Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

The following was written as part of the once-and-future Story Club in my newsroom.
We set "challenge" assignments with required elements and write a story around those elements.
This one's elements were:
Must make mention of:
mode of transportation
poet or playwright
place outside of B.C.
kitchen utensil or appliance
reality TV show
something that scares or used to scare you

Plus, required vocabulary – including shibboleth and dybbuk.

Here it is!

*

Gram was a woman of absolutes. There was right, and there was wrong. There was yes, and there was no. There was Catholic, and there was everybody else.
A conversation with her consisted not so much of dialogue as of nodding in agreement with her firm pronouncements on everything from eating habits to theological truths. The pope may have been infallible, but I was pretty sure even he wouldn’t have dared to cross Gram.
Porridge makes you strong.
Nice girls don’t climb trees.
Confession saves your soul.
Bad girls go to hell.
Children shouldn’t play with dead things.
That last came about after Simon dared me to pick up the squirrel Cheshire had pounced on in the yard. Then I had to put it in my bicycle basket and ride to the corner and back.
I wasn’t going to, but Simon knew how to get to me.
“What are you, a girl?”
That I was indeed a girl seldom occurred to me. When Simon said it, I took it not so much as fact but as deadly insult.
I hated the way the squirrel felt in my hands when I picked it up, how it was warm and soft and almost cuddly but somehow gross at the same time.
I didn’t want to put it in the bicycle basket Grampa had given me for my birthday. (The basket was pink and trimmed with white daisies, and Simon snorted whenever he saw it. When Simon was around, I made fun of it too, though in truth I thought it was pretty.)
Anyway, I put the poor little squirrel in there, and I pedalled as fast as I could up the hill, past the park, to the corner and back.
I was panting and feeling more than a little sick to my stomach when I returned, but I was rewarded by Simon’s enormous grin – so wide it threatened to split his freckled face in two.
“Guess you’re not such a girl after all!”
I pretended I didn’t feel like throwing up, and I grinned back.
But I felt bad about the squirrel.
I looked at Simon uncertainly.
“Should we bury it or something?” I hoped I didn’t sound too girly, but I had to do something. “Under the elm tree, maybe?”
Simon shrugged. “Yeah, why not?”
Without me even having to say anything, he reached past me into the basket of my bicycle and lifted out the squirrel, carrying it on outstretched hands in front of him.
I followed him around the house to the backyard, where he laid the squirrel on the ground under the elm tree and looked at me expectantly.
“Got something to dig with?”
I knew Grampa had shovels, but they were in the shed and I couldn’t get in without his key. Since I didn’t want to explain what I needed it for, I figured it was better to sneak into the house and grab one of Gram’s big spoons. We could always wash it before she found out.
As usually happened when Simon was involved, the well-laid plan went awry. Need I even say that Gram was in the kitchen? And that when I raced around the corner from the hallway – “nice girls don’t run indoors, Cassandra” – I very nearly banged into her? And that she demanded to know what I was doing and that I couldn’t lie because lying is a sin and sinners go to hell and anyway even if I wanted to lie there was something about the look on Gram’s face that made me tell the truth even when I knew it would get me in trouble?
So I told her.
She marched me outside with one hand gripping my left shoulder so tight I would have yelped, except I knew that would make whatever was coming just that much worse.
Simon knew too. I could tell by the wide-eyed look on his face when he saw me being hauled in his direction. He put on his winningest grin and turned a beseeching freckled face to Gram.
“Hey, Mrs. O’Brien, would you like to join us? We were just going to give the squirrel a funeral.”
Simon didn’t meet my eye, so I couldn’t shoot him the evil glare he deserved. Didn’t he know the very mention of a funeral would send Gram into one of her tirades about showing respect for sacred rituals?
Surprisingly, it didn’t.
Gram’s mouth merely tightened into a thin line.
“Children shouldn’t play with dead things,” was all she said. “Leave that. Cassandra’s grandfather will tend to it later. Now go home, Simon. Your mother will be wondering where you are.”
I wondered if Gram saw the hurt that flickered into Simon’s round blue eyes at the mention of his mother. I guessed she didn’t because she just stood there staring at him for a long moment, until Simon shrugged.
“’Kay. Bye, Cassie. Later.”
He sauntered off in his usual way, bouncing a little and swinging his arms as if to say, see, I’m happy, I’m okay, I don’t care.
He didn’t look over his shoulder for me to say bye back.
