A Morality Tale

The sparse interior echoed the pruned landscape, windswept and cold the small white church glared against the brilliant blue sky and blinding white snow. The small hunched black clad old ladies made their way into the bare interior, so cold even once inside, you could see your breath. Sitting with her adult children in the front pew, the three small floral arrangements looked forlorn and lonely against the altar and lectern. The minister, who had feuded with Marie over gay marriage looked back at the grandchildren and daughter, two of the three sons. Marie had walked out on one of his sermons three years ago in defense of her lesbian granddaughter, now seated staring at him, waiting for him to deliver his funeral service.

The morning had started badly, Ann, still in her pajamas and fur coat, had locked herself out of her hotel room. The snow was covered with ice and Ann was sockless in slippery mule flats, trying to climb the hill around to the front of the hotel to see if she could raise anyone to let her back inside. It was dark and minus twenty, the chilly air had made Ann have to pee and as she squatted in the snow, yellow urine spattering about her feet, a truck pulled up and rolled down his window.

“You Marie’s daughter?” the driver inquired watching Ann pee.

“Yup, how’d you know?” Ann asked incredulously, pulling up her pajama bottoms, wiping her pee soaked shoes in the snow.

“Just a lucky guess. You can’t get back in, you know. They won’t be up at the lobby until six thirty to seven o’clock. It’s only five. You’ll freeze to death by then. Why don’t you up in; we’ll go up to the Chat n Chew, have a cup of coffee.”

“Oh my yes, but I haven’t any money. I locked my purse inside.”

“I’ll buy. Your mother fed me pie more times than I can count. It’s the least I can do. My name’s Brad, I used to keep honey bees over on her property.”

Marie had been dead alone with her cat three days before they found her. She lived alone with her cigarettes and beer, visited by a favorite son. The son, not in attendance at the funeral, had bilked Marie of most of her savings and isolated her through restraining orders when the daughter and tried to intervene.

The Daughter, Ann, was lost in thoughts about her mother, the difficult circumstance of her death. She was concerned her brother may have finally assisted Marie in transiting across the River Styx and wasn’t at all sure she could contain her thoughts in silence, get through the funeral. Her brother had ordered a cremation immediately upon her mother’s death, effectively destroying any evidence. And now he had refused to attend the funeral, despite it being re-scheduled twice to accommodate his wishes. Eerily his wife was there, his children also.

The first hymn was a reedy affair, with the old voices trembling and off key floating up in the church rafters. The organ, clumsily played, wandered off score a number of times, then finding its way back by some miracle at the end of each verse heading into the reprise.

Ann was so completely lost in thought, she wasn’t aware the hymn had ended. Her daughter Alicia had to tug on her giant fur coat to return Ann to her seat. “Mom. Sit down,” her daughter whispered as the minister began his welcoming salvo. “Please sit down,”

Ann was lost remembering a winter as bitter, twenty years earlier, further down highway 218 at the other end of the State.

It was the night of a howling blizzard. The entire landscape turned into a giant snow globe of prairie wind fury. Ann had launched her Chevy Vega into drift after drift, making her way along the rural state road, as the highway patrol had closed the interstate due to the storm. It was February and she had a date of sorts, with an old flame of Marie’s.

It had all started innocently enough. Alicia had wanted her mother to date after her father’s death and had contacted a man through email she had long suspected was a former lover of her mother’s.

He was an author of some note, had made the New York Times Best Seller List more than once. His life was spent along an escarpment in the windswept part of southern Minnesota, where the plains begin a slight roll, and oaks huddle along creek beds.

His craft was spinning erotic violent stories of Noble Savages, primarily the Sioux, and their interactions with the encroaching white settlers. His sympathies were with the Natives and the narrative, along with the raw nature of the tales made him a controversial and mesmerizing teller of tales.

Ann’s mother had been an extraordinary beauty, drop dead gorgeous and a dead ringer for Lauren Bacall. The author was a womanizer extraordinaire. Ann’s mother was at her sexual peak and married to a brooding man ten years her senior, with four children in tow. She had attending a reading at her book club by the author and he immediately sensed the vulnerability and restlessness.

The relationship involved her mother dragging Ann to the quarry near the author’s home, and sun bathing naked on the rocks. Ann found the behavior mildly annoying and only much later realized her mother’s lover had been watching from the edge of the quarry cliff.

On occasion, after her mother had dressed, he would magically appear and read a story draft or a poem ostensibly to Ann for her critique. Based on the steaminess of the content, it was in retrospect, the way the two courted: Her mother listening while the author read to her daughter.

