nursery in mid December and decorated it that same night, fortified by hot chocolate and hot toddies, to the accompaniment of a crackling fire (the Dubonnet version of the Yule Log—vestige of an ancient Germanic rite involving human sacrifice, according to Gaston), and carols on the stereo.  The tree would remain in the living room until the weekend after New Years, when Daddy would denude it of lights and ornaments (which he insisted on doing himself, so that they were repackaged according to his own fastidious specifications), and then he and the kids would drag the remains ceremoniously through dining room, kitchen and sunroom onto the lawn, and a furlong or so into the woods to a certain stretch of stone wall, where, coaxed to the far side by team effort, it would join its forerunners in the Christmas Tree Burial Ground.

            This year, things had gone differently.  Gaston had lost his job in the interval between the holidays, and seemed disinclined to do much more than to take long walks up and down the road, shovel snow (digging the expected paths to bird feeder and oil tank, and then branching off into maze-like passages to nowhere—a pursuit in which the children had participated eagerly until the cold and the futility had driven them inside to watch their driven father from the windows), and fiddle around with the Christmas tree, which, now in the third week of January, had long since stopped drinking water (though he persisted in checking the level beneath the skirt several times a day), and was instead shedding needles onto the carpet like an old dog shed hair, which he’d gather up with a dustpan, and deposit into the trash.

            Deborah had tried to speed things along.  “Dear,” she would suggest to his back as he moved an ornament up or down or sideways, or swapped a regular bulb with a blinking one, or relocated a bit of tinsel to a nearby offshoot, “Don’t you think it’s about time for us to take down the tree?” to which he would reply with a grunt or a murmur, or sometimes not at all.

            Today, however, he had surprised her.  He came around the couch to encircle her with an arm.  “Just look at it, darling.  Isn’t it gorgeous?  I love our Christmas tree, this Christmas tree, more than any one we’ve ever had.  It’s proof, Debbie.  Proof that things don’t have to change, that they can just go on and on as steady and true as always.”  He gave her a kiss then, and a pat on the bottom, and she was beginning to consider how long they’d have before the school bus arrived when he was back at it, buffing each blown-glass sphere with one of her dustcloths.

            Later on—or maybe it was the next day, or the one after that—who could keep track anymore? Calandra had come into the kitchen while she was preparing vegetables.  Her daughter leaned elbows on the marble island and watched her mother with those piercing blue eyes as she chopped her onions and carrots and celery.  Kyril had the same eyes, of course—the exact same eyes genetically—but Cally’s had always seemed different somehow, with a quality that allowed them to see inside of you, as if she were reading your thoughts.  At times, Deborah found the effect disconcerting.  

            “Where’s Daddy?”

            “Upstairs, polishing his shoes.  He likes to keep them ship-shape, in case there’s a…”

            “Funeral?”  Her mother ignored that, and continued slicing.  Calandra stole a bit of carrot, and popped it in her mouth.  “Is Daddy going crazy?”

            Deborah looked up.  “No, sweetheart.  Your father is not going crazy.”

            “How do you know?”

            “How do I know?  Because—because when someone goes crazy, they—well, they do crazy things, and you can tell.  That’s how.”

            Her daughter thought about that while she chewed.  Then she made an about-face, and marched upstairs to her parents’ bedroom.  Gaston sat at the foot of the bed, a shoe-shine kit in front of him, and several pairs of wingtips, brown and black, fanned out in a gleaming crescent.  Calandra approached him and held out a hand.  “Come with me, Daddy,” she said.  “There’s something we have to do.”

            He looked up at her vaguely.  “What?”

            “Right now.  We’re going to take the tree down.”

            “What?  The tree?”

            “Right now, Daddy.  Or I’ll scream.”

            “What?  Don’t scream, honey.  Why would you scream?”

            “Right now, Daddy.”  She wiggled the hand.  Her father looked around confusedly, then grasped it and stood up.  She led him down the hallway to the next room.  Her brother was playing a video game on his laptop computer.  “Kyril, come with us.  We’re going to take the tree down.”

            “No way.  I’m fighting the Gorgon.”

            “Daddy, tell him to come.  Right now, please.”

            Gaston looked down at the blazing blue eyes, then over at his son.  “Come on, Kyril, let’s go.  Or Cally’ll scream.”

            “Huh?  Why would she scream?”

