by Ivan Blake
At a tiny family-owned pharmacy sandwiched between two closed shops, Chris bought glue, a marker, and the one remaining sheet of bristle board in the store. Pink, just great. He asked the shopkeeper if anyone in town sold old magazines, and the pharmacist suggested Marty’s.
Then, just as Chris finished paying, the pharmacist said, “Hey, you’re the kid from the newspaper! What you said about our town! Son of a bitch, get the hell out of my store!” Other customers waiting in line also began cursing and yelling at him.
Chris grabbed the supplies and ran.
Marty’s was one of several dingy shops on Main Street selling used clothing, old furniture, and housewares. As soon as Chris stepped through the door, he saw the enormous stacks of magazines: National Geographic, Life, Popular Mechanics, Playboy, and an entire box of Famous Monsters. He rifled through the box and found a special edition no less, entirely devoted to Corman’s masterpiece, and the issue was packed with pictures of victims in their sealed coffins screaming their guts out.
He paid for the magazine, raced back to the library, borrowed some scissors from the reference desk, and quickly crafted a poster. The final product was a work of art, a ghastly, tacky work of art, and with just minutes to spare, he left the library, raced into the school and headed for his locker to put away the project until class. That’s when it happened. He crashed straight into Mallory Dahlman.
* * * *
He didn’t hit her hard, and he managed to drop his own stuff in time to catch Mallory before she fell. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he blustered, half expecting her to scream and for Floyd Balzer’s huge paws to grab him by the neck.
Mallory was alone, just coming out of the washroom or something, and after she regained her balance, she smiled.
“That’s okay, Chris. It is Chris, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m so sorry. It’s just that I forgot about our assignment, and I was....”
“Is this your project?” She picked up the fallen poster.
“Yeah, weird huh?” he said.
She read the poster’s title aloud, “Funeral Fears.” She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I like it.” There was that wicked twinkle.
“I couldn’t come up with anything else.”
“It’s funny because mine is kind of on the same topic.”
“It is? On burying people alive?”
“Well, not quite. It’s on funerals.”
That shadow behind the mask again. “Really? That’s amazing!”
“It’s like we’re a team, like we’re supposed to help each other.” Mallory leaned forward, and with a grin, said softly, “I have an idea. Let’s make a pact. I’ll say nice things about your presentation, if you’ll say nice things about mine. Okay?”
“Okay, sure!”
“People,” a teacher called from down the hall, “the bell’s rung.” When the teacher realized he was speaking to Mallory Dahlman, he turned all sweet and said, “We don’t want to be late for class, do we, Mallory?”
“No, sir,” she said in the singsong voice that drove Chris wild. Then she turned and gave Chris a sly smile. “See you in class, Christopher.”
Chris was left standing slack-jawed until the teacher called to him again, this time in a different tone, “Nobody’s going to wait for you, Chandler.” Chris spun about, scraped gum off the padlock, opened the locker, and pushed his poster and essay inside, all the while muttering to himself, “Mallory thinks we’re a team!”
* * * *
“Thank you,” Mr. Duncan said as kids piled their projects on his desk and shuffled to their seats. “Looks like everyone finished on time. Good.”
Close one.
“Quite a mix,” the teacher said as he glanced through the pile. “Amish barn raisings, Papal masses, heavens, even the blessing of the fishing fleet, good stuff. Your oral presentation is as important as your visual aids, however, we’d best get started.” Mr. Duncan set up an easel at the front of the room and then shuffled through the projects in search of a first victim.
“Remember, I want to hear you talk about the importance of ceremony in maintaining social cohesion in the culture you’ve chosen to discuss.”
What the hell did that mean? Then, with a jolt, Chris realized his pink poster had caught Mr. Duncan’s eye. Sure enough, Duncan pulled it from the stack and said with a note of bewilderment, “I think we’ll begin with Mr. Chandler.”
A huge laugh went up from the class when the teacher placed the pink poster on the easel. “Mr. Chandler?”
Chris remained slumped in his chair, head rolled back, eyes closed. He sensed this was some sort of crossroads.
“You are ready aren’t you, Mr. Chandler?”
“Yeah sure, I’m ready.” Chris dragged himself toward the front of the class.
“Are you ill, Mr. Chandler?”
“I’m fine.” He turned to face the class and there was Mallory Dahlman, sitting immediately in front—and she was smiling at him. Chris’s heart skipped a beat. At him! And as she slowly crossed her legs, she winked! Oh god, it was like she was actually coming on to him!
He smiled back, a big dumb smile, took a deep breath, drew himself up, and with great self-assurance, announced, “I want to talk about the place of the funeral in nineteenth-century England. More specifically, I want to discuss the two terrible fears which gripped Victorian society and which have continued to shape funeral rituals down to our present day. I speak of premature burial on the one hand and of body snatching on the other.”
“Wait, what?” Mr. Duncan blurted out.
“I’m going to talk about premature burial and body snatching in the nineteenth century....”
“Yes, I heard you, but neither topic has anything at all to do with this assignment.”
