by Joe Oestreich
My grandma Esther is laid out in a casket, riding in the open bed of a pick-up. My uncles, her sons, are driving her body from Milwaukee to the Upper Peninsula to make good on a promise.
It’s 1982. February. The funeral took place this morning. Now it’s early afternoon, and the Wisconsin dusk has already descended. Uncle Rich sits in the drivers’ seat, a Schlitz tucked in his crotch. He drapes one calloused hand over the wheel. With the other, he works the gear shifter that extends from the steering column. The truck tops out at three speeds: three on the tree. Rich downshifts to second and swings left across the snow-blown double yellow to pass a slow-moving farm vehicle. He’s a mechanic for Harley-Davidson, and this is his deer hunting truck. Rich knows these country roads. He knows which double lines are rules and which are merely suggestions. Safely back in the right lane, he drains the last of his beer.
Over on the passenger side sits Uncle Jim. He’s a Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputy. On the floor, between his boots, rests an open 12-pack. He bends down for two more Schlitzs, then pries away the detachable pull-tabs, the sharp, summertime kind that teach you to watch your step when you’re walking barefoot. He exchanges full cans for drained ones. Drops the tabs into the empties and sets them on the muddy floor mats. He stomps with a boot to crush the cans flat, but then Rich picks that moment to downshift for another pass, causing the empties to topple over. Jim wings one can lopsided. He bends forward and plucks it up as the uncrushed can rolls under the seat, lost somewhere among the lures and bobbers and buck-shot cartridges.
Normally, like say on a trip up to the cabin in Hurley, my uncles would just slide open the screen behind their heads and drop the empty cans into the truck bed. Or, if they’d already had a few, maybe they’d fire the cans out the window and see how many they could land in back. Given the effects of wind speed and aerodynamics on the trajectory of empty aluminum, they’d miss far more often than they’d hit, the cans sparking against the pavement and bounding toward a resting place on the side of the road—dead soldiers left to rust among the hubcaps and hamburger wrappers.
But tonight Rich and Jim do not toss the empties into the bed. Tonight the cans stay up front. Because tonight Esther’s riding in the back.
My mom told me this tale many times, the version she heard from her brothers. But I’ll be honest. I can’t say for sure if my uncles were drinking Schlitz. I don’t know if Rich crossed the double yellows. I don’t know if Jim dropped the pull tabs into the empty cans. I would love to know, believe me. But there’s nobody of that generation alive to ask. Jim died in 2016, Rich in 2021. In the early months of the pandemic, my mom succumbed to covid, coupled with dementia. I’ll have to do my best with the secondhand story.
My grandma, Esther Roth (née Mattson), died when I was twelve. I didn’t know her well. My family would sometimes visit her on our Christmas trips from Ohio to Wisconsin, but my sister Jill and I had only ever met the old and senile Esther. She too suffered from dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, as my mom would later—and as I might eventually. But there was no definitive diagnosis. Getting a little diddly, was how my mom described her mom.
Jill and I were scared of Esther. She was frightening to us the way all strangers are, but especially bent, wrinkled strangers. When you’re a kid, old people are the nightmare versions of your parents. As you grow older, your parents become the nightmare versions of you.
Esther was family, but she hardly seemed like a grandma, at least according to my limited, Hallmark-card understanding of the word. My grandma was Frances, my dad’s mom. She lived with Grandpa Ruben in Watertown, fifty miles west of Milwaukee. Frances baked meringue pies and preserved raspberries in Ball Jars and set out crystal bowls of butter mints on chenille doilies. Frances and Ruben weren’t wealthy by any stretch, but they lived in a proper house. With a proper backyard. A driveway that boasted a proper sedan.
Esther lived in Arlington Court, a round, 24-story tower run by the Milwaukee Housing Authority to serve low-income seniors. I was always nervous riding the elevator to her floor. The building smelled like an unholy mix of institutional food and urine. Embarrassingly late into my twenties, I moved into an apartment that reeked like Esther’s home. A friend of mine said it smelled like prison. Old folks’ homes and prisons: places where days/months/years are constantly inventoried. But prisoners and old folks count in opposite directions.
Sometimes Esther would take the bus to Chicago to bet the ponies at Arlington Park. A first generation American, she was blessed with old-country intuition, passed down from her Finnish ancestors. She knew what to look for in a horse: one that had just taken a big, gushing piss.
There’s probably no data to support her equine urine theory, but Esther won more than she lost. Trouble was, even after she’d cashed in her tickets and ridden the bus home to Milwaukee, those ancestors were still speaking to her. Poltergeists are coming to steal your money, Esther, they’d say. Hide your winnings. She’d hide the cash well. Too well. So well that even she couldn’t find it. Blame the actual poltergeist, that little mischief-maker named Alzheimer’s.
