Ashes on the Wind
by John Fischer

CHAPTER ONE
Our Betty Lies Over the Ocean

The ashes hit the water in a manner unlike anything he had expected. He had purposely positioned himself where he could not see over the railing, never thinking there would be any sound associated with this rite. But these were not mere fireplace ashes. The pouring sound went on and on, and Jack Acres wondered how there could be that much left of her—she had become so frail.

She had always been frail anyway, even in her more healthy days, though health for Betty, as long as Jack had known her, had been a relative matter. Jack’s concept of a healthy mother-in-law was when she used to have only three coughing spells a day, which she would always wave off as “something down the wrong pipe.” That’s why he had been surprised to hear the loud pouring sound. A silent dust cloud of ashes flying out over the water was more along the lines of what he had imagined. Besides, he remembered stories from others who had experienced cremation rites like this at sea, complete with jokes about brushing Uncle Something-or-other off their shoulders where he had settled on the wind.

Bobbi Acres was surprised that the ashes were thrown out so abruptly, but unlike Jack, she noticed nothing unexpected about the sound. She was already training her memory to a time when her mother’s soul had more gravity. A committed marriage, an extended family ... Sunday afternoons at Grandmother’s farm after singing in the First Presbyterian Church choir ... her mother’s accomplishments as a medical research assistant ... her mother as best friend to all her high school boyfriends (something that still stirred a playful jealousy in her). To Bobbi, the remnant that now remained of her mother gave little tribute to her true essence.

Bobbi already decided she was going to remember Betty in her childhood home on a farm in New York State rather than in some pastel condominium in Cocoa Beach, Florida, where she lived out her final years devoid of history and family roots. In Bobbi’s mind, her mother would always be a woman of substance. The person she became at the end was a mere shadow of her former self, cast on the perfectly manicured lawn of a Florida golf course. She might have gained some security when she married Sam, but Bobbi was convinced her mother gave up far too much in the exchange. If only she and Bobbi’s father, Ruddy Brewster, had stayed together. Then, instead of being in a boat off the coast of Florida, they would all most likely be in Shaughnessy, New York now, laying Betty to rest in the Brewster family plot across from the church. Or perhaps on the Martin farm where Betty had grown up, overlooking the rolling hills outside Parker Corners. Either would be preferable to being thrown to the wind, only to disappear within the vast, aimless blue water.

No one knew Betty’s wishes until after her death. She had instructed Sam, but he had seen no need to convey that information to anyone else in the family. Never mind that Bobbi had already made a trip to the funeral home to pick out a coffin.

“What’d you go and do that for?” Sam said when he found out. “I’m not paying for any fancy box just to burn her up in. Makes no difference once it burns.”

“Pop, you never told me she wanted to be cremated.”

“Well, I’m telling you now. I don’t want anybody gawking at her, and I don’t want any funeral service either.”

Samuel Dunn never talked about anything before it was absolutely necessary, and even then, a person often had to pry it out of him. He was now twice a widower, and that alone was enough to make him matter-of-fact about the whole experience—except that he was already like that anyway. There wasn’t anything Sam went through, including the death of two wives, that didn’t have him looking as though he’d already been through it so many times that nothing fazed him. Sam lived as if it were his dying duty to never let another living human soul know a thing about what he was truly thinking or feeling.

Jack always wondered what his mother-in-law had seen in Sam, besides someone to care for her, if you could call his abruptness “care.” Perhaps that was enough for Betty. Give him credit; that much he did, right up to the end.

Sam had taken Jack to the marina in his car right after the service at the Palm Avenue Church. The memorial service Sam had never wanted, but got anyway at the insistence of the rest of the family, had made him antsy, so when it was over, Bobbi had suggested the two of them go on ahead. They had ridden most of the way in silence. This, too, was not unusual, since Sam only spoke when asked direct questions. When he’d answered one of Jack’s questions with a comment about Betty being in the back, Jack had been tempted for a split second to turn around and see her sitting there. Of course, Sam had only meant that the ashes were in a box in the trunk.

Sam popped the trunk lid open as soon as they pulled into the marina parking lot and immediately went around and got out the box. They walked in silence to the boat, where the captain met them with a large bouquet of flowers from which he gave them each a handful.

“These are nice,” Jack said, looking at them quizzically.

