Grounded (4 page)

Later that week an unfamiliar car was spotted cruising through town. A man no one knew was seen pounding wooden stakes in the empty field where the Digginsville Dairy Dream had been before it burned down.

A few days later, a hand-painted sign stood in the middle of the staked-off area. The sign read
FUTURE HOME OF CLEM’S CREMATORIUM.
I thought it meant we were getting a new Dairy Dream—and just six blocks from my house.

“Are you excited about the new crematorium?” I asked Janelle Harper. She’d come in the beauty shop for
Le Frenchie
, as everyone was calling the Marlon Brando–inspired haircut I’d given Barry Howe’s
cousin Frankie. All the girls in Digginsville suddenly wanted
Le Frenchie
cuts after they heard—and believed—it was the hottest hairstyle in France.

I was just trying to make small talk while I thinned the hair around Janelle’s ears. But it was obvious from her reaction that I’d hit on a sore subject.

“No, I’m
not
excited,” she said without hesitation. “I’m absolutely
disgusted.
Imagine someone you love dying and then being
burned
up till they’re just a pile of ashes.”

“What’s that got to do with hot-fudge sundaes?” I asked.

Janelle turned the stool around with her feet so she could stare me down in the mirror. “Dolly,” she said in a superior tone, “you don’t honestly think a crematorium is an
ice-cream parlor
, do you?”

Honestly I did. But I was too proud to admit my ignorance.

“I bet
you
don’t know what it is, either,” I said.

“I most certainly do,” Janelle replied with confidence. “A crematorium is a place where bodies get cremated.”

“Cremated—like
burned
?”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Janelle whispered solemnly. “Isn’t it just the creepiest thing
ever
?”

She swatted away a comma-shaped clump of hair that had fallen onto her lips. Janelle had been a mouth breather since kindergarten. It made cutting her hair a challenge.

“If you ask me,” I said, “being buried in the cemetery doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs.”

“Yes,” said Janelle. “But at least if you’re buried, your family can come visit you and decorate your grave on Memorial Day.”

Memorial Day. Wasn’t that in May? Right after school let out? This was June.
I didn’t tell Janelle that Mother and I had neglected to decorate our family’s gravestone. It was none of her dang business.

“Whereas if you’re cremated,” Janelle continued, “there’s nothing to visit. You’re just a sad little pile of dust that blows away and is forgotten forever by everybody.”

She shuddered and left. At least she remembered to pay me a dollar for the haircut. I stuffed the bill in the coffee can with the rest of my college money.

It turned out my other customers all felt the same way as Janelle about the crematorium. That is, until the following week when Aunt Josie came in for
Le Frenchie.
(Mother still refused to cut her hair.)

To my surprise, Aunt Josie was in favor of the new
crematorium, which turned out to be a trailer house with white vinyl siding and green plastic shutters.

“’Course it’s a little tacky to look at,” Aunt Josie conceded. Years ago she’d hired some high school kids to paint her house a lively shade of lavender. Over time the color had faded considerably, like Aunt Josie herself.

“But no, I don’t mind having a crematorium in town,” she said. “Most of my gentlemen don’t have family around here. Being cremated means they can have someone like me scatter their ashes wherever they want to go. Eureka Springs. The Grand Canyon. Even Timbuktu, if that’s what they want.”

I had a hard time picturing all this. “How do they do it?” I asked. “Do they just throw the bodies on a brush pile and then rake up the ashes?”

“Heavens no, child,” crowed Aunt Josie, her eyes closed tight as I chopped her wild mane of red hair. “It’s all very scientific. I’ve met Mr. Clem and he’s awful smart. He told me about this machine he has. It takes care of everything in a very professional manner.”

“But what about the viewing of the body?” I said. “Don’t people like to get one last look at a person so they can say good-bye?”

I was thinking back again to that night in the funeral home when Mother was curling Lilac Rose’s hair and trimming Daddy’s whiskers and Wayne Junior’s hair. I was wishing I’d done a better job saying good-bye instead of just standing there, doing nothing.

“There are some people who think it’s morbid to dress up a dead body,” Aunt Josie explained. “Besides, when a person dies, you should celebrate their life, not mope around about their death.”

This made sense to me.

“When it’s my time,” Aunt Josie went on, “I want you to get out all my scrapbooks and find the most flattering pictures of me. Put them in pretty frames on tables all over my house. And then I want you to invite everyone over and throw a big old party.”

“A party?” I asked. “At your house?”

“That’s right,” she instructed, her velvety voice rising. “Serve Bubble Up and club sandwiches, and let people stay as long as they want. And then, a week or so later when everybody’s gone, scatter my ashes in the backyard. Just sprinkle them under the apple tree.”

“You want to be
cremated
?” I asked, shocked.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not? It’s how the old-timey Greeks and Romans did it. It’s just a
body
.
Truth is, I don’t care what you do with me as long as you don’t bury me underground. I’ve never been a stick in the mud, and I don’t plan to start being one when I’m—”

“You about finished over there, Daralynn?” Mother asked from her side of the curtain. “Because you’ve got two cases of Coca-Cola that need to be put in the fridge.”

Aunt Josie looked at me and shrugged.

When I finished cutting her hair, Aunt Josie was so pleased with her new look, she gave me a ten-dollar bill.

“It’s only a dollar,” I said, handing back her money.

“Shush,” she said, shaking her newly shorn head. “Child, you
earned
it. Don’t I look like Mia Farrow? And if I’m not mistaken, I’ve just lost five pounds—in hair.”

