Fiction

Ashes to Stourhead

by Mavis J. Walmsley

My husband is carrying my ashes to England.

He is carrying them in a square, grey and pink, Anais perfume box, divided between an array of old prescription bottles, toiletry containers and even a recycled, plastic toothbrush holder lined with Cellophane. He has allocated my last remains to this curious assortment of receptacles because it is against the law to bring ashes into the United Kingdom; it is also illegal to scatter them in public gardens.

Yet that is exactly what he is going to do.

My husband is a decent man, and he has been a very good husband. He is not particularly brilliant, clever or ambitious. He has the nasty habit of hurting people’s feelings under the guise of teasing them, and he sweats a lot. To his credit, he has his father’s eyes: brownish green with flickers of orange — like a cheery peat fire on an Irish hearth — with ripple-chip wrinkles at the corners and droopy eyebrows.

Unfortunately, he also has his mother’s mouth. Unimaginative, judgmental, miserly, ending in a Kirk-Douglas cleft and a stubbly chin. That his disposition is not bitter, unlike his mother’s, is, I think, to my credit. We have been happy together. I have not been an easy woman to live with, but I have been curious, loving, intelligent and fair. We have had our share of laughter and then some.

My ashes are just 62 years old. I consider that young; some would say I have had my turn. I have regrets. You haven’t really lived if you can’t say you stepped in a few puddles you should have walked around. But I carry only one sorrow.

I am sorry I will not grow old with my husband; so old that we would have been simply papyrus shapes sitting on our white wicker rockers, rustling in the stock-scented breeze, whispering.

Perhaps I am being greedy; I am asking for too much. But I’m dead. I think that gives me some licence to sin.

Some die truly young, some have their breath snatched away at the exact moment of their birth, some are in agony every second that they breathe. I have lived 62 years, have seen many born, have held a few that died, and have suffered, bodily, only at the end. Yet for all of that, I feel young. Too young to be ashes. Too young to only watch.

Enough. I am going to England. I wonder whether my husband feels my ashes stir in their separate containers as he walks purposefully, although somewhat stooped, towards Security.

I am going to England. My ashes sing.

I know my husband is anxious. He is not a devious man, and he is undertaking this particular mission without his navigator, right-hand woman, partner in crime. I remember distinctly when I first gave him these instructions; he looked at me with horror — partly because I talked so calmly of my death, partly because he knew what I was really asking.

I was most concerned he would forget the music. But I know he has the small tape recorder, tape intact, tucked in his carry-on bag, wrapped in his best pair of underwear. I am assuming he has the machine cocooned in Stanfield’s to prevent it from being damaged in the suitcase, but I cannot help feeling that he is confused and thinks bringing a tape recorder into the United Kingdom is also illegal. Poor little mouse. I am afraid he will be sweating a lot.

I picked out the music years ago. Long before I knew about the serpent that curled its way around my intestines, my liver, my bowel. Long before I could imagine 62. Long before I gave my husband his instructions. But after I’d been to Stourhead.

I have been to Stourhead Gardens, Warminster, Wiltshire, England 12 times in my lifetime, thousands of times in my dreams. I have been there with every significant person in my life, and on my own. I have walked the garden in rainstorms, in the heat of summer, when a crusty frost covered the lake, grounds and trees. I have looked over its beauty from the first floor of the Spread Eagle Inn, from beneath an English oak, from beside the tiny church. I have explored every possible corner, crook and cranny, yet each time I have discovered something new. I have gone there pierced with sorrow, bored and angry, bursting with song.

But I have never been there with my husband.

My friend, Christina Ariel, high priestess of my soul, would say my husband and I were saving Stourhead for this final journey. I would say that’s nonsense; although my body is nothing more than mounds of grey ashes in an assortment of motley pill bottles, I don’t intend to leave my husband just yet. True, part of me will be in Stourhead, but part of me intends to haunt him forever. We may never be papyrus, but we will be ghosts together. I merely got here first.

The first song I have chosen is Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro, sung by Kiri Te Kanawa. It is the most haunting, precious song I have ever heard. Listening to it is like gazing into infinity.

My husband’s instructions are to play it as he scatters my ashes; I want them to return to infinity, to that immense energy that is heaven, and the Creator, and forever. I want my ashes to go there on the notes of Puccini, guided by the voice of Te Kanawa. I want to sing as I journey there. I want to move with singing.

There is a second song. It is to be played when my husband, overwhelmed with staring into the star-sprinkled face of infinity, and tired from the jet lag, the deviousness, and his 68 years, will need a rest. He is to sit on the stone bench, in front of the Roman Temple before the lake, and play the second song.

The second song — It’s a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong — is meant to make him smile, to remember me, and to help him focus in from forever to our wee lives. Me and him. I know it will make him sad, he will miss me terribly, the bodily me. But I have this worked out, too.