“They’re for marking the spot in the water,” Sam stated, looking for a place to sit. He found one near the engine housing, where he sat with the box on his lap looking like a schoolboy with his lunch. A green sport coat hung loose and unwelcomed on his shoulders. It covered the only thing anyone had ever seen him wearing: a pastel polo shirt, open at the collar. This one was a graying yellow from being washed too many times with dark colors, a detail he’d missed while caring for himself and his dying wife for the last six months. He had a drawer full of bright new shirts, but Sam was a creature of the familiar.

On the left side of his forehead, Sam bore the signs of recent brain surgery: a dent the size of a golf ball. The surgery had made him more reluctant to speak than he already was, though Bobbi thought he only used that as an excuse to stay even further removed from those around him. His sky-blue eyes under snow-white hair stared directly forward, and ever since his surgery they had a startled look, as if everything he saw contributed to a sort of chronic low-grade irritation.

The box on his lap was small, about the size and shape of a pastry box—something that would more likely accommodate half a dozen donuts than the remains of a loved one. He had already gotten rid of his flowers, setting them on top of the engine housing, where they trembled along with the idling motor. Flowers did not suit Sam, but something about the box did. Maybe it was the fact that he finally had Betty reduced to this. Not that he wanted her dead; he just wanted her under control. No one ever had any of the Brewster women under control unless they were in a box, and this was undoubtedly the smallest box any of them had ever been in. No one remembered any other cremations in either the Brewster or the Martin family history. This only served to underscore the sadness of Betty Brewster ending up in a pastry box on the lap of Sam Dunn on a smelly, chartered deep-sea fishing boat in a Cocoa Beach marina, awaiting her final demise on the water. It was not supposed to end this way.

Barbara Ann Brewster Acres was proud of her heritage, even though Betty had rejected it, and in some ways, Bobbi identified more with her two grandmothers than with her own mother. This echoed a practice not uncommon in upstate New York, where “old money” often skipped a generation in the family trust funds and endowments. Bobbi felt skipped over by both money and tradition. When her mother had divorced out of the Brewster family, that took care of the money, and when Betty married Sam and moved to Florida, that pretty much severed any traditional ties to either side of her family.

Bobbi loved both her grandmothers and bore strong traits in her character from each of them. From her paternal grandmother Brewster she inherited style, social acumen, and a spirit of philanthropy; from the Martin side she got her faith in God and a genuine, welcoming personality. In Grandma Martin’s home there was always something warm in the oven, as well as something warm for the heart. And many a needy woman in the poorer sections of Shaughnessy knew the compassion of Grandmother Brewster as they were warmed by a blanket, a meal, and shelter that came through her kindness, right on through the Great Depression.

To Bobbi, the differences between these two families were a great benefit to her. But to her mother, they were only a source of conflict. Bobbi often doubted that her mother, after growing up in Parker Corners, ever fully adjusted to being a Brewster in Shaughnessy. Betty’s social graces always seemed stiff and somewhat contrived, manifesting in a tendency to laugh too loudly and drink too much at cocktail parties. In the end, she adjusted just enough to lose the charm of the farm and yet never quite enough to embrace the Brewster style. And when she and Ruddy, short for Rudyard A. Brewster Jr., divorced shortly after Bobbi and her brother, Will, were out of the nest, Betty lost even what she had tried to adopt as a Brewster. It was a bitter divorce, and Betty dealt with it by leaving behind every single piece of silver or crystal or fine embroidery with a B on it. Bobbi still refused to believe that the attic fire on Bingham Street that destroyed all the Brewster heirlooms was an accident. Even the family films were burned up. God knew that if Betty hadn’t torched it, she wished it torched enough times to be held responsible.

“You might not want to be a Brewster anymore,” Bobbi once told her mother, “but you seem to forget that I was born into this family.”

So Bobbi had ended up with one grandmother’s faith and another’s fortitude, and a sense that her heritage had been stripped from her by her parents’ divorce. Like many other difficult marriages in their generation, Bobbi’s parents had thought they were doing best by the kids to fake a happy marriage until after their offspring were out of the nest, figuring that a divorce would be easier on their children if they already had their own marriages going. Bobbi knew that divorce at any time was costly. It wasn’t money she had been cut from; it was history, tradition, and some tangible connection to the women who had made her who she was. What Betty had tried to discard, Bobbi was trying to find. Betty’s funeral was no exception.

“He didn’t show you the will, did he?” Bobbi had asked Jack while they were getting ready to attend the memorial service.

