Family Not Going To Heaven

No one in our family is dead yet, but one day we’ll all be.

Dirty plates and empty mugs litter the tables in Grandma’s coffee shop. The lunch crowd is gone, so Mom hands me a stack of menus to wash. This chore bores me; I’d rather be helping with dinner.

While I work, my mind drifts to everyone who will not be going to Heaven. It’s comforting to know who I’ll spend eternity with.

Of course, none of my stuffed mice will be in Heaven, even though they’ve slept with me since I was tiny. Grandma insists I will not miss them any more than I’ll miss my dresses or the fancy turkey plates we use on holidays. I hope she’s right, but I have my reservations.

Our cat Vanilla, our dog Beans, and our turtle Dunlop will not be in Heaven because animals supposedly do not have souls. Everyone I ask is consistent on this point: my older sister, my mother, my grandmother…

But here is what I want to know: if pets don’t have souls, how come their ghosts return to haunt us? When Dad ran over the Phaffs’s Rottweiler, Zenith, we were kept up all night not only by her phantom barking, but the squealing of the litter of pups she’d been carrying. Zenith didn’t quiet down until Grandma prepared special oil for Dad to cleanse the undercarriage of his truck with.

“If pets can become ghosts,” I challenged, “why can’t they go to Heaven?”

“Because,” Grandma told me. “Ghost is different from soul. Ghost is angry, scared, bad feeling. Only instinct. Person can be in Heaven happy while their ghost stay on earth and make everyone miserable.”

I think about the coffee shop ghost, who’s always stinking up the air with the smell of his phantom pipe, and rummaging through the pantry at night looking for liquor. He knocks over cans, and spills oil all over the red stools. I hate cleaning up his mess; the cloth never absorbs all the oil, so you have to wipe over and over. No matter how many times I wash my hands I can still feel the stickiness between my fingers. The pest better be happy in Heaven for how miserable his ghost makes us here.

My uncle, Lou Henry (brother of my mother), will not be in Heaven.

Years before I was born, he grew mad at some woman (she worked on the streetcar in Hamilton), so he pushed her under the tracks and she was cut in two, right in front of everybody. She didn’t die right away, but didn’t have the air to scream, either––just stretched her mouth open while her blood and collection of nickel fares rolled into the street.

Not even Grandma defended him. He ruined the coffee shop’s reputation. No one wants to eat at a family restaurant that reminds them of such a vicious killing. After the loss of customers, she opened a new coffee shop under another name.

The judge sent Lou Henry to Kingston. He was sentenced to life, but offered the possibility of parole in twenty-five years. Didn’t matter, because I don’t think he intended to leave prison. He liked the company of all the interesting men there, with new ones arriving all the time. There were lots of radios so he could listen to every hockey game, and all the tobacco he could smoke.

In Kingston, he laid traps for insects, stealing spider webs he re-strung above the window in his cell. He collected shoeboxes full of dry insect husks. I imagined him sifting his hand through the piles, hearing the musical jingle of the dry bugs rustling against one another.

He crushed the bugs to brew a special oil beneath his commode.

The Kingston men loved his oil. They rubbed it into their bellies and felt forgiveness for the evils that landed them in prison. This forgiveness wasn’t an illusion, but it eventually ran out. Broken hearts and iron grudges were forever growing back, requiring even more oil to achieve the same state of grace for ever diminishing periods of time. Desperate, the men began rubbing the oil into their eyes.

In the winter, the oil ran out. Lou Henry couldn’t find bugs to make more. The men went wild. The guards were helpless to stop the riot, so they abandoned the entire prison.

Lou Henry had no interest in forgiveness for himself, so he hadn’t developed a dependency on the oil. He hid from the rampaging Kingston population by hiding in his mattress. He ripped open the bottom and dug a Lou-Henry-shaped hole. To cover his tracks, he flushed the stuffing down his commode, but when the pipes jammed, he was forced to eat the soggy excess.