If Te Kanawa and Puccini are my escorts to infinity, Armstrong is my husband’s protector, he will hug him close, like my hugs. His words will protect him, like I did, they’ll watch over him; they’ll restore him. Like I did.

And it will be then, after Te Kanawa and Armstrong, that he will most be able to feel my ghostly hugs, my ghostly kisses, my ghostly love. My husband is not a very complex man, and this will scare him a little. But Kiri, Louis and I will take good care of him, we’ll squeeze him close until the monster goes away.

I am assuming, of course, that my husband makes it through Security. And this, most assuredly, is not a safe bet. We have had trouble with Security stations all of our 41 years of travel. We have been frisked, padded, and prodded in more countries, more languages, more time zones than I care to remember.

It is not because we were a particularly dangerous-looking couple; in fact I would say that we looked rather ordinary. It was that, inevitably, we were always carrying something that set off the metal detector — decades-old gum wrappers; Peruvian intis; miniature, plaster house-fronts from Spain with metal hooks; Bahamian rum candies encased in foil. We were the German V-6s of the travelling set; we set off metal detectors like incoming Doodlebugs set off air-raid sirens. My husband often said, in that quiet, half-smiling way of his: ‘they always know when we’re coming, June, and if we get separated — I always know where you are.’

But, no, bless his heart, my husband is prepared, he has turned himself upside down, inside out, and is silent as he steps carefully through the metal jaws. He is, however, sweating profusely. One of the guards steps back hastily, nose wrinkled, as my husband approaches the counter to deposit the bag that holds my ashes on the mini-rubber runway. His body may be silent, but it is still smelly.

"May I check your bag, sir?" I don’t know why they ask. They have every intention of rummaging through your things, gliding their slippery fingers over your possessions whether you agree to it or not. My husband nods, holding his breath. In the end it is the tape recorder, wrapped in crisp, white Stanfield’s, that the over-zealous security guard is interested in. He looks carefully at my husband as he unravels the recorder and again as he pops out the home made tape: "June’s Tunes — For Stourhead."

I think for a moment that the guard is contemplating asking my husband why he has wrapped his tape recorder in his underwear and what the label on the tape means. But whether it is my husband’s sweating, his bent shape, or his brown-green, Irish peat moss eyes that change the guard’s mind, he simply sighs and carefully re-wraps the recorder, tucking it back into the precise spot from which he plucked it, and waves my husband through. We are on our way.

In the 40 years I have been travelling to England my first thoughts are always the same. "I have been here in another life," "My God, look at the way the ivy grows wild," and "When can we stop for a pint?" My husband seems unburdened by these memories, however, and orders a cup of tea and a tombstone-hard scone at a Happy Eater just outside Heathrow. This was not part of the plan, but I accept his improvisation. I would have driven another 20 miles and stopped at the Hoddington Arms in Upton Grey, a 300-year-old pub that serves Beamish Stout and country lentil pie. This is not to be, however. My ashes may be thirsty, but my husband holds the bag.

My family is unaware of this excursion. They know I’m dead; they know I’m cremated; they know I refused to let my husband have a funeral. They know my eyes have gone somewhere, my heart somewhere else — the rest of me wasn’t worth much. Perhaps, somewhere, sleep-deprived interns are sorting through my serpent-spoiled insides disproving yet another theorem. The shell of me, however, is with my husband, in a multitude of plastic pill bottles, in a bag, in a Happy Eater, in England.

I have two sisters, four nephews, five great-nephews, six great-nieces, and one great-great niece. I am a matriarch once-removed. I had not told my family of my husband’s mission because I do not want them to be burdened by the responsibility. I have lived my entire life assuming their responsibilities, but I cannot share one, even in death.

My mother passed away two years ago, I was her oldest child. I have a theory about death, and like the interns, I am in the midst of testing its validity. I think the energy that is our soul is only ours for a time, it has been given to us — no, "given" sounds too passive — rather, it has been "gifted" to us.

I don’t know who or what it is that watches over the energy; I know it is not the God of Sunday school, a sometimes grumpy, grandfatherly type, wearing long robes and an ivory-white beard. I don’t believe it is male or female, black or white, Buddhist or American Indian. It is all of these things, all of what we are, and then some. Whatever "It" is, It has been there forever, tending, spinning, gifting the energy. It rejoices with us, it mourns with us, it takes things out of our way sometimes, sometimes it puts things in our way so we can surmount them.

But it does not control our energy. We are not puppets or identification numbers in a universe-wide data bank. We are not file folders or children. We are not born in guilt and sin. We are born fresh, brand new, and wise. New because our energy is ours to do with as we choose and wise because it comes from forever.

My definition of heaven is giving back more energy than you began with, in which your energy becomes part of the forever whole, and in turn becomes part of another life. You live forever.

Or you can live one life. You can subtract from the energy, use up your life and the lives of others; you can suck up what is good and make it evil, negative, the opposite of energy — lethargy. You can be forgotten. You can be in hell.

