I Guess It’s a Cantwell Thing: A Fictionalized Account of a
True Story by D.C. Corso
“How about this tree?” Fran asked, pointing to
the pine tree that was currently throwing shade our way.
I set down my can of Diet Coke beside my beach
towel and shrugged, standing up. I approached the tree, giving it a quick once-over.
“I guess it’s okay,” I said, but upon closer inspection, I realized it wouldn’t
do. I pointed at the base of the tree. “Someone left a bag of dog poop. So…maybe
not.”
Fran laughed, seeing it now. “Yeah, I guess
not.”
I spotted another, smaller tree, right at the
end of the rocky outcropping we always just called “Cantwell Rock.” I imagine
every other family that went there called it after their own family, but to us,
it was Cantwell Rock, where we had at least one family picnic each summer at
Pinecrest Lake. “What about that one?”
Fran nodded. “Looks good. As long as there’s
no bags of dog shit under it.”
“So we’ve agreed on the minimum requirements
for a final resting place.” I picked up the two jars containing my share of our
Mom and Dad’s ashes and we walked over towards the little tree.
“Keeping the bar low is always a good idea,” he
nodded. My brother was like that: keep it light. Don’t expect too much.
Actually, that could have been the family motto: Don’t be too serious and don’t
expect too much. You might end up pleasantly surprised. Okay, so it's not as cool-sounding as the Stark family's "Winter is coming," but on the plus side, at least we're all still alive, unlike the Starks.
It was a cute little tree. It was easy to spot
if you were approaching by boat, and therefore easy to remember for future
visits. “Yeah, it’s a good tree.”
My original plan for Pinecrest this summer was
to spread Mom and Dad’s ashes with the whole family there, like some faintly
creepy family reunion. I’d imagined all eight of my brothers and sisters there
at the cabin on the lake, each of us holding our unmarked pickle relish jars filled
with each of our shares of Mom and Dad’s cremains, sitting on the porch with
cocktails and telling the old stories for the millionth time.
We’ve told the stories so many times that the
actual telling of the tales is more ritualistic than informative; it’s not like
there’s someone new who hasn’t heard about the time Cathy and John wandered off
onto the fire trail and got lost until Cathy made John go up to strangers and
cry pathetically until they asked what was wrong. Or the time that Fran was ten
and got left behind at the gas station in Oakdale, and the old man who worked
there gave him an ice cream cone and patiently waited for the Cantwell family station
wagon to return. Or when Dad packed the luggage on top of the car so high that
he couldn’t back it out of the garage. Or the year that we had a reunion and
someone came up with the awesomely inappropriate idea of printing up t-shirts
for everyone reading (unironically!) CANTWELL CLAN. Yeah, there was a reason I
never wore that shirt outside of the cabin that year – CLAN is definitely not
something you want to have plastered across your chest. It’s just wrong. I couldn’t even donate the shirt to Goodwill; the
homeless have enough problems without associating themselves with a clan.
In retrospect, I guess it was kind of
ridiculous of me to think that all of us could actually clear our calendars for
the same three days in August. Only my brother Fran showed up, sporting his awesome
Brad-Dourif-as-Doc-Cochrane-in-Deadwood ‘stache. I hadn’t really known Fran too
well growing up, since he’s about 12 years older than me and had already moved
out of the house by the time I was able to retain memories. And for a while, he’d
been the black sheep of the family, a motorcycle-riding hippie with a genius IQ,
the fourth child in a family of nine,
while I was the baby of the family, the good kid who craved everyone’s quiet approval.
But as it turns out, we probably have the most in common of any of us.
