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Dead Husband

by Christa Hill

Eva’s husband cleaned at least one of his eighteen guns every morning before breakfast, and then another one while she made his supper, and then another one after that supper had settled pretty well and brought him into a relaxed feeling of completeness after a full day’s work. As a mechanical engineer at the local Oscar Mayer factory, he earned enough money to keep his wife at home (waiting to get pregnant) and pursue his life-long gun appreciation and collection hobby. And so he sat in his tweed recliner polishing his newest addition, a pearl-handled .38 special, on the same night that he died. He didn’t know, of course, that he was going to die. He was strong and was always considered healthy at his regular checkups in the factory clinic. He kept in shape by playing church softball on Tuesday nights. And as for his guns, he had always been a self-proclaimed “meticulous perfectionist.”

At the other end of the shag-rug tapestry stood Eva’s grandmother’s cherry rocking chair that she had just inherited two months ago. Eva found this chair perfect for her crocheting because it didn’t have arms, so she never bumped her elbows. On this night of her husband’s death, Eva sat in her armless chair draped with a bright yellow cloak over her lap as she crocheted the trim on the ends and laughed occasionally at “Murphy Brown” on the television. When her fingers were tired, she would let them rest on the head of her eight-year-old Weimaraner, who was older than her relationship with the gun-collector and named after a favorite uncle, and who, no different from any other evening, was lying next to the antique rocking chair, almost asleep.

Eva had been working diligently on the same crocheted cloak for almost two weeks. It was one of her biggest projects yet, since her marriage to the gun-collector. During the commercial break, she reached for the scissors and clipped the yellow yarn umbilical cord from the mother skein and then creaked back in the rocker to admire her fine craftswomanship. The gun-collector at the adjacent chair also leaned back to admire one of the finest polishing jobs he had ever accomplished. And the couple sat and stared happily at their work as the dog slept peacefully, raising an ear occasionally at some noise on the television.

Eva, however, wanted her husband to appreciate the cloak. She knew it would be bold of her, straying from their unspoken agreement to allow each other peace in their individual evening lives. But it had taken her half a month to make this cloak, as compared to just a couple of hours to clean a gun. It was also more creative, she told herself. After all, she wasn’t cleaning something old -- she was making something new, something that had never existed before in the whole world. (Not that she would ever dare say to the gun-collector that it’s possible someone else owns exactly the same pearl-handled pistol that he bought at the gun-collector convention last month, of course.) But more importantly, they’d been married for three years, and that, Eva thought, should be reason enough for him to, for once, take a look at what she’s always working on in the same house, the same living room, in the same hours of the evenings, on opposite ends of the same rug. So she stood up to try it on and then walked -- confidently-appearing, she hoped -- over to the hall mirror where she could see what he saw at the same time that he saw it. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.

The gun-collector looked up from his child and squinted at his wife, but he could not see her. “It looks fine,” he said. But she saw him squint and accused him of lying or just not caring, like he used to do back when she was a new wife, back when she was ignorant about how much interest her husband would have in the things she did, back when she learned that it was better to just appreciate things herself and not ask for his opinions.

And apparently the gun-collector had changed since the early days. He seemed at least to love his wife enough to give the impression that he was interested. And so he carried his gun over to the bookcase where he had left his glasses and put them on. He allowed himself the opportunity now to inspect the gun from an armstretch distance before looking clearly at his wife’s cloak. She sighed impatiently as he examined the way the gun would shine if he were to hold it out like he were about to shoot it.

“Larry!” the wife said. “What do you think?”

He really was looking at it. One must not forgot that in order to be an accomplished marksman, one must study one’s target thoroughly. He thought it looked fine, although he was concentrating, and forgot to say so to his wife. Then gun-collector eased his shooting pose to the left until he was aiming directly at the cloak. From this view, he thought, it still looked fine, and he practiced changing his target from the collar to the third button to the left pocket. Finally he said, “It looks so good I could shoot it.”

Eva slumped and frowned. “Stop aiming that thing at me,” she complained. “It makes me nervous.”

The gun-collector held the aim a little longer, mostly just to prove that he could because he was the husband, and then he dropped his arms to his side and petted the dog, who had come over to the bookcase to join him. “It’s not loaded,” he explained. “I just cleaned it. See?” He lifted the gun up to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a quick, sharp, tremendous explosive sound, and then he just slid down the bookcase to the floor where a red puddle began to form.

