Her mom tells her.
"Really," Sarah says. "He did that?" And she laughs in a way that makes her mother uncomfortable. Makes her wonder how she could laugh like that at a time like this, about a person she should love, she should be worried about, especially at a time like this. At the loss of a son. "Not really!" Sarah says.
"And he said 'Please take it back,' and then he walked out."
"Who'd you hear it from?" she says, still giggling.
"Who didn't I hear it from? Everyone I met in town asked me about it. They all think he's losing it."
"Well of course he is," she says, smile disappearing. "Aren't we all right now? I mean, I know that I'm losing it. This is ridiculous! Utterly and completely off the charts stupid! Aaron'd planned it for the whole summer. He'd worked it all out. He worried about it. Got advice from people who knew, who'd done it before. Last fall he helped out the Heinrichs guys just down the road. From beginning to end he watched and helped and asked questions and then two weeks later we went over to help them cut. Everything was planned. And then this. He had it all working, and then this. He whips around to swipe at a fly and his knife ..." Her voice trails off into a sob. "So yeah," she says, and she doesn't continue. She can't.
And here's where the narration stalls. In this grief that is both unexpected and unmitigated there's trouble in sussing out the next move. Is it toward the possibility of tragedy? The terribly normal flaw of independence? Of going it alone? Or do we head toward the crush of grief and the Jobian test of forbearance under pressure. Will sanity hold? What is sanity? Will the marriage hold? How do we plumb these depths? Why do we venture here in the first place? And how about a little humour?
Let's try this: In a year or so Aaron will, together with his father and family, learn that his mother has died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human variant of Mad-Cow Disease. The doctors will confirm this as fact in the autopsy. The report will note the sponge-like formations in the gray-matter and detail the demise of his mother Anne's brain. The doctors will not however, be able to provide an answer as to how she might have contacted the offending prion that causes her death. They will speculate that it may have been during a dental surgery in the 1970s, that perhaps the surgical instruments were not properly sanitized. Or perhaps during her time working as an RNA in a TB sanitarium in Hamilton she contacted it, and the prion incubated for a quarter century (which is in fact the way the organism works, however, in this case there's no evidence of a "rash" of others who worked in Hamilton at the time contracting the same disease). In essence the doctors will be able conclude nothing, except the cause of death. They'll tell the family that it's a one in two million chance, as if that's some solace. They'll say that it's unlikely she became infected it from eating beef or other cow-related foodstuffs, that there's no one in her age cohort or living proximity with the same disease. They'll ask the family strange questions like, did your mother have friends who were Lebanese Jews, and would she have eaten together with them. But no one can remember whether or not she'd eaten sheep's brains at any time in her life - much less that she'd had foreign friends of any sort. There was, is, simply, no explanation for it.
But through it all Aaron and Sarah will know better. They will look at one another, grimace, smile, and nod. They will see the irony. They will see it from the bovine point of view. They will wince at the strangeness of this justice. They will continue to mourn the loss of their son, Isaac.
The ride in: Temp 3'C Wind 10 ks SW
The ride home: Temp 9'C Wind 6 ks SE
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