Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  Maude asked, “Have you heard from the court?” Doug looked at the gun and then at John. The gun reflected a distortion of their faces in its stainless steel as John holstered it. John’s face looked both babyish and waxy.

  “Come in,” John said.

  Doug asked, “Why are you so afraid of people from Richmond?”

  “I shot someone in Richmond.”

  “He broke into our house there,” Terry added.

  “Trying to steal this,” John said, touching the holstered gun with his fingertips. “A responsible gun owner cannot allow thieves to put his guns in the criminal system.”

  Doug didn’t say anything and didn’t move. Terry said, “Do come on in.”

  Doug stepped through the door, saying, “So you’re Maude’s kinswoman?”

  “Distantly,” Terry said. They all followed her to the kitchen, where she pulled a casserole dish out of the oven. Crayfish, whole three- and four-inch-long trouts curled tail to nose, and scallops lay half submersed, half browned, in a cream sauce. Terry said, “The scallops we bought. The crayfish and trout are local.”

  “Who fishes?” Doug asked.

  “We’ve got our own wild trout stream,” Terry said. “We netted everything this afternoon so they’d be fresh.” She put rice from another pot into bowls, then ladled at least a trout and a couple of crayfish into each bowl.

  Maude knew the game warden would cite them for the trout if the stream wasn’t protected by the Wart Mountain magic. Doug seemed uneasy about the trout. He said thanks when Terry handed him his bowl and then sat down by Maude on the opposite side of the table from John.

  “Doug, would you want to come shooting with me?” John asked. “If you’re not one of those California nuts who think all guns should be banned.” He smiled.

  “Isn’t it too dark tonight?” Doug asked.

  “This weekend,” John said.

  “We need another deer,” Terry added.

  “I’ll think about it. Could you tell me where you keep your plates? I’d like something for the trout bones.”

  Terry went to the cupboard and brought Doug a plate. He pulled the trout out onto it and began separating the tiny bits of meat from threadlike bones.

  John repeated, “We need another deer. Two guns are better than one.”

  “I’m not much of one for hunting.”

  “Well, if you get a deer in front of you driving home, hit it for us,” John said. “Call me and I’ll come finish it off.”

  Doug didn’t reply. Maude looked at Terry and saw she was beaming at John. Let’s change the subject, Maude thought, then she asked Terry, “How’s your hawk?” Maude realized she could have changed the subject further yet, but better to veer off rather than jump.

  John answered, “She’s just a buteo, not very glamorous.”

  “We think we’re going to get a gyrfalcon.”

  Doug said, “You can’t get a gyrfalcon. They’re a protected species.”

  Maude almost told him, so are five-inch brook trout She wondered if Doug was going to turn her into the village explainer. He didn’t seem all that willing to take her word for things.

  John said, “Hunting and guns are a way of life here, Doug. Get Maude to show you her gun when you get back to the house.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “We inherited one,” Maude told him.

  “I’ve never been comfortable around them.”

  “Mine saved who knows how many people from being robbed or raped at gunpoint,” John said.

  After finishing dinner and loading the dishwasher, they all went walking in the dark up to the mews. The redtail sat on her block asleep until the dogs barked. She opened her eyes and stared at them as though thoroughly disgusted, then hunched her head down again and raised her lower eyelid over her yellow irises.

  John said, “They don’t close the upper lid down; they raise the lower lid.” He unsnapped the hawk’s leash.

  Doug said, “She was asleep until we disturbed her. Let’s leave her alone.” John snapped the leash back to the perch as a car pulled up to the house. They walked back and saw Aunt Betty’s Essex parked beside Maude’s MiniCooper.

  Doug said, “An Essex? And still running. I’m impressed.”

  In the living room, Aunt Betty stood with her back to the door, wearing a long dark grey silk dress with tiny buttons running down the back. When she turned, Maude saw Betty’s bead purse, beads on cord knitted into rose patterns. Her silk dress had cartridge pleats across the bodice. Betty looked at Doug and said, “So you found a fairystone that wouldn’t hold its shape?”