In Ohio, our phone would ring. Esther calling in a teary panic about the lost money. She’d stashed it in the laundry hamper. Now it was gone. Over the phone my mom would help her search. Have you looked in your shoes, mom? Have you checked the cereal boxes? Sometimes Esther found the cash. Sometimes she didn’t. In those cases, who knows? Maybe there were no winnings to begin with.
Every so often, there’d be a span of several weeks where we’d get no calls from Esther at all. Mom would find out later that the poltergeists had stolen her phone.
Esther’s service is my first funeral, my first glimpse of a dead body. Here in the mortuary everything is old and worn. Chipped veneer and frayed particleboard. Reminders that nothing lasts.
My only dress-up outfit is a remnant from last Easter, a navy blue three-piece that’s already too small. Tie: clip-on. Pants: floods, revealing two inches of tube sock. Feels like I’m wearing a Halloween costume. Strangers smelling of mothballs and cedar tussle my hair. Plastic combs with missing teeth peek from the pockets of Sears dress shirts. Lee press-on nails tear through Naugahyde purses, digging for cigarette cases. Ancient, Aqua-netted women sit alone on folding chairs, their spotted hands running rosary laps.
I don’t know these people, but everyone seems to know me. My mom makes the introductions. This is your cousin. This is your auntie. Everyone says how strong Esther was. How funny she was. How beautiful she looks now, inside the casket. Not to me, she doesn’t. She’s too white. Too made up. Too dead.
The priest works the room, oozing conviction. Another day at the office. As he glides by, his robes stir the air with incense and cologne. It smells like mass—if mass were held at the perfume counter at JC Penney’s. He extends a comforting arm around my mom. “Ashes to Ashes,” he sighs. I assume he’s talking about the crowd out in the lobby, huddled around the ashtray. In here, everything is smoke. We’re all drifting toward the heavens, some of us faster than others.
Afterwards, my mom and dad are hustling Jill and me across the snowy parking lot, when something catches his attention. He looks off in the distance and waves his hand. “Goodbye Esther.”
“What do you mean?” asks my mom.
“The casket’s right there.” Dad lifts Jill to his shoulders so she can see. “In the bed of that truck.”
In the photograph that hung for years in my mom’s foyer, Esther is young and hearty. Tall with a high forehead and Scandinavian cheekbones. That Esther’s frozen in time, forty years from the stooped, senile woman I almost knew. Next to her sits my grandfather, an abusive alcoholic who made Esther and my uncles pay for whatever shitty deal life had dealt him. After chasing his frustration with Old Fashioneds, his mechanic’s hands would go work on his wife. Then on his sons. According to my mom, he’d pull Rich, Jim, and their brother Fred one at a time into a room. Through the door, she could hear the slaps, the punches, the tears.
Then he’d call my mom inside. But he never hurt her, never struck her. She was Daddy’s favorite. “Mary Anne is little and petite,” he’d often say, ignoring the redundancy—or perhaps using it purposely to reinforce his point.
Esther fought back, sometimes physically, but there was no winning. So she took all the kids north to the U.P., to Bessemer, Michigan, to stay with her Mattson relatives. They didn’t return to Milwaukee for nearly a year, but they did return. Esther had no real choice. Catholic marriage was for life. She needed to believe my grandfather would change. Maybe she could change him. Or maybe in time he’d change himself. For the kids, a lousy father was better than none.
He ultimately settled things by dying of a heart attack when my mom was thirteen.
Esther made her children promise that when she died, they would not bury her in the Milwaukee cemetery next to their father. No way would she spend eternity next to that man. “Take me up to Bessemer,” she said.
They’ve polished off the beers, so Rich and Jim stop at a package store for a pint of brandy. They joke that they should pick up a hitchhiker, somebody to chip in for gas. Where ya headed? I s’pose we can get you most of the way. So long as you don’t mind riding in the back with our ma.
The last time I saw Uncle Rich was thirty-something years ago, in the late ‘90s. I sat at his dining table with my mom, Jill, and my girlfriend Kate, who’d eventually agree to marry me despite the odd ducks that populate my family. I looked up at the buck heads mounted to the walls. Behind my chair sat a freezer, loaded, Rich told us, with venison. It had been a good season. The freezer was packed with tenderloin and backstrap. Round, shank, and sausage. He’d set a plate of that sausage out for us, along with cheese and crackers.
“You know my little dog?” Rich said to my mom. “My little Chihuahua?” He told us that the dog had recently died. “She was my girl.” He looked sad—justifiably and appropriately. But it was weird seeing Uncle Rich sad. He was always smiling, always laughing.