From inside the mattress casing, he heard the wails of his fellow prisoners, tortured by having been given a taste of forgiveness, and left suffocating after that grace evaporated. All the men gave in to despair. There was mutilation, self-cannibalism, sincere repudiation of everything just and natural in the world... In the great silence that soon filled those barred halls, only Lou Henry persisted.

“He didn’t expect things to get so out of hand with his fool’s oil,” Mom said as she checked over the job I’d done cleaning the laminated menus, making sure I hadn’t missed a splotch of dried syrup. “He was just looking to make himself popular with the other men.”

But their crimes weren’t Lou Henry’s to forgive, even temporarily. The wickedest thing you can do is prevent others from finding genuine forgiveness. Because of his oil, those men had no hope. With hundreds of lost souls staining his hands, Lou Henry will not go to Heaven.

Not only that, but I don’t think he’s yet found the nerve to climb out of that mattress.

My sister tells me more people will be going to Heaven than I think. She claims going to Heaven is easy.

“Everybody thinks there’s only one way to go to Heaven,” she says. “You have to drink the blood of Jesus Christ, or give all your money to the poor, or only eat plants, or go your whole life without having sex with nobody…”

We are in the coffee shop kitchen, oiling up pans in the calm before dinner hour. Always negative, my sister keeps a list of people she resents who will get to Heaven.

“Mrs. Gagne is going. So is her rotten son, the weirdo who’s always sticking his tongue through the fence.” She wraps her hands around her throat and chokes herself, crossing her eyes. “And every one of those smelly Lot girls are going.”

“I don’t mind the Lot sisters,” I tell her.

On the schoolyard, once, a large bird struck the side of the building. It landed on the hopscotch grid, wings busted and back twisted. It was in terrible agony, and frightened by the circle of children looking down at it. A few poked at it; a couple more yanked out souvenir tail feathers. One of the Lot sisters, Emery, pushed her way through the crowd and swiftly pressed two fingers on the bird’s neck to hold it in place, while her other hand pulled the top of the head, effortlessly breaking the neck and soothing the bird forever. I admired her decisiveness, and the selfless way she did what needed to be done. It gave me strength.

No good deed goes unpunished, the saying goes. Emery Lot was kicked out of school for a week. After she came back, she had to talk to a scientist about why she got pleasure from killing small animals. The fact that it was a one-time mercy killing made no difference. The teachers all saw a chance to punish and humiliate her, and they tripped over their own tongues running to tattle.

None of those teachers are going to Heaven, but Emery is. She’s going to be so surprised.

“You don’t even have to believe in Heaven to go there,” my sister says.

We dump mushrooms into the soup pot. Dinner will be ready for our customers in less than an hour.

My Aunt Danny (sister of my father) will not be in Heaven, because she made herself too heavy. You can’t tell by looking at her––she takes up no more space than any other woman standing just under 4ft 9––but if you grab hold of her waist and try to lift her you’ll be unable. Only she can make her feet separate from the ground. A donkey once kicked its hind legs into the back of her head, and while her scalp needed stitches, her legs didn’t so much as stumble.

Years after the airline industry banned smoking, they washed the planes, scraping out the air ducts and cleaning the wires under the cockpit, and found them clogged with layers of black, oily crust, like what you’d find clogging the stem of a much-used pipe. After cleaning, each plane weighed 50 pounds lighter.

Aunt Danny has obscene money. I never asked how she amassed her wealth, but I assume it’s an accumulation of mineral rights mixed with multiple alimony suits and gambling proceeds. She spends freely: castles in the highlands, dogs bred so specifically that their paperwork goes back a hundred years, young men with expensive taste in clothing… Some of her paramours have been on her teat for three decades, and when they retire from her bedroom, she provides a hefty pension. On holidays she never visits but sends gifts: long gold chains and pearl earrings Grandma buries in the backyard. Someday an archeologist is going to find one of those gift sites and think they’ve discovered the treasure room of the Pharaohs.

Aunt Danny spends her money like she expels breath. She always says, “You can’t take it with you.”

Grandma warns us our Aunt is dead wrong: we all take it with us.

The money that passes through your fingertips over the course of your life never leaves. Like cigarette smoke in an airplane, the act of spending creates oils that soak into your body, coating your soul and weighing you down.

