The Funeral Makers (25 page)

“You're a good man, Walter,” she told him. “The only good man I know.” And he smiled, revealing the beginning of a cavity on his front tooth.

“Call me any time you're ready to give up this traveling life,” Walter told her, and she reached into her wallet for something for him to write his phone number on. Walter took the paper, but before he wrote on it, he opened it and read what was written there. Then he folded it and carefully formed each number so that there could be no doubt what they were, no mistaking them in the future. He gave the paper back to Violet over the table in the Bluebird Café. “You're a butterfly,” he said.

***

When the bus stopped in Bangor, Violet put on her coat and shouldered the strap of her purse. The soldier had chatted with her some on the way down, told her he was sorry to be in the army at a time when there was no war. Now he was asleep in his seat, going on to Portland. Violet smiled when she passed his seat. “He'll have his war to fight when he gets back home,” she thought, remembering the straggly haired young wife back at the drugstore, a child in her arms and another growing in her stomach.

Several people were getting off in front of her so she waited for the aisle to empty. Then she left her suitcases and the cardboard box in a corner of the bus station and went to look for a pay phone. Digging a handful of change up from the bottom of her purse, she piled nickels and quarters and dimes on the shelf beneath the phone and lifted the receiver.

“I'll be back at exactly two fifteen tomorrow. Maybe we could have a drink or two.”

Violet jumped to hear the voice so close. She turned. It was the bus driver.

“Please leave me alone,” she said. The flirtatious look on his face turned quickly to a sneer. She watched as he went back out to his bus. Then she gave the operator her mother's number. The old woman answered after two rings. She sounded younger in spirit than Violet had ever known her to be. “It must have been living under Daddy's thumb,” she thought. She would be home in a few days, she told her mother. She had some things to do first. Shopping. Tying up some loose ends.

“It's all over, Mama,” she said, and the old woman began to cry.

“Come on home, Bethie,” she told her daughter.

Violet hung up the phone just in time to see the bus driver pulling away from the station. He waved to her and she pretended not to see. Digging again in her wallet, she brought out Walter Frontenac's phone number and took a deep breath.

“If he can teach me to clean up my act,” Violet thought, “I can teach him to clean his fingernails. All eight of them.”

“MacKinnons…are of royal descent, being a branch of the great clan Alpin. About the year 1400, the MacKinnons fell into misunderstanding with other clans, who were jealous of their rising influence…”

“The McKinnon Coat-of-Arms: quarterly, (1) a boar's head holding the shank bone of a deer in its mouth, (2) a castle, triple-towered and embattled, (3) ship with oars saltirewise, (4) a hand couped fesswise holding a cross crosslet.”

“The Badge is
pinus
sylvestris
, a slip of pine tree.”

—from R. R. McIan,
The
Clans

of
the
Scottish
Highlands

There's not much left to say when lives are over. Like a record that's been played and then put away, a man or woman's life is recorded in the grooves left in the living. Some replay it. Others forget to. Some speak well of the dead, once they
are
dead. Others remain true to themselves. A Gifford, for instance, never says a praiseful thing about a corpse if he didn't say the same things when the corpse was living. Not even if the dead is another Gifford. And that's to be commended.

There's no end to the stories in small towns. Story endings are inherited by the next generations, and just when you tire of one about some man or woman, they have a child who picks up the plot and carries it to new heights. Modernization can always be counted on for new twists. Once plant food was accepted at Lyman's store as a scientific way to produce healthier plants, it could only be expected that folklore would meld with science to provide an enduring myth for the townspeople. And it did. Ginnie Craft was accused of delivering an illegitimate baby and burying it beneath the lilac trees in her Mama's backyard, resulting in the bushiest, lilaciest one in town. Ginnie really miscarried at four months, was attended by a doctor, and came home from a visit to her Aunt Louisa's in Watertown as a slim girl given a second chance. There's always some truth in folklore. And some truisms in small towns:

Willie O'Brian could stop blood but he couldn't stop drinking.

Sarah Pinkham could hold her breath but not her husband.

Marge McKinnon needed a man like she kneaded bread.

Chester Lee Gifford was as hung as Nathan Hale.

