The Funeral Makers

by Cathie Pelletier

  She moaned softly at the touch of hands on her small breasts. Junior had never been quite so forceful a lover. He had always been subdued, almost indifferent. Once, during lovemaking, he had looked down at her and asked if she’d remembered to make the monthly payment on the Packard. Now he was feeling her body as though he were touching it for the first time, yet with authority. Like John Wayne touched the women in his movies. Brutish, but boyish.

  Thelma’s sex drive, which had been sound asleep, awakened, and she wrapped her arms around the male body that hovered above her. In her half sleep she murmured, “Junie, that feels good.” Chester Lee had already unzipped his pants and pushed the crotch of Thelma’s panties aside. He kissed Thelma’s tiny mouth. It was hard to believe the good luck he’d been stepping in lately.

  After she began to menstruate at the age of fourteen, Thelma had thought often in her life about rape. An issue of the Reader’s Digest warned women about the wiles of men in parking lots or behind bushes. Men who stood on the street outside a lonely woman’s house, smoking a cigarette down to the butt while staring up at the bedroom window, waiting for the light inside to unsuspectingly go out.

  Nights when Junior worked late at the funeral home, she kept the doors and windows securely locked, her heart hammering if an oak branch should scrape a window in the wind. In the parking lot of Cain’s Grocery, she scanned all directions before finally unlocking the car door and throwing bags of groceries onto the front seat, sometimes breaking eggs and mashing bread. In the event that an assault should take place, Thelma had asked God to let her pass out. That way, she could come to blinking her eyes in the warm sunlight, surrounded by scattered cans of vegetables and cornflakes to find the attacker gone, the act completed, and dinner waiting to be prepared for her family. She would never tell a soul. Not even Junior. And if a child should come of it, no one would be the wiser, unless, knock on wood, the rapist was a colored man. That could really let the cat out of the bag. There were a few colored in Portland, but Thelma was reasonably sure her assailant would have the decency to be white.

  So having armed herself with the Reader’s Digest’s helpful hints on what to kick and where, and having made her pact with God, Thelma faced each day with the conviction that she was more prepared than the average woman. But when the coarse mustache of Chester Lee Gifford pressed down upon her thin lips, the Reader’s Digest article vanished as though the words had been written with invisible ink. Strangely, she remembered a little pink comb set that she had gotten on her seventh birthday. The brush had been too bristly and hurt her head whenever her mother brushed her hair. When Thelma felt the stiff hair touch against her mouth she wondered, “Whatever happened to that little pink brush?” Then she tried to remember why Junior would be wearing a mustache.

  When Thelma Parsons Ivy realized she was being made love to by an unknown man with a mustache, that the pet fear of her life was becoming a reality, a terror gripped her that could not parallel the Packard incident or a husband threatening murder. This was something much more personal. And if God promised her she would pass out, He lied. The screams that came from her throat reminded Chester Lee of a crosscut saw cutting tin. Or a stuck pig. She beat her frail arms against his head, forgetting the vital areas suggested by Reader’s Digest. Chester Lee, really not a rapist at heart, lifted himself from off his supposed victim and staggered for the window.

  “Rape!” Thelma shouted, her life having become a series of brief, one-word ejaculations. The Digest article had suggested women should yell “Fire!” for it would take the rapist by surprise and bring others to her defense much quicker. But Thelma had heard “Fire” yelled enough on the hazardous trip up from Portland. If Pearl had yelled “Rape!” instead of fire, it might have made a world of difference.

  But yelling “Rape!” was surprise enough for Chester Lee. And it was an insult. He had been accused of many things, but raping Thelma was not one that he felt presented him in his best light. One leg out the window, he stopped and shouted, “I’d rape a chicken first!”

  The events of the past few days caught Thelma up in their frenzy and she wailed now in the enormity of the past grief she had borne because of them. “Rape! Rape! Rape!” she chanted, drawing from the experience of her past cheerleading days at South Portland High, where she had rattled pompoms and shouted, “Go! Go! Go!” or “Fight! Fight! Fight!” until her school-spirited throat became hoarse. She locked into the same rhythm now, using the word as a mantra, blocking out the real, physical world, as a kind of hysteric meditation settled over her.

  Chester Lee decided he would let her think what she pleased and proceeded out the window, letting it drop behind him with a thud. He did not, he conceded, understand city women. One minute they wanted it. The next minute they cried rape. From beneath the lilac bushes in Marge’s backyard, he could hear the frantic cheers of Thelma Ivy still coming from the house. He heard Junior burst from the camper parked in Marge’s driveway. Marge’s porch light flicked on.

