The Funeral Makers (16 page)

“She wants to sleep at Marge's, though I've tried to tell her that Junior and Thelma are using her bed,” said Sicily.

“Do you want to sleep with Junior and Thelma? Is that what you want?” Ed always used this approach on Amy Joy. Asking her if she wanted the ridiculous and forcing her to answer.

“Well, do you? Is that what you want? To snuggle up between Junior and Thelma?”

There was a pause, but Ed was patient. He would wait it out. Finally, tears filling her eyes, Amy Joy said, “No, sir.”

“Well, then. That's more like it. Your mother's made up the sofa for you. Now get in there and go to bed. You should have been in this house over an hour ago. Your mother lets you run wild.”

Amy Joy went into the living room. Sicily had left a clean nightgown for her on the sofa and she took it and went off into the bathroom to change.

Back in the kitchen, Ed said to Sicily, “You spoil her. She minds me because I don't let her get away with all that shit.” Then he turned and went back up to his study.

“Poor kid,” thought Pearl.

“Poor Amy Joy,” thought Sicily and went in to kiss her daughter good night.

O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,

So haggard and so woebegone?

The squirrel's granary is full

And the harvest's done…

—John Keats, “
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
”

Ruth Gifford was mixing scrambled eggs in a plastic bowl. Her granddaughter, Summer Daye, sat near her on the floor with a jar of marshmallow fluff and a spoon. The sticky mixture covered the child's face and her hair was matted with it. The dog, Chainsaw, sat waiting for the occasional opportunity to move in, lick the spoon quickly, then retreat before being kicked by Ruth or slapped on the nose with a sticky spoon.

“You already gobbled down half a jar of that stuff. Now put it away or you'll be sick,” Ruth told the little girl.

“Chainsaw got as much as she did,” said Chester Lee, who'd been watching with amusement.

“Get away, Chainsaw!” Ruth shouted as the dog dived in for a lick. Chainsaw got one last taste before Ruth caught him up by the skin of his neck and heaved him, fleas and all, out through the screen door. He whined several times through the mesh, his nose pressed against it, then went off to lie on the front porch.

“Doggie! Doggie!” squealed the little girl, her fat arms above her head. The spoon fell to the floor. Ruth took the jar away, helped Summer Daye to her feet, and pushed her off into the living room, where her mother was sleeping on the couch.

“Summer Daye's gettin' so big. Look at her waddle!” said Ruth.

“What a stupid name,” said Chester.

“What's wrong with it? Debbie saw it in a magazine a long time ago and remembered it.”

“It's pretty stupid to call a kid that when we only got three months of summer and the rest of the time we're up to our asses in snow,” said Chester Lee.

“It's to
remind
us of summer, dummy. Can't you ever think poems?”

“I'll tell you what I think,” said Chester Lee. “Debbie better quit spending her winter nights in bed with Boyd or we're gonna have so many
summer
days
around here we'll think we're in Florida.”

“You just mind your own business,” said Debbie, who came into the kitchen to get a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. “Ask Chester Lee where he's been hitchin' his horse lately, Mama,” she said to Ruth and winked.

“There's usually a herd of horses at your hitchin' post,” Chester Lee said as he ate the plate of eggs Ruth put in front of him.

“I know where he's been,” said Ruth. “Them McKinnons has had their noses up in the air for so many years their kids is born looking like little pigs.” Ruth Gifford was one of the many Mattagash housewives to make a connection between personality and genetics.

“Amy Joy is fat enough to be a little pig,” said Debbie. “Does she oink, Chester Lee? Or does she squeal?”

Ruth Gifford laughed with her daughter. Despite the teasing, there was an unspoken pride in the Gifford household that one of their own had scaled McKinnon walls and Chester Lee basked in the warmth of his social triumphs.

“Oink! Oink! Oink!” said Debbie as Chester Lee heaved a biscuit across the room. It hit her on the shoulder, then rolled off under the table where Chainsaw would be happily surprised to find it at breakfast.

“What are you gonna do if you get that little girl up the stump? That ain't no laughing matter.” Ruth's “facts of life” talks with her children had always been helpfully instructive, ranging from religion to politics and the legal processes.

“You get that little girl in the family way, Chester Lee, and Ed Lawler'll bury you so deep in jail all we'll ever see of you again is your cowlick.”

“I ain't afraid of Ed Lawler,” Chester Lee lied.