            “Let’s go, I said.  Right now.”

            Calandra did not, in fact, scream.  What she did do was to herd her father and brother into the living room, where they unplugged the lights on the Christmas tree and dismantled the decorations—stowing everything away just-so according to Gaston’s instructions—as her mother watched in amazement.  Then they put on their hats and coats and mittens, and trudged through the snowy woods to the Christmas Tree Burial Ground, where their friend was laid to rest beside his predecessors—in progressive states of decay, like a series of time-lapse photographs.

            Soon, Kyril and Calandra, famished from their exertions, were stuffing themselves with sphagetti and meatballs, while Deborah partook with lady-like decorum, and Gaston pushed his own around like a child avoiding the Brussels sprouts.  For dessert, Kyril requested ice cream.

            “Oh, I’m sorry, honey.  There isn’t any.”

            The boy was crestfallen until inspiration struck.  “Can we go for ice cream, Dad?  To Carvel?  Please oh please oh please?  Can we?”  His father looked to Calandra for help, but she was on the other team.

            “That’s a great idea, Gas,” Deborah piled on.  “A trip into town would do you a world of good.”

“You think so?” 

“A world of good, Daddy!  Please?  Please?” 

The next thing Gaston knew, he was behind the wheel of their SUV and tooling down Main Street in the winter darkness, the lampposts still dressed in their plastic wreaths and snowflakes.  Kyril posed a query from the back seat.

            “How do you bomb somebody, Dad?”

            His sister huffed.  “It’s em-balmed,” she corrected haughtily.

            “You pickle them,” said his father.  “On the inside.”  Then he was making a right as he had a thousand times, and stopping in front of a stately white Colonial with long black shutters.  A canopied walkway extended to the street, its forest-green canvas emblazoned with the legend, Dubonnet Funeral Home.  Floodlights bathed the outer walls, while the windows shone warmly with a golden incandescence.  Gaston turned to the kids.  “Wait here,” he told them.  “I’ve got to speak with Felix.”  Then he was out of the car and heading up the walk.  After letting himself in, he and a second man appeared in a corner room, talking.  Or arguing, was more like it, judging from their body language.

            Kyril pulled up his door handle.  “C’mon,” he said, “let’s check this out.”

            “We’re supposed to wait here!” Calandra protested, but as her brother circled the Jeep and began slinking across the snowy yard, resistance crumbled.  Soon the two of them were peeking in a window, hands cupped to their ears to listen through the glass. 

            “My father built this business with hard work and integrity!  And you’ve done nothing but milk it dry!”

            “Give me that key and get out!  Or I’ll have you arrested!”

            Gaston turned eight shades of purple.  “Have me arrested?  Why, you—”  A fist shot out to connect with the uncle’s chin; he staggered backwards.  “That was for my dad, you sot!  And if you act against me in any way, I’ll give them enough dirt on you to keep you swinging a sledge hammer till you’re ninety!”  He threw his key down on the table, and started to leave.  Calandra and Kyril hurried back to the car.

            When he was buckled in again, Gaston looked long and hard at the familiar premises.  “Believe it or not, kids,” he said at last, “this is the only place I’ve ever worked.  I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to do now.  I probably shouldn’t be telling you that, my own children, but I’ve always tried to be honest with you guys.”

            Calandra studied her father’s profile for a moment, then followed his gaze to the big white house beyond the canopy.  “Why don’t you just get another one, Daddy?”

            “Another what, honey?”

            “Another house.  Like this one.”

            “Yeah, Dad,” said Kyril.  “Where you bomb people.  You can do it better than that old sot any day.”  (He didn’t know what a ‘sot’ was, exactly, but it sure sounded right.)

Everyone was quiet for a while after that.  Then Gaston released his seat belt, and swung around to face the twins.  Even though it was dark inside the car, Calandra thought that his eyes seemed brighter than they had in ages.  

“You know,” he said, looking from one to the other, “I think you two may have something there.  Sure.  There’s plenty of business in the area.  That’s exactly what I’ll do.  I’ll open up my own place, on the other side of town.  That’d be perfect—”

            “You sure slugged him, didn’t you, Dad?”     

            “Now, Son,” his father began, “that’s not how we—”  But the jig was, as they say, up.  He put on a smile instead.  “How about some ice cream?”    

This story first appeared in Carbon Culture Review.