The Undertaking of Tess

by Lesley Kagen

  She doesn’t look terrified at all, which really surprises me. Birdie and me thought that Snake Pit movie was about boas and pythons falling into a hole before we saw it at the Tosa Theatre. It wasn’t. It gave the both of us nightmares for months, and it still does if I think about it in the middle of the night, because the biggest thing that I’m afraid of in all of life is not spiders or rabid dogs or ghosts. You can squash a spider, shoot a foaming-at-the-mouth dog like they did in Old Yeller, and throw holy water on a ghost, but the crazy? Seems like it just sneaks into you and you can’t do anything to stop it once it sets up shop in your brain.

  Birdie shakes herself free from my hands and says a little too uppity for my taste, “For your information, I’m not talking to bees. I’m talking to …,” she spins around, “her.” She is pointing at absolutely nothing. “Her real name is Betsy Elizabeth, but she said I can call her Bee. She’s my new friend.”

  A Friend Indeed

  Dreaming up a pal is not what Louise meant when she told Birdie and me that we should try to be more popular. This is more like, “Being between a hard place … between a hard rock … and….” What the hell is that famous saying?

  What am I supposed to say to Birdie? I can’t let her know that seeing people that aren’t there is also not good, that would really hurt her delicate feelings. How does something like this happen? Has she been hitting the bottle? Like that guy in another movie we saw who had a very tall, invisible bunny friend named Harvey? She begs me all the time to take her up to Lonnigan’s. I don’t, because I’m afraid that’ll get back to Louise, but has Birdie been sneaking up to the bar without me the same way I been sneaking over the cemetery fence without her?

  I take a step closer to get a whiff of her breath. It smells like cherry Pez and nothing like Daddy’s after a long shift, so that’s good, but it doesn’t really solve the problem.

  I ask her in a very ho-hum way, like this sort of thing happens every day, “So … ah … you and your friend are the Bird and the Bee?”

  She nods and smiles from ear to ear.

  I can’t help it. The Bird and the Bee? That hits my funny bone. Even though I shouldn’t encourage her, I tell my sister with a real, big laugh, “That’s rich.” Daddy would yuk it up if he was here too.

  My baby sister doesn’t know what that means because she’s getting held back this year, so she won’t go into fifth grade, which is where you learn that the birds and the bees has something to do with how babies are made. She doesn’t know about “Things” and “Wieners,” either, not the way I do. Kevin Remmington told me at recess last year when we were hanging out on top of the monkey bars together, “The man takes his wiener and puts it into the lady’s bun and wiggles it all around. That’s what it’s all about.”

  That sounded like the hokey-pokey and not so bad until a picture of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile came into my mind. (Heavens to Murgatroyd! Maybe that’s why Scruffy kept telling Mrs. Brown to cut off Mr. Brown’s thing. He was only trying to protect her!) Kevin Remmington started telling me more, but I fell off the monkey bars because I covered my ears. (That recess is also when I learned that knowledge doesn’t always give you power like it says on the library sign. Sometimes knowing something makes you never want to eat a hot dog again as long as you live.)

  A lot of stories like that go around school. You have to hear them even if you don’t want to. We all know our mothers push us out of their tummies, but what we’re not sure about is how we got in there in the first place and what that has to do with birds and bees. Plenty rumors about our teachers float around too. “They weren’t born with boobies and that’s how they know that they’re supposed to grow up and be nuns,” Marvin Howard told everyone because his father is the barber and he hears things. “And the nuns can’t have babies even if they wanted to because after they sign up they get hung upside down in the bell tower and their holes are filled with cement by the Archbishop.”

  I ask Birdie as we walk past a few of the graves, “Does Bee … ah … talk back to you?”

  “A course! She told me just now that you’re crowding her and that you should move over and give her a little elbow room.”

  I take a giant step to the right. “What does she look like?”

