On the balcony, as they sat together in the evenings, she tried to tell her father about her life in Alaska, nervously straining for words to describe the height of the mountains, the glaring brightness of the snow, the brilliant colors of the wildflowers, the size of the mosquitoes. She realized she was exaggerating everything. There seemed to be no realistic way of describing the mosquitoes—the size of dragonflies, she said, almost as big as those remote-controlled toy planes she had heard when she was biking past a field outside Cork. She had automatically looked up for a bush plane and had momentarily visualized herself sitting at the Riverside having a beer while floatplanes landed on the Chena and the mosquitoes buzzed like friendly visitors around her head. Now she realized she was exaggerating to her father partly because she couldn’t remember; there wasn’t a clear line drawn between the ordinary and the fantastic in her mind.
One night she tried to describe the northern lights to her father. The night was humid and sheet lightning flared in the distance. “The aurora is like neon signs, and it works on the same principle,” she said. Words failed. She thought of the pulsating colors and showers of brilliant light, sometimes described as a Chinese dragon undulating through the sky. She said, “The Tlingit Indians say the lights are spirits of the dead dancing—happy spirits. Some others believe the spirits are playing kickball with a walrus skull.”
“I wish I could have seen that,” he said softly. “I never got to go many places, holding down two businesses.”
It made Sandra angry that he talked as if his life were nearly over. She said, “You could still go to Alaska. You’re not even old. You’ve just been around death for so long it’s rubbed off on you.” She waited for a motorcycle to pass. “You could come and see me,” she said.
The next day, Sandra drove her father’s car to the library at the county seat and looked for pictures of the northern lights. She found a travel book that had a couple of photographs. The northern lights were nothing like she had described to her father. Although the pictures were not splendid, she realized that the lights were even more spectacular than she remembered—the sheer vastness of the space they covered, the implied shimmer and pulsation, the depth of the colors. They were more phenomenal than she could comprehend. She thought that sometimes sights and sounds were so unreal—like the news of someone’s death—they could not be remembered or believed. She had exaggerated the mosquitoes but understated the aurora. She recalled what she had said to Tom when they saw the lights together the first time. She said they were like an orgasm. Later, during an orgasm, the curtains of color rippled through her mind. When she told Tom this the next day, he said, “It’s like looking up a word in the dictionary and it gives you another word you don’t know, and when you look up that one, it refers you back to the first word.”
She thought if she showed her father the pictures, he would not believe them; he would not believe his daughter could have experienced anything so magnificent. “You had to be there,” she would have to tell him.
As the days passed, her father grew stronger, and Sandra stayed on in Cork, uncertain what she wanted to do. She felt she was testing herself, revisiting old memories and fears—the creepiness of living above a funeral home. Now that its doors were closed, she could imagine all the ghosts of the dead trapped in there. In her sleep, they hammered and clawed and whistled from the cavern below her.
Clemmie came over every day, sometimes bringing videos from the grocery. She cooked for them—fried chicken and ham and strawberry cake. Sandra’s father battled his way around, brandishing his cane like a sword and swearing at life. He seemed almost his old self.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Sandra wrote to Tom. “Give my love to Brubeck, Coltrane, Satchmo, Thelonius, Dizzy, Billie, Mulligan, Miles, Fats. You may not believe this, but I love you.”
The day after she mailed her letter, she received one from Tom. He wrote news of the dogs, the weather, the moose that visited the stream in the backyard. He was working an extra construction job in the evenings during the summer light and barely had time to scrawl notes to her. He didn’t have time to run the dogs now, and they were growing desperate—howling and breaking loose. He was thinking of giving them up. Sandra could feel the dogs escaping, racing away from her, running faster and faster.
Sandra and her father were eating lunch. She had been helping out in the furniture store and had come upstairs to make some tuna salad. Her father said, “When I’m gone, you and Kent can fight over the business.”
“Where are you going?”