I didn’t know whether to be mad at Simon or sad about the squirrel or even sadder about the fact that Simon’s mom wouldn’t be at home. I knew Simon carried his key on a string around his neck and let himself in after school because his mom was never there.
I knew Simon didn’t want me to tell anybody that. He thought it would make his mom look bad, and he didn’t want to do that because she worked really hard. She was a cashier at Army & Navy in the daytime and a waitress at Dooley’s at night. Sometimes Simon’s sister was home, but she was seventeen and had a boyfriend, and it’s not like Simon wanted to spend time with her anyway. He didn’t sit down with his family and say grace before supper like Gram and Grampa and I did.
I didn’t even know if Simon knew the words to Grace Before Meals. I didn’t tell Gram that. She had her own way of pinpointing Catholics who measured up, and one of them was knowing the right words to prayers. (Much later in life, I came to think of it as Gram’s personal shibboleth, her way of catching out the Protestants because they called the Our Father the Lord’s Prayer and kept on talking when they got to the “for thine is the kingdom” bit.)
Anyway, I was pretty sure Simon never said grace. He’d just go in and make himself some Kraft dinner, or maybe a hot dog.
He never got roast chicken and mashed potatoes with homemade gravy. Or meatloaf with green beans. Or big pans of lasagna.
Right then, that made me mad. So mad that I surprised myself and did something Gram says nice girls don’t do. I talked back.
“You didn’t have to send him home like that. Why couldn’t he stay for supper?”
I was regretting the words even as they were coming out of my mouth, but I couldn’t call them back. I knew I was in trouble for the squirrel already, so why had I gone and made it worse?
The hand that Gram had used to steer me into the backyard was still on my shoulder. She looked down at me, and her hold loosened a little.
“That wouldn’t be fair, Cassandra.” Her tone was softer than usual but no less firm. “He has to spend time with his own family. His mother will want to see him.”
What was weird was that Gram didn’t look mad anymore. She just looked sad. Which confused me. I didn’t know what she had to be sad about. It wasn’t her whose mom was dead. It wasn’t her whose father left right after the car accident and never came back.
I didn’t remember either of these things. It was nine years before, and I was twenty-one months old at the time. That’s what it said in the newspaper clipping that I found in Gram’s family Bible.
Mom and Dad were just pictures on the shelf in the living room – Mom so pretty in her long white wedding dress, with her straight dark hair all piled up on her head, and Dad wearing this goofy suit, with big sideburns and a bigger smile that reminded me of Simon’s. I didn’t know them.
But still, they were my parents and I was the orphan, or at least half-orphan, so why was Gram being sad?
Grownups never made sense.
What made even less sense is that I never got in trouble for that day. Grampa buried the squirrel later and let me watch. I didn’t dare pray out loud, in case he told Gram, but I did say a Hail Mary in my head, which was okay because God could hear your thoughts. I felt like I should say something – recite a poem, maybe, but I couldn’t think of any except that stupid one about daffodils and lonely clouds. (Gram said I wasn’t allowed to call it stupid, that it was written by a really famous guy, but I didn’t care. It was stupid, and anyway it had nothing to do with a squirrel funeral.)
So I didn’t say anything at all.
Gram never mentioned the squirrel again.
Not to me, anyway. I know she talked to Grampa about it later, after I was in bed. I thought I heard them laughing, but it couldn’t have been about that. It must have been something else.
No one ever said a word about the squirrel again.
I’d like to say I don’t know why that day sticks in my head, but of course I do.
It was the next day, when Simon and I were standing under the elm tree debating whether we’d ride to the park or walk to the corner store, that he told me they were going.
I didn’t get it at first.
“Going? Like on a trip? Where?”
What twigged me in to the fact that something was wrong was that Simon didn’t meet my eye, and that wasn’t normal – whether he was making fun of me or saying something nice, his blue eyes would never leave my face.
He just looked at the ground and kicked at it with his foot as if there was something there, but I didn’t see anything when my eyes followed the path of his white sneakers.
“No, going like moving. Mom wants to go live near my grandma. In Saskatchewan.”
All I knew about Saskatchewan was that it was flat and two whole provinces east of me. As far as I was concerned he might as well be going to the moon.
“Saskatchewan?”
I heard the stupidity of the echo, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Simon just kept kicking the ground.
When I finally found my voice again, it came out as a squeak.
“When?”
Simon stopped kicking the ground and looked at me then. If he hadn’t been a boy, I would have said his eyes were full of tears. “Next week.”
My squeak was practically a yelp. “Next week? That fast? How can you go that fast?”
Simon averted his eyes again. “Mom’s been packed for a long time. I just …”
If he hadn’t been a boy, I probably would have hugged him.
“You just didn’t want to talk about it.”
I finished his thought for him, and Simon almost smiled.
I thought for a moment, then I kicked the ground too. Hard. So hard that a chunk of dirt flew up and hit Simon’s jeans.
“Well, that stinks.” I felt so rebellious I decided to add something Gram would never let me say. “That sucks.”
Simon laughed then, and I laughed too.
We didn’t say anything more about it. We went back to our usual stuff that week, walking to school together and riding our bikes to the park and climbing the big tree in Simon’s back yard. We didn’t even talk about it the day the moving van came to take all their stuff away.
I went over the day he left. I just stood in his front yard, not sure what to do with myself, while his mom and sister got into the station wagon.
Simon came over and stood looking at me, kind of shuffling from foot to foot.
“Bye, Cassie.”
That’s all he said.
Which was two words more than I could manage. I just grabbed him and hugged him really tight and let go and ran home before he could say anything.
I never saw him again.
I sent him a couple letters and cards. For his birthday and Christmas, and even a jokey Valentine. He never wrote back.
I started hanging out with Marie more then, and Donna, and things just kept going and most of the time I didn’t really think about Simon.
Till the day Gram came to meet me at the door when I got home from school. I knew by the look on her face that something was wrong. I didn’t think I’d forgotten any chores, and I knew I’d said my prayers. Besides, something about her eyes suggested it was bigger than chores or prayers or even disrespect.
Her voice was so quiet. And it wasn’t firm. It shook a little as she told me the news she’d heard from one of the ladies in the Catholic Women’s League. She even let me see the article someone had sent from the Saskatoon paper.
Family killed in house fire.
The letters were already starting to swim in front of me as I read that a forty-year-old woman was dead, along with her eighteen-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son.
I didn’t read any more.
I just started to cry. Gram wrapped me in her arms and held me against her.
I never knew till that day how warm Gram was. How comfortably my head fit against her shoulder. How soft her cotton flowered dress was when my tears started to soak it. How still she could stay, just holding me as I cried until I had no more tears. How gentle her voice could be.
“He’s with God now, Cassandra.”
Something in the quiet conviction of her tone made me believe her.
***
What would have happened to us, I wonder.
Would we have grown apart with the inevitable passage of years.
I like to believe not. He’d have moved back west and we’d have been the same old Cassie and Simon, just hanging out, trading in bike rides and tree climbs for hikes on the North Shore and endless cups of coffee at J.J. Bean.
Sometimes I see him there, taller and broader-shouldered but with the same freckles and the same enormous grin. And I wonder if our relationship would have changed.
What kind of man would he have been.
Would he have been full of mischief still, and boyish charm, with a quixotic approach to love. Would we have lived an Amazing Race-like life – bungee jumping over Victoria Falls, running with the bulls in Pamplona, bartering with peddlers in the casbah, mamboing our way through the streets of Havana.
Or would the years have dimmed him, buttoned him up, faded the grin and the freckles into the cardboard-cutout face of just another bored man living a life of quiet desperation.
Sometimes I’m glad I never got to know.
Other times I wake up with tears streaming down my face and I know I was dreaming about him again.
Him. And Gram.
I like to think they’re out there somewhere, looking for me. I know Gram would be appalled – “good Catholics go to heaven, Cassandra” – but when I ran across the idea of the dybbukim in a world religions course at university, I latched onto it. I know their spirits are roaming the world still, benevolent dybbuks searching for corporeal form so they can return and tell me why they left.
It makes me smile to think of the pair of them, desperately trying to find a way to make me recognize them in their new bodies, to beckon me to look up from my writing, step away from the desk, go out into the world and live.
It’s Simon who’ll try the hardest, I know. He’ll smile out at me from behind someone else’s eyes, and he’ll ask me to come out and climb the tree with him.
Gram will be there, watching, and I’ll grin at both of them.
“I can’t, Simon,” I’ll say. “Because nice girls don’t climb trees. And children shouldn’t play with dead things.”