...a free short story. To read collected stories, read Two Feet by Mark Roper or visit his website. And feel free to comment.
A COFFIN AFLOAT
By Mark Roper
When I was
sixteen I lived in Swaziland. It is a small, mountainous country tucked between
the Northern borders of South Africa and Mozambique. In my time, Swaziland was
a true monarchy, but from what I now understand I don’t think even the present
King knows what the country’s political status is. Corrupt comes to mind, but I
digress, which I have a tendency to do. I apologize.
My
stepfather had rented a farm. It worked oranges, avocados, cotton and
grapefruit. As my stepfather was nearing bankruptcy, he went off in his
Volkswagen station wagon to sell cheap, American cosmetics and so-called
organic house cleaning products and left me to run the farm. But that is not
what this story is about, though it will, at some point in time, deserve a
telling.
Across the
fence, the neighboring farm was called Paradise Caravan Park. It was not
Paradise. It was anything but. It tried to offer traditional dwellings to
wandering tourists – six beehive shaped huts lit by a single bulb with sleeping
mats on the floor. Spend the night as a Swazi does I suppose the logo would
have read if there had been an advertisement. Unfortunately, the huts had been
thatched with immature grass so the cattle came from across the river and,
nightly, would chew into the structures, much to the alarm of the few foreign
visitors. The pool was green. It was occasionally visited by crocodiles and
getting a crocodile out of a swamp-like swimming pool is not easy, I can tell
you. But, again, I digress.
P, who was
a few years older than I, looked after Paradise farm. His parents Mister and
Mrs. J. managed the caravan park. P had a very, very large Afro even though he
was white. He occasionally wore mascara which collected the day’s dust when he
was riding the tractor. P and I became comrades in arms – we tried to run our
farms even though we both knew that an orange or an avocado was a fruit you ate
and not how it was meant to be cultivated: such as it is, in a faraway place
somewhere in Southern Africa.
Mister J
died in hospital. It was rumored then, and now, that he had been anechoic for
twenty-four hours before anyone noticed. This was no fault of Mister J’s
family, but of the hospital staff. He had been admitted a week prior for an
extreme case of piles and a capitulating kidney. What was meant to have been a
brief visit to those not so sterile wards was, alas, the end of Mister J’s
journey: such as it is, in a faraway hospital somewhere in Southern Africa.
Many full
and glorious clear moons prior, Mister J had told all and sundry that when he
was to snuff it and was to become fodder for many invertebrates, he wanted to
be buried on a hill outside the town. He had chosen it. He had visited it on
many occasions to seek sanctuary from his wife, Mrs. J. It wasn’t much of a hill:
more of a grassy lump, a knoll. But it did require a bit of a trek to gain
access to its rounded peak. It was a knoll wanting and waiting to be a hill.
However, the view from the knoll, in those times, was spectacular: it offered a
panoramic view of an undisturbed, inhabited veldt. Miles upon miles of waving
elephant grass crisscrossed by meandering game paths and the occasional smoke
signals from a cluster of distant, grass woven huts. Mister J had chosen his resting
place well. His head would face to the West, his feet to the East.
The funeral
was on a Saturday. It was well attended. Mister J had many friends, even though
his recent, and final, attempt of breeding the New Zealand white rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) for the tables of the
locals had become an item of dinner and bar gossip. An ill wind had torn
through Mister J’s self-built hutches and had sent a few hundred rabbits
scampering off into the stormy night to mate, one presumes, with the local leporidae,
the consequences of which, I'm quite certain, have deposited a breed of rabbits
yet to be reckoned with. But, yes again, I digress.
The coffin was simple.
It had brass handles. The local farmers had secured a labourer or six to haul
the casket up the path to the peak of the would-be hill. Mister J was buried
and Mrs. J, adorned in her usual purple attire, wept politely as her husband
was buried amongst the awaiting invertebrates. The sun began to set in the West
and we all trekked back down the would-be hill.
A month later Mrs.J.
asked her son, P, to drive her to the grave of her late husband so she could
pay her respects and place a bunch of flowers. P invited me and, as I had been
quite fond of the deceased, agreed. P drove the Ranchero without its canopy on
that day. Mrs.J. sat between us. She cradled a bunch of yellow blossoms that
smelt of musty honey. She wore purple – even her nail and toe varnish was
purple. It had been raining heavily over the last few days, and the day in
question was warning of further downpours. P, as usual, drove the Ranchero as
if the world and its problems were up his arse. P wanted to be David Bowie and
that transition was somehow not working for him and he was frustrated. Perhaps
he needed a haircut, but I never told him that.
The Heavens opened up as
P slid the Ranchero to a jaw breaking halt at the side of the dirt road
alongside the hill that wasn’t quite a hill. The rain hammered down. We sat in
the cabin of the vehicle and waited. P leant forward and looked out of the side
window nearest to me. He peered through the deluge toward the hill.
“Shit,” he said.
I looked. “It’s the
coffin,” I said.