Bert Fogarty skimmed the truth like he skimmed milk. And a child of Amy Joy's will come home from school one day and ask, “What did Mike Fennelson mean when he said we need more homework like Ed Lawler needed more bullets?” And people will be hurt anew, generations of them wounded by one bullet.

But that's how it is in small towns. Even in cities. It's all a matter of deism. Our ancestors came in with their bold dreams and vague visions and, godlike, they laid down examples they themselves couldn't follow. Then they died and went off somewhere. Forgot about us. Took no further part in our functioning. And we've been spitting into the wind ever since. We're limping into the computer age while dragging behind us the rotting rituals of the Middle Ages.

In 1842, during the dispute with Great Britain over the Maine–Canada boundary, a fort was built in Watertown, in case soldiers marched that far north. One man died during the war, of pneumonia. He was not considered a hero for having done this. But neither was he considered a coward. He was locked somewhere in the middle in a kind of humorous limbo that allowed schoolchildren to laugh out loud at his misfortune. Edward Elbert Lawler, on the other hand, a lone soldier in his own kind of boundary war,
was
considered a coward. Just why suicide was deemed less than noble never occurred to anyone in Mattagash. Unless you were one of the romantic heroes who did it for love, or for country, or for honor, you were weakhearted. Why it would be more valiant to pursue one dull, predictable day after the next until death came upon you unawares than to plunge willingly into the black uncertainty never surfaced in their minds. It was gritless. To kill yourself for no reason other than a little depression was an act of cowardice. It was an ignoble way out, an ideology no doubt planted in the minds of peasants by their kings who envisioned an empty kingdom if suicide became an expedient among the disgruntled, miserable masses. By priests who liked full churches. By pharaohs who needed the living, antlike bodies of slaves to build their tombs. Ed Lawler, by placing a gun to his head and planting a bullet in his brain, had earned himself a place in Mattagash history, more certain but less tasteful than the pneumonic soldier whose battle against the bleak winter of northern Maine was harder to fight than the enemy.

Three deaths in Mattagash in a matter of twenty-four hours were something to buzz about. The elderly could drop like flies and no one would be surprised. No one would get that rush of hot blood flushing through their veins in appreciation of the life still in their own bodies. They would be surprised at the first sounds of the siren but, after the ambulance pulled into the yard of some elderly man or woman and the telephones rang around town and people listened in on party lines, they would be satisfied that the grim reaper had claimed no undue morsels and the women would go back to their ironing boards and wringer washers and children would leave their stands around the telephone to go outside and roll their hula hoops about the backyard.

Marge McKinnon's death came as no surprise to anyone, but Ed's and Chester Lee's measured among those choice occurrences that caused blood to pump through veins that had nearly clogged with boredom. Theirs were the deaths that myths are made of, but there was a general feeling in the town of having been cheated out of a ritual. The Gifford funeral was a social event that only Giffords and their relatives, either legitimate or of the same blood, cared to attend. There was a closed casket at Chester Lee's funeral. It was said in Mattagash that this was because they feared someone from among the mourners would steal the silk pillow out from under Chester's head. It was also said that the pallbearers had to push the casket up to the grave because Bert Gifford had stolen the handles. But the one story that will most likely outlast all others, true or not, was of Chester Lee propped up in the backseat of Bert's old Ford and accompanied by Bert and his brothers, who had been released from the state pen for the occasion, being driven around Mattagash for one last frolicking family get-together. Bert Gifford told that one himself, saying that they stopped at Lyman's store and everyone went in and stole a pack of cigarettes while Lyman was out gassing up the old Ford. Even Chester Lee. Bert said a little thing like rigor mortis couldn't keep Chester Lee from a free pack of Lucky Strikes.

Marge and Ed were buried on the same day, at the same time, in the same corner of the Protestant graveyard. It was the first time in their relationship they had gotten along so well. For a McKinnon, Marge went back to the earth peaceable. There was no fanfare, no gathering except for the immediate family. Ed's suicide made a normal funeral impossible. Marvin Sr. and Junior had come by early the morning of the funerals to see that the graves were dug properly. A matter of semantics to funeral directors. As if the earth would spit Marge and Ed out like watermelon seeds if the dimensions were a quarter-inch off. The whole quiet affair was so unbefitting to Marge that it fit her exactly: “Never let them think they've got you figured out,” she once said. “Keep them wrong all the time.”