  Birdie studies the girl who isn’t there. “She’s got brown hair, and her eyes are Robin’s egg blue like mine, and she’s the exact same tallness as me, but …,” she looks closer, “she’s prettier and skinnier and … she’s really smart and her mother loves her a lot. She knows big words and can read like you, and she’s very brave.” She stops for a second, like she’s listening to her friend tell her something. “And she can do magic too!”

  Oh, boy.

  I thought her and Bee just met today, but it sounds like they’ve known each other for awhile. How did I miss this? Maybe this is where she goes when she drifts off. She pays a visit to Bee. A chill runs up my spine when I wonder if Louise knows. I put my arm around Birdie’s shoulder as we walk toward the graves across from the pond. I ask her in my most serious voice because this is no laughing matter, “You … ah … haven’t told anyone else about Bee have you?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Thank you, sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Thank you from the bottom of my wicked heart!

  “Well,” I tell Birdie with my best fake smile, “It’s neat that you’ve got ah … new pal, but I think Bee should stay one of our sister secrets.” We have a lot of ’em. Stuff that only her and me know from spying around the neighborhood, visiting the cemetery, and just plain keeping are ears to the ground. “Okay?”

  She doesn’t answer me ‘cause she got distracted when we pass the grave of Dargu Malishewski—Born July 10, 1911 — Died April 22, 1957. It’s one of Birdie’s favorites because it’s kept up really well and looks very peaceful, which is kinda funny considering how Mr. Malishewski died. According to Mr. McGinty, he got shot in his head in his taxi cab outside the Greyhound Station by someone that took all his money and never got caught.

  I would never do something like that to get rich, but seeing someone else murdering someone could be really helpful. If you don’t tell the police on ’em, you could get a lot of dough to keep your mouth shut, but until my luck changes, here’s my list of people who could be blackmailed for at least $50, or definitely $14.99, which is how much penny loafers and two pairs of Wigwams cost at Shuster’s Shoes, plus the ten cents you put in the slot near the toes so you can use the pay phone in an emergency.

  CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

  Mrs. Holcomb steals apples from Mrs. Mertz’s tree.

  Arnie Esbach cheats in arithmetic from Patsy Johnson.

  Miss Peshong and Mr. Lerner watch the submarine races in her backyard on Wednesday nights. I think that’s a mortal sin, but maybe not. One of the Ten Commandments says that thou shalt not cover your neighbor’s wife with kisses, but it doesn’t say anything about covering your neighbor’s husband with kisses.

  Butch Seeback ties tin cans to the tails of the kitty cats his mother started selling after his father ran away with Vera Schmidt to Niagara Falls—chief exports: water and honeymoons. Butch also tried to kill one of those kitties. He put it in a gym bag and threw it in the cemetery pond late one night and ran away. I’ve got living, breath proof, and an eyewitness, so that makes it an open-and-shut case.

  Number four might not be a good blackmail. Butch is pretty dumb, so he might not know that if I threatened to call the cops on him, they would have probably decided that what he did to the kitty was attempted justifiable homicide. Once they did some digging around, they’d find out that Mrs. Seeback loves those cats a lot more than she does her kid. (Who could blame her?)

  The reason it would be called “attempted justifiable homicide” and not just plain “homicide” is because Mr. McGinty and me were firefly catching not far from the pond the night Butch threw the kitty in. You’d think hearing a bomb blow up almost on top of you would hurt your hearing, even make you deaf, but his shell-shocking did just the opposite. His h
earing got super powerful, much better than mine, so he heard the splash, but my night vision is really good for being up at all hours and I saw Butch run away.

  After Mr. McGinty jumped into the pond and rescued the poor little thing out of the sopping wet bag, I got a little nervous when I saw what unlucky color it was, but he told me that he wasn’t superstitious, that the kitty was a boy, and that he was gonna keep him. He let me name him whatever I wanted to. I thought about it for a few days. ’Cause he’s black, I figured we should call him Midnight after Buster Brown’s cat, but then I decided we should call him Pyewacket after the cat in the Bell, Book, and Candle movie. (That Kim Novak, she’s really something, prettier than Marilyn Monroe.) Pye lives in the shack with Mr. McGinty now. I strongly suspect that cat has some sort of magical powers just like his namesake. He looks at me all the time like if I don’t pet him, he’s gonna cast a spell on me, so I do, because he also looks like he could hold a grudge.

