GATHERING THE DEAD by Polly Buckingham

Birds gathered on the corner of a building and in a tree and on a wire. And when they lifted off, Charlotte rose also. She was not walking across a parking lot. She was suspended among the clatter and shuffle of wings and beaks. She was light inside. And then she was again listening to the thud of each sneakered shoe on the blacktop, louder than the cars pulling in and people shouting in the distance. This was the second day of college. Her brothers hadn’t gone, but her father had – he’d been a geology professor, though now he was mostly incommunicable, sitting by the window in his wheelchair, or on the La-Z-Boy when her mom took the time to put him there. His head would hang outside the wheelchair’s headrest, and his eyes looked in two different directions; it was hard to tell what he actually saw.
A thin duffle bag hung off her shoulder. It was her brother Jordy’s gym bag from when he’d played sports. Before her father’s accident. He was the only one to play sports. She hadn’t known Jordy then, and now she couldn’t imagine him like that, playing sports. She hadn’t known him because she wasn’t even three at the time of the accident. She remembered her dad when he could walk but only in the way you remember a dream you had when you were a child – in pieces as if through a series of doors and windows. She’d seen her father where a road crested at the top of a hill. He was small in the distance and surrounded by light. He was walking toward her.
Ahead of her was the red brick building she hadn’t been able to find on time yesterday. She’d wandered around campus looking for the names on buildings, people rushing by her, greeting one another, talking on cell phones, looking like they had somewhere to be. She walked by the same fountain twice; the second time there’d been no one anymore, and, defeated, she’d stared into the three inches of water, listening to the echo of water hitting water, the gray blue bottom of the pool warped like a window of the red roof shed in the back yard where she’d first seen Jordy and Darren with the girl. She’d seen them through a window and then through a doorway with no door and she’d backed away from them, her bare feet in the dust, purple knapweed scratching her calves.
When she found the building, Patterson, she couldn’t find the right floor. She’d gone up and down the elevator, but each floor had looked the same, darkened hallways with no carpets. The elevator said basement, first floor, second floor, but the numbers on what she thought was the basement said one, and on the first floor two – was the elevator wrong or had she pushed the wrong buttons?
Finally she landed on the floor where all the classrooms were in the 200’s. She walked through the dark hallways twice, her feet echoing on the linoleum, before she found the classroom. Suddenly people were pouring out into the halls. She made her way to the door and waited. Inside the classroom a woman with a pleasant face stood talking to a student, while two others waited. Charlotte waited also until they’d finished talking. She stood on the side of the doorway, looking in as the last of the students left through the other door. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. How could she explain what had happened? She thought the teacher would leave, that she would not see her. But the teacher suddenly turned toward her as if she’d known all along that Charlotte had been standing there looking in.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m,” Charlotte said, “I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m late. I got lost.”
“It’s okay,” the teacher said. “It can be confusing on the first day. What’s your name?”
“Charlotte.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much.” The teacher picked through the stack of papers in her arms. “Here’s the syllabus and some reading for tomorrow. Do you have the books?”
Charlotte nodded. Her mother had sent her on the bus to buy books the week before. She’d felt prepared until now. Even as the teacher gave her a small, crooked smile, she felt lost and ashamed, the way school had always made her feel. “Thank you.” She’d taken the papers.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” the teacher had said.
That was yesterday. Today at least she knew where the classroom was. She looked up again at the roof and the wires, but the birds were gone. She crossed the street and walked along the cement path where other students were in front of her and behind her, in groups and by themselves. She watched her feet, but then remembered to look up so she wouldn’t lose sight of the building. They were all alike. She wondered where the fountain from yesterday was, but quickly tried to forget, so as not to lose her sense of presence again. Of three glass doors, she chose the left side because the middle was too busy.
Today she used the stairs. Even the sight of the elevators sliding open scared her. She felt the weight of the duffle bag and imagined the two English books, one with the teacher’s syllabus folded inside. She’d done the reading. She walked into the classroom, studying the patterns on the linoleum floor squares.
“Hello, Charlotte,” the teacher said.
Charlotte looked up. “Hi,” she said. The teacher was smiling at her.
The teacher asked the students to write for the first ten minutes of class. “I’m going to read these,” she said. “So put your names on them.”
There was a shuffling of papers and scribbling of names. Charlotte had a new bright blue notebook, so far empty. The pages could tear out along the metal spiral binding or they could tear out at a perforation beside the binding.
“I want you to tell me what your job is – and I don’t just mean where you work, though you can tell me that too, if you work. I mean what you see as your job in this world, on the bigger scale. What are you here to do? What’s your role? You might start by listing all the things you see as your job and then keep writing from there. I don’t want you to think much about this, just write.”