That morning was a bright sea-blue one, with the Ivys and Sicily and Amy Joy leaning into a strong autumn wind that whipped their clothing about them, as if they were a field of crows waiting for the first sign of a seedling to come from the planting. Sicily stood over Ed's grave on that high hill where the Protestant graveyard lay, and wept painful sounds into the wind that carried down off the hill and echoed along the river like the ancient sounds of bagpipes the McKinnons had played when they marched into battle, long before the clan sought refuge in Ireland. The sounds of a wife mourning a husband dead in battle. Musical chords and notes inherited and dragged down the ages with us, our instruments from the old country broken or lost so that we chant the same laments a cappella, wringing our hands as if in memory of the lyre, as if longing for the smooth, narrow body of the flute. The last of the McKinnons in Mattagash, in blood if not in name, stood on the hillside to mourn their dead. Then they came down from the high ground, that favorite spot of the builders of castles that looks far out on the whale's road, on the swan's path for the first glimpse of an enemy coming to take the high ground. Sicily and Amy Joy and the Ivys came down from the Protestant graveyard that overlooked the Mattagash River. They came down empty-handed and went home, went back about the idea of living, to the foolish notion of life, and left the earth freshly piled behind them. Left Ed and Marge alone, to sink down into their bones like the hulls of old ships come aground in the storm. They left the fragile, gossamer dreams of the dead where they belong, up on the high ground, where the wind could sift through them gently, where they could quietly, softly go back to dust.

The leaves will drop from the trees, leaving them bare as bone. The river will rise to cover the rocks along the shore; in early December it will freeze over. Red fires made from sticks and blown-out tires will dot the black night beneath the bridge where skaters have gathered, their cloudy breaths hanging in the air like frozen words, like an Impressionist painting. Until spring comes, the woodsmen will wade in snow, cutting the trees and hauling them out of the woods with tractors, if they can afford them, or with work-tired horses that pull them from memory.

When the ice finally leaves the ground, the graveyard will take in the dead: the ill and aging, the young and unlucky. Babies born in January's cold with little stamina. A young woodsman crushed beneath a falling pine. The occasional lone figure who goes off to the river and slips in, or who goes to the barn with a rope and quietly closes the doors.

Summer will bring the tourists who drift down the Mattagash in red and green canoes and gaze up at the backs of houses that line the river, never seeing Mattagash from the front but seeing only the shabby backside of the town, the occasional outhouse, the gutted cars, a chicken pecking here and there. And they'll laugh their sharp city laughter. The one or two who don't laugh have drowned in the fast, white rapids a mile below the falls. That's where, as everyone in Mattagash knows, the river laughs at tourists.

Mattagash will go on with its cycles of life. There will be husbands lying down in the wrong beds. Wives caught in the wrong arms at the wrong time. There will be hasty weddings. The dying will die and move aside for the living to die, and the patterns of life will continue, as they have since that wet autumn day the first tiny group of settlers scraped their pirogue up onto the banks and stepped out, trembling with cold and expectations and maybe, at least for one of them, needing a spot to pee. A kind of squatter's right. After the deaths that rainy fall of 1959, Mattagash will lie dormant for many uneventful years. And when some excitement happens again, it will, as it always does in a little town, happen in a big way.

harvest
home
1. The last harvest load brought home.

—Webster

I bring the harvest home to her,

I bring the last load home.

She sits and rocks the night away,

She rocks at night alone.

So who will separate the chaff

So we can eat the grain?

“The wind,” she said to me at last

And closed her window pane.

—Fictional Old Folk Song, Mattagash, Maine

Marvin Sr., Junior, Thelma, and the little Ivys went back to Portland driving a rehabilitated Packard. Pearl would have liked for Marvin to stay longer, but business was waiting. “They're dying in other parts of the state too, you know,” he told her. Pearl remained an extra week to be at Sicily's side, to help get her adjusted to the rough spots, to clear up the loose ends of Marge's estate.