  Not one to linger needlessly at the scene of the crime, especially if it was raining, Chester Lee left the sanctity of the lilac bushes. Where could Amy Joy have gone? He almost expected to trip over her plumpness out there somewhere in the dark, her fat little fists full of money. Fearing the incident inside might get out of hand if Junior decided to come outside with a gun in search of a rapist, Chester Lee abandoned the dream of money and escape from Mattagash. He would retreat to his hideout until things cooled down. In a day or two, he would poke his head up out of the earth to see if he was able to glimpse his shadow. It was when he turned in the direction of the Legion Hall that he saw her, sitting all sleek and silent in the yard, her silver grill glistening and wet under the porch light, flashing at him that sexy Packard smile.

  WAILERS AND DEMONS: THELMA MAKES USE OF HER VOICE TRAINING

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon lover!

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”

  Thelma had wrapped her arms around her pillow and was standing on the bed when Junior burst into the bedroom. He had come as fast as a cracked wrist could open doors and a sprained ankle could cross floors.

  “Rape! Rape! Rape!” Thelma hollered, as though an imaginary crowd of basketball enthusiasts were behind her in the bleachers stomping their feet in unison. Junior grabbed her hands and tried to calm her but it was impossible. He did manage to pull her down from the bed and take the crumpled pillow from her. She could no longer speak in sentences. Junior collected words from her and puzzled them together, working with mustache, window, and man, until he felt he had decoded the events of the evening.

  At the window he found the empty spool of thread and saw one curtain panel hanging outside in the rain like a dead appendage. This was not one of Thelma’s flukes. This time, he decided, she was onto something.

  “I’ll be right back, honey. You stay here,” he said to his hysterical wife.

  Thelma launched into “No! No! No!”

  “I just wanna take a look outside.”

  “No! No! No!” Thelma clenched the pillow again and held it to her chest like a doll, rocking it, lulling herself.

  “What’s going on in here?” asked the nurse, who stood in the doorway in a pink terry-cloth housecoat, her hair mashed beneath a net.

  “Stay with Thelma,” Junior said and rushed past the startled woman. Outside on the front porch, Junior saw the red taillights of the Packard as it left Marge’s yard, being driven by a stranger, being touched by a stranger, being handled by a stranger. A jealousy arose in him that had not surfaced when he discovered his wife had been handled by a stranger. When his father came up behind him and said, “What in hell is it now?” Junior slammed his fist against the porc
h railing and said, “Somebody stole the Packard!”

  “What’s Thelma crying about now? This whole damn family’s turning crazy.”

  “Thelma!” thought Junior, and raced back into the bedroom to comfort a wife who had just been test-driven by the elusive Chester Lee Gifford. Marvin Sr. stood in the doorway and surveyed the goings on in Thelma’s room. The nurse, in her fuzzy pink robe and hairnet, looked like a giant cone of cotton candy. Thelma rocked a pillow and mumbled words to herself. Junior was trying to comfort her and asking, “What did he look like?”

  “Muh-uh-sta-ash,” was the only identifying clue that came from Thelma.

  Randy stood by the foot of the bed, watching his parents as he picked his nose, the product of which was slyly deposited upon a bedpost.

  “A man came in the window and did something to her,” Junior told his father and pointed to the spool of thread. Marvin Sr. inspected it carefully and lifted the window to look out into the black, wet night that engulfed Mattagash.

  “When?” asked the nurse and gathered the pink fuzz about her neck, thankful she still was, after a lifetime of professional nursing and celibacy, intact.

  “What did he do, Daddy? Mama, what man? What did the man do with the spool of thread?” Randy, now drilling for facts, had forgotten the natural resources in his nose.

  “Go back to bed, Randy!” said Junior, who had not known his son was present.

  “But I ain’t sleepy no more. What man was it, Daddy?” said Randy, who felt a genuine television script was being unrolled just for him. It had been a wonderful vacation, all excitement and danger, and now here was more of the stuff Hollywood was made of.

  “Did he have a fly’s head and hand?” asked Randy as Marvin Sr. took him firmly by the shoulders and scooted him out the door.

  “We need to call the police,” said Junior.

  “Do you think you want this kind of thing spread around?” Marvin Sr. asked, knowing full well what Pearl’s attitude about the issue would be. A McKinnon’s daughter-in-law assaulted in a McKinnon bed. In Mattagash. In the heart of McKinnonland.

  “Well, we’ve got to report the Packard,” said Junior.

  “The Watertown police, if you can get them up at this hour,” said Marvin Sr., looking to see that it was one ten a.m., “are thirty miles away.”

