With a box of burnt bones on the edge of Tim’s Ford Reservoir,
we stood at the water to spread my grandfather’s ashes, not really
standing together—we are not a “together” family, especially that
side, nearly everyone battling some kind of mental infirmity—relations
from Indiana, my uncle over there, my aunt over here, my mother and I
sort of near each other in the way we would always be, not quite trusting
but not able to get away, uneasy, hearing each other breathe, then there were
my cousins back on the road with their phones. Grandfather had been a lake
fisherman, leisurely out there daily on the flat blue to wallow and dream.
Sometimes he came back with a small mouth bass or a trout, he would tell
us that he had been thinking about the Lost City of Atlantis. He wasn’t really
there when he was there, if you know what I mean, and he was even more
absent at his ceremony—there was no body to remind us of him, and no one had
anything planned to say. Someone poured the ashes and we watched them sink.