“If Ed Lawler catches you where it's dark, he'll hit you on the head so hard you'll have to unlace your shoes to blow your nose.”

“Don't you worry none about me. I got it all under control.”

“Chester Lee, you need more trouble right now about as much as Noah needed more rain,” said Ruth.

“I ain't gonna be in no trouble.”

“Then keep your pants up,” said his mother.

“Or keep Amy Joy's up,” Debbie said and ran from the kitchen when Chester Lee pushed back his chair as if to chase her.

“OINK! OINK! OINK!” she shouted again from the living room before taking Summer Daye up to bed.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” Chester Lee told his mother and went out into the rainy night.

Leaning on Marge's garage and finishing off his Lucky Strike, Chester Lee cupped the cigarette in his hands as he smoked, hiding the telltale orange glow. He mashed the stub beneath the heel of his boot and flicked it into the lilac bushes. He wanted as little evidence as possible left behind, and a Lucky Strike stub could be incriminating. Even on mere social visits, Chester Lee rarely touched the objects in the room around him and left few fingerprints. The drizzle was still coming down, and he was anxious to get inside and into a warm, dry bed. He spit on the ground and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. He could have easily settled for claiming Amy Joy on his cot in the basement of the Legion Hall, but something about crawling between the whiteness of McKinnon sheets in a McKinnon house was a challenge any true Gifford would take up. It would bring McKinnon noses down that had been up for generations.

But that was not the principal reason Chester Lee was anxious to visit with Amy Joy in her bedroom. She had promised she'd take the roll of money Ed kept hidden in his desk when Chester Lee hinted to her that money was all that kept them from a hasty wedding downstate. Away from Mattagash, no one in their right minds would believe that Amy Joy was only fourteen. She would pack her suitcase and they'd go off together. That's what he'd told Amy Joy, and if he had allowed her to come to the Legion Hall, he'd have been bound to take her with him. Telling her he wanted to make love to her in a real house, in a real bed, like they were married, had made her romantic heart flutter and she'd agreed quickly. Now he could take her body one more time, take something a McKinnon
owed
a Gifford. It would be his last laugh. Then he could take the money, leaving behind a promise to wait down the road a bit in Boyd's pickup truck. Alone, he would be free to get to Watertown by hitching a ride. The next day, he would catch a Greyhound bus downstate. What would Ed Lawler tell the police? That a Gifford had crawled through his willing daughter's open window, made love to her, took money she had eagerly stolen for him from her father, and then ran off? Chester knew Ed Lawler would consider it worth the money to have him out of town and out of Amy Joy's life forever. It was a job, really, and Chester Lee would be well paid. It warmed his heart to know that a man like himself, with no major education to speak of, could outsmart a college man who was a principal. He was paving inroads for the Gifford clan.

The window to Amy Joy's bedroom was waiting for him. A spool of thread had been placed to wedge it open, so that Chester could reach inside and push it up to the hilt. Amy Joy had done this early in the evening so that she wouldn't forget. It was a sentimental gesture, one of love, and Chester Lee was almost touched by it.

The window lifted easily, noiselessly. Chester Lee was surprised that Amy Joy was not waiting at the window for him. When he heard the soft breathing that meant sleep coming from the bed, his ego was a bit bruised. That Amy Joy could fall asleep when she expected him had never occurred to him. Was he losing his charm? Had she come to her senses and decided not to rob her father after all?

He carefully eased the window down behind him, resting it again on the helpful wooden spool. He gave his eyes several seconds to adjust to the objects of the room. The bed was against the opposite wall and he inched his way toward it, one hand in front of him to avoid a collision. He could hear the sounds a woman makes in sleep, the short half snores, the smooth breathing. He wondered if Amy Joy might be pretending to be asleep. Or if she was all naked and waiting for him. Waiting to say
Boo!
when he reached for her. He groped around in the darkness for the sleeping form. Finding her face, he bent down and kissed it. He felt for her breasts and, touching the prominent ribs on Thelma's skinny body, Chester knew immediately it was not the body of one whose main diet was ice cream and Hershey bars. It was not the plump Amy Joy Lawler.

“You could scrub socks on these ribs,” thought Chester, realizing that this was the skinny little woman married to Amy Joy's cousin. Chester Lee had spied on the Ivys one evening while he waited for Amy Joy behind the hazelnut bushes that grew along the road across from Ed Lawler's house. That was the evening the Ivys had come to Sicily's to discuss the funeral preparations, and Chester Lee had given each one a close scrutiny. Thelma Ivy was not enticing to him but, after all, it
was
dark in the room.
Any
port
in
a
storm
was navigational advice a true Gifford would be happy to heed. And she
was
a city woman, born and bred away from Mattagash. The curiosity of making love to a sophisticated woman was enough to put flesh back onto Thelma's bones.