Eva had just finished complaining, only two seconds before, that the gun made her nervous. So when she heard the shot, all of her muscles twitched and everything went black, and all she could hear after the explosion was a body-numbing, flat ringing, almost a singing, in her ears -- initially she thought it was she who had been shot. But when she could see again, and she realized she was still alive, it was not her husband slumped down on the floor that first caught her revived vision, but rather the slight tipping movement of the bookshelf.

Eva’s husband was probably already dead at this point, but Eva, several days later, thought it might have been possible he was still breathing a little bit just before the bookcase fell. That heavy walnut bookcase had never really been very stable, in fact, since the moving van people had chipped one of the legs. So when the dead (or almost dead) gun-collector had slid down the side of it, it had started leaning slowly away from the wall, which is exactly what Eva saw when the blackness in her eyes faded. The books began to slide toward the front, and suddenly Eva’s grandmother’s antique vase on the top shelf rushed forward and flew off the shelf.

“Oh!” Eva exclaimed as she darted to catch the flying vase. She succeeded without so much as a scratch to the delicate porcelain, even though she stumbled, perhaps on her dead husband, and ended on the floor over by the television.

The dog had darted out of her way and right into the path of the falling bookcase, and when she got up she saw him and her husband crushed under the weight of the books and solid mahogany case. The man lay motionlessly, soaked in his own blood, but the dog’s front half squirmed to free his back half from the load.

“Oh, Oliver!” she cried out. “Oh, my God!” The poor dog squirmed and whimpered, but he could not release himself from the painful situation. Eva hardly knew what to do because she really wasn’t strong enough to lift the bookcase herself. Usually in a situation like this, she would call her husband to help, and so she called out, “Larry? Larry?” It was then that she realized what had just happened, that in the past six seconds, she had said she was nervous, her husband had indicated that she shouldn’t worry, he had shot himself, the vase had fallen out of the bookcase (but she had caught it), and the bookcase had tipped over onto on her dog’s back and almost all of her dead husband. She blinked and breathed and then reached to touch the lifeless leg under the black polyester pants. But the dog was whimpering and squirming and howling out in agony. Eva’s heart tore at the sound of it.

She realized there was no time to waste. She tried stacking some of the books up as a prop, but she couldn’t get the bookcase onto the stack. Finally she used the vase on its side to roll the bookcase up along several stacks of books that gradually increased in height until she was at a high-enough stack to pull the dog out, but by now he had frozen in shock. Then she rummaged through her dead husband’s pockets to get to his car keys and, finding them, wrapped the dog in the closest thing she could find, her new yellow cloak, and rushed him with all her strength out the door into the car.

The traffic was heavy, and Eva was frantic that she would not make it to the animal hospital in time. The dog’s breaths were really light now, and his back half was starting to swell up grotesquely.

Eva’s Weimaraner didn’t die before the veterinarian saw him. Dr. Edward assured her that the dog was going to make it but was going to need a lot of medical attention and so would have to stay at the hospital. Eva finally sighed with relief and then remembered her dead husband on the floor under the bookcase and decided she’d better call the police before he got rigormortis so that they couldn’t straighten him out to fit him into a coffin. She knew that he would have appreciated her thinking of that.

She decided that it would be best to call from here and just meet the police at home instead of going home and calling from there, since that way she could say she shouldn’t really hold up the veterinary phone line with 911, and so she asked the veterinary receptionist if she could borrow their telephone. The receptionist complied and pushed the phone toward Eva, who placed her purse and her new yellow, but slightly bloody, cloak on the receptionist desk so that she could have a free hand to dial.

“Oh, how beautiful!” exclaimed the receptionist, touching the cloak. “Such lovely material! What is it, some kind of fur or something?”

Eva stood with the receiver lifted halfway to her ear and watched the receptionist fondle her cloak. The way she stroked the woven yellow strands so gently and so cautiously struck Eva suddenly with a strange excitement, and her body melted into a slight slump, standing still. The monotonous double-tone from the receiver was drowned completely out by the receptionist’s sighs of admiration.

“You really like it?” Eva whispered, her eyebrows raised in nervous hope.

The receptionist smiled broadly. “Oh, do I!” she said. “It’s just beautiful, really!” Her eyes glistened and appeared quite sincere to Eva, who just stared back at those same eyes until they dropped down embarrassedly and resumed the study of the cloak.

“It’s yarn, actually,” Eva finally responded to the original question as she lowered the receiver mechanically back to the cradle. “Angora hair yarn. It comes from Austrian goats.” The receptionist widened her eyes with interest. “I made it,” Eva announced somewhat suddenly.

