Condolences

By Charles P. Brownson

The girl in the black velveteen dress tilts backwards off the cement step, suspended from the handrail by her tendril arms and pitching from side to side as she gazes upward at the boy on the porch. The boy wears an ill-fitting black suit with fake brass buttons and rests his chin on his knees as he stares into the vacant lot across the street, his face slack and without expression.

“What’s it like to have your father die?” asks the girl.

“I don’t know,” answers the boy. “Sad I guess.”

He is 10 years old, she is three years younger, and she wonders how the boy remains dry — even at the funeral — so she watches him closely and waits for the tears to fall.

It is late in the day, the time of year when daylight is short but the weather still mild, when heat radiates from the city prolonging the season. A pallid breeze drifts down the quiet street carrying soot and bits of dust that rake unswept driveways and porches, that settle into half-neglected proletarian lawns perishing beneath a sun that fades like a withering callous. A car rumbles past, stereo thumping. It turns the corner and soon all is quiet again.

The girl lets go of the handrail, pirouettes to the ground and skips down the walkway to her mother’s car parked curbside as the boy watches, bemused and squirming inside his jacket one size too small. The girl returns with a box of tissues and hands them to the boy.

“Here you go.”

“What’s that for?”

“Condolences. Mommy says we’re here to give condolences.”

“Don’t need ’em!” Scowling, he pushes the tissues away.

“Mommy brought a casserole.”

“People’s been bringing food all day. Like it’s Thanksgiving already.”

The boy stands, pretending to stretch, and strains his ear towards the snatches of adult conversation that drift through the screen door. He listens for the sound of his mother’s crying and hearing nothing, he relaxes, sheds his jacket, unclips his tie, and loosens the collar of his white shirt. The shirt cuffs he folds twice backwards along his forearms while adopting a pose of relaxed dignity the way grown men do in those leisured hours aft of formality.

But he is uncertain of what comes next.

He leans against the porch railing and watches the dead leaves scamper across the lawn into the gutter at the curb. The leaves merge with litter like traffic on a freeway. Then he shifts his gaze towards the dull, colorless sky and adjusts his eyes to the peculiar light his world has entered.

A distant rumble swells the canopy as a jet passes unseen above the clouds. The girl climbs the steps to the porch and takes her place beside the boy. With eyes cast heavenward, they listen, silent until it has passed.

A boy in a gray windbreaker and Yankees baseball cap tramps through the weeds in the vacant lot across the street. He kicks a stone along his path, which he follows as if the stone marked the trajectory of his journey. When he crosses the street, he looks up, meeting eyes with the porch dwellers, and enters the yard with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his windbreaker.

“Okay?”

The boy on the porch shakes his head.

“Did you just get back?”

He nods.

“How was it?”

“Was nice …”

“They fired guns into the air,” says the girl. “And folded the American flag into a triangle and …”

The boy in the white shirt and the boy in the gray windbreaker regard the girl in the black velveteen dress. She stares back, dismayed by the sound of her own chirping inside her head. Unwittingly, she has betrayed how fascinated she was by the military funeral.

“At least they found him …” offers the boy’s friend.

The Manhattan skyline rises in the distance, shrouded by haze. Their memories fill the rifts along the horizon.

A dog yips and whines in the backyard of the house next door. His cries follow the drag and tug of a heavy chain and the boy in the white shirt knows by the sound that the dog has tangled himself around the clothesline pole.

“Murphy sounds near to stranglin’ again,” says the boy in the gray windbreaker.

“Yeah,” says the boy in the white shirt, “we ought to help him out.” He steps down from the porch. “No telling when the old man will get home.”

The two boys round the corner, treading shadows between the houses as the girl follows cautiously behind. When they arrive at the gate to the neighbor’s yard, the boy in the white shirt works loose the coat hanger serving as a makeshift latch and the gate sways inward on its hinges with a great creak.

The backyard is small and is mostly dirt. In the center of the sparse lawn, a clothesline sags between canted poles that spear the arid surface like the masts of a buried ship. A heavy chain, thick with corrosion, snarls and twists around the base of the poles. The girl lingers, taking in the squalor and the monstrous chain symbolic of a fettered savage beast.

Then it rises, pitiful and helpless: a golden retriever with matted fur and mournful eyes — a sack of discarded rags suddenly animated.

“I’ll get his food,” says the boy in the white shirt. He enters a screened porch while his friend leads the dog around the poles. The girl in the black velveteen dress maintains her distance, statuesque against the back of the house and away from the salvos of dust that coil through the air like fallout. The screen door yaws as the boy in the white shirt steps down into the yard portering a coffee can full of dog chow. He follows the path of a garden hose that snakes down to the doghouse and a couple of overturned cooking pots. He rights the pots and empties the chow into one while calling for the girl to turn on the water. She appears not to understand, or says something about her dress, and he points to the spigot on the wall and tells her again to turn it on.

His chain untangled, the dog leaps forth, delighted, and gulps from his water dish, not waiting, even as the hose gushes upon his head and water trickles down his ears to stain his drink with mud. Streams of pity wash across the faces of his provisioners.

“The poor dog,” says the girl in the black velveteen dress.

“Give that thing a bath,” says the boy in the gray windbreaker and he reaches out to take the hose from his friend and turns the nozzle southward along the canine’s back.

When he nods, the girl turns off the water, cranking the spigot with both hands, and when she turns again to face the yard the dog is quivering, shaking himself dry in a reeling mass of fur, a shower of flickering muck.

The boys withdraw with shouts of laughter and the dog bounds after them until halted, snapped backward by the end of his chain, and so he claws the earth unwilling to regress. They return, and force the animal onto his haunches where he remains, obedient, absorbing their affection with rolling eyes and a lolling tongue.

Then the girl in the black velveteen dress hears her mother calling and she runs to the gate but is unable to work the latch. The boy in the white shirt and the one in the gray windbreaker say goodbye to the dog, who sweeps the dirt with his tail, watching as they depart. The girl steps aside and allows the boy in the white shirt to maneuver the twisted coat hanger.

“Your shirt,” she says to him, “it’s muddy.”

He shrugs and opens the gate to release his friends.


The house is quiet and still. Shadows mingle with patterns on the wallpaper, imbrications of substance and phenomena cast by a single lamp. Bathed, and wearing clean bedclothes, the boy sits at the end of the couch eating a slice of cake.
His mother is asleep in the other room. She had turned in early, exhausted from her grief but apologetic, and had asked him if he wanted to come to bed, turning down the covers on the side on which his father slept. But he had said no because he was not tired, and helped himself to a slice of cake after she put out the light, knowing that, because of the circumstances, she would not mind. He sat down before the television but did not turn it on because he thought he would prefer the sound of his own quiet thoughts instead.

Finished with the cake, he sets the plate aside and listens to the metronomic sound of his mother’s breathing while licking the frosting from his fingertips. Nestled in the pocket of light spread upon the sofa cushion, he slumps into the imprint left by a firefighter’s bulk.

A growing numbness seeps from the base of his skull.

“What’s it like to have your father die?” the girl had asked. But he had been unable to answer.

Now, with all the guests departed, with just him and his mother and all the chairs and places his father once occupied as empty as the silence descended upon them, that is when he does not have to pretend to be brave. He knows now what death is. He knows what it is like to have his father die. Now he knows.

• Charles P. Brownson, 33, lives in Palmer. This story received an Honorable Mention in Open to the Public, Fiction.