COMPASSION

Chapter 11

The Dance of The Dead

Finally, the clock strikes three and the afternoon viewing is over. Family and friends have paid their respects and have left the room. Tom and Catherine sit quietly in the back trying to remember happier times. Tom senses he has to do something to combat his wife’s depression. He pulls out a harmonica his Father gave him when he first arrived in the Spiritual World. His Father told him only to play it on special occasions because only the Dead can hear this music.
 
Tom gets up and removes the harmonica from his blue suit pocket and approaches the casket. He starts playing a strange music Catherine has never heard before. It is a haunting unearthly sound meant to wake the dead. Tom bites down on the harmonica and starts blasting sounds at his wife’s corpse. Catherine’s body starts to move. The body rises up in her casket and Tom lifts it out of the coffin and starts to dance with the corpse.
 
Suddenly the entire room if filled with Loved Ones from the Afterlife. Catherine sees her parents dancing and smiling. Her Father was a Coal Miner who developed Black Lung from working in the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania. He had to sleep on his knees with his face on the bed in order to breathe. His heart eventually gave out and his wife followed him six months later died from breast cancer.  Then eight months later after only eight years of marriage, her husband Tom dies in room 666 at the Bethesda Navy Hospital in Maryland.  Catherine remembers asking God if he was trying to Kill Her by taking her parents and Husband. The three most important people in her life all gone within two years.
 
Tom continues to play and summon the dead relatives. Catherine’s eight-year-old nephew Patrick, her sister Thresa’s youngest son was dancing in the room with his Aunt Stella Catherine’s younger sister.
 
Patrick was on his way to the park when he was hit by a car crossing the street.
 
Aunt Stella wore a scarf to hide her hair that had fallen out from woman cancer treatments.  Stella never married and was only fifty years old when she crossed over.
 
Patrick is dancing all alone when his cousin Phyllis shows up and starts to dance with Patrick. Phyllis was the youngest daughter of Catherine’s oldest sister Mary. She is a beautiful girl who dreamed of becoming a Stewardess for an Airline. She went to School in New York in the late sixties and was one month away from graduation. She went to a party one night and came home the following Monday. She wouldn’t tell her family why she left school and just stayed in her room. They put her in a Mental Hospital for the next twenty-five years and she never told anyone why she was troubled. There were rumors a boy she met at a party assaulted her.
 
She was eventually released from the hospital in the late eighties because the Mental Hospitals lost funding. Phyllis was found dead on the streets six months later.
 
Catherine sits alone watching all her dead relatives dancing to Tom’s Harmonica playing and is crying tears of joy over seeing all her family again. Something inside her tells her don’t interrupt the dance just sit and enjoy the music.
 
Catherine sees Joseph her younger brother. He is kneeling at the front of her casket praying. His appearance is the same as the Coroner found his body in his apartment in Buffalo. He was sitting in his favorite chair drinking his favorite Vodka 80 Proof.  He fell asleep and his drink spilled on his shirt and pants. His cigarette eventually fell out of his mouth onto the spilled Vodka. He died from fourth-degree burns. He broke off his engagement to the girl he loved. She gave him the engagement ring back and he threw it in the Buffalo River in New York. The family said he didn’t die from the fire he died from a broken heart.
 
When you come to this dance you don’t come pretty.
 
William, Tom’s younger brother, who served in the Army during World War II. He was a trained Accountant who wanted to find a new life outside of Plains, Pennsylvania. He is staring at his older brother Tom still dancing with Catherine’s Corpse. He in his Sargent’s Army Uniform.
 
William left Pennsylvania after the War and headed West in search of a new life. He stopped one night in a small town outside Denver, Colorado. He had too much to drink one night and got into a bar fight during the middle of winter in Colorado. The patrons didn’t want a Drunk who just lost a fight in their bar so they threw him outside into the street. Three men followed him outside the bar. They picked him up and put him in their car and drove away. The police found William the next morning face down in the snow. He froze to death. He was twenty-seven years old. He was also missing his head. The police think someone cut it off so his body could not be identified. 
 
There were two people Catherine did not know. She saw a man dressed in a Japanese Pilot’s uniform standing with a beautiful Japanese woman. There were also sailors from the USS Randolph just sitting in chairs not dancing. These were Tom’s shipmates he served with during World War II.
 
Tom stopped playing the harmonica and everyone vanished from the room. Tom returned Catherine’s body back to her coffin and walked over to his wife.  
 
“Tom, why did everyone leave when you stopped playing the harmonica?”
 
“They all wanted to pay their respects to you but all the people in the room are still angry about how their life ended. They are all trying to come to terms with their death.”
 
“Did your Brother William tell you what happened to him?”  Catherine asks.
 
“This is not the time or place to discuss what happened to Billy. We will talk about Billy later.”
 
“Who were the two Japanese people?”  
 
“You don’t know them. They are friends of mine. They are Mrs. Asaki’s Children. The man’s name is Hiko and the woman is Sakura.”
 
“How do you know them?” Catherine asks.
 
“Do you remember when I told you I was on the USS Randolph in May of 1945 and the Japanese plane passed over our ship and dropped a Five Hundred Pound Bomb and killed the men in our Anti -Aircraft Battery. Those are the sailors you saw at your viewing. The plane came around again for another pass over us and I grabbed the 40 mm gun. I started blindly firing at the plane and hit the Japanese Bomber. I was told by my Captain I shot the plane down but the pilot crashed on to our flight deck. The pilot of the plane was Mrs. Asaki’s son Hiko. He was with his sister. I have become good friends with them since I have been here. We have a yearly reunion on the USS Randolph. Both sides Japanese and Americans. We all know now we are all Dead but we are all Brothers and Sisters. We are all just waiting hoping to meet our Creator one day. No more enemies, No Japan, No USA, just people…just souls…all part of the same energy ball.”

"What about Phyllis? Was she raped at that party?" Tom asks.

Catherine replies, "All Mary her Mother would tell me is somebody put something in her drink because she passed out after one drink. When she came to she had bruises on her legs and she was bleeding. Her anger turned from the boy to her Mother because she wasn't there to protect her. The poor girl spends her life living in a mental institution. I asked Mary to have her live with me but she wouldn't answer me. 
I think I have seen and heard enough. I don’t want to stay for the six o’clock viewing. Please take me home so I can rest for my funeral tomorrow.”
 
Tom and Catherine leave the viewing room so they can return home and rest up for the big day tomorrow.