It’s time to move the body.

I always have to get the end with the head since James Earl has gotten older and doesn’t have the strength. When we reached the house, the family was still crying. Their mother had passed away less than an hour ago. Cancer, the son said, when we sat at their kitchen table doing the paperwork for cremation. The daughter was visiting with her husband and kids. They had flown in from St. Louis the week before so the kids would be close to their grandmother before she passed. They knew it would be soon, she said, just not this soon. There was an at-home nurse still there, packing up the equipment from the hospital and hugging the family goodbye. Her job was over. Now she could go home.

At the Cape Fear Crematory, they teach the body transporters two things when they are first hired: Always agree with the family about the afterlife and always wipe your feet before entering a home. James Earl and I do both every time.

The bedroom we are in is a sepia maze of memories. The walls are the color of malaria and every few feet you bump into another box full of old pictures or Tupperware or clothing or books. It’s as if the family had designated the room their dying mother lived in as the place for things with no apparent use anymore. We can hear the family in the living room. The son is still sobbing and the kids are running back and forth through the hallway unaware that their grandmother is dead.

James Earl and I bend at the knees and lift her off of the bed. After securing the body onto the gurney we cover her in a sheet and make her look peaceful.

As an act of courtesy we ask the family if they would like any last moments with the deceased before we remove the body from the house. James Earl has the habit of referring to the dead as “the expired”, which comes out sounding clinical and cold. “Would anyone like to see the expired once more?” “The expired is ready for removal...” “Where would you like us to leave the expired one’s jewelry?”

This is countered by his southern effeminate accent that sounds as if he is cradling families in his arms as he speaks. He takes their hands and in only minutes becomes an old friend as he provides condolences concerning the passing of a loved one, our place in the universe, the order of things. There have been times when I’ve sat quietly next to him as he talks to the mourning. I think of my mother, her place in the universe.

As always around him, I regret the way I take care of myself. We are both in our standard outfits of black suits but James Earl’s always looks freshly pressed. He is fifty years older than me but he still has a full head of hair the color of snow, and skin with so few wrinkles that it looks plastic. It’s as if working with the dead his whole life has afforded him some sort of safety from aging.

James Earl tells people death is everywhere. You see it once and then it never goes away, like staring into the sun a little too long. He comes from the mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up poor and religious with three older sisters and parents who liked to argue. When James Earl was eleven, his family took a trip into town when they were hit by an eighteen-wheeler that ran a stop sign. He woke up in the hospital where they told him he only survived because he was wedged between his sisters. The backseat of the family car should have only held two. They couldn’t ever really recover the remains of his parents, so at the funeral their caskets were empty.

Like mine, James Earl’s father was a mechanic, which means he was good at taking things apart and putting them back together again. My father always told me he didn’t want me to end up like him, fixing other people’s problems. But this is basically what James Earl and I do for people – put the things back together that have just fallen apart in their lives.

*******

When I get home tonight I can smell fried potatoes and onions as I walk through the front door. My mother has pinned up maps of Eastern Europe in the living room and has moved all of the furniture to one side of the room. The day she quit her job – the day she found out she had cancer – she came home with books from the library and began reading. She decided if she was going to die then she would accomplish the one thing she always wanted to, but never had time for: to be on Jeopardy! and meet Alex Trebek.

That was two months ago, when we still cleaned the house and paid bills on time. Now, we let the pictures on our walls hang at angles without fixing them, and when a bulb burns out in a room we just use a different room. Now my little brother Andy doesn’t have a bedtime and is allowed to say things like anal sex without being scolded.

In the kitchen, my mom is sitting at our dinner table as the potatoes spit and bubble in the pan. Her glasses sit on the tip of her nose as she thumbs through a book.

“I think the potatoes are burning,” I say, but she ignores the warning and continues reading.

I pull out a chair and sit down with her. On the table is a stack of books, all about birds. My mother looks up at me, smiles, licks her index finger and then turns another page.

“Did you know that the Eastern Kingbird is actually found all over the United States?” she says.

“No I didn’t.” I get up and open the refrigerator. Inside it’s all vegetables and cheese. My mom switched the family to vegetarian after a book she read about pesticide levels found in meat. I close the refrigerator and sit back down.