What money Marge had left from the modest inheritance from her father and the sale of her personal belongings would not, it was legally decided, go to the Widows of Missionary Brothers. The president of the organization, it was discovered, was Luther Toot, brother to Harley Toot, a real-life missionary from Bangor, now dead. Frances Toot, Harley's surviving widow and treasurer of the fund, as well as Luther's girlfriend, swore there had been no false representation in the advertisement that Marge had clipped out of one of her many religious magazines. Frances Toot, although she had refused to accompany her husband to China in 1929, was indeed a missionary's widow. Marge's will was declared void. She was not in the presence of her faculties.

“She wasn't even in the same room,” said Pearl. She had finished packing and was waiting for Jasper Gardner to give her a ride to Watertown.

“Jasper is charging me three dollars for a ride to Watertown,” Pearl laughed. “Remember how I paid his daddy a dollar to take me to Watertown the first time I left? Seems I'm always paying to get out of here.”

“Maybe I'll learn how to drive now,” said Sicily. “I could start a taxicab company.”

Amy Joy hugged her aunt Pearl and then went off into the kitchen in her endless quest for food. The two sisters stood on the front porch of the old homestead looking out at the field across the road.

“They say everything happens in threes,” said Sicily.

“Maybe we asked for it,” said Pearl. “Coming up from Portland with our suitcases full of black clothes, expecting a funeral. Maybe we brought it all on ourselves.”

“I should have waited until Marge died to call you. But the doctor said she wouldn't last the night. It's modern living is what it is. In the old days people didn't hear about someone dying until they were dead. Like we heard about Daddy. And then, well, what can you do? You accept it and go on about your day. But now it's all different. That's the way the whole world is nowadays. Fast-paced. Everybody wants to know everything before it happens and only God should know things like that.”

“People just want to be prepared is all,” said Pearl. “They don't want the devil to catch them sitting down.”

“The river rose a lot from all that rain,” said Sicily.

“I can hardly sleep for the sound of it. It sounds like a thundering downpour to me,” said Pearl.

Jasper's car pulled slowly into the driveway. Jasper flicked a cigarette butt out into the yard through his side window and it lay smoking near a mud puddle.

“Are you sure you won't come with me, Sissy? You could get a nice little place just down the street. Amy Joy could go to a good school.”

“No, Pearl, really. This is home to us. Amy Joy has school here. And our friends and our roots are here. I'm thinking of turning Marge's house into some kind of a shop since you don't want your half. I could cater to tourists. Maybe get the women in town to make quilts and little souvenirs and such. And we could turn a couple of the rooms into a community center for the kids so they'd have a place to go, something to do in the evenings. I don't think any of them would get into any trouble if they just had something to do with their time. I even thought I'd get a little plaque to put on the door, saying something like ‘In Memory of Edward Lawler, Principal.' You can get them made at the Western Auto in Watertown. Ed had one made once for old Girdy when she retired from teaching.”

“That sounds real nice, Sissy,” said Pearl, hugging her. “We're tougher than we thought, you know. It wasn't just Marge all these years who knew how to roll with the punches. We rolled with a few ourselves.”

Jasper tooted his horn. “I got to get Myrtle to her doctor's by nine o'clock,” he shouted out his window. “And Sarah and Belle to the bus by nine fifteen.”

“Darn it,” said Pearl. “Am I going to have to ride to Watertown with Sarah Pinkham? I'll hear all the gossip I missed in the past twenty years!”

“She and Belle's going down to her sister's in Vermont. Winnie says it's cancer and Sarah's going to take care of her until she dies.”

“I can't imagine Sarah Pinkham having that big a heart,” said Pearl.

“Winnie says she and Albert ain't really pulling very well. She says she'll fill me in on it once I get back out and about for a cup of coffee. But I hear there's a will involved if Sarah takes care of her.”

“Don't say
will
to me,” Pearl said and winked. Sicily squeezed her sister's hand, then watched the body that looked so much like her own amble, the way a McKinnon does, down to Jasper's car. Before the car pulled out of the yard, Pearl turned in the backseat and threw Sicily a kiss. When the car disappeared around the turn, Sicily finally went inside Marge's house, the old McKinnon homestead, to pack up Amy Joy's things so that the two of them could go home. Before going in, she opened the back door. Listening hard, she could hear the rapids, a distant seashell sound, the way it must have sounded over generations to the ears that listened for it, except for a few rocks that would have shifted some in the spring jams, changing the melody a little but keeping the same refrain. But no matter how hard she listened, she couldn't hear Pearl's downpour of rain. So she closed the door and left the problem of the river for nature to work out, left it for God to understand.