Normally at this point, Chris would have acquiesced, apologized for getting the assignment wrong, asked for a few days to make corrections, and returned to his seat without another word. Not today however. Not with Mallory sitting right in front of him, watching him, the object of her rapt attention. He was going to give the performance of his life, even if it killed him.
“Oh, I think it has,” Chris replied with complete confidence, “and that’s what I’ll show, if you’ll let me continue.”
“The assignment was to examine the role of public ceremony in one of the world’s great cultures,” Mr. Duncan said with growing irritation.
“The funeral ritual in any era is filled with symbolism and significance for the host culture, is it not?” Chris asked in a grand rhetorical flourish. “I propose to look at a subset of such rituals, and examine the impact widespread fear of premature burial and grave robbery has had on Western culture.”
“But this assignment is for Social Studies, not History...”
“Sir, I don’t think you ever said the culture we examine had to be a present-day culture.” Actually, Chris had no idea whether this was true, but the bluff worked.
“No, perhaps not, but...”
“And I’m sure you’ll agree the nineteenth century, with its Victorian morality and its penchant for grand industrial enterprise and exotic scientific exploration, was one of the shaping and most significant cultural epochs of all time.” No one ever said Christopher Chandler couldn’t string a line of bull if he had to. It’s just that normally he tried to say nothing at all.
Mallory Dahlman put her hand up. You could have knocked Chris over with a feather.
The teacher seemed almost grateful for Mallory’s intervention.
“Mr. Duncan, sir, I’m interested in hearing what Chris has to say about funerals because I’m also going to talk about funerals as cultural ceremony.” Then with a smile aimed directly at Chris, she added, “Our two presentations may complement each other in some interesting ways.”
Chris was bowled over by Mallory’s support, and so it seemed was the rest of the class—everyone except Floyd Balzer. Chris couldn’t help noticing that Floyd, sitting in the back row, had drawn himself up in his chair. If l
ooks could kill....
After Mallory’s comment, a couple of students called out, “Let him finish, sir.”
“Quiet, please. Oh, all right. I’ll allow Mr. Chandler to continue, for the moment anyway, since it’s clear he has nothing else to present.”
Whoops from the class. Chris saw Floyd Balzer slam his fist down on a book.
“Thank you,” Chris said with a small nod to the teacher, as if Mr. Duncan had acceded to the inescapable logic of Chris’s argument and acknowledged his moral high ground. He also smiled at Mallory, and no one including Balzer could have missed that.
Amazing, what a great start!
But thereafter, he had only crap.
He blustered on for a few minutes about how fascinated people in the nineteenth century had been with premature burial. Penny dreadfuls with their gruesome etchings, and public lectures with their ghastly slides, all gloried in the horrific details of every patient mistaken for dead. “Imagine,” Chris suggested to the class, “waking up in a dark and tiny box, where no one can hear your screams, and your shredded and bloodied fingernails can make not a scratch in the wood just inches above your face.” There were shudders and gasps from several girls.
“You’d never get me in some coffin,” a guy muttered.
“Wasn’t your choice. People thought you were dead,” Chris replied. “Anyway, people were scared enough to spend their own money to protect themselves from premature burial. You could buy coffins with bells in them.”
Some clown called out, “If Dalton rang his bell, nobody would answer!” to a few nervous chuckles.
“Or you could hire a guard to sit by your grave and listen for your cries. You could even buy a grave with lights and a staircase in it. People were so upset by all the stories in the penny dreadfuls, they organized a Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive and pressured their politicians for legislation.”
“Yeah but how many times did somebody really get buried alive?” a girl asked.
“Okay, maybe not often, but there were enough stories in the papers about corpses doing weird things to scare the hell out of people.”
“Doing like what kinds of weird things?”
“Well, okay, let’s say you were worried about your loved one and you dug up their corpse. What did you find? Maybe a build-up of gases in the chest made you think the rotting thing before you was still breathing. Or maybe the tendons in the legs and arms had tightened and twisted to make it appear they’d been struggling to escape their coffin. Or maybe the gases and fluids in their stomach and intestines were suddenly expelled from, you know…like everywhere.”
The class exploded in groans, and laughter, and exclamations of ‘oh sick,’ and ‘so gross!’
“And that actually happened! Of course, the papers only had to report a couple such cases to make everyone scared silly.”
By now Chris was having the time of his life. He was on a roll, and that was when he blundered.
“One of the coolest cases happened in 1832. A doctor from Zanzibar, who’d served in the British Army, was hung for drugging his wife and her lover and then burying them alive. The papers were filled with horrific descriptions of the terrible injuries they’d suffered as they’d struggled, without success, to escape their coffins.”
“Zanzibar?” called Floyd Balzer from the back of the room.
Without thinking, Chris said, “Don’t worry, Floyd, someone will show you where it is.” He hadn’t really intended the insult; it just came out.
“I know Zanzibar,” Floyd said. “Freddy Mercury’s from Zanzibar.”
