I dialed the number at eight the next morning from the kitchen table, with the release form flat in front of me and my reading glasses sliding down my nose. It was a phone number with a Montana area code, written in blue ink in the box for contact information, in a hand that was almost mine and not quite. The funeral director had told me three times that the signature was only a near copy. I had stared at it all night, at the loops of my own name, Margie Wickersham, repeated by a stranger. Each ring seemed to last a year. On the sixth, a man picked up.
“Hello,” said a slow, cracked, elderly voice. “Is this Margie?” I nearly dropped the phone. I had expected a thief, a clerk, an angry stranger. Not a man who knew my name before I spoke it. My voice came out in a whisper. “Who is this?” There was a long silence, and then the man said, “It is Earl. Earl Wickersham. Brother of Ron. I have been waiting for you to call. Margie, I am so sorry. I should have asked you. I did not know how.” I put down the pen. I had not heard that voice in thirty four years.
Earl was the younger brother of Ron, the one who had gone off to Montana after the funeral of their father and never come back. They had quarreled over the farm, a bitter, silly quarrel, and for decades they had not exchanged a word, not at weddings, not at birthdays, not even when Ron was diagnosed with the illness that took him. I wrote to Earl at the end. He never answered. I had always thought it was pride. Now I heard something different in his voice, a thickness, a hesitation, as if he were speaking through a wall of grief.
“Let me tell you from the start,” Earl said. “Two years ago, when Ron died, the funeral home made a mistake. I only learned it three weeks ago, when a nurse at the office of my doctor told me the funeral director in your town had called, looking for a relative. They had mixed up two cremations. The urn they gave you was not Ron. It was a stranger. Ron had been sitting in their back room all that time, with a tag that said unclaimed. I thought I would die when I heard it.”
Sometimes the years of silence between two brothers are only a long breath held, waiting for the word that lets it out.
He told me he had driven nine hundred miles in a day and a half, in an old truck with a bad clutch. He went straight to the funeral home and asked to see the director, and the director, mortified, apologized again and again. The funeral home did not know how to reach me, he said, because my number had changed. Earl said he had forged the form in a moment of weakness. He could not wait. He signed my name because he thought the funeral home would not release his brother to anyone but a wife, and he was terrified I would say no.
I closed my eyes. I thought about the man I had been married to for fifty one years. Ron, who had loved Glacier more than any place on earth. Ron, who had proposed to me on a flat stone beside Lake McDonald in 1971, in a pair of borrowed boots. I remembered what he said on the day he got sick. Scatter me in the lake, Margie, where I asked you. And I had. But the ashes I had scattered were not his. For two years, I had been grieving over a stranger, and Ron had been sitting in a back room, waiting.
“Where is he now?” I asked, and my voice cracked. “He is with me,” Earl said. “In the cab of my truck. I drove back to Libby, to the farm. I could not go any further. I did not want to leave him alone in a hotel room, and I did not have the nerve to knock on your door. I have been sitting on the porch of the old house for three days, with the urn on the seat beside me, talking to him. Margie, I told him everything. I told him I was sorry. I told him he was right about the fence.”
I laughed, and I cried, and I did not know which was which. I called my daughter Shelly at once. She screamed. She was at the kitchen counter in her pajamas, and she screamed so loudly that her husband Brandon ran in with a spatula. By ten o clock the three of us were in the minivan, with a thermos, a bag of sandwiches, and a map of Montana. Brandon drove. Shelly sat beside me in the back and held my hand all the way across Idaho, and we did not talk much. We just watched the mountains.
We reached the farm outside Libby at dusk. It was a gray house with a red barn and a porch that sagged. On the porch, in a wicker chair, sat an old man with white hair and the exact chin of Ron. He stood up when he saw us. We looked at each other for a long moment, and then I walked up the steps and put my arms around him. He smelled of woodsmoke and old flannel. He wept like a child on my shoulder. “He wanted you,” I said into his collar. “At the very end. He asked for you.”
The urn sat on the kitchen table, a plain brass jar with a number engraved on the bottom. We sat around it that night, the four of us, and drank coffee, and told stories about Ron until after midnight. Earl made a pot of chili. He showed me a box of letters he had written to his brother over thirty years and never mailed, and we read them aloud. Brandon pretended to look for something in the pantry so no one would see his face. I fell asleep in the chair beside the stove.
We scattered him in Lake McDonald on a clear morning in August. Earl came, in a borrowed suit, and Shelly read a poem. Half of the ashes we gave to the lake, the way Ron had asked. The other half we buried in the little family cemetery behind the farm, beside the graves of the father and mother. Earl planted a wooden marker. It says, Ron Wickersham, beloved brother. Fence mended. I stood between his brother and his daughter and watched the water shine. For the first time in two years, I felt that my husband was truly home.