One boy raised his hand. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t have a job. I’ve never worked. What if we’ve never worked?”
“Your role,” the teacher said again. “What do you see as your role? For example, you’re in college now, you probably expect to learn things that later you will do something with. What do see as your contribution after college?”
“So you want us to write about what we’ll do after college?”
“You can. You can also write about what you do now – not just jobs. For example, some of you might be really good at listening to your friends, so maybe right now your job is listener. Or maybe some of you make people laugh, or you’re always the one making plans. Mostly,” the teacher said, “I want to know something about you, how you see yourself. Whatever you say, I want it to be revealing, so I can get to know you.”
Charlotte looked at the first boy who still looked confused. She was not confused. The students did not do what the teacher said. They did not start writing immediately. But Charlotte did. She could hear her pencil scratching the paper and only one or two others, and then she lost track of all the sounds. The letters were slow for her to write and some of them, she knew, were backwards, but it was hard to tell. She started with the easy stuff.
My job is to go to school. None of my brothers went to college. I have five brothers. I had six, but one died. I’m the youngest. My father was a teacher. He taught geology here. My job will not be a teacher. I’m not very smart. I don’t know what my job will be. I was a maid over the summer. I hear a lot of things. I’m a good hearer. I see things. I’m a good see-er. She’d watched Jordy and Darren in the red roof shed with the girl. She’d heard the girl crying. She’d heard her brothers laughing. She’d seen warped sunlight through the window strike the girl’s blonde hair. It shone like it was white, translucent, otherworldly. I gather things. My job is to stack wood while my brothers chainsaw it and chop it and my mother cooks dinner. My job is to gather rocks on the property into small piles so the . . . what was the word? . . . machines . . . won’t get stuck on them. When we had chickens, I gathered eggs. Sometimes, when it was time for dinner, my mother would send me to gather my brothers, even though I’m the youngest, and they don’t listen to me. I gather other things too. My job is to gather things. She looked at the crooked words, “My job is to gather things.” She’d never thought of herself as someone with a job.
“Finish up what you’re working on,” the teacher said.
Charlotte was done. The classroom had three oblong windows. She looked out at the view of grass and the bottoms of the trunks of trees. The view was vertical – long and narrow – vertical like her father had been when she saw him walking along the crest of the road, toward her, covered in light. Light like the girl’s hair illumined by the warped sun through the bubbly glass of the red roof shed. It was a little shed made out of wood, like a little cabin. There were many little sheds on their property, which sloped down to a deep pond covered in bright green algae. An old wooden building, half collapsed, leaned over the surface of the pond. Her brothers used to make her chase them. We’ll burn your hair off if you don’t. They’d hide in this collapsed building, and she’d look for them in the green light, the wood planks diagonal as if they were perpetually falling, each whitish with age and light and arid weather. She’d found a dead dog there once. She was sure her brothers had wanted her to find it. She was sure her brothers had killed it. A bird thudded against one of the oblong classroom windows and fell. She did not see it rise again. It must have died or at least knocked itself out.
“What was that?” a student asked.
“A bird,” Charlotte said, surprised by her voice.
“Let’s hope that’s not a bad omen,” the teacher said, and some students laughed. Charlotte couldn’t understand why laughing was the right response.
“Okay,” the teacher said. “So before you turn these in, I’d love to have some volunteers. “What do you see as your job?”
The boy who’d asked the first question raised his hand. “My job is to heal people. I want to be a doctor.”
“Great. That says a lot,” the teacher said, her eyebrows slightly raised in such a way that Charlotte recognized the teacher was instead humoring the boy.
“My job is to make money,” a girl said.
“My job is to be a mother,” another girl said. “And a wife,” she added.
‘‘I’m a bank teller.”
“I like to make people laugh.”
To each the teacher nodded.
After five or six responses, the teacher looked down at her roll book and began to call out names, asking, “What’s your role, Martin?” And finally, “What’s your calling, Charlotte?”
“I’m a gatherer,” Charlotte said. It didn’t seem right after all the doctors and teachers and money-makers, the mothers, the good listeners, the funny guys, and the fathers.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” a girl asked.
Charlotte looked at the teacher for help. The teacher had a soft look on her face. She was smiling at Charlotte, like no one had ever smiled at her before. There was nothing phony about it. She was smiling at Charlotte, and her eyes were soft. The teacher liked her. Maybe she even thought she was smart.