“Nope.”

“So we’re taking Sam’s word for it that she wanted to be cremated?”

“Are you thinking it was his idea?” Jack asked as he leaned over his wife in the mirror and tied his tie. “I guess I wouldn’t put it past him to save a few extra bucks and a lot of hassle.” It was cramped quarters in the small second bathroom of Sam and Betty’s two-bedroom condo.

“I don’t know. It was probably her idea.” Bobbi was a little annoyed at Jack’s intrusion and purposely took up more of the mirror, relegating her husband to one last glance at his Windsor knot from the upper left corner of their reflection. “She burned up everything else—might as well burn up herself. But what about her jewelry? Where do you suppose that is?”

“I’m sure Sam has it.”

Jack didn’t mind his fragment of functioning mirror. It was a trade-off for the joy of watching his wife primp. One of the most underrated pleasures of married life, he always thought: watching beauty maximized before your very eyes.

“She wore Grandma Martin’s wedding ring,” Bobbi said, tossing her hair. “The diamond is probably not worth fifty cents, but it’s the only thing Mom kept that belonged to her past. With my luck it got cremated too. Could you zip me up, please? And remind me to ask Sam about the ring.”

The memorial service at the Palm Avenue Church had almost been one of those pitiful events full of prayers and readings that boil down to a feeble hope that maybe—just maybe—the resurrection of Christ actually happened. It was going to be one of those services where the minister says some of that resurrection verbiage just in case, while the bulk of it is a kind of passing on of the baton of life, the present runner having given out entirely on the race. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective on these things—Bobbi had gotten wind of this ahead of time and made sure her mother’s funeral service had more substance to it. The minister was one of those who thought it was unfortunate. One would think that, being the minister, he would have been in total control of these services, especially in retirement-centered Florida, where churches abound more in funerals than weddings. But then again, he had never dealt with a female Brewster before.

There were more nice things said about Betty Brewster Dunn in that hour-long service than were ever said of her in her entire lifetime. The Reverend William Oglethorpe had been able to manage only a brief session with Bobbi and her brother, Will, in advance of the service. At times the family wasn’t sure the reverend was talking about the same woman they knew, but that’s one of the casualties of dying in a place where few know you.

Sam and Betty had lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, for almost ten years, but Sam was not the churchgoing, community-oriented type. Betty had developed a casual relationship with a few women at the church, more through a bridge club than anything that had to do directly with religion. It wasn’t anything like her former marriage and life in Shaughnessy, New York, which was centered around church and community. But that’s why Sam had wanted to move to Cocoa Beach in the first place: to get away from all of that. It was a sad commentary that a woman who had expended such effort trying to live a socially oriented life, in the end, had to have a minister presiding at her memorial service whose primary information about her came from a two-hour briefing with her adult children the day before.

That was one of the reasons Bobbi had wanted Jack to take part in the service along with Reverend Oglethorpe. He had a knowledge of Betty that the minister did not possess, and from what Bobbi and Jack could tell, a faith in God that also seemed to elude the aging reverend. Over her husband’s protests, Bobbi had insisted that Jack rewrite the service. It turned out to be a task he had actually relished, replacing all those vague, flowery sections with Scripture like “faith is the substance of things hoped for,” and “though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” The Reverend Oglethorpe was undoubtedly going to be glad to see these folks leave town.

The most poignant verse Jack picked for the memorial service turned out to be the one about Christ in the life of a believer being like a treasure in a jar of clay. It was hard, given the context, for everyone not to imagine Betty in an urn.

But Betty never saw the inside of an urn. No, Sam’s treasure was in a box—a cardboard box—with a plastic bag and the dust of Betty inside, closed up with a wire twist. “I don’t need a fancy urn,” Sam had insisted. “I just need to get her out to sea. Doesn’t matter how I get her there.”

Jack didn’t mind that sentiment, but Bobbi was having a harder time with it. She simply had not been ready to part with the material presence of her mother, even if it was only a handful of ashes now. Bobbi had watched her mother’s true essence spill out of its spent vessel three days earlier. She had smelled the scent of death in the small condo where Betty had breathed her last. Bobbi knew her mother was safe and happy now, but she herself felt suddenly, strangely alone.

