The Funeral Makers
Page 1
Copyright © 1986 by Cathie Pelletier
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Cover design and illustrations by Amanda Kain
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in 1986 in New York by Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc. This edition based on the 1997 paperback edition published by Scribner Paperback Fiction, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Marge Succumbs to Beriberi: She’s Veri Veri Sick
The Ivy Family Comes to the Funeral: The Packard as a Hearse
Sicily Keeps It Under Control: Mary Magdalene Had a Mom, Too
The Albert Pinham Family Motel Fills Up: No Room at the Inn
The Gifford Family: Chester Lee as a Mythic Hero
God’s in His Heaven: All’s Right with the Ivys
Marge Grows Up: Coming of Age in Mattagash
Funeral Preparations: Discussions of Death in the Living Room
Dressing as an Art Form: Amy Joy as a Waddler
Amy Joy Loves Chester Lee: The American Legion as a Hollywood Set
Ships That Clash in the Night: Ducks and Drakes in the Dark
Sicily Suffers the Slings and Arrows: Pains in the Rib Cage
Survival of the Fittest: The Ivy Genes Get Tested
Sarah Pinkham Keeps Watch: Big Brother with Binoculars
The Gifford Outhouse: A Home Away from Home
Beyond Courtly Love: A Slow Pirogue to China
Foreclosure on Room 3: Violet Takes It All Off
Sicily as Instructress: Chester Lee Gets a Little Manna
Rain in the Night: The Ark Leaves the Campground
The Ivys as Nomads: Nuclear Family About to Blow Up
Dividing the Ivys: One More Story in the Naked City
Braille as Sexual Expression: Chester Lee Discovers the Holy Grill
Wailers and Demons: Thelma Makes Use of Her Voice Training
East of Mattagash: James Dean Meets Lucky Lindy
The Bird of Time Gets Shot Down: Marge Poles Down the Milky Way
No Hope for the Hope Chest: The Legion Hall as a Cenotaph
The Disciples Arm Themselves: Shoot-Out at the OK Motel
Marge’s Will Be Done: The Phoenix Rises from the Ashes
The Last Stone Unturned: Another Poet Bites the Dust
Sea Changes: The Siren Quits Singing
Castle for Sale: The McKinnons Lose the High Ground
The Last Load: Filling in the Empty Spaces
An Excerpt from A Year After Henry
About the Author
Back Cover
In memory of CHARLOTTE MOIR McKINNON, my great-grandmother, who died in childbirth in 1894, at the age of thirty-three. And with loving memories of my grandmother AUGUSTA McKINNON O’LEARY, born 1885 at the head of the Allagash Falls, a place now returned to the wilderness.
But the absolute heart of this book is dedicated to my great-great-great-grandparents JOHN GARDNER and ANNA DIAMOND, who came to Allagash, Maine, in 1835 from Campbellton, New Brunswick, with a grant from the king of England to cut pine for the masts of his ships. With them were my aunts SARAH and ELIZABETH DIAMOND and their husbands. They made the arduous journey in pirogues, a trip that included portaging the Restigouche and Wagon rivers. Later, my great-great-great-grandparents LUCINDA DIAMOND and GEORGE MOIR also followed. It is to their courage, which pulled them through the hardships of establishing a new home, a new town, a new way of life, that this book is dedicated. I’m sure they would take no exception with the humorous and fictional way I’ve presented their battle against the obstacles they faced. I know this because they left in their descendants the sense of humor that pervades this entire novel.
“Mattagash is an old Indian word all right. When only the Indians was here, it used to mean where the river forks. But after the white man come up here and brung his white women, it means where the tongues fork.”
—Old-timer, Mattagash, 1924
INTRODUCTION
“Our ancestors come here after that big potato famine hit Ireland years ago. But I don’t think we need to worry about that happening again. The potato farmers are doing real good around here.”
—Henrietta McPherson, President,
Mattagash Historical Society
In 1833 a small band of men and women left New Brunswick, Canada, in a pirogue to battle the upstream waters of the Mattagash River for one hundred fifty miles until they came to shore at what is now Mattagash, Maine, where the river creates a natural boundary between the United States and Canada. It was the age of wood, wind, and water. England’s shipping industry was at its peak, so it was toward Canada that she looked for a means to obtain the white pines that would build the ships’ masts. This lust for pine prompted the King of England to offer his colonists grants to the unsettled timberlands of New Brunswick. And it was such a grant that brought the aforementioned settlers to the head of the Mattagash River. The McKinnon brothers, Jasper, Bransford, and William, born of Loyalist stock, had said farewell to hearth and kin to strike out to unknown regions with their wives and enough supplies to battle the elements until permanent dwellings could be raised.