“God knows you’re not very sharp,” her mother had said. “But you’re my last chance. One of my children will get an education.” Her mother had sold a piece of the property, the house that Eric had lived in when he died, in part to pay for Charlotte’s tuition. “Sometimes we just have to make sacrifices,” her mother had said. But the family still owned the A-frame, the two manufactured homes, the trailer, the 50 acres behind, and a piece of the lake front.“Gatherer. It could mean a lot of things,” the teacher said. “But one thing’s for sure – it’s revealing and honest. I like it.”
Was this praise? The teacher noticed her. The teacher liked her. The teacher thought what she said was honest and revealing. And from that moment on, she thought of herself as a gatherer, and when she thought of the teacher she felt warmth inside and yearning.
After class Charlotte wandered around the outside of the building until she found the classroom’s window. She stepped off the path onto the grass and found the bird dead beside the oblong glass. She bent down to examine it. It was a robin, and it looked perfectly well except for the fact that it wasn’t moving. A little feather on its copper-colored breast was twisted out of position and wavered in the breeze. Her brothers used to shoot birds. And cats. Jordy used to bury the cats with their heads sticking out of the earth, as if he wanted girls like her to see them and have bad dreams. But what was a dream when the things she saw were not what everyone else saw? She looked over her shoulder at the people on the walkway and thought twice about putting the bird in Jordy’s old duffle bag.
The bus took her from Cheney, where the university was, to Spokane, and then back out to Medical Lake. The whole ride was an hour and a half, plus another half hour waiting at the bus plaza, even though the school was only nine miles from her home. “There’s no need for you to learn how to drive when you can take the bus,” her mother had said. “No need at all. I’m not going to pamper you just because you’re going to school.”
She got a window seat, and another girl sat next to her. Neither spoke. She stared out the window thinking about the teacher. She thought about things she’d gathered. She’d gathered the antlers of deer after they’d shed them when she’d wandered through the acreage her family owned behind the green pond – ten or more antlers throughout her childhood. She’d gathered broken bird eggs and pretty knots of wood, feathers, sap balls, and pieces of bark brightly colored with orange and green mosses. She’d gathered the elbows of roots, parched from the sun; they’d looked like the elbows of tiny people. When she’d been very little, she’d gathered the colored bullet casings from rifles. She’d gathered her father’s empty beer cans and liquor bottles; she’d gathered the ashtrays to empty them. She’d gathered the syringes out of the house her brother had lived in, where he’d died, when her mother had sent her in to clean it out. “Throw them right out now,” her mother had said when Charlotte had brought them to her. “Now.” She’d gathered the dead chickens after Nanook, the chained malamute, had gotten off the chain and killed them. She’d gathered courage and stuffed down her fear when she’d woken up at 3 AM to a gunshot then watched Guy sling Nanook’s body over his shoulders, holding the dog’s front paws in one hand and back paws in the other, and walk hunched down toward the green pond. She’d wanted to pull the dead girl out of the algae pond and gather her in her arms, but she and the dead girl had been about the same size, some fifty pounds. Charlotte couldn’t have moved her.
The bus pulled into the Spokane Plaza. A homeless guy was sleeping on one of the benches wearing layers of dark clothing, even though the day was sunny and warm. Next to him was a pit bull on a rope. Her brother Guy raised pit bulls. They lived in the old chicken coops behind Guy’s house. They had scratched and battered faces but big pretty eyes.
The second bus she got on was not filled with students. It was not filled at all. An old woman slept with her head thrown back, her mouth open, the skin on her thin neck stretched and vulnerable. Charlotte got her own seat and resumed her stare out the window. When they turned off the highway onto 71 and toward Medical Lake, she saw a deer with a bloated belly on the side of the road. It reminded her of the horse they’d had, how it had starved and died. She’d been small, but she’d never shaken the vision of the horse’s ribs, the sharp angle of its withers. She’d woken up one morning to the collapsed horse, its eyes rolling back in their sockets. The malamute had howled half the day, and her brothers had yelled at it to shut up or they’d shoot it.
The bus traveled through the town of Medical Lake, where the grocery store, one of two bars, the old liquor store, and a restaurant were all vacant and boarded up. She kept thinking about that bird and how it had hit the window in the middle of class at the very moment she’d discovered her calling, as the teacher had called it. Its eyes had been closed, and the urge to stuff it in her bag had been so strong. What did it all mean? It was as if someone had put a spell on her long ago, and the moment that bird thudded into the glass, the spell had been called up.
The bus dropped her off at Lakeland Village, a sprawling complex of buildings that was home to adults with mental disabilities – “Retards,” as Darren said. “Like you.”