“So tell me about work,” she says.

“The same,” I say. “Do you want me to turn off the stove?”

“No, no. I’ll get it,” she says, dragging a hand down her face and closing the book. She turns off the stove and then opens the cabinet and grabs some plates. On the counter is a plastic case that houses all of her pills. The case has slots separated by days of the week, each full of multi-colored shapes of medicine. My mom carries this with her like a suitcase from room to room and sleeps with it at night on her pillow as if it’s her lover. The day she bought it, my brother and I watched as she emptied all of her prescriptions into the daily slots. She sat holding the pills up as she dropped them in, explaining what they were for: “This one is for nausea, the blue one too. This little pink one is for constipation…”

My mom sprinkles salt over the potatoes and then some on my head.

“For good luck,” she says. She rubs my cheek and I lean into it for a moment. Her palm smells like a mixture of onion and grass.

“Why did you move the furniture in the living room?” I ask.

“I needed more room for my books. When I get the call for Jeopardy! I have to be ready.” She starts spooning potatoes onto a plate. “None of us ever use that room anyway.”

“That’s what you said about the den.” She just turns and gives me a look. “Tell your brother dinner is ready. I think he might be in his hole.”

I find Andy in his hole in the backyard digging. The hole isn’t really a hole at all, it’s more like a crater – a good twelve feet across and six feet deep. It first appeared shortly after my mom told us she was dying. The day my mom told us she had cancer we cried. She cried while telling us and I cried while I listened. My brother didn’t understand what cancer was but he cried because I had started to. This made my mother cry more, and this continued all night.

The next day my mother told us she would be flying to California for the Jeopardy! preliminary tests, and I would have to take care of Andy until she got back. In my mother’s absence, my brother asked what cancer was. He knew roughly what I did at the crematory everyday and he had heard me talk about people that had passed away from it before. One night, as I put him to bed, he asked what he could do to help mom get better. I told him he could do nothing and he began to cry. I had comforted so many families who were grieving, but now that it was my family I didn’t know how. This time I cared. False sentiments and fashionable condolences aren’t what I wanted to give my brother, but I wasn’t sure how to tell him that our mother was going to die. I told him it would be easier to dig a hole to China. I don’t know where the idea came from, but I said it and it seemed to work. He stopped crying and didn’t bring it up again while my mother was away.

His sixth birthday came a week later and there had been no time to plan a party. My mom had returned from California and had been in and out of the hospital as she prepared for chemotherapy. On the day of Andy’s birthday, my mom decided she would simply take him out and let him choose whatever gift he would like. After a day of shopping they returned with the only thing that my brother seemed to have wanted: a shovel.

“A shovel?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t even look at anything else,” my mom said.

I heard a loud, scraping noise coming from outside. I went to the window and saw my brother. He was lugging a silver shovel, almost as tall as him, from the back of my mom’s van into the backyard where he began to dig the hole.

*******

When I was a child I would die in the backyard every day. I would clutch my stomach and hold my throat as I stared into the autumn air, gurgling and grunting, before losing all strength in my legs and collapsing onto the floor of the earth. I would lie motionless for long moments until all that could be heard were the birds and the grass bending like one entity to the gusts of wind coming through the neighborhood. It said Thanksgiving was coming and after that, Christmas.

I played this game so often I began to perfect it; laying so still that you couldn’t even tell I was breathing anymore. I was only six, but I felt it was as if I had invented death. With my eyes fixed on the clouds, my mouth open only wide enough to remove any emotion from my face, my legs would be beneath me, contorted into right angles bent at the knee. It was as if I had been dropped from the sky above and had landed into a state of repose. My favorite last words: I think that cloud looks like a horse.

My father died when he was thirty-seven. They first found out he had prostate cancer shortly after Andy was born. After the first operation it only got worse. I was almost a teenager at the time and I remember rummaging through his things and taking whatever I could find. Before he got sick, I was never allowed near my parents’ bedroom, now I had free rein of everything he owned. I stole the shaving kit he had stopped using and hid it in my room. At night I would shave my bare face in practice for the five o’clock shadow that would one day appear. I stole his ties and a few pairs of his slacks, his watch and other oddities. I started hoarding these items, pushing them all underneath my bed each night, starting a collection to remember him by.