Flash forward twenty years and Ann contacted him through email. He asked for photos, begged to see her. While asking for photos Ann sent pictures of her with her mother. The man confused Ann and her mother. He flat out ignored the photos of her mother that were current and Ann pieced together that he was a bit senile. She called him to try and remedy the confusion and he cried with joy at her voice, thinking Ann was her mother. His difficulty with hearing (He was now 80) merely added to the confusion and he begged Ann, who he mistook for her mother, to come and see him. He indicated his wife had died, that he was painfully lonely, begged her to come.

Ann decided to go see him with the thought she would explain that she was the daughter, and set up a time for him to see her mother, rekindle their love affair.

So when Ann arrived at his door in a swirl of Minnesota Prairie white out, he embraced her with tears of joy and would not allow her to speak. Tenderly with words of love and surprise, he removed her snow soaked clothes — all of them — and as best he could with an eighty year old body, made passionate love to her, all the while calling out her mother’s name.

Ann didn’t have the heart to tell him her true identity, and as he staggered off to the bathroom, soiled long underwear around his ankles, she hurriedly wiped herself off and dressed. He returned to cup her foot with his hand and help her slip on her snow boots. Tender as the snow was deep he brushed her car, pushed it out into the driveway and without a word waved her off into the now lessening snow fall.

A year later, he died.

Ann wasn’t sure if she had committed a mortal sin, or should be made a saint. Or both.

Her mother, now dead, never knew of the encounter. As Ann glanced around the tiny church, she felt an odd sense of detachment and wistfulness. Her mother had been so difficult; awful really. Ann mused about the distance between her mother and her lost lover, the odd coupling in the night of the blizzard.

The funeral service had been difficult for Ann to pull together. Her brothers refused to help, and only two out of the three attended. Ann’s children wanted to bid farewell to their Grandmother and did her friends, and Ann thought it important despite her mother’s explicit wishes for no funeral of any sort.

In the receiving line, one of Ann’s brothers had made fun of the poor dye job Ann had done to her hair. She was having a complete financial meltdown at the time of her mother’s death, and could barely afford gas for the trip to Florida, much less a hair dresser. So she had bought dye from a beauty supply store. Not realizing the proper way to mix the liquids she had ended up with bright pink splotches in an almost black dye job. Ann told the brother to fuck off. It hadn’t gone over well and the reception in the church basement following the service was as chilly as the weather outside.

Then Ann had loaded her car with the few mementoes her brothers had set out for her and her mother’s traumatized cat and headed out for the long drive to Florida. Midway about Nashville she hit a big pot hole at the rise of a busy hill and blew out tire.

The patrol car stopped, put on his flashers, “Did you call someone to come change your tire mam’?”

Ann nodded. She was in her fur coat, leggings and a baggy shirt. The cat, having escaped his crate, was howling and looping the inside of the aging Lexus which was filled to the brim with her mother’s things.

Ann managed to get out of her car without letting the cat escape, which was a miracle in and of itself. The wind was whipping, Ann began to shake, the giant trucks careening past, narrowly missing her car.

“You can’t stay here” The patrolman looked at the car, then Ann in her fur and pink splotched hair.

Ann started to cry, “I’ve come from my mother’s funeral. This is her stuff, her cat. I’m a mess, and I’ve been driving for nine hours. I need to get to Florida, I’m dead broke and the cat won’t stop screaming. He was left with her body for days before they found her and is psychotic I think.”

The patrolman sighed. With the wind chill was hovering around minus ten. He looked at Ann. He looked at the car. He looked at the cat. He looked at the trucks as they lumbered past going 85 miles an hour. “You can’t stay here,” he reiterated. “Give me your keys. Go sit in my patrol car back seat.”

Ann did as she was told, and the patrolman began unloading her trunk. Quilts, pictures, vases, boxes of papers, all carefully placed on the leeward side of the car. When he finally reached the spare donut and the jack, he was sweating, despite the mind numbing wind.

He changed the tire. Put all the crazy array of stuff back. Got in the patrol car and sat in the back next to Ann.

“Look. You look just like my mom did. She died a few years back and I still miss her. Do you want me to let that cat go? It would solve a lot for you,” he smiled wryly as Ann wiped her tears and started to thank him.

“Nope. Just doing my job. Write a note to my captain. Here’s my card,” as he handed her a bent business card.

“I will. Thank you. You are like an angel.”

“No mam’. You are. In more ways than you know.”

Ann got in her car, signaled and batted the cat away from her head as she moved into traffic, the patrol cars rotating lights keeping the other traffic at bay.

By Margaret D Kruger

Copyright May 2018

Sarasota Florida 34236

All rights reserved