Back in her own kitchen, Sicily put the teakettle on and stood listening as it came to a slow boil. She poured water over a tea bag and milk that waited in her cup. Then she took her cup of tea, turned out the kitchen light, and walked slowly through her living room where several days earlier the family had gathered to discuss plans for Marge.

The whole house was so quiet around her that the only sounds came from outside, from the old birch behind the house that began its career in growing before the Reverend was even born, its mossy limbs fighting off the wind. From an empty pop bottle that rolled in the wind across the yard and banged into the front steps. From the wild cats that were living in Willie's abandoned barn, holed up in the gray firewood that had been tiered along one wall and forgotten when Willie was killed by lightning and Margaret went alone into the big barn to hang herself. The original ancestors were house cats owned by Willie, but after he passed away, they had taken to living off the land, raising their litters in the barn, each generation growing further and further away from human contact. Finally, the image of their ancestors curled sleepily on a braided rug in front of man's fire was no more meaningful than the dim red reflection in each other's eyes as they gazed down from the barn's upper windows at the bonfire by the river where man had come to skate. When the bonfire died down and the humans were gone, they settled down upon their paws, snoozing, sensing the danger had passed.

“Amy Joy has got to stop throwing her pop bottles down wherever she happens to finish them. We're getting as bad as the Giffords,” thought Sicily, then hated the comparison she had used. She had promised herself, the day they buried Chester Lee Gifford, to stop using the Gifford name to denote all that was distasteful in the human condition. It was the same way she used the word
communist
until Ed asked her one day if she had ever met a communist, and if she hadn't, perhaps she should reserve her judgment until she did. Ed's way of correcting her was the same one he used on Amy Joy, by asking the ridiculous and then forcing an answer.

Sicily opened the screen door a crack and heard the cats far off in Willie's barn, at each other's throats again, too many generations born to know they were all related, all still of the same blood and bone. Their numbers never seemed to fail them. Despite the occasional one here or there being picked off by a wild boy with a new rifle in his hands, or the not so rare sight of one flattened in the road by a pulp truck until it was board stiff and thrown into the river, or the old ones who caught some sickness or simply went off to die of age, the cats in the barn survived even the slow-moving, food-scarce winters,
would
survive, until the day when one of the kittens was caught and brought back to the human hearth, given back its rightful bowl of warm milk.

Sicily closed the door and turned off the light at the foot of the stairs. Amy Joy was in her downstairs bedroom in pajamas and ready for sleep. Sicily had kissed her good night earlier but she was still up. There was a light beneath her door.

“Mama?” Amy Joy asked from behind the door. “Are you going up now?”

“I thought I would,” said Sicily.

“Good night then.”

“Good night, honey. You sleep tight.” Sicily stood with her hand on the railing, not able at first to go up the stairs alone. Since Ed's death she had not felt truly alone in the house. Amy Joy's bedroom was just downstairs. And Pearl had been sleeping in the extra room across the hall from Ed and Sicily's room. Sicily had put a cot in there for her, and at night Pearl's snoring had been as comforting as song. Ed used to snore, but Sicily never really heard it. At least it never bothered her. It was like the river you grew up too close to. You were so used to it you'd never know if it quit running. It was because Pearl had been living in Portland so long that the river kept her awake at night. Sicily, on the other hand, had never gone anywhere long enough to miss the river. To miss Mattagash. To miss the people she was always around.

“Watch out the bedbugs don't bite,” she told Amy Joy and went on up the stairs alone.

Upstairs, Sicily avoided the bedroom at first, going instead to the bathroom and drawing a full tub of hot, sudsy water. Then she took off her robe and eased herself down into the pleasant, engulfing warmth as goose bumps sprang up on her arms like little pleasure domes.

