Oddly, the fragments of family present at the service had requested a viewing at the graveside in lieu of a formal funerary event. Indeed, the opening of the casket had very little to do with a need for closure, although nobody cared to ask for an explanation. I suppose you could say that the real reason rested somewhere between confirmation that the woman was really dead, and the satisfaction of knowing that she hadn't hidden any of her fortune inside of the coffin.
Eldon stood in his tailored suit, cut at his request a bit smaller than was recommended for his generous size. His waif of a wife wore a dainty draping dress that clung to her tiny form like a sheet on a coat tree. She refrained from gawking at the pallor figure resting in the black satin-lined coffin, while Eldon and his comrades leaned in suspiciously, studying the embalmed figure.
The interment consisted of a severe rationing of words garnished with an unseemly number of snickers and side comments. After the last words were uttered, the would-be mourners did not budge, but looked around expectantly. After an uncomfortably long pause, Eldon spoke. "Where are the shovels, then?"
The undertaker blinked in amazement, uncertain if he'd heard Eldon correctly. "Beg your pardon sir?"
"The shovels then, I say. Shall we have this finished?" Eldon repeated, a bit impatiently.
The timid man paused, and then nodded in understanding. "Well, sir, 'tis a backhoe that we use these days."
"Where is it, then?" Eldon said, quite immune to his own repetition of the word, 'then.' He'd heard the word used by an admired associate and fancied himself quite the intellect for having adopted the practice into his own daily conversation. He was blind to the fact that it had quite the opposite effect on his listeners
"'Tis yonder, sir, waiting out of respect for those grieving to depart before..."
"I assure you that the only grief felt at this moment is due to a lack of shovels. Still, I suppose a backhoe will suffice. Well, then?" He asked, leaning toward the undertaker expectantly. Muffled snickers were offered by his fellow relations.
The undertaker attempted to mask the surprise in his eyes, and then turned to place an arm high in the air. He waved the backhoe forward. It crept out from behind a cluster of trees, lurching and jerking as the tracks ground against the gravel road in an unholy fashion. It halted several yards away, filling the air with the hum of its engine and the scent of burning fuel.
"Please step to the other side of the road." The undertaker shouted rather elegantly over the sound of the backhoe engine, attempting to mask the disdain in his voice.
The family obediently shuffled across the road, giving sufficient distance for safe admittance to the metal contraption. If art could be had in maneuvering a backhoe, this operator had mastered it. Despite the spastic lurching of the machine, he gracefully replaced the dirt and patted it carefully into place before obediently limping off behind the clump of trees once again.
Without another word or a glance backward, the family melted away into their respective vehicles and vanished from sight. The undertaker stood, staring off into the distance at the cemetery gate.
"Now what was that all about?" The backhoe driver stood with his hands in the back pockets of his overalls.
"Never in 45 years have I encountered a family so eager to toss a body in the grave. Some you suspect would, but they have the decency to feign affection and grief of some sort. Jack, I confess, I could not have been more surprised had they brought along a fiddler so they could dance a jig on the grave!"
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Chance fills the gap where conscious decision and destiny fail to meet. It is the crevice in which a single coin falls to determine the fate of a wishful heart, or the tiny slip of paper containing an a scrap of information that will lead astray the driven soul. It is the cast off, unforeseen element that begins a chain of events in which the parties involved unknowingly leap down the veritable rabbit-hole or swallow some catalyst for life-long change.
Such was the case with Cheryn Hammond, a woman of simplicity in every possible way. She was the type of individual that never catches the eye. She was not too thin, nor too heavy. She was not beautiful, nor did she have anything about her that would cause one to pay attention to her for lack of beauty. She did not fancy herself fashionable, nor did she consider her style particularly frumpy. She was never a cheerleader, an all-star, a champion, or an MVP, but she had always remained active and successful in her own small way. Above all else, she had considered herself an observer of humanity, watchful without being nosy, curious without prying, and hopeful without being overly optimistic.
She wore glasses because she could not afford contacts, and usually wore her hair in a simple stacked A-line cut because it required little maintenance on her part if she had it cut each month. Her friend Stacy had tossed her receptionist career to the curb eight months ago in pursuit of becoming an aesthetician, making Cheryn's monthly haircut financially feasible.
Cheryn refused to wear perfume, mainly because her mother reacted so badly to fragrance. She could not justify sending others into anaphylactic shock in order to safe face by masking some unseemly body odor. The only scent that she occasionally carried with her was the faint and temporary smell of vanillaroma car freshener from her seven-year old Honda Accord.
When Cheryn left work that day, she certainly did not expect anything unusual to happen to her. She had become quite accustomed to the fact that anyone with the name Sharon was destined for monotony and normalcy. She found little comfort in the blatant misspelling of the name. Her entire elementary and secondary education was spent trying to explain why her name SOUNDED like Sharon, and yet was spelled completely different. Her parents' creative attempt to give her a competitive edge with this unique orthography had failed miserably.
While Cheryn sat waiting in the left turn lane at Bingham Street and 45th, she noticed a large green garbage truck driving up Bingham Street from the opposite direction. Just as the left turn signal turned green, the garbage truck swung in front of her onto 45th. Being of the ordinary type, she sighed with resignation and followed the grinding, smelly truck down the road toward the freeway.
"Ugh. Really?" She said out loud as a flurry of loose paper scattered into the air from the open top of the truck. She turned on her windshield wipers to keep the pages from sticking to her window, but somehow they slipped under the wiper blades, blocking her vision. She heard a loud clunk and pulled to the side of the road to remedy her sightless condition. The driver behind her generously offered the sustained fermata of his horn as he dramatically swerved into the middle of the road to avoid her.
She ripped the papers off of her windshield in frustration, and inspected the hood of her car to identify the source of the loud clunk. As she looked under the front wheel of her car, she noticed a large, old book. She wasn't sure how it had escaped the garbage truck given its weight. As she reached out to remove the book, she noticed that some of the pages that she had crumpled in her hand were torn from it. They were hand-written in a shaky scrawl.
She straightened the page in her hand and began to read the first few lines:
Tonight I walked alone to Robert's grave. The moon was bright, so it was easy to find the way in the darkness. It's so hard to think that he is gone, and with him my one connection to the children. I know I will never see them again.
Another driver blasted a car horn in Cheryn's direction, but she didn't notice who it was. She was contemplating this old journal that had somehow fallen into her world. Something in those four brief sentences had stirred something in her heart.
She glanced around at the sheets of paper. Some were scattered in the street and danced wildly each time a car drove by. Others were clinging to the chain-link fence on her left, and a few were lying in the gutter beneath her car.
She picked up the book and set it gently on the floor of her car along with the torn pages in her hand, and then proceeded to collect the scattered pages. Some had old newspaper clippings or theater ticket stubs attached with brittle yellow tape. Others had drawings or lists scrawled on them. Some bits of paper were just scraps of garbage that had flown out along with the book, and these she left behind.
Time seemed to fly as she carefully followed the trail of the garbage truck on foot, sorting through bits of paper for book pages until the paper trail ran dry. She wasn't sure if she had them all, but at least she had those that had been left behind by the truck. Content, she looked at her armful of paper, and turned to see her car sitting almost a mile back. A police officer was slipping a ticket beneath her wiper blade.
"Wait!" She called out, but to no avail. The officer had just climbed into her car and was pulling away. Cheryn shook her head in frustration, wondering if her sudden urge to become a garbage collector was worth the $45.00 parking ticket.
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