Aunt Danny is generous, as if attempting to buy her way into Heaven, but she doesn’t realize it makes no difference if she spends on mink coats for her dogs or medical equipment for orphans. It all weighs her down the same amount.

Dad says, “It ain’t the spending of all that money, it’s the fact you took that much to begin with.”

It occurs to me that there is finite room in Heaven. That’s probably the reason why not everyone can go there to begin with.

Grandma is angry when I say this. She believes the suggestion that Heaven is flawed is disrespectful.

My reasoning is sound: the world will not last forever. At some point the lava rises or the sun burns out, and people will be extinct forever. Since there won’t be an infinite number of people, Heaven must have limitations. Why create a place larger than it needs to be?

Tucking me into bed, whispering so Grandma doesn’t hear, Mom tells me Heaven won’t be full for hundreds of years, long after we’re all gone.

“So it’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “We should concentrate on doing a good job while we’re here.”

I believe Mom while she’s sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning over so her eyelashes kiss my cheeks. But when I’m all alone in a darkness that reminds me of everlasting non-being, I can’t shake the dread of Heaven filling up. I imagine massive wooden doors made from the trunks of century-old trees. The doors bulge, and the wood splinters from the pressure of everyone inside. No room for a single soul more.

I ladle soup into bowls and carry them to the lunch counter. My sister brings a tray to the tables in the coffee shop’s front window. In the movies, waitresses like my sister are always subjected to leering and groping, but the men we serve are polite. If they say anything to her, it is with great respect and kindness.

These men are all going to Heaven, sooner than they expect.

The food Mom prepares with Grandma’s oils is delicious. Our ingredients are fresh. No matter how thoroughly I clean the vegetables, they are still speckled with nutrients from the soil, but the earth they come from is Eden clean, so there is no displeasing taste.

Grandma’s oils float on the surface of the soup. I see my reflection in each yellow blob. It looks like the grease from a boiled turkey carcass. The soup gives off an inviting aroma. The men dip their spoons and sup. They race to the bottom of their bowls, looking forward to the main course. The smell of roast vegetables slathered in Grandma’s oils wafts from the kitchen. My sister and I have been patiently turning them in the oven pan until the carrots are caramelized and the potatoes are crisp all around.

By morning, all our customers will be in Heaven. They die in great agony, leaking oil from their mouths and their eyes. The oil is black. It smells like dead dinosaurs. This oil is all their spending, all their un-forgiveness, all their doubt. It is the unmeasurable weight on their soul accumulated over a lifetime. Detoxified, they are now fit for Heaven.

When sixty diners at the same restaurant all die, conclusions are drawn pretty quick. The same thing happens every time. A weeping mob smashes the coffee shop windows. Often, the grieving horde burns the building to the ground.

We’re never inside, of course. Grandma makes us hide across the street like bandits, so we can watch the destruction. “That was a good home,” she says. “We need to be here until the very end, like how you don’t abandon a pet when it’s time to be put down.”

The town hunts for us, but we’re never spotted. We’re on our way to the next location, often learning new languages so we’ll fit right in. We are patient, taking years to make our new home, while Grandma begins the long and arduous process of making new oils. We are dedicated to ensuring those in need will go to Heaven.

I will not be in Heaven, because serving the oil makes you impervious to its effects.

I cannot shake the image of Heaven filling up, despite Mom’s assurance I will be asleep forever long before that happens. We are not the only family tasked with the duty of serving oil. How large of an army are we a part of? Are there a hundred of us? A thousand? When I hear of an entire village dead in Uganda, each body leaking black oil, I dream of Heaven’s doors beginning to strain.

When my time comes, I won’t be resentful, or feel cheated. I won’t say No good deed goes unpunished. Knowing I helped to fill Heaven means more to me than eternal life. Besides, I bet it gets boring after a while.

My reward is to follow Grandma, and Mom, and my sister, and my Aunt and Uncle, and our pets, and my stuffed mice into peaceful quiet. Before you’re born, after you’re born, it’s all the same to me; everlasting, all encompassing, and never filled up.