She moaned softly at the touch of hands on her small breasts. Junior had never been quite so forceful a lover. He had always been subdued, almost indifferent. Once, during lovemaking, he had looked down at her and asked if she'd remembered to make the monthly payment on the Packard. Now he was feeling her body as though he were touching it for the first time, yet with authority. Like John Wayne touched the women in his movies. Brutish, but boyish.

Thelma's sex drive, which had been sound asleep, awakened, and she wrapped her arms around the male body that hovered above her. In her half sleep she murmured, “Junie, that feels good.” Chester Lee had already unzipped his pants and pushed the crotch of Thelma's panties aside. He kissed Thelma's tiny mouth. It was hard to believe the good luck he'd been stepping in lately.

After she began to menstruate at the age of fourteen, Thelma had thought often in her life about rape. An issue of the
Reader's Digest
warned women about the wiles of men in parking lots or behind bushes. Men who stood on the street outside a lonely woman's house, smoking a cigarette down to the butt while staring up at the bedroom window, waiting for the light inside to unsuspectingly go out.

Nights when Junior worked late at the funeral home, she kept the doors and windows securely locked, her heart hammering if an oak branch should scrape a window in the wind. In the parking lot of Cain's Grocery, she scanned all directions before finally unlocking the car door and throwing bags of groceries onto the front seat, sometimes breaking eggs and mashing bread. In the event that an assault
should
take place, Thelma had asked God to let her pass out. That way, she could come to blinking her eyes in the warm sunlight, surrounded by scattered cans of vegetables and cornflakes to find the attacker gone, the act completed, and dinner waiting to be prepared for her family. She would never tell a soul. Not even Junior. And if a child should come of it, no one would be the wiser, unless, knock on wood, the rapist was a colored man. That could really let the cat out of the bag. There
were
a few colored in Portland, but Thelma was reasonably sure her assailant would have the decency to be white.

So having armed herself with the
Reader's Digest's
helpful hints on what to kick and where, and having made her pact with God, Thelma faced each day with the conviction that she was more prepared than the average woman. But when the coarse mustache of Chester Lee Gifford pressed down upon her thin lips, the
Reader's Digest
article vanished as though the words had been written with invisible ink. Strangely, she remembered a little pink comb set that she had gotten on her seventh birthday. The brush had been too bristly and hurt her head whenever her mother brushed her hair. When Thelma felt the stiff hair touch against her mouth she wondered, “Whatever happened to that little pink brush?” Then she tried to remember why Junior would be wearing a mustache.

When Thelma Parsons Ivy realized she was being made love to by an unknown man with a mustache, that the pet fear of her life was becoming a reality, a terror gripped her that could not parallel the Packard incident or a husband threatening murder. This was something much more personal. And if God promised her she would pass out, He lied. The screams that came from her throat reminded Chester Lee of a crosscut saw cutting tin. Or a stuck pig. She beat her frail arms against his head, forgetting the vital areas suggested by
Reader's Digest
. Chester Lee, really not a rapist at heart, lifted himself from off his supposed victim and staggered for the window.

“Rape!” Thelma shouted, her life having become a series of brief, one-word ejaculations. The
Digest
article had suggested women should yell “Fire!” for it would take the rapist by surprise and bring others to her defense much quicker. But Thelma had heard “Fire” yelled enough on the hazardous trip up from Portland. If Pearl had yelled “Rape!” instead of fire, it might have made a world of difference.

But yelling “Rape!” was surprise enough for Chester Lee. And it was an insult. He had been accused of many things, but raping Thelma was not one that he felt presented him in his best light. One leg out the window, he stopped and shouted, “I'd rape a chicken first!”

The events of the past few days caught Thelma up in their frenzy and she wailed now in the enormity of the past grief she had borne because of them. “Rape! Rape! Rape!” she chanted, drawing from the experience of her past cheerleading days at South Portland High, where she had rattled pompoms and shouted, “Go! Go! Go!” or “Fight! Fight! Fight!” until her school-spirited throat became hoarse. She locked into the same rhythm now, using the word as a mantra, blocking out the real, physical world, as a kind of hysteric meditation settled over her.