“Oh, Diz,” I said. “Of course I will. Of course I will.” My voice shook and my eyes brimmed, every indication of the weakness she despised in me, but she just continued looking at me. For once, I saw no judgment or contempt.
A few days later, she was dead. I worked the farm chores hard, cooked eggs and bacon for the men, kept the house in order. Brassard was stunned, shell-shocked. He drifted looming through the house, over to his desk to shuffle papers, then realizing he couldn’t see without his reading glasses and then discovering he couldn’t find his glasses and then remembering that Diz wasn’t there to help find them as she always did.
Will and Earnest made all the arrangements. Of which there weren’t many. They bought a coffin and a plot in a cemetery near Tunbridge, where other Brassards had been buried. Jim had a stone made but didn’t hold a church service, because Diz didn’t believe in God or religion and would have disemboweled anyone who suggested doing such a thing. Toward the end, only half-jokingly, she told Jim that she wanted him to put her through the chipper—the farm keeps a big one that’s driven by the tractors’ PTO—and mix the chunks into the compost. Brassard said he wanted a place to visit her, and insisted on a real plot with a real gravestone.
We had a gathering of remembrance at the house. The group included Lynn and Theo and Theo’s younger sister Robin, a couple of the hospice people who had acquired a very moving affection for Diz, Jim’s sister Elizabeth, and some other Brassard relatives. Several farming neighbors from down the road came, but no “trash” Goslants from up the hill. I didn’t know any of these people and wasn’t sure how they were connected, but I noticed that none of them introduced themselves as relatives of Diz. Her long-estranged stepdaughter Jane didn’t show. There was one sixtysomething guy in a dark green jacket, who skulked uncomfortably on the periphery of the room trailing the reek of stale tobacco smoke. He struck me as the lounge-lizard type, and when I asked Earnest about him, I learned he was “one of Diz’s prior husbands.”
I grilled chicken outside and prepared trays of other edibles. Mostly people talked about cows, crops, weather, dairy policy, tractors, and other relatives or neighbors who had died. At one point, Will came to help me in the kitchen, where he stood at the counter trying to remember what he was supposed to do, which can to open or cheese to slice, looking so lost that I took his hand. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at each other. He just held my hand with a firm, grateful grip: two lonesome hands there on the Masonite counter.
After a time, I let go because it was time to ferry some bread and cheese slices back to the living room.
Numb, adrift, Brassard gave a short eulogy: “She was my wife. I loved her and I don’t know how I’m gonna get along without her. She was my companion and I loved her. I was always very proud of her. Lot of people don’t know it, but back fifteen years ago she had the gumption to go out and get a certificate in cosmetology. Worked for two years at it between milkins, can you believe it, at the beauty place over to Randolph, and you never heard that woman complain, not once. I was proud of her. Always proud to call her my wife.”
He seemed to have more to say but couldn’t put his finger on just what. Will took him by the elbow, led him to a chair, said some words from a grieving son’s perspective.
We caravanned to the cemetery, a typical Vermont graveyard on a gentle slope with a few big maples in the lawn, shelves of bedrock rearing out of the ground here and there, gravestones with dates ranging from the 1700s to the present.
The cemetery people had dug the hole. The funeral home delivered the coffin and settled it into the straps, where it hovered for a while at the top of the grave as we said our farewells. Will, wry sorrow on his lips, knocked affectionately on the lid as it began to descend. We threw in flowers and then handfuls of dirt. We left before the backhoe came up to start filling it in, but not before I spotted her gravestone, waiting to get set up. It was a simple rectangle carved out of good Vermont gray granite, polished on the front, rough on the other side.
All this time, I hadn’t cried for Diz, had been too preoccupied living up to my promise to her. But I burst into tears when I read the inscription on her stone and abruptly a window opened on this hard-fought life:
In Memory of
Our Beloved Wife and Mother
Maureen Goslant Brassard
“Diz”
Chapter 27
I had stepped into Diz’s functional role even before her death, so the workday didn’t change much for me except for the period right after her funeral, when it fell upon me to help deal with her things. Elizabeth, Brassard’s widowed sister from Rutland, came to help with this—somehow, as throughout history, certain details of death being left to the women. I doubt Brassard wanted Diz erased so quickly from the house, but Elizabeth, four years his senior and considering herself an old hand at spouse death, said it was the best way to do things, and he assented.
We sorted Diz’s wardrobe, a typical bunch of underthings, pants, shirts, and a very small collection of dresses. Mainly, she owned work clothes. Her cosmetics were similarly limited: She had long since abandoned lipstick, rouge, eye shadow. Jewelry: She did have pierced ears, and small earrings appeared to be her only indulgence. There were probably two dozen pairs, inexpensive things, practical and nothing pendulous, because, she’d told me once, they’d catch on things in the course of a day’s