  Doug didn’t ask how Betty knew. “I thought so, but Maude wonders if I was just seeing what I expected to see.” Doug stayed on his feet even after John and Terry sat down. John’s face looked blank. Terry’s looked like a photograph, the strong cheekbones tilted slightly, her head cocked as though she was listening to something. Betty looked at John and frowned slightly. John sucked his lower lip and stood up, took off his holster and gun, then put them in a closet, locked the closet, and came to sit back down again. He seemed to be sleepwalking. Betty looked over at him and smiled.

  Maude almost sat down herself, but didn’t.

  Aunt Betty said, “Doug, I’d appreciate it if you took Maude away for a few days. I’d recommend the Appalachian Trail above Roanoke. I’ll make sure to look in on Partridge and Lula.”

  Maude wanted to protest, but couldn’t speak. Terry and John seemed frozen. Betty said, “I’ve got to talk to them. John is a very dear boy, but a trifle overly trusting of guns. I’m afraid he’s going to have trouble for his shooting.”

  Doug said, “Perhaps he deserves it.”

  Maude touched his arm and said, “Let’s go. She wants to talk to them.”

  “But I also wanted to meet your Douglas,” Betty said. She inclined her head. “So you’re an engineer who likes sophistication, the arts. I must show you my prints someday.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Doug said. “And you did say the fairy-stone changed its shape for me?”

  “Yes, Doug, I said that, but then perhaps I’m a superstitious old woman.”

  “And perhaps not. Well, good-bye then,” Doug said, nodding his head. As he and Maude passed the Essex outside, he stopped and touched the car’s hood. His hand lay spread and moving slightly on the Essex for a moment. “Except for the paint, it’s in beautiful shape.”

  “Paint?”

  “It’s wrinkled. Maybe a bad restoration job.”

  “Or maybe it’s wrinkled because it’s so old,” Maude said.

  “It didn’t feel like the original paint,” Doug said. “Your Aunt Betty’s some old lady.”

  “She’s some witch.” Maude wondered if her car would start or if the Essex had drained it. The battery seemed a trifle weak, but after a few tries, she got steady firing.

  “I’d want my witches to be like her,” Doug said. “Ordering people with her eyeballs. Did you see how John put the gun away? Who buttons her up?”

  “What?” Maude said.

  “The dress buttoned up the back with about a hundred buttons. Also, she had button-top shoes.”

  “She has a maid she and Luke got out of an insane asylum in the tidewater.”

  “And a humanitarian, too.”

  “Only a desperate woman would be willing to fool with that many buttons. Aunt Betty’s offered to teach me magic. If I thought it was just superstition, I might take her up on it so I could satisfy your curiosity by telling you what I learn.”

  “If magic is real, you must take her up on it.”

  Maude wondered what he’d think if she told him that one of the calls was for her to bring Bracken County the head of an engineer. “Unfortunately, I know magic is real.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But your cousin’s husband is truly scary.”

  “We agree on that, Doug, for sure.”

  9

  * * *

  OTHER PEOPLE’S DEATH

  On the winter trail, only other p
eople’s boot tracks and litter broke into the experience. Maude said to Doug, “In the summer, the trail is one long party, gossiping about record-breaking through-hikers.”

  “The Pacific Crest Trail isn’t much different,” he said. Through-hikers walk months between Georgia and Maine. Culture shocks hit the trail. Women from northern cities where there’s no stigma against drinking in a bar find redneck bars in Georgia, then get followed back to their campsites and raped. People too poor to walk weeks on end rob hikers carrying $90 worth of freeze-dried food but only enough money to gas a car left a hundred miles uptrail. The Great Smokey black bears hop up and down in the trail to bluff hikers into dropping their packs. Lesbian activists run into backwood macho recluses. Men who don’t like women hiking with dogs expose their bear knives in the shelters and the women come back hiking with .38 Specials like a third of the trail hikers, illegal in some of the trail states, but…

  Maude said, “There’s a mystique about the trail. Wilderness as cottage industry.”