Anyway, there we were: only two of the
remaining nine Cantwell kids, looking for a proper place at Cantwell Rock to spread
my parents’ ashes. Oh, sorry - my share
of my parents’ ashes. Fran didn’t have any because he never collected his from
my sister Gail, who somehow ended up with the job of Parental Ash Distributor. Gail
and Chuck somehow always get stuck with the jobs like that, although I have no
idea how that happened. And Fran probably just thought that someone else would
want them more than he did. I could see his point: it’s kind of a weird feeling
to just carry home two unmarked jars of your parents’ ashes after having
Thanksgiving dinner at your sister’s house. Leftover turkey and stuffing? Sure.
Ashes…not so much.
“So…who’s who?” Fran asked, nodding to the jars
I’m holding.
“I don’t know,” I
admitted. “I used to know. Um, I think this one is Mom.” I held up the jar
filled with lots of white ash. “I remember thinking it was odd because there
were more ashes of her than there were of Dad.”
“Yeah. That is odd.” He squinted at the jar that I
suspected held our mom’s ashes. “Oh, maybe Pauline got half of Dad’s ashes, and
so there was less to split up?”
“Oh, yeah!” Why hadn’t
that occurred to me? Of course our stepmom would have taken half the ashes for
the Naval Ceremony they had back in New York. Yeah – the one that nobody told
anyone about. I didn’t really mind, since that was typical for our family and
not something done out of spite. We just honestly assume, when we hear about
things like weddings or funerals, that someone else might actually give a shit.
It’s honestly like we’re a whole family full of absent-minded professors, bumbling
our way through other people’s emotions.
Without asking my
brother if he had parting words, I unceremoniously dumped the ashes at the base
of the tree, careful to wait for the breeze to stop. “We don’t want to pull a
Big Lebowski, do we?” I add, tapping out the ashes first from one jar, and then
the other. I knew he would get the reference, and he laughed.
I stood up once I was
finished and the ashes were settled, already mixing with the dirt at the base
of the tree. I placed some pine needles over them, as if that would keep them
from blowing away. “Um, so yeah,” I said finally. Neither of us were religious.
A prayer would mean nothing. So instead, I said, “Sorry, guys. I guess you’re
stuck with each other, now. But you’ll like it here, I think. Thanks for giving
us Pinecrest. And Cantwell Rock.”
It felt weird saying
those words instead of an Our Father or a Hail Mary. Or even a “Peace be with
you,” like at the end of all those visits to church as a kid. But by the same
token, as a family, we had never done funerals for anyone in our family. We’d do kind of a
memorial party; I guess you could call them “celebrations of life”, but no
funerals. So it made sense that we’d not really know what to say when dumping
the ashes of our divorced parents who’d just happened to pass away six months
months apart from one another, at the ripe old ages of 91 and 93.
“Want me to take your
picture?” I asked, putting away the empty jars and coming back with my iPhone.
Fran was instantly game, and immediately took up a pose. He made imaginary guns
with his hands and pointed towards the tree, grinning broadly under his straw
hat. “What is that supposed to be?” I snapped a few photos even though I had no
idea what his pose was.
“Isn’t this the pose
from those photos at Abu Ghraib?”
I rolled my eyes and had
to laugh. Leave it to a Cantwell to hilariously send up your parents’
ash-disposal with a touching recreation of infamous torture photos. “Oh my God,
Fran!” It really was perfect. I loved my big brother more in
that moment than I ever had before. It felt really good to laugh just then, and
he joined me. We’d never actually say we loved each other, but we didn’t need
to. We were forever unified in finding the inappropriate hilarity in horror and
the macabre. We were Cantwells; that’s just what we did. It was in our DNA. It
was what made us who we were.
We packed up our picnic
things, including the empty jars that were now lined with the ashy residue of
human cremains. Later, I put them in the recycling bin. I understood that to
some people, this may seem uncaring or harsh. But the thing I think both I and
my brother understood was that it didn’t matter how a thing might seem. What
mattered was the take-away. And that day, we exorcised the gravity of death
from the beauty of the life. Who needed empty jars? Who needed prayers and
words, when we had love and laughter?
Not us. Not the
Cantwells. And definitely not me.