“I think I’ll close down the home for good. We never have more than two funerals a month anyway, and nowadays they want something fancier, or else they want to be cremated.” He speared a cherry tomato—as expertly as Tom speared a fish, Sandra thought. He went on, “I always tried to make it homey, so people wouldn’t feel out of place. It wouldn’t be hard to turn into apartments.”
“Who would want to live in it?” Sandra said.
“If you move out all the equipment and get rid of some of those morbid old carvings and lamps, you could have a pretty big apartment house here.”
To Sandra’s surprise, her father sobbed—a short belch of emotion. Tentatively, she touched his shoulder. He straightened up and cleared his throat.
He said, “There’s something I want you to have—that old furniture of your great-great-great-grandfather’s.”
“Those old chairs in the sewing room?”
“There’s more in the basement. I’ll get it out when I’m able. I want you to have it when you know where you’re going.” He pushed his plate forward.
“It used to be in the dining room when I was real little,” she said. “I haven’t thought of it in years.”
“I stored it away when your mother got all Danish modern upstairs. Your great-great-great-grandfather made that furniture—Thomas McCain.”
“The one who started the business?” Sandra had only vague notions about such a distant past.
Her father nodded. “Thomas McCain was a carpenter, and in the old days, carpenters spent a lot of their time making coffins. So he’s the one who started both businesses.”
“Where did he come from?” asked Sandra, suddenly curious.
“He came here from North Carolina in about 1850,” her father said as he reached for his cane. “He buried four wives and four children. He made their caskets, and it was such pretty work people started coming to him for their caskets.”
“People died young then,” Sandra said with a shudder.
“Later on, people started wanting to be embalmed and laid out in public. His son John McCain put out his shingle in 1889—Cabinetmaker and Undertaker.”
Sandra’s father stopped to reflect, as if he could actually remember that far back. “Thomas McCain had fourteen children, and his first four wives died in childbirth. But he kept going—kept finding new young wives to tend to all those babies.” Her father laughed. “I always think about Thomas McCain when I take care of the dead. He’s always in the background, giving me advice.”
Sandra started hanging around the furniture store. The place could use a few new ideas, she thought.
“God, Daddy, some of this furniture down here looks like furniture from hell!” she yelled at him from the sidewalk. He was on the balcony, reading an undertakers’ journal. “Only Satanists would buy it.”
He hadn’t said any more about the furniture he wanted her to have. She let the topic slide, not knowing what she would do with a collection of ratty old pieces. She didn’t want to be responsible for them. Sandra rearranged the furniture in the store, making new combinations of tables and lamps and couches. She replaced the tacky dinette set in the window with plush love-seats. As a child, she had played with her dolls amid the clumsy pieces of furniture, and now she was playing there again. That was what she had always done with her life, she thought—play. In Alaska, Tom’s log house was like a playhouse. She spent her time playing Scrabble with Tom, working jigsaw puzzles,
making salmon quiche, building fires. She missed Alaska. In her memory it was warm.
Clemmie was sitting with them on the balcony, smocking a pinafore for a grandbaby. It wasn’t quite dark. Teenagers on their way to the softball game passed below, jostling one another and screeching casual obscenities. Children on bicycles raced up the street, and barefoot kids tiptoed across the grass in front of the funeral side.
“Tomorrow is the longest day of the year,” Clemmie said.
“In Alaska the sun will shine all night long,” Sandra said.
Her father swatted at a bug. Sandra was annoyed that he and Clemmie had shown so little curiosity about Alaska. She felt twelve years old.
“In Alaska there’s always something going on,” she said calmly. “Something incredible to see.”
Clemmie said, “The longest day of the year always comes sooner than I expect it to. I’m never ready for it.” She laughed. “It gets dark so late I don’t get indoors in time to watch my television shows. But they’re all reruns anyway.”
The telephone rang, and Sandra dashed inside to answer.
“I need to make some arrangements,” a woman said.
“I’m sorry, the funeral home is closed right now.”