  Maude had never hiked the trail in the summer, since the first time. She categorized it with the same set of memories as urban parties where she didn’t know anyone—not a natural experience at all. “We won’t need the tent,” she told Doug as they packed.

  “I’ll pack it,” he said, meaning, it’s for private sex. “So what about Shenandoah National Park?”

  Maude said, “It’s a bit far. I know a place where the shelter’s only two miles away from the parking lot. And in the other direction, we’ve got four-thousand-foot peaks.”

  “Foothills.”

  “Two-thousand to three-thousand-foot climbs.”

  “So, tell me which way to go,” he said. Maude gave him the keys and hoped that the car would work for him. They drove at her direction up the mountain. Doug didn’t speak much, then said as they turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, “It’s different here.”

  “On the mountain people aren’t so trusting of charisma and charm,” Maude said. “Only magic left is the Sight, and that’s more a problem than not.”

  “The land’s been groomed,” he said.

  “For the tourists.”

  He didn’t say anything for another twenty miles. Maude felt the relationship ebb as though it was a downhill curve on the parkway. “We’re headed for the Religious Range, the Priest, the Cardinal.”

  He looked over at her. “Why Catholic?”

  “I dunno.” She felt that the names she’d never speculated about before were intrusions now. Ironic names, not sincere. “Are you bored here?”

  He said, “Not at all bored, studying a new place, new realities.”

  Bored with me, though, Maude thought. Her reservations about magic probably seemed, if not paranoid, rigid and disspirited. A fairystone waving its crystal arms at him was charming. Her suspicions weren’t. He thought he knew what magic was. His world was metal and silicon, bent to man’s imagination. He thought charms would work the same way. She asked, “Did you and John get a chance to talk tech?”

  “I’m not interested in guns,” he said.

  “Computers?”

  “He’s either an operator or a programmer. I’m an engineer. And he’s nuts.”

  Maude said, “We’ve agreed on that already.”

  “If you lived where magic did work, you’d be silly not to learn how to work it.”

  “Would you like magic to bind you? Would you like to have something talking through you the way the guns talk through John?”

  “Be nice if someone could magically keep his guns from shooting.” Doug seemed to think magic was a tool, not a relationship.

  “His guns found him. People aren’t the only personalities in a magical system.”

  “What about your gun?”

  The Colt inserted its image into her mind then. She tried to imagine anything else, but could smell the iron of it. “I should get rid of it when we get back.”

  “Isn’t it a collector’s item, though?”

  “Maybe,” she said, wondering how many of those Colts had been made. Be Southern, don’t argue, change the subject, she thought. “What do you want to do when we get to the trail?”

  “If it looks like rain, let’s go to the closest shelter, then hike the other direction tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” They returned to silence.

  Several hours down the road, they parked the car at the parking lot where the Appalachian Trail crossed the road. Doug got out and looked in both directions. “Strange to think that little path goes from Georgia to Maine.”

  Maude got both packs out and said, “You want to leave the tent here? I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about privacy.”

  “Let’s go uphill,” he said.

  “I haven’t carried a pack since California,” she said. He turned around and looked at her. Maude hoisted her pack and hunched her shoulders to raise it. She tightened the hipband, lowered her shoulders, and tightened the shoulder straps. He came over and put on his own pack, standing close enough to radiate body heat. Maude wondered if he wished he hadn’t come here. The tent was still with him.

  “Okay, so we take it easy this trip,” he said.

  They went down the trail to the closest shelter. People had deserted this valley but left their signs—cabin foundations, rock walls. Doug finally said, “Did they abandon this place or were they evicted?”