“You know Queen?” He probably should have left it there, only he was genuinely surprised. Chris was a huge fan himself of Freddy Mercury and Queen, but Floyd Balzer? He would have expected Balzer to be a fan of Iron Maiden or Metallica, but never Queen. Chris grinned for a second and added, “You know Freddy called Queen the bitchiest band on earth.” A few people sniggered. “So is Freddy why you wear the muscle shirt?” More people laughed. “And why you’re trying to grow the moustache?”
The whole class roared, even Mallory!
Floyd turned purple. He slumped in his chair and glared at Chris.
“Mr. Chandler,” Mr. Duncan shouted over the laughter, “are you done?”
“Sorry, sir, no, not quite. I still have to talk about body snatching,” and he tried to get back on track. Corpses, he explained, were by the early nineteenth century in such huge demand among medical students in university towns across Europe that families had to lock away the coffins of their loved ones in cages and post watchmen near their graves to prevent their deceased from being stolen and sold for dissection.
“A Mortsafe...” Mr. Duncan said.
“What...?”
“They were called mortsafes, the cages used to protect coffins.” Mr. Duncan pointed to the strange cage on Chris’s pink poster. “We had lots of them in Edinburgh, where I grew up.” Chris had never before heard that term. “And in Medieval Europe, graveyard watchmen were called Mortsafemen,” Mr. Duncan continued. He then turned to Chris, and asked pointedly, “But you knew that, didn’t you? No?”
Mr. Duncan had a look of such irritation. “Look, Mr. Chandler, all this...”—and swept a hand across the poster—”may be entertaining for the ghoulish in the class, but what does any of it have to do with the place of the funeral ritual in society?”
Chris replied with some sputtered nonsense about the impact that the fear of premature burial and body snatching had had on the public. In response to the hysteria, Parliament had passed laws requiring death be officially certified by a doctor. “The result,” Chris said, “is that, today, most people die in hospital, alone, at night, hooked up to some sort of machine. We no longer die surrounded by family. Death is no longer a communal experience. It has become foreign to us, terrifying.” Wanting to end on a dramatic note, Chris announced, with a sweeping gesture, “Death is now under the control of doctors. Instead of it being the most human experience, it has become alien.”
“So, that’s it? You’re done?” Mr. Duncan asked.
Chris nodded and started back to his desk. Mallory touched his arm and said softly, “You were great.” No one in the class missed her gesture, and Chris grinned like an idiot.
Back at his seat, Chris covered his eyes as if contemplating all the pain of the world. Inside, however, he beamed like a kid at the sensation of Mallory’s hand on his arm. Then he heard Floyd Balzer from two rows away, “You’re a dead man, Chandler.” And the realization of what he’d actually accomplished with his ridiculous performance sank in.
Two or three more presentations followed. Chris paid little attention as his anxiety grew. He’d humiliated Floyd Balzer in front of his girlfriend and the entire class; he’d even questioned Floyd’s macho image. What the hell had he been thinking! At the bell, Chris tried to get out of the room as fast as he could, but Mr. Duncan called him back.
The teacher waited until everyone else was gone before starting in on Chris.
“Look, Mr. Chandler, I know you’re getting a rough ride because of your father’s job. I’m not blind so let me be clear. I have absolutely no interest in the plant or the town or your father. I am only interested in how you perform in my class.
“I’ve no doubt you’re quite bright, Mr. Chandler, but you’re doing nothing to help yourself in my class or anywhere else for that matter, with your snide remarks, your long-suffering attitude, and your clownish performance today. I can’t speak for the rest of this school or this town. I can assure you, however, you will always get fair treatment from me, provided you make a decent effort to learn. Clear?”
Chris was struck dumb. All he could do was nod.
“You can go now.” Mr. Duncan turned away, then asked, “If you’d like to know more about Mortsafemen, I could lend you a book.”
“Uh, sure.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” Mr. Duncan collected the assignments and locked them away in a cabinet in the corner.
* * * *
Malcolm Duncan watched Chris walk away. Good looking boy, if only he’d get rid of that hood and stand up straight. And those eyes!
From somewhere inside his head, a voice bellowed back at him, Oh Christ, what the hell are you doing?
“I’m not doing anything,” he whispered. “I just offered the boy a book.”
Well, don’t get involved! You’re an idiot. Gabe Boucher warned you about that boy. He’s trouble.
Duncan packed up his briefcase. “More likely he’s troubled. The whole school treats him badly. I’m just trying to be a good teacher! It’s my job. Find something that interests him. Stimulate his intellect. Help him get the chip off his shoulder. With my help, Chandler might accomplish something.”
Stimulate his intellect, my ass! Okay, so he might have something besides looks, but don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re actually interested in a student’s well-being. Not again!
Malcolm Duncan had no illusions. He wasn’t in this job because he cared about teaching, or young minds, or much of anything else these days. He was in the job because his undistinguished academic career at a middling university in Scotland had come to an ignominious end in a scandal involving a male student, and he was hiding out on the Maine coast, trying to finish a book on Catholic ritual that he’d been picking at for decades—ever since he’d left the priesthood—in a vain attempt to recover something of his self-esteem. After getting sacked, he’d needed a job, any job, and as a kindness, an old acquaintance from their seminary days together had offered Duncan this part-time position teaching high school social studies.