By Mary Ellen Campagna
Mr. Foley’s sister, Gin Thompson, was somewhat taken aback when the mail person arrived on the Wednesday after New Year’s with a suspicious looking package; suspicious because it was both heavy and oblong; a dimension heretofore not observed by her, at least not pertaining to a package.
“Mercy!” she yelled upon twisting the last bit of brown paper away from its contents.
Mr. Thompson stood beside his wife as she read the note addressed to her from St. Paul, Minnesota. They lived in Sioux City, Iowa.
“This is obviously from your brother Jack,” Harold Thompson said, grinning due to the curiosity aroused because Jack had been out of touch for years.
His wife didn’t find her husband’s big grin amusing. She usually knew what he was thinking. Yet, he was right. Jack hadn’t contacted Gin, his only sibling, in coming on fifteen years.
“It’s not FROM Jack!” Gin screamed. “It IS Jack!”
“What the hell?” was all Harold could find to say. To ask. Whatever.
Gin plopped down in Harold’s usual chair holding the ominous quart jar in both hands. “Gee whiz,” was all she could muster, and then a quieter, “Damn.”
“I had so many things I wanted to ask him,” she said.
“I wanted to pick his brain a little too,” Harold said, trying not to smile. “I guess that opens up a can of worms now,” he continued, still pretending a serious demeanor.
“Shut up, Harold!” Gin insisted.
Still, the couple agreed that what Jack Foley did, sending himself to his sister in such an unadulterated, absurd and impossible form with only a brief note was, in itself, unthinkable, untenable, and even morose.
They didn’t use those exact words, but that’s what they thought and Gin did say: “He’s made a mockery of my life.”
After all, Jack Foley had known that ever since his older sister turned sixteen, she’d adored canning. He was present in the Foley home attending grade school when Gin enthusiastically learned to can and pickle cucumbers, beets, zucchini, radishes, and okra. There were also jars of tomatoes and a host of other vegetables.
This very day in the Thompson basement assorted canned veggies were lined up with care on grease papered shelves.
But what should I do with this jar of mortal remains? Gin wondered.
She suffered, perhaps more than was necessary, over the prospect of Jack’s ashes getting mixed up with the onions which were the same color, though of a coarser texture, of course; dear nostalgic memories mixing with fatigued, cooked vegetables in a pickled sauce.
“What do you make of it?” Harold asked with a ruddy faced naivete that deserved scolding, but she didn’t have the stamina for it at that moment.
His question seemed as rottenly absurd as the jar full of what had been her brother for over 59 years. She pondered over how she was to remember him now. The phrase: Jack the vagabond’s last stop occurred to her but was quickly abandoned.
Jack was once an itinerant deli worker. A pill popper of barbiturates; yet he’d probably saved the life of a little girl named Betsy Sears by taking her to Hobby ’N Crafts every Friday so she could buy supplies and paint her way past the abuse she was dealing with at home until she was old enough to go out on her own. Ten years of going to the craft market, reading the ads while Betsy shopped.
He’d desperately wanted to donate one of his corneas to the Eye Bank but they’d insisted on a pair; something he couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice. Still, it was a sweet thought, their mother always said.
“And what would Mama think of Jack passing this way?” Gin asked, conjuring a gnawing question that Harold certainly couldn’t answer.
“What way?” Harold asked. “We know nothing of how the fellow actually died; if he were ill for a long time or hit by a bus. We just don’t know.”
“I guess I mean, what would she think of him passing himself to me like this?”
Gin confessed that she should have called her brother more often, not understanding the true nature of her failure; yet, realising deep down that there must have been a time when she dropped the ball, when she might have kept it surging in the air until Jack could have caught it, might have returned it, and kept the momentum going. She’d never been one to send birthday cards, or even Christmas cards. She thought of that too.
“You did all you could,” Harold soothed.
Everyone who says that phase knows it’s a lie. Still, as Harold saw it, soothing was a husband’s duty in such a situation, and he was merely doing his duty. He certainly felt no guilt in regard to the strange demise of his brother-in-law — no guilt or remorse whatsoever.
His only hidden concern was that Gin would somehow grow less fond of canning. This might affect his daily menu as it was presently full of pickled relish and mango chutney, condiments he favored almost as much as he loved a good cut of beef.
And Harold was right to worry, for it did take Gin a few weeks to bounce back, but canning was in her nature. Her mother had always told her that, and it was true.
She would store Jack on the bottom shelf, far to the left of the vegetables, and that would be that.
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Mary Ellen Campagna taught Creative Writing and Essay at Virginia Western Community College after receiving her Master’s in Liberal Arts from Hollins University in Virginia. She now writes full-time from Upstate New York. She was recently published in Wild Sound Festival/Experimental Stories, Half and One Literary Magazine, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Guild.
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