The day he passed away he was in the bathroom vomiting when my mom came storming out, holding her hands to her face and crying. She came into their bedroom and I was in the closet, looking through suitcases, when I startled her and she screamed at me for witnessing the breakdown she thought she had the privacy for.

I often wonder now if my mother’s death will be similar to my father’s. Will I wake up at night to the sound of her yelling on the floor of the hallway, after she has tried to get up and use the bathroom? Will she throw up at the dinner table while we are eating, and will we clean it up calmly as if nothing is wrong, continuing to pass food and finish the sentences that were interrupted moments earlier?

My father used to drop the glass he was drinking out of. The first time we were in the kitchen making breakfast. He was leaning against the counter when his glass of water simply fell from his hands, shattering on the floor. My mother immediately grabbed a towel and began picking up the pieces as my father’s feet started bleeding from the shards of glass that found a place in his skin.

The sicker my father got, the more polite we would become. The closer he came to death, the more we would ignore it. For his sake, my mother would tell me. He can’t help it. Showing sadness would only hurt him and make him feel guilty. Cancer: the good fight; cancer: the silent killer, cancer: the etiquette maker.

*******

My mom is sick today. She can’t get out of bed. Her pill suitcase is in her arms as she snores. I try to help with everything around the house. I take my brother to school and pick him up every day. I make breakfast and try to clean the house as much as possible, but everything here is a mess now. Parts of the house literally have stacks of books so high that it creates passageways in the middle of rooms, hallways that smell like libraries and mold.

James Earl and I travel from city to city picking up the dead and putting them to rest and then I come home to my mother and kiss her face, hoping I won’t have to listen to someone comfort me in the future. She’s never seen me cry because I try to wait until I’m out of the house. I hide it from James Earl by telling him I need to use the bathroom or that I forgot something I need in the hearse, but sometimes it all overwhelms me and I end up breaking down unexpectedly.

Once we were in Burger King eating lunch. James Earl was telling me that Alex Trebek was actually Canadian and that he wasn’t sure if he could be trusted. Then I felt it inside. This building of sadness and shame and longing for change. I just began sobbing. This wasn’t a typical crying session; I was balling, food still in my mouth, tears streaming down my face. People with their whispers and darting eyes began to pretend they didn’t see me and that nothing was wrong. It became a contest. Whoever could resist the urge to stare at my breakdown would win. James Earl became speechless and tried to stand me up but I couldn’t. I began beating the table, screaming; the visceral feeling of loneliness and doubt about my mother’s future felt like sandbags on my shoulders as I thrashed about. The manager came over to us and offered a complimentary apple pie. He then told us if we didn’t leave he would have to call the police.

I thought I might be fired from my job, but I just began getting calls to only deliver ashes afterwards. Apparently, James Earl had been placed with someone else and I would work alone for a few weeks. This change never came with an explanation, but I knew it was because of the scene I caused.

It almost scares me how big the hole in the backyard has become. It encompasses almost the entire yard now. At first, I was angry that my mother would let Andy take it this far, but as her condition got worse the hole took less precedence over the fact that soon I would be his only living relative. The hole stretches now from one side of our backyard to the other, right against a large tree with its branches stretching over it, looming. If you step only a few feet out of the backdoor you can peer over the edge. Pipes that Andy simply dug around and ignored that probably house the neighborhood water system can be seen stretching across the bottom. Our neighbors have complained several times. They tell us property values will go down with our backyard looking the way it does. They complain about the noise Andy makes at all hours of the night digging. What kind of family are you? Who would let a child destroy a yard? After several complaints I learned all I had to say was that my mom was dying. This avoided explaining the hole in the backyard at all. Later in the week, we would receive a cake or a casserole with a note attached: Keep the dish, God Bless.

How could only one boy do this? There are piles of dirt taller than me that line the perimeter of the hole. A year ago he was only concerned with the shape of his belly button. He used to chase birds and eat crayons and now he digs with a shovel too big for him to hold. He’s so much stronger than I ever was; I haven’t seen him cry in months. I’m proud of him and sad for him all at the same time. Where will we live? What will we do? I think these things as I see the house literally morph and take new shapes with the movement of furniture and the incoming clutter of books. My mom keeps our portable phone on her bed waiting for Jeopardy! to call. Sometimes she yells my name just to tell me an interesting fact she’s just learned or to ask if Andy has eaten something.