“Did you?” the receptionist asked, now even more impressed, as she slipped her long, painted nails through the crocheted loops of the border. “You’re really so talented.”

Eva grabbed up the cloak with excitement and slipped it over her shoulders in order to model her work appropriately. She buttoned it down the front and brushed off some gray dog hairs with a few quick strokes. Standing stiffly erect, she raised up onto her toes and pivoted slowly around to display all the intricate detail of the back and, incidentally, a large, circular, red-brown stain. The receptionist was a little shocked when she saw it and started to alert Eva of the problem, but she stopped short her words before saying anything.

“What?” Eva asked, turning briskly back around. “Is something wrong with it? What is it?”

“No, really,” said the receptionist. “Not a thing. It’s just lovely.” Eva didn’t seem convinced now, so the woman continued. “You could probably sell it for a hundred dollars, at least!”

Eva grinned immensely, and her heart leaped. Sell her cloak! Oh, but who would want to-- “Oh, no,” she said, now depressed. “Nobody would buy it.”

“Of course they would buy it!” The receptionist seemed sure of it, and to prove it, she called over the nurse who had come into the room with a clipboard to call the next patient. “Linda,” said the receptionist. “Look at this woman’s cloak. Isn’t it amazing?” She nodded to the nurse with high eyebrows.

“Oh, yes!” said the nurse. “Lovely!”

The receptionist nodded to Eva and then continued, to the nurse, saying, “You’d buy it for a hundred dollars, wouldn’t you, if you could?”

“Of course!” the nurse responded eagerly. “Well, that’d be such a steal, really. I’d expect to pay more than that, you know, if I saw it for sale!” She nodded as if to seal her statement and smiled approvingly at Eva. And then she turned to a woman in the waiting area holding a small gray terrier with a pink bow on its head. “Frisky?” the nurse called.

Eva suddenly moved toward the nurse. “Well, it is,” she said.

The nurse turned to her to make sure Eva was talking to her and not someone else, or even to herself, as people are known to do. Especially, she thought, people who bring in mangled pets to the clinic, hoping for the best. “Is what?” asked the nurse.

“For sale,” she explained. “You said you’d buy it if it were for sale. Well, it is.”

The nurse glanced speechlessly over at the receptionist, who shrugged her shoulders, and then at the woman holding the terrier, who made no response, and then she said, “I don’t think I said that exactly.”

“Yes you did,” Eva argued. “I heard you. You said you’d pay more if it were for sale.”

“No, no,” the nurse responded nervously, pressing the bottom edge of her clipboard into her stomach with both hands. “I said I’d expect to pay more if it were for sale. I didn’t say I would pay more. That’s different.”

Eva unbuttoned the cloak angrily. “You’re lying to me!” she exclaimed, fumbling over the last button. “You’re not even paying attention to what you’re saying! You’re just telling me what you think I want to hear! Well I don’t want to hear these lies anymore! Why don’t you tell me what you really think?!” Eva ripped the unbuttoned cloak off her shoulders and threw it, bunched up, into the nurse’s face. It fell onto her clipboard and flattened out, exposing the great blood stain. The nurse grimaced and backed her face away from it.

“Oh, God!” Eva cried as she studied the darkened circle. Tense silence surrounded the stunned woman, suddenly infecting all within hearing range, even the dogs. No veterinarian’s office had ever been that quiet before. The only sound in the room was of Eva’s hand scraping across the blood stain on her beautiful cloak, her mouth open, her eyebrows intense and studious, and her face only inches away from the stain. The nurse and receptionist could only blink at one another. Eva rubbed her fingers across the stain two more times and then turned over her hand to inspect the blood on her fingers. She smelled it, both on her cloak and on her fingers, and then suddenly raised up quickly to pronounce:

“It’s just blood. It’ll come out with some cold water and a little hairspray. Do you still want it?”

The nurse did not answer. Eva looked at the receptionist, who shook her head innocently.

“It’s simple, especially since it’s so fresh. It just happened, you know. God, it’s probably all over my carpet, too. But that’ll have to be replaced because you know how carpet stains are. They just get absorbed up into those threads and the pad and they don’t come out. I’m sure my carpet’s ruined. And to think it’s only a year old! But I’m sure Larry’s life insurance policy will cover that.”

Eva paused with her eyebrows raised at this evident truth and looked about the room. Some people sat still, and others shrugged their shoulders to agree with her, including the nurse, who added a nod.

“So anyway, it’s just blood. It comes out if you soak it in cold water and some hairspray, like I said. And if that doesn’t get it out, try a little peroxide. Works every time.”