Thinking they were in Canada, and not the area which is now Maine, the McKinnon brothers settled at the head of the Mattagash River. Oral history says they stopped where they did because one of the women needed to pee. In truth, it may have been inaccurate maps. But as a result, even at its inception, Mattagash was a mistake. And if some divine power had had the foresight to look one hundred twenty-five years into the future to see the genetic entanglement, the implanted hatred, the narrow-mindedness that one tiny settlement of Loyalist stock would unwittingly breed, a huge pencil would have descended from the sky and erased the mistake before it had time to take root.
Encouraged that the brothers had a firm footing on Mattagash soil, other families followed, adding a few new surnames to the lot. The town grew only of descendants of those first few families, with cousins marrying cousins, out of necessity if not romance. By the early 1860s, when Union army scouts came that far north into the wilderness looking for fighting men and were told by a settlement of only women and children that they hadn’t seen any men in years, it was evident that Mattagash would endure, and so would the ideas and prejudices that were to haunt the next unsuspecting generations.
Its isolation from the rest of the world (thirty miles upriver from Watertown, the nearest settlement), its inaccessibility (no one wanted
to paddle thirty miles upriver to watch a few men and women cut down pine trees and feed chickens) kept Mattagash safe from common sense and a spirit of fair play. The McKinnons, already ensconced as the first to put foot upon the soil, became somewhat of an oligarchy and passed their community standing on to their heirs in the same way crowns are passed from kings to their royal offspring. As natural monarchs, the McKinnons believed that no one else was qualified. As natural peasants, the rest of the town believed them.
As the years passed, the log drive became the main source of employment. Each fall the lumbermen left their families behind, left the smoke curling from warm chimneys, and trudged back into the woods to find the best timber. Hired by a large lumber company to cut trees, they worked through the winter, their days spent hard at work with a crosscut saw, their nights spent at a cribbage board, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, the northern lights in a brilliant dance over their heads. When spring came, they broke up jams in the freezing high water and followed the logs downriver to the ocean. It was a dangerous occupation. Lives were lost beneath the icy waters and many a widow was kept alive by the goodness of her relatives and neighbors. And out of the harshness of life came a bitterness for life, as women rocked on their porches and men gathered around the community stove, and gossip was the only newspaper.
By the time the century turned, the old McKinnon settlers were unknown to the young, except for an occasional excursion into the Protestant graveyard, where the stones of who they were in life, if they could afford stones, crumbled and lay vine-covered. But no matter how many McKinnon names were carved on granite, there was always a new McKinnon among the living to take over where an old McKinnon had passed on, like a red army, a microcosm of nepotism at work. The McKinnons became the town’s selectmen. They made up the school board. They monitored the town’s meetings. They ran the church, if it was Protestant, and left the Catholic one to the devil. If they didn’t directly control an office, a McKinnon woman always managed to marry someone who did. But if the McKinnons left an elitist heritage to their descendants, other families weren’t so lucky.
Within the next group of settlers who arrived a few years after the three brothers was a man named Joshua Gifford, who made the mistake one bright October morning of stealing a bag of oats and an ax from Will McKinnon. No one remembers now why Joshua committed thievery. No one wonders if his horse was starving. Or if he had no wood to burn. What everyone does remember, what has been passed down orally for years, is that it was Will McKinnon’s oats and ax.
A McKinnon will carry a grudge with him as faithfully as if it’s a family gem brought over from the old country, and Will McKinnon wore his like a medal. Joshua Gifford was never forgiven for the crime, much less exonerated. So after several years of ostracism, he and his sons incorporated and took up thievery full-time. Over the years their business grew, with branches reaching outside Mattagash when occasional crosscut saws and nails were stolen in Watertown. Each family has a sense of pride. A sense of continuity. As soon as the north side of the Catholic graveyard filled up with Giffords whose bodies had broken down with age, who had closed their fingers for the last time around another man’s belongings, an initiate from among the living Giffords was sure to take his place.
By the mid-twentieth century, there were no male McKinnons left in Mattagash. Some McKinnons who enlisted in the army, and never bothered to come back once they’d seen the world, were probably siring male McKinnons somewhere on the earth. But in Mattagash the name had ground to a halt, like an old machine that’s finally seen its last production and settles down to rust.
By the time 1960 was threatening to roll around, no one in town could remember who was related to whom, unless it was obvious or within the past few generations. But somewhere back in the dim history of Mattagash’s past, the entire town of 456 people was genetically linked, like paper dolls, whether they cared to admit it or not. Most did not.
MARGE SUCCUMBS TO BERIBERI: SHE’S VERI VERI SICK
“If God had meant for me to be religious, he would have alphabetized the books of the Bible. It was just too hard for me to find what I was looking for, especially if I was looking for it through a few glasses of scotch.”