Mrs. J leant across me
to take a look, too. She screamed. “Argh!” she screamed. Then she fainted. Her
head went forward into the bunch of flowers she was holding. Just like that: as
if she had been KO’d by a heavyweight.
“She’s fainted,” I told
P.
He started taking of his
anorak. “That’s okay. She’s been doing that a lot lately,” he replied. He made
a pillow out of his anorak and leant his mother’s head back onto it. “Oooh
Aladdin Sane,” he started singing, his shade of mascara a matching purple to
his mother’s toenails. Bowie soothed him so I let him sing.
Reddish brown rivulets
of rain water were cascading down the hill toward our stationery vehicle.
“We can’t leave it like
that,” I said. “It’ll wash away and bugger off down into the valley.”
“Shit,” responded P.
A quarter of the oblong
shape of the casket protruded, like a tired obelisk, on top of the hill. Mister
J’s feet were now pointing toward Heaven: towards the stars. It was a semi-flaccid
and macabre silhouette against the brooding clouds. Globules of mud dripped off
the coffin like warm ice-cream and even through the rain smeared window I could
see the water bubbling about the base of the wooden box. Mister J, it seems,
had been buried atop of an underground stream and now with the heavy rains, the
stream was claiming its territory. The coffin had become a cork. It had,
simply, popped out of the ground.
Mrs. J began to snore.
When she exhaled, her breath stirred the tired petals of the yellow blossom she
still clasped.
P and I were drenched
with seconds. We slid and clawed our way up the hill toward the coffin. The mud
sucked on our shoes and the rain flattened P’s Afro so that it looked like a
badly knitted tea cosy. His mascara began to run and I wondered (seriously I
did) what Bowie would have said. We reached the coffin that protruded like a
drenched, inert, wooden missile.
The rain pelted down.
P’s mascara became tears, so I thought. “We have to pull it out,” he told me.
“And then?”
“Load it up.”
It was his father in
there. His mother snored in the cabin of the Ranchero, her breath infused with
the scent of a yellow flower. “Pull”, said P.
So we pulled. We grabbed
the coffin by its brass handles and heaved against the suction of the mud as
the rain poured down and the scent of Africa’s earth bubbled in our nostrils: a
scent like no other. We slipped and fell as we grappled with the wooden box and
the dull thud of Mister J’s inert body within the casket was audible above the
sound of the rain: like dull, sullen thunder.
With the coffin above
ground, we stared at it. I looked down from the crescent of the hill toward the
parked vehicle. Mrs. J was asleep; her head nestled in P’s anorak like a child
in her comfort blanket. Out in the valley, the rain moved in waves, sheets, as
it does in Africa. Cloaked in mud and water, the wooden box squatted defiantly.
“We can’t carry it,” P said. “It’s too heavy.”
“Uh-uh,” I agreed, the mud sucking at my heels as if it were
a disorientated octopus. “We can slide it,” I offered.
A coffin, in mud and rain, is not a sled. From what I can
fathom, the sled originated either in Holland or in Canada, but not in Africa. That
is because they had snow. We had mud. Pushing a casket, downhill, even with the
assistance of a deluge of rain and free running water, was no easy task. The
box, weighted by old man J’s body, had a mind of its own. With P on the left
and me on the right, we tried to guide the casket down the hill. It slew left
and right and, at some point, even tried to overturn itself. In order to
stabilise what was now becoming a projectile, P planted his weight onto it. He sat
on the top of the coffin. He weighted it down. He sat on the body of his dead
father and used his feet to guide, to stabilise the muddy projectile. This
enabled me to steer it from the rear toward the awaiting vehicle, where Mrs. J
was, alas, coming out of her stupor.
I can presume the sight of two men, one her son, sliding down
a muddy hill, one astride the coffin containing her deceased husband, the other
bent over like a hunchback, was suffice to knock her out again. She fainted,
her head dropping forward into her bunch of flowers.
“All this fainting can’t be good for your mother,” I told P.
“It’s her medication,” he replied. “Anti-stress tablets.” P
dug in his heels and brought the coffin to a halt near the Ranchero. Still it
rained; still the mud clung to our boots and hands and P’s mascara ran down his
long face in ink stained tears.
Between us, we carried the coffin to the rear of the vehicle.
P dropped the tailgate and we managed, on the third attempt, to load the casket
as if it were a medieval battering ram. The tailgate just managed to close with
some argument as the wooden box wasn't a perfect fix. We managed to rectify
this problem by putting the toolbox under the head of the coffin so it was
raised, so it leant upward in the rear of the Ranchero. We slid our way back
into the cabin.
“Where are we going to take it?” I asked P.
“The morgue I think.”
Mrs. J woke up a few minutes into the drive. The rain was
thinning. We rode in silence. Then she looked over her shoulder through the
small window that was there, looked back to where she could see the propped up
casket that rattled against the metal toolbox.
“I hope he’s not getting wet,” she said. “He hates being wet.
That’s why we left England.”
Copyright Mark Roper 2014.
