christmas ash
Stopped off at Waterman’s Funeral Home around 6:30 to pick up Dad’s remains. ‘We’ve come to pick up some ashes.’ ‘Yes. Yes of course. This way please.’ The man at the door greeted us with several expressions at once: Condolence. Pity. Irritation. Flatness. He told us to sit in a paneled room and wait. He came back with a box. A tan cardboard box about six inches square. It had a sticker on it: The Forest Hills Crematory. Richard Gustave Kinscherf, Jr. ‘Dad’ in this pathetic box. It seemed ludicrous and cold. We drove back to his apartment on Mt. Vernon St. Dad inexplicably wanted his ashes scattered over Beacon Hill (he’d only lived here for two years). We took a bread knife from the kitchen and a single rose that someone had brought to the service earlier. Sam built a fire in the fireplace to burn the box after we finished upstairs. Lisa or Janie silently carried the thing and the serrated knife and we began the short climb to the roof. When we got to the top of the stairs and were about to open the door, a geezer in a bathrobe appeared in the hallway. ‘Hey! You can’t go up there at night! It’s not allowed! Come down from there!’ We stare down at him, Dad’s children, weirded-out by this old Scrooge. ‘I said come down from there. I got a wife sick in bed!’ ‘Please. Sir,’ in my most controlled tone, ‘there is something very important that we have to do, and we are going to do it. No one is going to stop us. It won’t be dangerous. We won’t have to do anything like this again.’ I don’t mention the ashes. Scrooge retreated back into his apartment and slammed the door. It had been snowing all day, but had stopped to unveil a startlingly clear night. Snow crunched underfoot. Janie thought it’d be good to stand in a spot where the wind would catch the ashes and not blow them back into our faces. We approached the far end of the roof and peered down into the cobblestone alley below. It was deserted except for a Country Squire station wagon. I bent down in the snow and began to cut open the box. It was a struggle because it was tightly sealed and had no mark on the outside to indicate which end was up. I managed to crack into it, pieces of cardboard separating like broken wings as Lisa and Janie held the flaps apart. Inside was a plastic bag filled with grey ‘flakes’. Bits of bone and wood and cavity fillings and un-burnables. Chips. As if Dad had been shoved through a garbage disposal into a see-thru Burrito packet. We decided to hold onto the thing as three, leaning out over the edge of the roof. We upended the bag and a rush of the remains roared out of the box. They were too heavy to float out over the city as Dad had imagined. We were shocked and freaked and we let go of the thing entirely. A miniature plastic parachute chased after the debris, partly filled and landed with a smack on the windshield of the station wagon below. Straight down. No happy scattering whatsoever. We were crying and laughing and pissed off that there was no information about this sort of thing. Couldn’t this have been
a more graceful affair? We stumbled back into the apartment. Sam’s fire was roaring. We tossed the box onto the flames. It caught quickly and exploded back into the room, a fire spirit straight out of the Lord of the Rings. We jumped. Sam picked it up and shoved it back. We went downstairs to the street to see what had happened. Good God. Bits of Dad scattered all over the hood and glass of the car. Based on the license plate, ‘Dad’ would be going to Rhode Island in the morning in a car he hated and a state he no liking for.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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