Free All the Dead Yale Men by Craig Nova Page B

after season, onto this file in particular. As a good spook, he had let nature take its course. If the papers were hard enough to read, he could appear to have done one thing while actually having done something else. And, of course, right there on top was a copy of the trust deed that I had found, years before, in my grandmother’s notebooks.
    Still, I had practical matters to face. The body had to be cremated. And so, a week after Cal had jumped off the bridge, I picked up my father’s ashes.
    This was the first week in June, my father’s favorite time of the year. ( In June, Frank , he used to say, you have the feeling all is forgiven .) The funeral was going to be held the next day in the town close to the land my grandfather had owned and which would be mine after probate.
    The funeral parlor where I picked up my father’s ashes was just beyond a prison on Route 2. The walls of the prison were gray and looked as though time had been made into a hard substance. Rolls of razor wire were at the top, and every fifty yards or so a guard tower protruded from the wall, and in each one a man stood, his face inscrutable from the distance of the road but yet, for me, as I drove to get my father’s ashes, the inscrutable guards seemed to be an accusation. I supposed this was part of the feeling of picking up my father’s ashes, but it could have been fear, too, of ending up in this place.
    The funeral parlor was in Concord, a sad, pretentious town of such gloom as to seem that this atmosphere was the main product of the place. It was on a residential street, although a dry cleaner, a lunch counter, and a fast food outlet were mixed in with the single-story houses. The overall impression of the block was one of being washed out, dimmed somehow, as though the smoke from the crematorium obliterated all the colors on the street. A woman in a housedress pushed a cart from the Stop and Shop down the block, the basket filled with what looked like rags, but which was her dry cleaning.
    The records in the cellar told a sort of story, really, although it was in running ink, indecipherable checks, the names of banks I guessed at more than actually knew. They were kept in my father’s slanting handwriting, which was usually easy to read. The first pages were a summary of how much had been left, and a copy of the trust agreement, some parts of which were underlined. It had never been much money, although I was curious that while the stock market had increased, the three hundred dollars a month, which I had gotten as an undergraduate, never did. But even after his spy deviousness, when I had gone to see him years before, and maybe in spite of it, I thought that not talking about the cheating was a way, silent to be sure, of saying how much I loved him. As everyone knows, though, love can get tough, and I had saved what I knew until the time when I was in trouble and wanted to get his attention. To get him to take me seriously. And nothing would have done that like showing him how he was cheating. I was left with a particular emptiness, since I realized I had thought of this as a secret weapon, and what did I have now?
    The path to the door of Michael and Green, the morticians, was like the path to any suburban house: shrubs of a dusty green, walkway made of brick, white aluminum door with dusty glass.Inside, before the reception desk, a brown carpet, stained here and there, as though fluid had leaked out of one of the containers for the chemicals they needed. Mr. Green, a man in a tie and a short-sleeved shirt, waited at the counter, his eyes set on mine, his entire air one of reduced humanity. The ashes were in a wooden box, which he had politely put into a foil bag the color of a red piñata and as shiny, too. The oak box was held shut with a little hook. It smelled like an ashtray where my grandfather had been flicking the tip of a cigar, a good one from Cuba rolled by blind men, as he used to say.
    â€œWould