She walked half a mile along Clear Lake Road, which wound through lodgepole pine forest, rocks, and ponds. It always surprised her how many more dead things you see on the road when you’re walking than you see from the car. She saw a squirrel and the last remnants of a couple turtles who’d tried to cross the road from one pond to another. All summer the turtles did this, and all summer they’d get smashed, except for the ones Charlotte escorted across. The road opened up to the lake on the right and her family’s property on the left.
In front of the A-frame, the “Dangerous Dog” sign was still up even though Nanook had never been dangerous and had been dead over ten years. She used to sneak out at night and curl up with him in his plywood shelter, losing herself in his dusty dog stench. It felt safer there with him breathing beside her in the dark, while the coyotes yipped and howled throughout the night. When she was a child, her brothers had nightmares. They’d run through the house screaming. They’d beat on the walls. Once she’d found Darren, the youngest except for her, sitting in the corner of the kitchen trembling uncontrollably. She’d been small and naïve, and she’d put her arms around his neck, which was clammy with a cold, stinky sweat. He erupted in a fury and threw her onto the ground where she remained until morning when her mother found her and shook her back into consciousness. “Get some ice on that,” her mother said. “And get back in bed.” Charlotte had felt the lump on her head, a tackiness on her fingers from where it had bled. Even touching it had hurt. “You can take some aspirin.”
She turned up the dirt road that led to the A-frame, passing as she went the house of their closest neighbors, now empty. In high school a girl her age had lived there briefly. The neighbor girl told Charlotte that she’d heard a lady down the street tell her mother that Charlotte’s father had had a drug problem, that he’d fed her brothers drugs when they were little, that he’d made her mother undress and stand in the corner where he’d do awful things to her – the lady down the street had not described these things – that her father’s car had ploughed into a tree when he was on drugs, and that’s why he was in a wheelchair. The neighbor lady talked about the cops visiting all the time and the brothers shooting at each other. The accident part, the guns, the cops, Charlotte had known; the rest of it she’d believed. In fact, it remained the best explanation anyone had given her for the way her family was.
She walked up the dirt road to the A-frame where she lived with her mother and father. Darren lived in the trailer, Guy in one of the manufactured homes where his son and wife sometimes visited, though the visits often ended in screaming and gunshots. Jimmy and Jordy used to live together in the second manufactured home, but now Jordy was in jail, and Jimmy had moved to Spokane after he lost his arm in a car wreck. Frank had lived in the house on the hill when she was very little, but she hardly remembered him; he had kids with dirty faces she’d seen looking out the windows but had never met. Now Eric’s house, the neighbor house, and the house on the hill at the end of the dirt road all stood empty. Old car parts and lumber littered the yards of all the houses, and there was a sofa and a fire pit in front of the trailer. Even the lake was empty. Far away a dog barked and another answered, and above her a plane cut across the still sky.
Inside the A-frame, there was a note on the kitchen counter. Charlotte – your father is in a coma. We’re at the hospital. Don’t call. He can’t talk. Mom.
Suddenly Charlotte felt very tired. This was not the first coma. He’d first been in a coma after the accident, but she knew somehow this would be the last. And even though she’d never really communicated with her father, he’d been a fixture in their living room, his feet propped up, looking out the window drinking beer or snoring, sometimes yelling obscenities at nothing. She doubted he even knew he had a daughter, though occasionally he seemed to recognize there was a female nearby because he’d yell out “Bitch!” or “Cunt!”
She fell down on the sofa and stared out the big window at the darkening lake. Cliffs rose up on either side. Inside she felt her heart, and it hurt. She held her hand against her chest as if to acknowledge the presence of the hurt. It was a physical pain – dull, throbbing, congested. She thought of the teacher’s soft face, but it seemed so far away, so unreal, as if it had all happened in a dream, and not just that morning. The geese filled the lake’s long, narrow canyon with their clattering calls and chatter. Thirty or forty of them flew down the length of the lake like a great shadow. The cabin was all closed up and still held in it morning’s chill. There’d been no fire in the woodstove, and now the coming night brought on more cold. She curled up on the couch with a throw blanket, using one of the cushions as a pillow, and watched the lake turn dark.
The phone woke her. It was 1:30.
“Charlotte, did you get my note?”
“How’s Dad?” she said, for a moment feeling like any other eighteen-year-old worried about an ailing father.
“He’s still out.” Her mother’s voice, normally steady and hard, sounded tired and thin. Charlotte wondered if her mother’s heart felt the same way hers did. “I won’t be coming home tonight. That’s all I wanted to say.”
“Okay,” Charlotte said.
