Chapter Fifteen – The Night Tackle
The Misery of Mrs. Geesky Number 15. The Red Reticule.
BEFORE CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Avalokiteshvara, the bright being of compassion is a central figure and symbol in the Heart Sutra. This symbol is important for many reasons, one main reason is that compassion is often misunderstood to be a feeling.
How could that be when the Heart Sutra clearly iterates feelings are empty?
This emptiness is followed by the recognition that Avalokiteshvara is saved from all suffering and distress because compassion does not get entangled with the distress and suffering of another.
Dispassion allows the compassionate response to be free of seeking any reward or fruit or credit in being compassionate.
What does this point to for us?
It points to equanimity. We need the ability to remain composed and calm without self-interest in facing the suffering and distress of another.
Does Mrs. Geesky, despite her disruptive nature, exhibit compassion towards her cats? Is she entangled in such a way she seethes in a rage that may lead to retaliation?
How about you? Are you composed, calm, and dispassionate when encountering the suffering and distress of others?
Chapter Fifteen – The Night Tackle
Finished with her act of love Mrs. Geesky savors the sweetness of the feline heart. Independent. Free. Loyal. It’s how she sees herself.
She steadies her intention. ‘Tonight, I’ll bury Oslo. It is the only mercy left for him. To bury him properly.”
She keeps her mind on the work in front of her. Does not want to imagine him. Cold. Stiff. In the dark. Worst of all; gone. Someone thinking he is useless and unloved. Swept up as trash.
The main job tonight is to prepare. She finds her tattered cardboard box. In it she keeps what she calls her Guidebook. A handbook on death and dying. She shuffles her hands in the back of a kitchen drawer and tugs out the box. It is well used. Cracked and one corner is broken with age. She lifts off the lid with pleasure. The worn book cover is full of tiny holes where the leather gave way to finger marks. The small girth and narrow length are more like a phone book than a diary. A fine point gel pen hangs on the front cover.
The cats fed and cleaned scatter except for the old tom. She mimics a meow at him under the long white wooden table where he alone remains.
“I must write,” she insists. She needs to talk to herself to tailor things. Tracing three fingers over the diminished cover of the book, she leaves it on the table and gets up to draw herself a glass of water. On the table is a paper napkin where she arranges the glass. With a gentle kindness to the old tom, she bends down and lifts him up which alarms the old boy to the extent he yowls and strikes his paw in the air.
“Sorry there.” She whispers to him and drapes his body back on the floor as though he is boneless.
Opening the cover, she wants to hurry, wants to do things right. Instead, she reshapes her mind and adjusts the loose, laminated sheet which is always the first thing she sees. The yellow color is a telltale sign of the page being chalky white in a past life. In between the blue lines sealed in plastic in the hand of someone else, are the words from an old teacher whose name Mrs. Geesky can no longer remember.
You made them happier. Think of it from that place. You made them happier.
“It’s get out of jail free.” She says aloud to the old tom that is fast asleep.
In silence, she mouths them again and again sealing them into memory. “I must never forget these words.”
She vows glancing over at her sleeping witness. It is a prayer for forgiveness. Turning things on its head. Shaking out the guilt. Another time in a whisper. You made them happier…think of it from that place…you made them happier. Almost sad she lifts the old plastic sheet up exposing the first page of the book. In a childlike way with a crayon, she presses all five fingers on the barrel of the gel pen and with scrupulous attention draws one circle after another down along the left side of the paper. Careful to place each one under the one before, between the red vertical line and the inner hinge of the book. She draws each one the size of the one before. With each circle she recites in silence the three-line refrain. When she reaches the bottom, she lays the book on the palm of one hand and flutters the soft pages with the thumb of her other until she reaches a blank page.
Here she writes….
Sister. I bought a blue plastic baby bath for Oslo. You know Oslo. A sporty boy with tiger skin and a teethy grin. I will get him tonight. Bury him under the light. Where the sun shines and the grass grows high. Where it stays green for the longest of time. I follow the law.
In the middle of what she writes she panics and tries to make happy her terrible sadness. Big round tears fall from her eyes smudging the words. With a tissue she blots the page and smears the words. Over the inky words she says aloud the lines she struggles to write.
I told someone. Don’t be mad. Don’t be mad. Don’t be sad. Don’t be sad.
The old tom hears her pleading and offers absolution by folding his warm, big body on her feet under the table. Mrs. Geesky looks away from her words at the old tom face remembering how he looked when she stole him from a hoarder in an abandoned building. Bone thin, barely breathing, covered in mats…. wounded, dirty and unable to chew. She hears her long, sorrowful exhale as she reaches to touch the long thick fur on his aging face. She makes a throaty sound acknowledging his clemency.
She looks back at the page comforted by the old tom.
“I must remember.” She confides in the old cat lying at her feet.
I made them happier. I must think of it from that place. I made them happier.
She furls the pages of the book back to the first page where she with painstaking trouble restores the laminated yellowed sheet between the cover and the inner hinge of the first page. Before she disturbs the old tom, she lowers her head down and reaches for the old cat’s head. “You wonderful boy, you!” She says as she rubs and scruffs his ears. With both paws the cat cuddles her hand. The grip is tight and strong, and it is not until she slides her chair away from the table that the cat reels onto his back freeing her hand. “I’m a fool for you.” She croons, he swoons and purrs. She retrieves the cardboard lid, closes the box, and secures it back in the drawer.
“It’s time to get ready.” She announces to the old tom.