I went through Andy’s room yesterday to wash his dirty clothes. They are soiled all the time, full of dirt and mud from his constant digging. At the foot of his bed I found my mother’s make-up; Lipstick and mascara were lying in a pile by his bed. I got on my knees and looked under his bed and found a bra. Normally I would be worried, but I know what he’s doing. He’s starting a collection.

*******

So, you spend a year of your life looking for things you’ve lost. Or, more specifically, the average human will spend 360-370 days in search of things that will never be found. I now also know that you can’t cry in space due to gravity, that the growth of cancer slows as you speed further and further from earth. My mother’s name is Ruth, which means to have compassion for others. These are only a few of the things I’ve held onto in the last few months. These facts that I hear every day from my mom have become the replacement conversations that our family used to have with each other.

It has become a ritual to watch Jeopardy! with my mom every night and talk about how great it will be when she is there buzzing in and proving her intellectual stealth. I have surrendered myself to the fact that my mom will never be on this show. I’ve seen the contestants night after night with their anecdotal stories and their professional jobs. No one says someone with cancer can’t play, but would they let my mother on their stage with her patches of missing hair and the bucket we leave by her bed?

And another fact I’m suddenly remembering: When Swans die it’s said that they sing.

My mom tells me she met our father the same day she lost her favorite ring, that when he found out, he promised to hold her hand so she wouldn’t lose that also.

There is a city of framed pictures sitting on the dresser in her bedroom; so many that if one frame was moved just so, the entire amalgam would all come falling down. You can almost see a pictorial timeline of her life with him – their wedding, holidays, new haircuts – they smile in every picture.

I found a world globe in our attic recently and realized that from where we live you couldn’t dig to china even if it were possible. You would come as close as Cambodia, or maybe Vietnam, but most likely you would end up in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Lenity: what a beautiful word. This is what most of my job consists of. This is what people gave my mother when my father died, and it is what they will give my brother and me when the time comes.

I have a dream tonight that my brother does it. He digs to China. That when he returns he brings a cure and everything is fine again.

I wake up to the sounds of my brother crying. My mom is asleep beside me and she wakes up too, her pill suitcase still cradled in her arm. Andy comes into the bedroom with his arm twisted and raised in the air and then runs back outside the back door screaming in pain. I run after him and catch him and tell him to calm down. He’s filthy with dirt and he smells like sewage, probably because he’s finally broken one of the pipes in his hole. Apparently, he fell on the shovel as he was digging and broke his arm. I embrace him and hold him still. My mom comes outside and I tell her I’ll drive him to the hospital.

It’s now too dark to see the bottom of the hole and the black void of shadow it creates makes it look twice as large. I take my brother into the house and fill a bag with ice when the phone begins to ring. My mom answers it and magically it’s the hospital, as if they know what’s just happened. I tell Andy to go sit in the car and that I’ll be right there. My mom appears again from her bedroom and tells me the hospital has called for her, not Andy, and that she has been put on hold to speak with her doctor. This has become a common occurrence since she became sick.

I walk out of the back door and towards the car. I have to stop for a moment and just peer into the chasm in our backyard. I pick up a rock and throw it in, waiting to hear it hit the bottom. I lean and then I kneel, but I still can’t hear the rock find ground. I get on my knees and throw in another rock, putting my ear towards the earth and waiting. How far down had Andy dug? My mom comes outside behind me with the phone to her ear when I hear the word miracle spoken. She begins crying and laughing and tapping my shoulders fervently. I am still waiting for the sound. On the ground I can hear the wind in the trees, the grass moving like water. It says Thanksgiving will come, and after that, Christmas.

* * *

Antony Grow is currently a high school English teacher who will be pursuing an MFA in creative writing within the next year. He lives in North Carolina and is on the review board of the Trillium Literary Journal. When he isn't working on his writing, he is crying violently at movies, admiring himself in mirrors, and being very, very modest. He hopes this bio is longer than others. This is just another line.