She admired her reflection in the mirror for several minutes. Then she turned and looked over her shoulder, admiring herself with puckered lips and a “come hither” expression. She laughed and gave me a big hug before pulling the curtain and walking toward the door.

“Bye for now, Hattie,” Aunt Josie said, leaning in
to give her sister-in-law a hug. But Mother flinched and successfully dodged the embrace.

It was a snub, to be sure. But I could tell what my mother was thinking just from the look in her eye:
Josie looks pretty even with her head practically scalped! Ack!!

Of course I was thinking something else entirely.
Someday Aunt Josie won’t be around anymore. And there’s not one darn thing I can do about it.

I had suspected Mother was opposed to the crematorium just because Aunt Josie was for it. But that wasn’t the problem at all.

“That crematorium is going to put the funeral home out of business,” Mother told Mamaw one night when they were sitting on the porch. It was after dinner. I was in the living room, eating a jelly sandwich and listening through the screen door.

“Just a matter of time,” Mother explained. She was combing out a pile of artificial hairpieces she used on customers with thinning hair. “Dan Danielson said cremation is the way of the future. If the funeral home goes out of business, I’ll lose my best customers—the dead ones who don’t complain. And
then I’ll lose all my
living
customers who want to look snazzy on funeral days.”

She was right to worry. The days leading up to a funeral were always the busiest days in a small-town beauty parlor.

Mother was still grumbling about the crematorium when the sound of music from Aunt Josie’s house floated through the trees and down to our house.

“That
woman
,” Mother snarled.

“Baby likes her music,” murmured Mamaw, washing a Barbie doll’s hair in a roasting pan. Mamaw had become so forgetful with names she’d started calling everyone Baby. Yet her ability to ferret out my dolls—even after I hid them under the basement stairs—was uncanny and impressive.

“The way she carries on with those
men
of hers,” Mother elaborated. “I swear.”

But just then, I heard the voice of a man who didn’t sound old enough to be one of Aunt Josie’s boarders. He had a deep, distinguished voice like a doctor on a TV show. When the song ended, the trill of Aunt Josie’s laughter filled the air. Minutes later, she and the man with the deep voice were walking in front of our house.

“Oh, Mr. Clem,” Aunt Josie purred. “You shoulda been a
comedian.
”

“Please,” replied the male voice. “Call me Clem.”

Mother blasted through the front door. “I cannot be
lieve
Josie’s been entertaining a
cremator
in her house,” she fumed. She stopped when she saw me. “Daralynn!”

I thought for sure I was going to get in trouble for eating in the living room. “I’m being care—” I started to explain.

“Hush!” Mother ordered. Then she hid behind the door so she could listen to the conversation on the sidewalk without being seen. I listened, too.

“Now Mr. Clem—er, Clem—” Aunt Josie was saying, “I want you to use Old Mary any time you want. I keep the key in the ignition, so you just help yourself. Don’t even bother askin’ because I’ll just say take it. It’s yours for the borrowing.”

“Not even her truck,” Mother whispered behind the door.

This wasn’t entirely true. Daddy had given his 1959 Ford F-100 pickup truck to Aunt Josie after Mother complained that it was an embarrassment to have a rusty pickup parked in our driveway. Aunt Josie named the truck Old Mary. She used it to get
her Christmas tree every year and also to haul junk to the dump whenever she cleaned out her garage. She even let me drive Old Mary up and down her driveway a couple of times when Daddy said it was okay.

“Daddy gave her that truck,” I whispered.

“Shhhh!” Mother said, erasing away this fact with a wave of her hand. She leaned in closer to the screen door. I followed suit.

“Why, Miss Josie,” Mr. Clem was saying, “I’m beginning to see why you’re the most popular lady in Digginsville.”

Mother emitted a deep growl as she spun away from the door. “Put Mamaw to bed,” she directed me. Then she retreated upstairs to her bedroom, where I heard the unmistakable sound of delicate things being slammed on a marble-top dresser all night long.

It was my idea to put the
fun
back in funeral. After sleeping on the problem, I told Mother and Mamaw my thoughts the next morning at breakfast.

“I’ve heard some folks like to celebrate the life of a person who’s passed, rather than their death,” I began.

Mother stared at me as she stirred her coffee. The altitude of her eyebrows told me she knew exactly where I’d heard this.

“So I was thinking,” I said, “what if you talked the funeral home into offering living funerals? It’d be a way to—”

“
Living
funerals?” Mother asked. “That’s a contradiction in terms.”

“Let her finish,” Mamaw said. “Go on, Baby.”

I hadn’t really thought the whole thing through yet. But I just kept talking while Mother glared at me, and Mamaw held a glass of orange juice to a doll’s plastic mouth. I was hiding those dolls all over the house, but Mamaw always managed to find them.

“Well,” I ventured, “what if the funeral home offered people a chance to have a little get-together before they die? It’d be like going to your own funeral, but you’d be
alive
so you could hear all the nice things people generally say about dead people. And you’d get to thank the people in your life who—”

Now it was Mamaw who cut me off. “Funerals upset my babies,” she said, putting the doll over her shoulder to burp.

But Mother was smiling. “This is good,” she said. “This could work.”

And then she dumped her coffee in the sink and marched over to Dan Danielson’s house to tell him the idea.

The following Monday, this ad ran in
The Digginsville Daily Quill
: