No New Shoes

Do other people plan for this moment? I shift the hangers in the wardrobe though I already know there’s no good suit, pristine for a smart exit. Cuffs are worn, collars rough at the back, and the lapels are all too wide, or too narrow, I don’t know which, but I do know, like Goldilocks, they are not just right.

The shoes are worse. Even Harry’s Sunday best have been out in the paddocks. The heel of the right shoe when I pick it up is the counter-wedge to the accelerator on the tractor. We got out of the habit of buying new things in the last few years—decades if the truth be known. Harry and I made do. They say people return to their upbringing as they get older, and we are children of the Depression. Are. Were. We. Me. Language isn’t working like it did before.

The Funeral Director is waiting for me. For me and the suit and the shoes. I made him a cup of tea when he arrived. I think the milk is off—those telltale lumps that thankfully sink—but he is a polite man and said nothing. We used to call them Undertakers. Because they undertook to do the things the family didn’t want to face. This man sitting in the front room not drinking his tea has given my husband his last bath, his last shave, and I am left to dither over ties. Birthday ties, Father’s Day ties. A timeline in strips of cloth.

“I’ll have to buy some new shoes,” I say as I catch him with his eyes closed in the one chair that catches a block of sunlight at this hour. He has usurped the cat who has always used this fact to her advantage. Harry used to let her be, and sit in the other chair. His kind heart. I will not cry at memories.

“Oh no.” The Undertaker is up already, coming towards me, arms outstretched. “Please, no new shoes.” He takes the shabby suit away from me. Suddenly I don’t want to let go. I don’t want any more of Harry leaving me. I fear the time when the place will no longer smell of him.

“Truly, any shoes are better than new,” he says. He is no longer a vague man in black, this director of funerals. He sounds honestly concerned, even passionate. “Shoes are made for walking.” He laughs suddenly. “Like boots. Like that song.” I remember the song but can’t imagine Harry walking all over anyone. “New shoes won’t walk anywhere. It’s best he leaves in his shoes, shoes that have been places with him.’ 

There is time set aside so we can go and sit with Harry. The girls arrived this morning and drive me in. They are both grandmothers themselves now. How can that be? It’s only a moment ago I told Harry I was pregnant and he was staring at me, for once in his life lost for words.

Before I can get to the casket, Laura bends to kiss my cheek in some misplaced motherly instinct. That was actually the first inkling of getting old: when the children started to look down on us. They overtook even Harry.

Bethany is ahead. She beckons me over.

“Haven’t they made Dad look fine,” she whispers.

I don’t know why it is all hushed voices in funeral parlours. It’s not as if the dead are likely to be eavesdropping. I say loudly, “Yes,” though I am suddenly reluctant to join Bethany by the casket to verify her claim. This place is thickly carpeted—to better hush voices. I hang back. I want to remember Harry as he was, my Harry. But Harry’s voice is in my head, quite loud, ignoring the hushiness too. “If I’m going to be hung for a goose, I might as well have a gander.” He was always coming out with silly sayings. I never knew what he’d say next. Whatever it was, he was always right. So I haul my flesh over for a gander.

And yes, he looks fine. His hair is neatly parted and brushed back. He was inordinately proud that he had all that hair to the last. He is neat and clean and fine and wrong.

My Harry was born on the land, lived on the land, died on the land. The land was in him, and for all his scrubbing over the laundry tub at the end of each day, it was on him. The clean body resting on satin did not look like Harry at all.

“Remember Saturday breakfasts?” Bethany was whispering behind me.

“Pancakes,” sighed Laura. “The only time he cooked. Served with lemon and white sugar.” They both forget themselves and giggle. The lemon tree was at the back by the dunny. They’d fight over who would have to go and pick the lemon.

“Remember the tree he put on the roof when he was building the new house?” asks Laura.

“What was that all about?” says Bethany.

They were sharing their memories. Telling stories as they have been since they arrived from Melbourne and Sydney respectively. They didn’t know him until after the war so they remember a one-eyed man, who nevertheless saw all their foibles and embarrassing moments. He is not Harry in these stories, he is Dad, an adult man sandwiched into their lifespans. Dad, every story a eulogy, and none from the last year. They avoid that.

“It was for luck,” I turn to tell my daughters, having forgotten about the tree myself till this moment. He hauled up a fir tree in its pot and left it squatting on the new roof like a misdirected Christmas tree even Santa would avoid. “Builders put a tree on the top of a new building once the roof is on. An offering to the trees that gave the timber.”

“And it was a lucky house, wasn’t it?” says Laura, our baby, stroking my hand.

Lucky. It’s a word I keep hearing since I rang the ambulance and waited the twenty minutes until they got to our new house, now old. I may not have conveyed any urgency. It was the way of us, not to draw attention. I told the nice woman on the phone that Harry was quite unwell. The paramedic when he arrived confirmed what I already knew.

“He was lucky, he’d not have suffered,” he said from his kneeling position beside Harry, Harry himself beside the tractor.

Then a litany of luckiness since.

Lucky. He had a good life.

Lucky. He had a long life.

And lucky. It came quickly. At the right time.

A relief really.

As if this hole in my life is something to be thankful for—just because we’re old and death is in the correct order. Juliet can grieve Romeo but I must hide my sobbing in the shadows of night. The long and the short sobs, sending messages of despair. My re-morse code. Silenced in company because old women get on with it and count their blessings and admit they are lucky. Lucky that I had him so long and lost him before “it” went too far. The “it” our daughters won’t talk about because the dementia left him unable to recognise them.

The girls are sending silent messages to each other over my bowed head. I can feel them in the movement of the aerosol pine-scented air.

“Yes, let’s go and have a coffee,” says Bethany brightly. “The bakery looked like it’s changed since the days when the bread choices were sliced white or block white.”

She is the one with my hand now. They want the sad look out of my eyes, my dear children. They imagine they can mother it away.

They are right though, a coffee would be nice. But I have somehow come out without my purse. I break from Bethany’s gentle grip.

“Mum?”

I lean in and rummage in Harry’s pockets. He’s always sticking money away, for the plate at church, for a packet of Marlboro. Sure enough I pull a twenty-dollar bill from his inside pocket. It has grimy fingerprints over it. Something the undertaker hasn’t scrubbed clean.

“Thanks Harry,” I say, I whisper—it’s between him and me. I run my right hand through his hair, mussing the straight lines. I can kiss his forehead now.