I have tried to give back more than I have been gifted. And I have been lucky, because I have had an example to follow. A soul, that even now, is ahead of me, showing me the way. And that is my mother. I do not know how these things are counted, what scale measures the energy, what criteria are used to count the choices and the chosen, but I know my mother has racked up a lot of points. There were times she blazed with light.

She has touched many, used her gift to nurture others, cleared a path so her children could see their energy, and given us some of hers when we were low. My mother was not a saint, but she was saintly. She touched us, in our hearts, with love and giving. She was our steward; she always kept the ship secure, the monsters in their place, the stars aligned so we could navigate our way.

I know my husband is thinking of my mother and his father. He has stopped the car now, at the crest of a hill overlooking the Salisbury Plain. He is leaning against the car, staring out over this majesty of space, this Saxon stronghold, this England. I used to tease him that I had to do a Vulcan mind-meld in order to know what he was thinking. But some time over the years it became unnecessary. I finished his sentences, even those that were unspoken; he stirred my tea after I put the sugar in.

Like my mother, his father gave back more than he had been gifted. He of the Irish, brown-green, peat moss eyes, was a gentle, gentle man. Not weak, not cowardly, not invisible — but temperate, sensible and free. He had been a soldier, he was not proud that he had killed; he was a grandfather, a good grandfather. He was a Lion’s Club member who gave away his pins; a postmaster; a mayor; a fire chief; and a poker player.

My husband loved him dearly and told him so. That is unheard of among his people. A year after his father died we lit a remembrance candle for him in Lincoln Cathedral; I knew then — and I know now — his ghost was with us, and when he left he whispered he loved us, too.

It is late; but we are nearing our destination. You must plunge down into a tiny valley, drive through the single-lane village of Stourton, and even then you cannot see anything but the tops of trees. It is only after you have parked your car in the stone-carpeted courtyard of the Spread Eagle Inn, figured out how to lock the car door without setting off the alarm, and rounded the stilton-cheese crumbled corner of the inn that you get a hint of what awaits you.

To your left is the church, framed by a solid wall of slender poplars, sumptuous green grass, and old, old headstones. Perched on one headstone is a peacock, beneath it lies a baby lamb. To your right is a brief row of houses, stone cottages that blur one into the other. In between is the beginning of the garden, the entry into Stourhead, the beginning of my end-beginning.

But my husband goes no further. He is under strict instructions to send me on my way in the early morning, when there is no one else afoot.

I need solitude for my journey, I need to believe there is no one else clamouring at the door I intend to knock on. I want "The Provider of the Energy" to hear Te Kanawa and Armstrong as clearly as I hear the linnet now. Besides, my sweaty, little mouse is tired and thirsty. I sense a pint is on its way.

The deed is done; my gentle man, my husband, performed splendidly. No sweating, no hesitation, no furtive glancing to see what arbiter of law or decency might claim him. Just pure purpose, pure precision, pure love. And his own wee surprise tucked carefully into the end.

In the evening, before he went to bed, my husband emptied the contents of the pill bottles, toiletry containers and toothbrush holder into the pink and grey Anais box. It was then that he surprised me and not for the first time, although he is a man indisposed to spontaneity.

As the glorious English sun slid gently behind the stained glass windows of the church, spilling streaks of orange and purple light into my husband’s room, he silently, and deliberately unwrapped a piece of gum, tore the piece of foil into tiny ribbons, and placed them gently among the ashes in my perfume box.

"I want them to know you’re coming, June. And I want to be able to find you."

In the morning he crept silently out the inn’s front door, moved purposefully towards the garden entrance, dropped a pound in the National Trust’s honour box — practical to the end he paid for only one — and headed for the temple.

There was no earthly audience for my husband’s manoeuvres. The swans were interested; I think they were hopeful he was tossing strange-looking bread crumbs, bits of life spiralling in the tender, morning breeze amid flakes of tiny silver. No one else participated, observed, or interrupted our final adventure.

I wished Puccini could have heard Te Kanawa sing in that garden. Perhaps he did. I said there was no earthly audience, but I felt, as I watched my husband carefully take the Anais box from the bag, and with steady hands remove the lid, a sense of others behind me, looking kindly over my shoulder. They did not crowd me, but their presence was comforting. I felt like a writer whose play had finally come to the stage, and all those whose energy is a part of me were there to sustain me.

I am glad Louis Armstrong was there, too. As I had predicted, my husband needed him. He needed to be held and we squeezed with all our ghostly power. I’m not sure whether it was the embrace, or the song, or the magic of the sun breaking through the wall of slender poplars, but my husband smiled when it was done. And I know in his heart he knew I was there.

My ashes were as papyrus.

He heard their whisper.

Mavis J. Walmsley lives with her husband in a heritage home in Creston, BC, where she wrestles daily with a 1/4 acre flower garden and her dreams of being a writer. This is her first published short story.