In this, she and Sam shared something in common. Though Bobbi firmly believed in a resurrection, she lived in the here and now. As far as Bobbi was concerned, her mother was in two places at once. She was in heaven—of that Bobbi was certain—but she was also in the cardboard box. What was left of Betty had material significance. Though Bobbi had gone along with the cremation, she was not happy about letting her mother disappear on the wind. She would have preferred to have the remains in a place where she could visit and remember.

As far as Sam was concerned, all of Betty was in the box. There wasn’t anything else. He mocked all that Christian talk about resurrection. For him, a cruise on the ocean was the quickest and most efficient means of getting this whole thing over with and getting on with his life, whatever that would mean for him now.

“The service is over,” he said to Jack as he scanned the parking lot for the arrival of the others. “No more holy talk.”

“No more Scripture?” Jack said, half joking but half serious. He had been thinking about some kind of final word as they scattered the ashes at sea.

“Nope.”

“Nothing about coming from dust or going back to dust?”

“Spare me.” Sam clutched the box tighter, as if Jack were trying to wrestle it from him. “If you want to do something, you can sing some songs. Songs that everyone knows. Just as long as they’re not religious.”

Jack realized right then that Sam had probably been subjected to more religion in the last hour and a half than he had experienced in ten years.

“No problem, Pop. You’ve got it.”

Sam had visibly endured the church service well enough. Though there were moments when something might have touched him, his eyes stayed dry. And yet there were other signs of weakness. Bobbi would later show Jack bruises on her hip bone where Sam had a vise grip on her in the receiving line. And then there was the time during the service when Sam’s estranged youngest son came over and gave him a big hug from behind. That had made his eyes brighten. It happened during a camp song that Jack was teaching everybody. The song has a part where everyone reaches out and touches the people around them—a calculated risk at a Florida funeral attended mostly by elderly retired folks who were all strangers to them—but Bobbi had been clear about making sure they gave Betty what she would have liked regardless of anyone else, and Betty would have liked the reach-out-and-touch-someone camp song. It was what she had been trying to do with her life when she lived it, for in spite of whether she was happy or not, Betty always wanted everyone else to be.

The service had started with four hymns Jack picked out about the Resurrection and ended with a Catholic folksong that Bobbi’s sister-in-law had taught him about rising up on eagle’s wings. Bobbi’s brother, Will, had surprised everyone by ushering his whole family up front to help sing it, while motioning vigorously with his arms to the rest of the immediate family until they were all up there singing too. Sam wasn’t singing, but they got him out of the pew and up there with them. That was enough of a miracle.

The people loved it. A change of pace from the typical dirge was a welcomed experience. The brightness they emanated as they came through the receiving line afterward made it seem more like a wedding than a funeral.

Sam had never wanted a funeral in the first place, and Bobbi could smile afterward and know that, in a way, he had gotten his wish. This was nothing like a funeral.

“Will you do mine?” one spry Floridian had beamed at Jack as she shook his hand. Bobbi, Jack, Will, and his wife, Jackie, would later joke on the boat about going into business. “On Eagle’s Wings Funeral Coordinators” was what Jackie wanted to call it.

“Where are they?” Sam kept saying impatiently from the boat. The trembling flowers over the engine compartment were dusting the panel with yellow pollen. Some of them had broken away from the bunch and were working their way to the edge. Jack wondered why the captain had left the motor running.

Whenever Jack and Bobbi visited Florida, Sam acted like he was always waiting for Bobbi. This time was no exception. Bobbi had her mother’s gift of gab, and when she was around people, she was never conscious of time. Jack paced the boat, impatient as well. He couldn’t think of anything to say to Sam at the moment and wished for the quick arrival of the remainder of the funeral party to come and save him from the awkwardness he was feeling.

“Sit down,” said Sam. “You’re making me nervous.”

Jack obliged and sat on one of the white wooden chairs along the railing. The sun was about to dip behind one of the many condominium towers that line the more popular Florida beaches. The captain came and spoke a few words to Sam that Jack could not hear over the gurgling engine.

“What was that all about?” asked Jack with his expression.

“He wants to know how much longer,” shouted Sam. “I told him we leave in fifteen minutes whether they’re here or not.” And Jack knew that he would.

Luckily, they arrived in exactly fourteen minutes. The entourage piled out of two cars. Will and Jackie along with their two young sons, Kyle and Kevin—they lived locally in Cocoa Beach—and then the out-of-town guests: Jeffrey, Kate, and Jeremy, adult children from Sam’s previous marriage whom Betty had raised since their adolescence, Sam’s brother Albert, and Bobbi. Jack and Bobbi had left their own two children home with their neighbor in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a decision Bobbi was now regretting. The absence of her children only added to her loneliness.