But her mother had already hung up, and Charlotte was left staring into the darkness, which was profoundly quiet. She thought about the teacher and about the little feather on the bird’s chest that had moved slightly in the breeze. A small moon hung in the sky. After she’d sat for long enough, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She found a black watch cap and Darren’s old jacket by the door. The jacket hung just above her knees, the sleeves covering her hands.
She went outside to one of the sheds and felt around for some work gloves. She considered a flashlight but decided instead on a lantern, which hung on a nail inside the shed. The wheelbarrow was leaning on the outside of the shed. The night pulsated with frog sounds from the green pond. She thought about the girl in the pond, the child Jordy and Darren had raped and killed and thrown into the pond; there would be nothing left of her now except bones sunk in muck, but the urge to pull the child out of the mud and gather her in her arms was as strong as it had been some ten years ago when she’d stood inside the collapsed building, grass almost as tall as her growing through the floorboards, and watched the girl slip from the arms of a teenaged Jordy, her head snapped back, and into the green pond until all of her disappeared under the algae.
Around her crickets clicked and squealed like violins, and the air smelled at once of the gas of the stagnant pond and the fresh, cool water of Clear Lake. She imagined herself gathering her father right out of his wheelchair and making him new again. She tried to imagine him before the accident and before the drugs; she tried to imagine the geology professor walking in light along the crest of the hill.
She felt in the pocket of Darren’s jacket for matches. He always carried matches. He liked to light them, even though he didn’t smoke. Even as a child, he’d light matches like it was a nervous tic, then throw the burning sticks onto the ground, inside, outside, anywhere, as if challenging them to start a fire. She lit the lantern, hung it over one arm of the wheelbarrow, and held both in her hand. She rolled the wheelbarrow down the dirt road. All the houses were dark; the rocks in the dirt road jingled as the wheelbarrow rolled over them.
When she turned onto the paved Clear Lake Road, the wheels were quieter. The lantern illuminated only one side of the road. Everything beyond its circle of light was dark. The first thing she found was a squirrel flattened by tires on Clear Lake Road. She put the wheelbarrow down, put the lantern on the road beside the squirrel, put on the gloves, and peeled the squirrel off the cement. Bits of fur and skin stuck to the pavement, but she put what she could in the wheelbarrow and continued on. Already her heart began to open.
She found a bird with its head smashed and put it in the wheelbarrow. She found two turtles, though there was little left of them but the dust wheels had made of their shells. Still, she did her best to get them in the wheelbarrow. Then she turned onto Salnave. She found more turtles. No cars passed her. She walked for what seemed hours, listening to the whir of the single, wobbly wheel and the occasional rise of the coyotes as they called to another, like the faraway sound of screaming children. She lost track of what road she was on. The shapes of rounded hills surrounded her, wheat fields that stretched under the partial moon, the wheat rustling in the occasional breeze. She found a cat and two more squirrels and something else she couldn’t recognize. One of the squirrels was the freshest animal so far, and she was able to see its face. The smell, too, was stronger than the others. She felt wrapped now in the smell of the dead things. She’d expected the wheelbarrow to be heavy, but most of the animals had been dead so long that the weight had gone right out of them. She, too, felt filled with the lightness of the wheelbarrow. Her heart, once a tight, congested fist, opened wider and wider as the sky shifted from dark to the faintest bit of light. The road ahead was straight and uphill, and under the jacket she was sweating as she pushed the wheelbarrow forward.
In pre-dawn’s semi-dark, she found a coyote, buzzing with flies, crawling with bugs. He was freshly dead, his leg smashed by a car, the blood still tacky, staining the road like a shadow. Her back hurt. She put down the wheelbarrow and the lantern and stretched her arms in the air arching her back. She lifted the coyote in her arms; it was stiff and heavy. Part of the leg remained in the road. She thought about her dog Nanook who’d eaten the chickens, and she felt an immense, gushing love, a burst of light inside her, like the love she’d felt when the teacher had said, “It’s honest, it’s revealing.” On the crest of the hill was the vertical figure of a man surrounded by light. She bent her head toward the coyote like Nanook used to reach his nose gently toward her face in greeting, acknowledgement, and love. The coyote’s battered head hung below her elbow. It felt like a prayer, the way she tucked her chin into herself and closed her eyes, leaning toward the animal. Then she slid the coyote into the wheelbarrow, where it appeared to sleep atop the bones and fur of the others; she blew out the lantern’s light, picked up the wooden arms and pushed the weight of the wheelbarrow up the hill.

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Polly Buckingham is the author of the story collection The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 2016), and a fiction chapbook, A Year of Silence (Florida Review Press, 2014). Her stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, New Orleans Review, and Silk Road.