And now, as if on cue, he chuckled, then told us about the promise he’d made to the dog in the days before she died. “I told her I’d never let one speck of dirt touch her,” he said. “Not one. Never.”
My mom nibbled a cracker. “So how’d you bury her, then?”
“I didn’t bury her,” Rich said. “No dirt, like I said.”
Suddenly I had a vision of Rich elbows deep in DIY taxidermy. I looked around the room for a stuffed Chihuahua.
But Rich didn’t have his girl preserved, or, God forbid, mounted. He told us that right now, as we spoke, he was storing her in the freezer.
I reached back, pointed to the appliance behind me. “This freezer right here?”
“Yep,” he said, smiling. “She’s tucked in with the venison steaks.”
My mom almost spit her cracker laughing. “How long are you going to leave her there?”
“’Til the freezer conks out or I drop dead.” He walked over to the unit. “I’ve got her wrapped in her favorite blanket.” He cracked open the door. “You want to see?”
Last summer, Kate and I, and our kids—fifteen and thirteen—drove from our home in South Carolina up to Wisconsin. The plan was to make our own trek through the Badger State north to the U.P. The optics were very different from the drive Rich and Jim made forty-three years earlier. No truck. No casket, obviously. Instead, a Subaru Outback with a Thule roof carrier loaded with tents and sleeping bags.
On the way, we camped in Baraboo, where my cousin Becky, Uncle Jim’s daughter, lives. Every family has that one person who researches the genealogy, goes all-in on ancestry. In the Roth family, that’s Becky. She showed me copies of all kinds of records: Esther’s birth certificate from 1906, Esther’s father’s death certificate from 1921, a news article mentioning Esther’s mother’s death in 1933. Becky sent me an article about our great-great grandpa on my mom’s father’s side, who, it turns out, was some sort of Milwaukee pickle magnate. She texted me cemetery names and Google-map pins. Kate, the kids, and I found Esther’s parents’ headstone in Bessemer. We found Uncle Rich’s gravesite in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.
As genealogically savvy as Becky is, there was one piece of information she didn’t know and couldn’t unearth: the location of Esther’s grave. Becky assumes Esther’s buried in the U.P., but she can’t determine where. Uncle Rich’s son Fred is pretty sure Esther was interred in Milwaukee after all, despite the promise. His brother, Richie, thinks she’s in the U.P. None of my cousins, nor I, can track down the obituary that might provide a clue. Everybody agrees that the casket-in-the-truck trip happened, but nobody knows for sure if that trip to Bessemer resulted in the actual burial.
Here’s what I know: I trust my mom. Before dementia stole her memory, she knew the truth. And she told me what happened. So let’s finish her story.
It’s evening when Rich and Jim arrive in Bessemer. Fully dark. Even colder, even snowier, than down in Milwaukee. But my uncles’ work isn’t quite finished. Before settling in at the motel, they drive around town, stopping by the homes of cousins and second cousins, friends and neighbors, any house they remember and any house that might remember them.
Half-drunk, they stumble up icy front steps. Hats in hand, they knock on doors.
“We’re Esther Mattson’s boys,” Uncle Jim, the Sheriff’s deputy, says. “Sorry to bother you so late, but we’ve got some sad news.”
“She’s right out here in the truck.” Rich points toward the street. “You want to say goodbye?”
Esther can’t be buried. Not in the Upper Peninsula in February. The earth is hard-frozen, and spring, well, spring’s like a twenty-point buck: it’s not that people doubt its existence, but it’s been a damn long time since anybody’s seen one, and nobody’s holding out hope of it coming around soon. So tomorrow, they’ll drop off Esther at the receiving vault (a.k.a. “the dead house”) where she’ll wait until the ground thaws enough for the grave to be dug. Could be April. Could be May.
Tonight, after they’ve rung the bells, knocked on the doors, and taken their mother on her last tour of the town, they check into the motel. Jim takes a final swig of brandy before bed.
Rich says, “Let me see that.” But he doesn’t drink. Instead he replaces the cap. Pulls the comforter off one of the beds and drapes it over his shoulder. He opens the front door to the frosty night.
“Where you going?” Jim says.
“Taking this stuff out to her,” Rich says. “In case she gets cold.”
And he walks outside to the truck. He lays the blanket carefully over the casket. Sets the brandy on top. “Goodnight, ma,” he says, tapping the box. “Rest well.”
Joe Oestreich is the 2025 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellow in Fiction from the South Carolina Academy of Authors and the author of four books of creative nonfiction, including Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. His work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Salon, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and many other magazines and journals. Four of his pieces have been cited as notable in the Best American series, and he’s received special mention twice in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches creative writing at Coastal Carolina University