Take Care of Your Dead

Take Care of Your Dead is the admonition Hub Gates addresses to Frenesi Gates in a dream. Spoken as he drives away with his lights and generators, it converts a familiar image of her father leaving for work into a warning about the claims of the dead—and about what may happen if those claims are ignored.

The Dream and Its Speaker

The phrase occurs in a dream Frenesi says she had the night before seeing her father. In it, Hub is traveling along a country road at dusk toward another job, with lamps, generators, and projectors trailing behind his car on small trailers. The procession makes his working life tangible: he carries the equipment that produces light wherever work takes him, and continues onward without turning to face her.

Hub addresses Frenesi as Young Gaffer, a name that connects the dream’s warning to his work with lighting. His words make the departing father sound both familiar and unreachable. He answers her call but does not turn around or show his face, so the admonition arrives without the reassurance of direct eye contact.

Frenesi’s Reply

Frenesi responds with anger, suggesting that the dead may be too occupied with being dead to look after anyone. Although she cannot see Hub’s face, she senses it becoming vacant; she wakes at that point. The dream therefore ends not with an explanation of who the dead are or what they might do, but with a rupture in the exchange: the warning is delivered, challenged, and left unresolved.

The Phrase in Context

The waking scene places the dream beside Hub’s actual work. At nightfall, he lights two of his arc lamps for the children and shows Justin, his newly met grandson, how to position and clean the carbon rods for a better beam. Hub is temporarily out of work, but his small company, Lux Unlimited, earns enough for him to eat; sleeping arrangements are less secure, and he expects to work in Beaverton, Oregon, the following week. The dream’s image of him moving from one job to the next thus draws on the practical rhythm of his life, while giving his departure a more ominous meaning.

The phrase remains an admonition rather than a settled explanation. Set against Hub’s skill at making light and Frenesi’s sharp answer, it brings care, absence, and death into a single exchange without resolving their tension. Its force lies in that unfinished warning: the dead are invoked as a responsibility, while Frenesi resists the idea that they can—or will—answer for themselves.