  Once we’re past her favorite grave, I tell Birdie, louder this time, “We gotta keep Bee a sister secret. That means,”—I really have to spell things out for her or she can get forgetful or get mixed up—“that you shouldn’t mention her name in confession.” The priests tell you that they won’t tattle on you to your mother, but I don’t believe them. “And don’t tell the kids at school about the new friend you made either.” That would be around the neighborhood in a flash. I almost told her, “And don’t write about her in your how I spent my summer vacation story either,” but since she can’t write very good, I don’t have to worry about that. “And whatever you do, you have to be really careful not to talk to Bee in front of Louise because….” I can’t tell her that this would be the straw that broke our mother’s back, which is where her nerves are located. “She … ahhh—”

  “I know, Tessie,” Birdie says in her teeniest voice. “Bee already told me that Louise wouldn’t let us play together anymore if she knew we were friends.”

  “She did?!” I can feel my jaw drop open. “Well … that’s good, real good. Bee is not only very pretty, she sounds very smart.” A lot smarter than my sister. Maybe this isn’t gonna be as bad as I thought. This imaginary friend might turn out to be a real help in taking care of Birdie. Who cares if Bee’s not really here? It’s the thought that counts.

  The two of us, well, I guess it’s the three of us now, at least until Birdie moves onto something else weird that I get the chills just thinking about, don’t stop to stare at Harriet Jones’s grave because it always makes us feel sorry for her. If you hung out in a graveyard for as many years as we have, you’d know who is missed and who isn’t too. You wouldn’t be fooled by a big marble gravestone. Size doesn’t matter. The real way you can tell if someone misses someone with all their heart is if they come to pull the weeds that Mr. McGinty misses, or if they stop by and leave the dead person, at the very least, a fresh tussie-mussie. These are darling little bouquets that Gammy taught me all about when we worked in her garden together. Tussie-mussies go all the way back to Merry Olde England times when people didn’t use flowers just for smelling, but to send secret messages to other people. All flowers have special meanings. Like roses stand for romance and baby’s breath for purity. When I find Daddy’s pretend grave, I’ll go to Mr. Yerkovich’s flower shop and buy a purple gladiola to lay on it. Glads stand for remembering, and purple stands for “I’m sorry.”

  Birdie slows down at one of the fresher graves. They always give me an instant tummy ache because it makes me think about how the Grim Reaper can come get you whenever he feels like it. That dead person was here last week, probably eating bratwurst and having a gay old time, and now they’re not. There are two yellow chrysanthemum plants that I bet were watered with tears because the Teddy Bear propped up against the stone looks damp. There are a ton of baby angels carved into the stone of poor:

  Catherine Wilma Otis

  Born January 1, 1948 – Died August 22, 1959

  Beloved Daughter

  Loved for All Eternity by Her Parents James and Dorothy

  Birdie stops. “That’s the grave of the coffin we saw getting buried the day of Daddy’s pretend funeral when you painted my fingernails shell pink and I won six Candy Land games in a row.”

  How come she remembers all that, but seems to have conveniently forgotten she lost a jinx to me that day? I haven’t gotten a dime offa the little cheapskate.

  “You sure that’s the same grave?” I look behind me to see if I can see the back porch of our house through the leafy trees even though I know she’s right because besides all the other great things about my sister, she has an excellent sense of direction. Birdie is my compass.