In another drawer she finds a carton of trash bags. She removes one green bag and lays it on the table.
With only the cat as an agreeable onlooker she moves like a dancer, well trained and choreographed. From the neat and ordered broom closet she selects a short shovel. It with a gravel-colored head and a thick round shaft of hickory wood, is just what she needs. She holds the shaft vertical to her face as she might a mirror….and looks into the blade. ‘I bury my loved ones with you.’ She affirms and lines up the shovel on the slick surface of the trash bag.
Back and forth she glides. The light through the kitchen window darkens as it slips into night. ‘The days are shorter. The streetlights were not bright enough. It’s dark where he is.’ She returns to the closet. Gathers gloves from an ordered stack of old garden pairs. ‘Next, a light.’ A Smith & Wesson pen light, still wrapped in a vacuum sealed package of hard plastic.
“Hermetically sealed!” She complains as she tries to open it with both hands. She struggles to free it from the airtight, molded plastic. “God almighty!” she condemns the manufacturer. Shining it at a wall she mumbles “It comes with batteries. Little consolation!”
‘What else?’
She steps back, checks night tackle. To herself, “Let’s see. The baby tub is in the trunk. The green body bag, gloves, light.... shovel. Am I forgetting anything? Scoop him out…bag…tub…gloves, just in case…light…shovel.” Mrs. Geesky looks down at her sleeping cat and confirms to him she thinks she has everything she needs. She checks with the cat again.
“I think you should stay in tonight old boy. I don’t want you following me. I’ve got enough to do without worrying about you.”
“Oh wait!” She broadcasts startling the old tom. “I need a cloth. Something to wrap him in.” The old tom sits up under the table. “I almost forgot. Oslo needs a shroud.” She collects a red and white flannel sheet from the same shelf of the gloves. Unfolding the cloth, she checks the size of it and decides it is large enough to cover him in a way she feels is proper.
With her palms down and flat she smoothed the unfolded green bag on the tabletop. She tilts her head, snuffles the kitchen air. The business at hand is to make things right and fit. She steps back away from the table. Checks again. “Do I have everything?” Tracks the gear. Smacks her lips. She stands with her folded arms under her bosom. “What? What?” she puzzles. She moves her hands to her hips. “Got it.” She claps her hands together in satisfaction. “I need something to mark the place where he died.”
“What?” she says as she inspects the room.
She wants something lasting, something durable.
“Oh.” she grunts. “I must not forget the stick. The stick. The stick. The stick.” She stops and takes a long, tired breath.
“THAT old interfering woman.” She stops. These thoughts splinter in between the well-rehearsed steps of her night work. She fights off her thoughts with a memorized line.
“I love all waste and solitary places.” She snaps her fingers first once…. then twice …. until she recalls the last of the line…. “Where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see.” In the lightness of a ritual, she spins around and recites aloud, “Seeing is believing. Seeing is believing.”
In this naïve lightheartedness she sits down on a little painted stool, opens the top of an equally small, ornamental trunk, and runs one finger along the surface of the in-laid artwork. It is a glazed motif of a single, bare-breasted woman kneeling in an imaginary forest where a large tiger guards her from behind. The images are neither fully real nor fully imagined. The colors are stern and unfriendly, calling the eye to look again and again in an attempt to decipher what is being imagined. She sits and opens the trunk and there on the top of her treasures she sees a stick. It is a discolored, watered down ordinary gray stick, a piece of driftwood. One end is rounded up and slopes down in a remarkable likeness of the melonhead of a false killer whale. “Yes!” she says as she shakes the stick. She holds the stick with both hands and turns it ninety degrees and moves the melon-shaped side up towards her face to get a better look. There is a long, thin shear in the wood, cutting a threadlike line in the place where she imagined the mouth would be and another shorter and curved one for a place where an eye would be. With the lightness of a happy child, she nods in satisfied delight with her find.
“Requited.” She whispers as she presses the stick against her two lips in a remarkable resemblance of a loving kiss. ‘I will place this stick to mark his death.’ This was her first thought but soon another thought came which pushed her to reconsider. ‘No. No.’ she banters with herself, ‘someone might steal it or break it. There’s no telling what might happen to it. No. No. I will give Oslo a respectful memorial and pound the stick into the ground where he is laid to rest.’
Content she places the stick on the table with the bearings of a headmistress; Mrs. Geesky, unmarried, sees herself as a woman, a governor of the homeless and unfed with the certitude of many years at her trade. She orchestrates an exactness of someone in charge.
In watchful preparation and meticulous arrangement, she picks up the small shovel in one hand, pulls one layer of the shiny, dark green bag with the other and begins to conceal and cover the shovel. One by one, in a familiar arrangement she organizes her tackle. She adds the leather gloves, then the pen light….one tool after the other, covering each one and wrapping it with the trash bag until she is able to roll them into one long round bundle. To secure the tools she folds in the excess ends and pulls to tighten the loose remaining flap. With the round roll of tools under her arm she rummages in a second drawer for a roll of tape and secures the bag.
‘I have the right tools…. everything I need,’ she congratulates herself. She puts everything away (she never liked leaving anything undone, believing it confusing and unnecessary) and makes one more visual sweep to make sure nothing is left out of place.
Pleased, she moves the green roll to the table by the front door. From the nearby hall closet she finds her camera. She smiles. “I’ll get him. Bury him. In the light.”
She stops and checks everything one more time. Then, waits for night to come.
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