“That feels so good,” she thought, then felt guilt rise up inside her for participating in the act of being alive. Ed was dead; Ed would never feel goose bumps again. That Ed had chosen a bleak grave over a hot bubble bath did not occur to her. She felt, as all of Mattagash did, as all the world would, that if Ed could heal the gashing canal into his brain, he would choose life over death. It was, after all, only natural. It was what man's entire quest was about. Keeping alive. Keeping one step ahead of the grim reaper. If suicide was the better alternative, why were so many people still alive and doing well in the world? No, if Ed could undo what he'd done, he would. That's what made his suicide so hard to accept.

“If he could have just gotten through the night,” Pearl had said to Sicily. “Tomorrow would have been a new day.”

“The sun always shines brightest after the storm,” the minister had told her. “If he'd only waited for the sun.” No one, not even Sicily, suspected that Ed had gone through many storms and found no sun waiting for him. Had staggered through countless nights and found the same old tomorrow descending on him like a bird of prey.

Sicily toweled herself dry. In the mirror she studied her figure. Her breasts drooped. The extra weight around her stomach and thighs that refused to leave after Amy Joy's birth was so familiar a sight to her that she had forgotten the silky feel of the size-nine wedding gown that Marge had zipped her into on her wedding day. The day she married Ed Lawler. The day Ed Lawler married
her
, thinking she was pregnant with his child. Sicily lifted one breast, then let it flop back down on her chest. She and Martha Fogarty and Winnie Craft had joked about the bodies that they'd donated to the cause of childbearing. Sicily's, having been used only once, when the one-of-a-kind Amy Joy was brought squalling into existence, had suffered less ravaging than the other two women, Martha with eight children and Winnie with five. Yet Sicily never kept her figure fit.

“I'd never pass the pencil test now,” Sicily said to her reflection. Martha Fogarty used to remind them that if a woman put a pencil beneath her breast and it stayed there she was in trouble. There was too much droop. Like a suspension bridge that has begun to sag. “I could hold as many pencils as Amy Joy's pencil box now.” Sicily moved in closer to look at her face. She was still pretty. Her cheekbones, a feature she'd once been so proud of, were still there. A brush stroke of blush or two could bring them back. And her hair. She'd always hated her auburn hair. She could dye it a different color. But that wouldn't be a good example for Amy Joy, who was pining away for Sensuous Ash. But maybe just a dark rinse to take away the reddish highlights. That wouldn't hurt. A person should have the right to change the things about themselves that they didn't like, if that person was older than fourteen.

“What am I thinking about prettying myself up for?” Sicily asked her reflection. “Me with a husband not cold in his grave. Oh God!” She put a hand to her heart. The thought of Ed in a cold casket in the ground was a picture she was just not ready to deal with. She would whisper the Lord's Prayer to keep her mind off Ed.

There were spaces everywhere in the bathroom, a space between her hair spray on the shelf and the talcum powder. Ed's shaving cream used to sit there. The absence of a man's belongings was so obvious to her that it was like a loud noise. Like one of those puzzles in the
Grit
that asks “What's wrong with this picture?” and you realize that there's a mouse sitting in the fish bowl or that a lamp is hanging upside down from the ceiling. The disappearance of Ed's things was the work of Pearl, who had thoughtfully packed everything into boxes and stored them in the closet of the spare room until Sicily found it possible to sort through the items and dispose of them accordingly. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. But now it felt contrived. The whole house was like a big dollhouse. As if it wasn't the real thing. A
pretend
house. Sicily smiled, thinking of the dollhouse out back that Ed and some of his students had built when Amy Joy was five years old. When Sicily had something that was no longer useful, she'd give it to Amy Joy, who would push it out to the dollhouse in her baby carriage. Out went old lamps, a broken toaster, a chipped dinner plate, empty perfume bottles, a broom whose straw had begun to fray. Maybe Pearl had given Amy Joy all of Ed's things and they were hanging at that very moment in the dollhouse. Waiting for the daddy of the house to get home. “Little Amy Joy setting up house in the backyard,” thought Sicily, and remembered how Amy Joy used to tell her that when she got married and had babies, she was going to live in her little dollhouse. “And stay close to you, Mama,” she'd say, her chubby hands burying themselves in Sicily's dress.