  “People were evicted from the Shenandoah National Park, but I don’t know about here.”

  “Agonal walls,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Dying cul-de-sacs of pioneer enthusiasm,” he said.

  “Agonal?”

  “Death agonies.”

  “Maybe their magic ate them,” she said.

  “Or they got caught between the old ways and technology,” he said.

  “Probably these people were bought out,” Maude said.

  “No, I feel something.”

  Maude didn’t want to feel something. Humans lost here. She said, “I wonder if they took their graves with them.” She let herself contact a bitterness worn vague by the years and hikers. So Doug could feel something. Maybe he could develop direct connections with entities and wouldn’t be forced to serve a witch or adopt a world view rigid enough to hobble magic.

  The path kept crossing and recrossing a small creek. Doug didn’t say anything further, just walked ahead of her, the tent strapped to the bottom of his pack. The big silence went on, the silence that had continued even when they’d spoken to each other. From the angle of his neck, Maude expected an argument over something trivial. Why had she come to the woods with a 170-pound animal loaded with testosterone?

  The sign pointed them to the shelter. “Hello, the shelter,” Doug sang out.

  It was empty. “In California, we’d be sharing it,” he said. “I guess not so many Easterners walk.” He slung off his pack and put it on the shelter floor.

  “Not so many in cold weather,” Maude said. “And not on a week day.”

  “So, how are you doing?”

  “Fine.” Maude put her pack beside Doug’s and unstrapped her sleeping bag and pads. After laying down a plastic sheet, she unrolled her three-quarter-length pad sealed in rubberized nylon and the full-length piece of closed-cell foam she used under it. Then she pulled out her sleeping bag and fluffed it out on top of the pads. “Want me to do yours?”

  “We could have gone to the Religious Range, then. Go ahead.”

  “I did fine for two miles,” Maude said. She found his pad and sleeping bag and spread them by hers.

  Doug grunted and began checking the spring, the woodpile, and the outhouse on the hill above the shelter. When he returned, he said, “You know modern backpacking wouldn’t be possible without engineers. Nylon, delrin, and dural.”

  Maude said, “I’m opposed to magic, not engineering.”

  “For most people, they’re the same. Engineered products you can use with minimal understanding and no commitment. Think about all the woo-woo backpackers with their littl
e Svea stoves and Goretex raingear pretending they’ve stepped back into the archaic.”

  “I can’t. I’m just some dumb girl.”

  “I didn’t mean you personally. But most people wouldn’t know the difference between a car propelled by magic and a car propelled by gasoline. And it doesn’t matter to them.”

  “For whatever I don’t know about technology, I do know about magic.”

  “Your aunt isn’t just another woowoo cultist. She’s competent.”

  Now Maude understood what attracted him to Betty. Betty’s charms were as polished and case-hardened as any lock, any set of valves and pistons. “She’s very sure of her position in the magic. You’re responding to her sense of authority.”

  “She knows both worlds. She can afford a personal maid to button her dresses and shoes,” Doug said. “She collects prints. In California, all the occult people were marginal.”

  Like me, Maude thought. “She says she’s cultured. I don’t know if she’s got more taste than you have. But if it’s true, does that give her the right to take what she needs?” Maude felt chills run from back to front through the left side furrows of her brain.

  “I don’t like making things for people who use them without understanding them.”

  “That’s not an answer, Doug,” Maude said.

  “If she takes from people who don’t use or understand what they have, then…”

  “Let me explain things to you, Doug. The magic keeps them from understanding. Witches charm them into accepting their positions in life, from the poor quality of their schools to the jobs that wreck their health. They don’t have magic, they get used. Even some of the witches get used by the entities. Look at John.” Maude knew she did have magic even though she’d tried to ignore it. On welfare in Berkeley, she could always cheat up an additional couple of bucks to go wandering. She rode time like a bicycle, hitting just the right moments at the bars, finding the perfect suckers to drive her to Marin for dinner.