“Well, Claude told me when my husband passed on he would make the arrangements. He had cancer, and he went about an hour ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Sandra said. “But my father’s been sick. And the place is closed.”
“I know. Is Claude able to come to the phone? This is Mrs. Bud Johnson.”
Sandra recognized the name. Bud Johnson had been an old friend of her father’s. She relayed the message. “What should I tell her?”
“Oh, mercy,” said Claude, struggling up from his chair. “Tell Daisy I’ll have him brought over. I promised.”
“Dad, you’re not able to do this.”
“Oh, I can do it. I’ve got plenty of help.” He nodded at her and Clemmie.
He grabbed the telephone and spoke soothingly to Mrs. Johnson. When he hung up, he stomped around the kitchen, punching the air with his cane. “Clemmie, get John over here to get the hearse out. It may need gas and oil.”
John was his assistant, an insurance man who had helped at the funeral home part-time for as long as Sandra could remember.
“Claude, are you sure you’re up to this?” asked Clemmie.
“John and I can do it if you two can get the place ready,” he said, eyeing Sandra.
That night, she and her aunt opened the funeral side and aired it out. They plugged in large window fans and blew the stale air out—the stagnant sweet smell of powder and dead flowers and incense. Sandra had avoided the funeral parlor for years, but the smells were familiar. She shuddered and her lungs tightened. Clemmie hauled the industrial vacuum cleaner from the utility room.
As she turned on a chandelier, Clemmie said, “Now, Sandra, this won’t be hard. We’ll just clean up a little, and then tomorrow we’ll take care of the details so your daddy won’t have much to do at all.”
“Dad doesn’t seem sad,” Sandra said. She realized her hands were trembling.
“Sad?”
“Bud Johnson was his friend.”
Clemmie smiled. “They used to play in the hayloft when they were kids. They’d swing out on a rope and fly into the hay. Those boys would do anything for one another. ” She punched the switch, and the vacuum cleaner roared across the carpet of the front parlor.
Sandra remembered Bud Johnson playing softball with her father—with the Kentucky Lakers, a local team. When her mother died, Bud was around all the time; he brought ice cream on the day of the funeral. Sandra remembered it was chocolate chip. Yet she couldn’t recall her mother’s voice.
The funeral home was a maze—a scattering of rooms, furnished over the years with pieces from the furniture store—dark velveteens and brocades, dim lamps with romantic scenes painted on the shades, Early American tables. The place looked dilapidated, but strangely home-like. Sandra remembered her mother lying in the parlor, her head resting on a blue satin pillow, with her hair looking nicer than it ever had, and her lips bright and glistening, almost alive. Her eyes were shadowed uncharacteristically, her face deeply rouged. Sandra had seen so many dead people by then, she barely gave them a thought, but when her own mother lay there, she felt a deep betrayal, as though her father had been preparing all those bodies in anticipation of displaying her mother there one day, in a hairdo too perfect to tease her about. She vowed she would never forgive him.
As Clemmie vacuumed, Sandra peeked into some of the closed rooms. She entered the one with the cold metal table that cranked up like an elevator. Once, she and Kent had played doctor/nurse on the table, until their father caught them. He was there now, cleaning out a sink.
“Bud had that prostate trouble for seven years, and it finally got him,” Claude said as he squeezed out a sponge.
The hearse arrived then, and some men deposited the body of his friend in the refrigerated room—what the family used to refer to, crudely, as the meat locker. Claude had turned on the refrigeration and it was already getting cool.
Sandra didn’t sleep. In the early-morning hours she heard a car drive up, then a tapping on a door downstairs. She heard her father talking to someone. She remembered many times when deliveries arrived in the night. She remembered the quiet hearses. She remembered her father up at all hours, working secretly in the closed rooms. She was forbidden to enter the back rooms when he worked, and he always warned her and Kent to stay away from the Dumpster behind the building. For years, she had nightmares about her mother’s ice-cold, bleached body. Again and again, Sandra dreamed that her mother was still downstairs, wandering through the rooms, a prisoner. Now she was afraid to sleep.