The fact that Albert Dunn and Samuel Dunn were from the same background and the same family defied reason. Albert was everything Sam was not. He was as positive as Sam was negative, as kind as Sam was gruff, as believing as Sam was unbelieving, as religious as Sam was pagan. It was almost as if they had sworn a pact during childhood to take the opposite side on everything. The one thing that betrayed their kinship was their orneriness. Uncle Albert was as ornery about doing good as Sam was ornery about being nasty.

“What have you got there?” said Albert as he pulled up a white chair next to his brother.

Sam made no reply.

“Betty’s not there, you know.” Albert leaned over and turned his ear, as if listening for something from the box.

“She’s not anywhere else, either,” Sam said. “And don’t start in on me.”

Uncle Albert winked at Jack and smelled the batch of flowers that he waved in front of his nose. He never gave up on Sam, though they were hardly ever together except for important family events such as this one. Uncle Albert had not made the expected geriatric migration south; his home would always be in upstate New York, where everyone knew him well. When Albert Dunn died, no one would have to brief the minister. And when Albert died, it would be hard to find a place to park in the church parking lot.

Albert had lost his own wife in a violent automobile accident, and though it had been sixteen years since her passing, he talked about her as if they were still married. In his mind they were. People at his church were always trying to fix him up with some spry young widow, but Albert would have nothing of it.

“So what are you going to do now, Sam?” Albert said.

“Travel” was the reply.

“Where?”

“Maybe I’ll come up and see you.”

Anybody who heard Sam’s response over the roar of the engine was a little surprised. Sam had never indicated before any desire whatsoever to leave Florida, even for a trip, and it certainly was a shock to hear him talk about seeing his brother. The words exchanged between them over the last thirty years could fit on one sheet of paper.

“That would be splendid,” said Albert, quite pleased with the news. He then threw in an idea of his own. “Or we could go back to the Keys.”

Everyone in the family knew that stories of a dark, mysterious past in the Florida Keys haunted the brothers’ childhood, and Sam’s permanently startled eyes seemed to focus on some distant memory with the suggestion.

The boat pulled out of the marina as the sun slipped behind one of the resort towers on the beach. By the time they got out to the open sea, there would be a painted sky. Betty had always loved a sunset cruise, and Bobbi tried to comfort herself with the thought that her mother would find her resting place on such a perfect evening. Bobbi was trying as hard as she could to keep a positive attitude, but her mind was on the rolling hills of her childhood and her grandmother Martin’s farm outside Parker Corners, where she wished they were placing Betty’s remains. In such a place, she could remember her mother in her best years, return to visit with her own children, show them the farm where their grandmother had grown up, and teach them about their great-grandmother Martin.

Jack, unaware of her struggle, lovingly caught her eye, and she managed a smile back.

“What are you thinking?” Jack spoke into her ear, moving closer to her.

“Oh, I was just thinking about how Mom wanted her bed turned toward the door the last couple days of her life so she could welcome her guests. Imagine that. The sorry state she was in, and she was still trying to be a proper host.”

They stared silently out at the brilliant water for a while until Bobbi spoke again. “Didn’t Sam want you to play some songs?”

“Oh yes, I almost forgot.”

Jack then got out his guitar and led everybody in “If I Had a Hammer,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and “This Land Is Your Land.” Nothing religious, but it cheered everyone up. And then, just when Bobbi was about ready to make a move toward organizing the final ceremony of the ashes, Sam got up and took his box over to the railing, and before anyone could say anything, he undid the wire twist on the plastic bag and dumped Betty into the ocean. Unconsciously, Bobbi’s hands flew out before her as the ashes poured out and then returned slowly to her lips as if they had been caught doing a silly thing. A look of vacant futility filled her eyes as she stared out at an empty sea.

Everyone quickly tossed their flowers onto the water, and as the boat turned back, the children spotted a school of dolphins diving in the very spot where the flowers were floating.

“She loved dolphins,” Bobbi said softly to Jack, who was holding her at the railing. Her voice was immediately swallowed up by the roar of the boat’s engine.

Copyright © 1998, John Fischer
Published by Bethany House Publishers
ISBN 1–55661–678–3