Fiction by N.H. Van Der Haar

After Steel Magnolias

With a deep and queer passion, I live in delusion. If I were to die before her, heaven forbid, knock on wood, my mother will perform a tremendous impersonation of Sally Field from Steel Magnolias. A sublime performance in that greatest of films. She would buy a dress for the occasion, a stylish black number snatched off the rack from David Jones. She would match it as best she could to the shoes she had. She will clutch at the soil on my grave and scream. She will rip and tear at her hair and jewellery. My father would passively tell her to calm down and to get a hold of herself. She will swipe him away with a large hand.

“I wanna know why, I wanna know! Why my son’s life is over!”

My sister will heave my mother up from the fresh grave. Both women will struggle to compose themselves, dabbing their cheeks, eyes, and nose. My sister will dust my mother’s knees and gently scold her for getting dirt on the bottom of a brand-new dress. Our mother will look stoic for a moment only to lift her head to the sky and howl. Like a wild animal. My beloved husband will have already driven off to the wake, to sip an icy old fashioned and fan themselves with the funerary program.

“I’m fine… I’m fine… I’m fine!”

Mother takes a manicured fist and smacks it into the palm of her other hand and swears viciously. Like her mother did and her mother before her. My father would again tell her to calm down with his shaky, emotional voice. Repetition would not enhance the phrase’s effectiveness. My mother ignores her blubbering husband and rants with vitriol rising in her voice, eyeliner moving to stain her tired face.

“I don’t think I can take this… I… I don’t think I can take this! I just wanna hit something! I just wanna hit somebody… till they feel as bad as I do! I just wanna hit something! I wanna hit it hard!”

Again she stumbles. My sister will back away as she drives her hand deep into the soil and squeeze a handful of it in her fist.

“I’m supposed to go first!”

She struggles to hold herself upright. Her ankle will bend at an awkward angle. She has sprained it painfully but will only become aware of this tomorrow morning as the alcohol leaves her system.

“I’ve always been ready to go first!”

 She will weep thick tears and stain the words on my small tombstone. At the wake, she will get so emotional she will try to blow her nose with the funerary program and get a paper cut just beneath her nose. My cousins will grin and snicker at the red mark and say Mother got it shaving her beard off.

In his own very particular kind of mourning, weeks from now, my father will plant over my grave a magnolia tree. All day my father will slave over a hole in the ground. Dressed in a stained white skivvies and tradie’s shorts. He will dig it alone with nothing more than a shovel, despite the gravedigger turning up as the sun begins to set, with a post hole digger that gets it done in a quarter of the time and with no sweat.

The magnolia tree will grow tall and straight, unassisted by unnatural fertiliser, to close to its full height of 5 metres tall. Children with their parents, on visits to the graves of grandparents and great uncles they cannot remember, will pluck the creamy flowers to leave as gifts on stranger’s tombstones. A lonely woman, whose parents are all dead now and her girlfriend will sit under it and weep. Years later, cemetery garden maintenance will be instructed to trim it back in the winter. But they will be pruned too far and the following year later it will die. All that will be left of my crumbling grave is a rather small tombstone and a dead magnolia tree. My mother will another hole in this cemetery. My father will be quietly cremated and his ashes scattered on the property his second wife owned with him. My sister will tear at the soil and earth holding my crumbling body until she can hold me aloft. From my rotting mouth, I sing to her.

“Behold the Ship of Theseus”.

On the way to the wake, Father plays ‘Past Carin’ by the Bushwackers Band on the radio. The thrum of the guitar and heavy lyrics fill everyone’s hearts. My sister whispers, almost to herself, that the song reminds her of that Australian film, Acute Misfortune. The artist Adam Cullen dying alone on his stripped mattress. Mother is moisturising her dirty and red hands with the creams she keeps in the glovebox.

“That is awful, just awful”

Slowly, the tears will dry and the sniffling will stop. The group’s individual gazes move out to stare at the landscape, the vanishing road beneath the car and the slow-moving cattle stomping through the passing fields.