During the morning, flowers began arriving, and Clemmie and Sandra kept busy dusting and arranging chairs and vases. Sandra was quiet. Sleeplessness had aftereffects that were like grief, she thought. Claude and John had finished the preparations on the body, and some men had moved the casket into the front parlor.
“What a handsome devil!” Clemmie said when Claude appeared in a dark suit. “Claude, with that cane, you look like somebody in vaudeville.”
“I don’t even need it anymore,” said Claude with a smile. “It’s just for show.” His step was sure and his voice stronger. He disappeared into a back room.
A boy brought an arrangement from the florist down the street. More flowers—the inevitable gladiolas and mums—arrived from another town.
“I hate this,” Sandra said to Clemmie.
Clemmie brushed a wisp of hair away from Sandra’s forehead. “I know, honey,” she said.
Sandra plunged ahead. “What always bothered me was the way people always came to the funeral home and acted like it was some party, a social occasion. They always laughed.”
“Now, Sandra. People do what they have to do,” Clemmie said. “They can’t just go around with a long face.”
“They say the wrong things. They gossip and tell jokes.” Sandra was agitated, her head spinning. She might blurt out anything.
When her mother lay dead in this parlor, Sandra saw her father in a corner talking with Bud Johnson. Her mother lay on display in a casket, and Claude stood smiling, trading fishing stories with Bud. Sandra told Clemmie about it now. “I remember exactly what they said. Bud said, ‘I caught forty bass in that pond, and I didn’t even know it had bass in it.’ And Dad said, ‘That was all of them, wasn’t it?’ And he laughed. They went on like that. I remember it!” She pulled distractedly at her hair. “Everything about funerals is inappropriate,” she said.
“Now, honey,” Clemmie said, wrapping her fat arms around Sandra. “What should people say, Sandy? What would you have them say?”
Clemmie enveloped her like a down sleeping bag. Sandra pulled away.
“I don’t care what they say. It’s how they do. How could he have done what he did? How could he—how could he work on her? How could anybody do anything like that to anybo
dy?” Sandra might have been crying. She wasn’t sure.
“Get that out of your head,” Clemmie said sharply. “He didn’t do anything to her body that wasn’t love. Maybell Cox fixed her hair, and I did her clothes. He got Roy Hicks over here from Hopewell to do the work.”
“He did?” Sandra held on to a door facing. “I didn’t know that.”
“We told you that, but I guess you forgot. Why, you know Claude wouldn’t treat Sally that way. He couldn’t have.”
“I always thought he did.”
Clemmie hugged her again and Sandra didn’t struggle. Clemmie said, “Why, Sandra, we had no idea you were bothered about that.” She paused, pushed back, and gazed into Sandra’s face. Her hands clasped Sandra’s shoulders firmly. She said, “But you never know what might be bothering a child.”
Sandra said, “I didn’t know she was going to die. Dad didn’t even take me to the hospital except twice.”
“Well, nobody knew she was going to die,” said Clemmie, wiping tears from Sandra’s cheek. “Besides, you said it depressed you to go to the hospital and see all those sick people. You were just a child. And you were busy. You were in the twirling competition, and you didn’t understand.”
“Twirling?” Sandra said. “I was twirling?”
In the afternoon, when the friends of Bud Johnson gathered, Sandra went to a dark nook upstairs where she used to hide out. Back then she couldn’t escape totally from the laughter; now she had a small radio and earphones. She curled up in a nest of musty old cushions and tried to read, listening to some kind of New Age music that sounded like a stuck record. The station, broadcast from the college, called itself “the difficult-listening station.” She forced herself to concentrate on the meaningless sounds until her head vibrated with the yelps of excited sled dogs racing in the bright snow, and she fell asleep. Eventually, Clemmie found her there.
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Page 12