—Gert McKinnon, Atheist and Spinster, 1935
The summer of 1959 was short and dry. The leaves fell from the trees much earlier than they should have fallen. There was something uncanny about the birds flying south too soon, in the hurried way the squirrels gathered hazelnuts, how the river sucked up its own water for the early dog days. It was all in the signs by the time September arrived and Marge McKinnon became seriously ill. And while the land and the animals had been in a hurry, Marge was not. She held on to her illness as though it were a medal, and in a way it was. She was the only person in Mattagash, Maine, suffering from beriberi. It was the town’s solitary attraction and a well-deserved one considering that Marge contracted beriberi because her father, the missionary Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, died in China of kala-azar.
Someone in Mattagash looked it up in a medical book and discovered that kala-azar is sometimes called dumdum fever. Many of the townspeople wondered who had had the foresight to call it that without ever having met the Reverend Ralph. His own sister Gert, who had been nipping from the little silver flask in her purse, stood up at Ralph’s wake, leaned over the empty coffin, and said, “No wonder they call it dumdum fever. Why would a reverend want to traipse off to China when there’s sinners to save right here in his own backyard?”
Marge’s few relatives could enjoy an unspoken pride in her rare condition. Not to be outdone by even the medical community, the McKinnons had always managed to become afflicted with only the rarest of diseases. Not that Mattagash, for a town of its size, didn’t have its share of unusual ailments over the years. A doctor from Watertown, at the nearest hospital, said it was because everyone in Mattagash was descended from a little bunch of people who left Canada in a pirogue looking for pine trees. Their descendants were all interrelated, he said. Their genes had gone haywire. Whatever the reason, Mattagash was not unfamiliar with carnival-like maladies. There had been cases of giantism, clubfoot, hunchback, a few untraceable types of cancer, lumpy jaw, brain tumor, two blue babies, and a case of undescended testicles. The latter was the unfortunate Herbie Fennelson, who later went to New York and wrote home that he had caught homosexuality in a movie theater on Forty-Second Street. Everyone in Mattagash agreed that it was connected, one way or another, to his early illness. But no one in that town, in the entire country, in this day and age, was ever before or ever again stricken with beriberi because his or her father died in China of kala-azar. When Marge went out, she was determined to go out like a true McKinnon.
Marge got the news about her father in 1927 from the druggist over in Watertown, who also handled telegrams. The old Reverend was dead. He had been dying for almost two years but had never let anyone know. Marge, a spinster who had pined for sainthood from an early age, had been saving her dollars to go to China and join her father, to live on polished rice and save unpolished souls. Two weeks after the telegram, she got a long letter from Reverend McKinnon. It had been mailed before he died. He told her all about kala-azar and how a sand fly had bitten him while in the service of God, and that his spleen and liver were swollen from it. He told her not to mourn him, that dumdum fever assured him a room in the house of God. But Marge ignored this advice. She began wearing only black, and as a sacrifice which the townspeople thought only the hell-bound Catholics capable of, she began fasting, giving up all food except for polished rice and Chinese tea. Marge figured if rice and tea were good enough for the missionaries of the world, they were good enough for her, too.
Over the years she lost weight and her legs became heavy and swollen. She was short of breath and had to pay some boy a dime a day to carry her letters in from the mailbox. Finally, Amy Joy, sister Sicily’s daughter, began sleeping over nights to keep an eye on her. Marge spent her last days writing nas
ty letters to Sears and Roebuck, suggesting they begin a new line of black cotton handkerchiefs for widows, orphans, and people in general mourning around the country. She complained often to her neighbors of what she called “disturbing sensations” in her arms and legs. At last her mind began to go. The doctor said her heart was waterlogged and that she needed to be hospitalized immediately. But there was no convincing her of this. She was a true McKinnon to the end, saying that if kala-azar got the Reverend a room in heaven, then beriberi would get her the one next to it.
Marge never referred to her father’s disease as dumdum fever. She even wrote once to her state senator asking that he petition the AMA to have the derogatory reference removed from medical books, and hinting that her family would be eternally grateful to him and loyal in their votes. She even went so far as to suggest that they consider “McKinnon’s Malady” as a proper alternative. Thankfully, she lapsed into a coma before the polite refusal came back. Refusals could really upset Marge McKinnon.
Doctor Anderson came over from Watertown complaining of eccentric old women and the hospital being thirty miles away. Sicily spoke up and told him that most folks couldn’t always die in the vicinity of a hospital. That’s why God created ambulances.
The doctor took one look at Marge and gave the signal to summon the family. She was drawing her last breath. “Any woman who’s lived on rice and tea from 1927 until 1959 can’t expect much more,” he told Sicily and Amy Joy.
“She cheated sometimes,” Sicily told him, going on to mention the Drake cupcake wrappers Amy Joy was forever finding in the garbage can.
“The woman needs fresh vegetables. She needs B1. Haven’t you ever heard of thiamine?” he asked.
“Simon?” Sicily looked closely at the doctor. She wondered why he had not lisped before. “Wasn’t he that little MacLean boy who almost died of rat bite?”
“No, Mama, that was Therman,” Amy Joy said.