  Cathy Otis must really be missed because there is also a whole bunch of white daisies resting in front of her stone. I pick one up and stick it in Birdie’s hair with the bobby pin that’s not holding back her too-long bangs, then I herd her over toward the pond because she gets very red in the cheeks when it’s hot. She’s got on her blue shorts, so I tell her, “Look at you! You look like the Fourth of July!” That makes her smile because that’s her favorite holiday. She loves the parade that goes down North Avenue in the morning and the fireworks that get set off in Washington Park when it goes dark.

  When we get in the shade of the willow tree that grows next to the pond, we strip off our socks and shoes and dangle our feet in the water. I try not to think about all the time Daddy and me spent here together. Since Birdie despises fishing so much, she doesn’t have to remember that. She picks up a skimmer rock, flings it, then lies down on her back and chats with Bee about God only knows what. I can’t make out what she’s saying because she sounds like she does when she’s praying.

  “Okay, break time is over. We gotta get back to work,” I roll over and tell her after the memories get too bad. “We’ll look until the church bells ring twelve, then we can eat our lunch, and go get those chocolate-covered cherries off Mr. Lindley’s grave.” They’ve probably melted in this heat, but Birdie isn’t fussy about the shape her chocolate is in.

  We don’t even bother putting our socks and sneakers back on because Mr. McGinty is an excellent lawn mower and the grass looks and feels like green shag carpet. I remind Birdie, “When we find Daddy, you gotta remember that it takes a little while for St. Peter to sort out the good from the bad things somebody did before he can open the Pearly Gates. So even though it’s a pretend grave, like I told you before, the important part of Daddy will still be hanging around down there. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some of his soul coming right out of the gravestone!”

  Which it will. It’d be better if I could do this at night in the dark, that’d really be something, but beggars can’t be choosers. I brought along our flashlight, and after we find him, at just the right minute when Birdie is bending down to kiss and hug the stone because she’s so lovey-dovey, I’m gonna shine the Eveready on the back of the marble so rays’ll come off it in beams the way they come offa saints in holy cards. She’ll fall for that.

  We’re just coming around the corner of the Gilgood mausoleum, one of my all-time favorites because I really like the idea of being buried in a little house instead of underground where the worms will go in and out and turn my snout into sauerkraut. There’s also this bench, and a big oak tree next to the mausoleum. It’s a good place to rest and cool down. Because it’s so important that we find Daddy’s grave today, I can leave no stone unturned. The reason I haven’t looked for Daddy in this part of the cemetery before now is because that woulda been a waste of time. Mr. McGinty calls this area, “Prime real estate.” They would never put renters in— HOLY COW! I rub my eyes, pinch myself, but … but two mounds down from the mausoleum … I’m so shocked that I can barely breathe or lift my arm up to point at:

  Edward Alfred Finley

  Rest in Peace

  Born September 2, 1931 – Died August 1, 1959

  I tell Birdie, who’s looking in the direction of Mr. Lindley’s grave and those chocolate-covered cherries, “Look! It’s—
”

  But at that exact same second, Louise hollers off the back porch of our house, “Theresa Marie! Robin Jean!”

  Goddamn it all! What’s she doing home?

  I’m Moving Her to the Top of My Shit List

  Talk about bad timing!

  Before Louise showed up, I was finally gonna get to cross #3 off my list:

  TO-DO LIST

  Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.

  Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.

  If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing. P.S. That resurrecting idea you had is a good one. Don’t forget to tell her that.

  Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.

  Louise can’t know for sure that we’re over here, she’s just guessing. We could be anywhere. But it’s such unbelievably rotten luck that she’s calling for us at all that for a minute I think that I imagined her voice coming offa the back porch. I turn around to ask Birdie if she heard it too, but I can see that she did because she’s turned into a white statue. But then all of a sudden, she topples down to the dirt because hearing Louise’s yelling voice can drain the blood outta her face and cut her off at the knees.

  I grab her under the armpits and drag her behind the mausoleum. Once I have her propped against the wall with my arm I bit by bit peek out. Parts of Louise appear and disappear when the breeze rustles the branches of the leafy trees.