Fit Month for Dying by M.T. Dohaney

Greg had installed a small oil stove in the seldom-used dining room so Philomena and Hubert could watch television in comfort. The room is warm because a neighbour tended the stove while we were at the cemetery.
    We bunch up around the stove and discuss the burial, and I confess that when I stood at the edge of Hubert’s grave and watched him being lowered into the ground I felt as traitorous as Benedict Arnold. I admit that I had known several days before Hubert’s death what the family only found out afterwards: that he couldn’t be buried in his birthplace. I had checked the government records, but I didn’t let even Greg know this because I didn’t want him feeling obliged to tell Hubert that he couldn’t have his wish to be buried beside his parents.
    Philomena is still wearing the borrowed cap and cape, which she hauls close around her even though she is so near the stove she is practically touching it. She sits in Hubert’s chair and lets her index finger idly trace the groove in its wooden arm, a groove worn by Hubert’s years of match-striking to light his pipe. After I admit I dodged the truth, Philomena laments that when she mix-married Hubert almost fifty years earlier it had never entered her mind that one day she would be lying high and dry on the cliff-top cemetery on Dickson’s Hill while poor Hubert would be down below in the Cove in the Protestant cemetery, drenched to the skin in the salty water that swamps the place every spring.
    â€œIf anyone had said to me back then that such a thing would bother me,” she says, “I would have said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Who cares where yer buried once yer dead?’ But then ye gets old and ye finds ye do care.”
    In the morning Greg and Brendan gather their belongings together to return to St. John’s. Brendan has school and Greg has a court case that can’t be delayed. As well, Danny is going back to British Columbia. He has a drive to the Torbay Airport with a friend of his. I am going to stay on for an extra day to help Philomena sort Hubert’s clothes.
    Before the brothers go their separate ways, Greg tries to get Danny to tell him about the argument he had with his father, the memory of which upset him so much on the night of Hubert’s death.
    â€œBeer talk,” Danny again says, “just beer talk. I already told you that.” He diverts the conversation by turning his attention to prying open one of the swollen kitchen windows, saying as he grunts over it that the place smells like the inside of an old suitcase that has been kept in a damp shed. “Should open some windows upstairs, too. In fact, if you ask me, the whole house has death breath.”
    Philomena, coming in from the clothesline carrying an armful of still-damp dishtowels, overhears Danny’s remarks. “And who asked you, anyway? Besides, if the house has any kind of breath it’s cigarette breath from you and Paddy and those cursed American cigarettes you smuggled in from Seattle.” She tosses the dishtowels on the table. “As if the Canadian cigarettes don’t stink enough. Maybe you think American cancer is not as bad as Canadian cancer.”
    She goes to the window that Danny just opened and pulls it closed. “June or not,” she grumbles, “I have to keep the fire going, and I don’t intend to heat up the whole Cove.”
    Shortly after noon, as soon as we get the house to ourselves, Philomena and I begin sorting Hubert’s clothes. As we sort, Philomena keeps up a steady prattle, as if only the sound of her voice can distance her from what she is doing. When we come to Hubert’s shoes, she gets out the polish and brushes and puts a s hine on each pair. She tells me about a woman in St. John’s who didn’t want her husband’s clothes to be worn by anyone else, so she put all of his right shoes out for garbage pick-up one week and all of his left shoes