Funerals for Horses Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Deborah,” despite the fact that it was her given name. In DeeDee’s world, people could be maimed for lesser transgressions.
    There was a time when I truly believed that I stood and offered the proper correction aloud, with such firm authority that the rabbi could hardly do other than to apologize to our sister’s lost soul. I ran it by Simon years later, who informed me, with tenderness, that we both sat frozen and lifeless, and uttered not so much as a peep.
    I felt engulfed in hopelessness at that moment on my sister DeeDee’s behalf. Imagine DeeDee, of all people, forced to lie in a box and endure such insult without recourse. Surely death is the most helpless and irrevocable of states.
    Simon cried. My father wiped his own eyes in nervous, twitchy little motions, as if he might dissociate from the action. My mother clutched his arm, or knee, or both, gazing at him lovingly.
    Beyond that, I remember only a mental veil, a kind of blankness, like the white noise of after-hours television before the test pattern arrives.
    Later that night, long after ten, Simon and I crawled out onto the roof of our house, through the attic window and on into the night, and stared across the wreckage.
    We perched at the apex, carefully straddling the shingled slopes for balance, and the moon sat in its own yellowish glow on the horizon.
    Our mother’s ancient Studebaker stood where it always stood, parked at the curb, collecting pine needles, waiting for nothing. The cracked, charcoaled support beams that had once been our garage lay at crazy angles, shiny in their blackness. Beyond this stretched the three-acre woodlot, its trees appearing more twisted, more darkly gnarled than before, like the netherworlds and dark forests of fantasy tales I wouldn’t read for years to come.
    “Nothing seems very different, Simon, does it?”
    He didn’t answer, and I heard the question ring back through my ears and wondered if I understood it myself. Everything was different. Yet somehow, in a way I couldn’t explain, I wanted the loss of DeeDee to change something that appeared unchanged. Maybe I wanted the moon to stop in its orbit, or the day never to arrive. Maybe I wanted to be a different person without her, instead of what I was, myself, only more beaten, less direct.
    Just for a moment I wanted Andy back. Though I knew I’d never defile his grave, I felt pinched between her wishes and my own desire to hold on.
    “Nothing will ever be the same,” he said at last.
    “But if we just go on, like we’re doing,” I said, “then why was she even here? If she can just be subtracted, what was she? Why did she even go to all the trouble?”
    Simon turned half around and slid down the roof a ways to rest his back at an angle against the slope, his knees bent, feet braced for stability, his head dropped back to face the stars.
    I did the same.
    “We’ll keep her with us,” he said.
    An outsider, overhearing this remark, might have taken it as a bland, sappy comment about the dead living on in the hearts of those who loved them. That wasn’t what he meant. Simon and I spoke in a kind of shorthand.
    From that moment, DeeDee would exist between us in a freakishly tangible way. We would consult her before making decisions, talk and listen to her with respect, leave room for her in all physical spaces and in every personal exchange. I comforted myself by thinking that this did not make us at all like our mother, because, unlike her, we recognized the arrangement as a poor second. We admitted it to be a fractional salvage of loss.
    Our father stayed the night, packed Sheila into a cab the following morning and sent her away alone.
    He picked up the telephone receiver and left it glued to his ear, only pressing the button to hang up between calls.
    I sat on the landing of the stairs with my brother Simon, magically relieved of our responsibility to school, which I suppose was something of what I wanted in suggesting that morning had no right