Trauma Clean Part Two

“Have you ever seen a thing like this before in your life?” marvels Roy, as we stand and stare at the mummified bull, partially unwrapped, perhaps by the homicide investigators to ensure it wasn’t human remains. The papery, desiccated flesh on the bull’s face peeks out from resin-browned cloth.

I’m not game, at this point, to tell Roy I helped my father make one similar when our cat died, or to reveal just how deep my father’s obsession with Egyptian mythology actually ran.

The Egyptians believed the heart was the organ of wisdom, not the brain. I think, in hindsight, my father’s attraction to that idea said a lot about him.

“I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do with it?” Roy tells me, incredulous. “Nobody mentioned anything about a mummy. Do we throw it out? Do we call a museum?? This is nuts.”

This is nuts. A sentiment I often harboured about my some of my father’s antics when he was still here. Along with a fear that taking his passion for stories and mythologies too seriously might one day make me just as crazy as he was.

When he abandoned his own particular brand of Catholicism, because the parish priest told him it was heresy, he opted instead for a mishmash spiritual belief system pieced together from cultures across time, and over the globe. I confess I had no faith in it.

I have, in fact, seen my share of mummified bulls before. Along with mummified ducks, fish, monkeys, lizards, gazelles and a few ancient Egyptian humans.

I am well acquainted with the judicial process of the Egyptian afterlife. A person’s heart, which records all the good and bad deeds of their life, is weighed on a set of scales when they die. If your heart weighs less than the feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and justice, you’ve lived well enough to deserve a place in paradise with Osiris, the god of the afterlife. If your heart weighs more than Maat’s feather you get eaten by Ammut, a god with a crocodile head who erases you from all existence. No afterlife for you.

I’m also pretty familiar with ancient Egyptian symbolism attached to bulls. Lots of stuff about masculine protection, but also sacrifice. I think my father embraced it to try and let go of his own story about a bull.

As a small child he lived on a farm. He told me there was a large Jersey bull on the property that terrified him. Largely because his father would threaten to feed him to the bull whenever he misbehaved. It took him several years to learn that the bull was a herbivore, so his father had been making an idle threat the whole time. Yet, much like his fear of his father, his fear of the bull never subsided even once he knew this.

It was only a lifetime later, when he was caring for his father in advanced stages of dementia, that his father’s identical childhood terror of a bull emerged. The fear was one passed down the generations.

People who lack answers can become pretty vulnerable to myths, and search their hearts out for meaning in signs and symbols. Sometimes these symbols may blind them from the truth before their very eyes.

My father often told a story about a water demon who had once nearly dragged him into the darkness beneath the surface, to his death. He said he still feared these types of demons. Was this really just his way of telling us he spent his life trying not to drown?

What if he took so much effort to grow his Marigolds in order to cleanse unwanted energies from a place in his heart that he wanted to protect his children from?

Neither my mother nor my brother will let go of the idea that when he disppeared, it was because he was taken from us by some nefarious culprit. I think I might have to, because more and more I worry that he might have taken himself away.

And if he did, I hope Maat’s feather would weigh up all the love and joy he gave us before that happened, and let him into paradise, I really do.

A mummified bull. What on earth was going on in the life of the woman who had lived in this house that she had a mummified bull in her possession? Then again, given she is now nowhere to be found, and we are here to trauma clean her own blood from the walls, having a mummified bull in her house is probably the very least of it.

“I’ll give them a call and see what they want us to do with it.” Roy says with a sigh, signalling we ought leave the strange discovery alone now and get back to the job.

I nod, and start back down the hallway.

As I pass a long window with its picturesque image of the frozen pond outside, I can hear someone screaming. I dismiss it, as I often have to, as my mind playing tricks on me.

Until Roy notices it, too.

“Is there someone screaming outside?” he says turning towards the window, looking out at the frozen pond.

I stop in surprise.

“You hear that, right?”