  “Whoever stole the Packard is the same man who came in the window, and where could he go but toward Watertown? Toward downstate? He sure as hell ain’t going far the other way. What would anybody do with a Packard on a dirt road in the woods in Canada?” Junior was rambling, trying desperately not to give in to the tears that pushed behind his eyelids. The Packard was the one thing, other than his family, that he valued. All the years in grade school when he had walked home past the other kids, overweight from Pearl’s constant supply of candy and pastry, when he had heard the cruel taunts about the Ivy Funeral Home, the nicknames associated with death they had attached to him, he had set his sights on something special, something none of those other boys could have, the way a crow yearns for something shiny. That aura of being above the rest was realized when he bought the magical Packard. He purposely pulled into the service station where Ron Blackburn, the football captain in high school, was working as a mechanic.

  “Can you check her over, Ron?” he’d say. “There’s a little slackness in the brakes.” Then he’d stand back to watch the grease-laden fingernails and desperate shoulder droop in what had been Portland High’s resident celebrity. Seeing Ron now with such greasy hands always amused Junior. It was Ron who had given him the high school nickname “Formaldehyde Thumbs.”

  “I bet Connie Woods wouldn’t let one of them fingers into her now,” Junior would tell himself, remembering how Connie, the captain of the cheerleaders, the Connie he’d been so enamored of, had clung to Ronnie Blackburn their entire senior year. It was Ron Blackburn and Connie Woods, the cheerleading captain. And it was Junior and Thelma Parsons, one of the second-string cheerleaders that Connie only allowed on the floor during a game in which Portland High was more than twenty-five points behind and all the first stringers were too embarrassed to bound back onto the floor.

  “A real beauty of a car,” Ron would say, before Junior drove the shiny vehicle out of the garage and spun off down the street.

  “I want that Packard back,” Junior told his father.

  Marvin Sr. went to the telephone and dialed the operator.

  “They should at least have a sheriff in this goddamned town,” he muttered into the receiver. When the operator connected him with the police department in Watertown, Marvin Sr. had difficulty convincing the janitor, who came in nights to clean up, that it was, indeed, an emergency.

  “The chief’s over at Rock’s Diner,” the janitor told Marvin Sr.

  “Would you go get him for me?”

  “Is it for a felony?” asked the janitor. “Or a misdemeanor?”

  “Will you go get the goddamned chief of police!” Marvin Sr. thundered into the phone.

  “All right,” said the janitor. “But he ain’t gonna like it if it’s only a misdemeanor.”

  Back in the bedroom, under Junior’s constant interrogation, Thelma had begun to wail again. The nurse had found a sedative among her professional paraphernalia and, with Junior’s help, they persuaded Thelma to take it.

  A restless Randy came back into the room wearing his Batman costume and mask. Junior pointed one finger at the door and, understanding the tacit order, Randy pivoted on his heel and went back out as quickly as he had entered. It was difficult to enjoy himself when it seemed all the excitement lay with the adults in the bedroom drama from which he had been banned.

  “The police have the Packard’s description,” Marvin Sr. told his son. “They’ll be on the lookout for it. If he does head south, they’ll get him for sure.”

  “Who would head north?” asked Junior. “Who in their right mind would drive a Packard into the wilderness? This damn town is as far as you can drive a Packard to. He’ll have to go south. Anybody in their right mind would drive a Packard south.” Junior was talking more to himself than his father. The nurse eyed him with a professional scrutiny. She wondered if a second pill was called for. After all, she had plenty. And he was rambling.

  Thelma had calmed a bit, her own pill beginning to take effect. The nurse’s gentle hands sponging Thelma’s forehead reminded her of her mother, Madeleine Parsons. Maddy. Those wonderful motherly hands. The kind that had spent a lifetime giving. Not like the hands that had just touched her body. Those were molded by a lifetime of taking.

  “Mama. Mama. Mama,” Thelma was saying softly now.

  Junior eased her back against the pillow.

  “Darling, I’m right here,” he told her. “I’ll stay here until you fall asleep.”

  The nurse smoothed back Thelma’s hair.

  “Poor little thing,” she whispered to Marvin Sr. “Who in the world do you suppose it was?”

  “He had a mustache,” said Junior.

  “Captain Kangaroo has a mustache,” Marvin Sr. said. Something crashed to the floor in Marge’s bedroom.

  “That sounded like a bedpan,” said the nurse, who recognized the music of her profession the way some people recognize songs.

  Junior and Marvin Sr. rushed into the room in time to find Randy, still in his Batman costume and mask, standing on the end of Marge’s bed, the bedpan before him on the floor.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said, stepping back to avoid his father’s one good hand as it grabbed for him. Randy stepped on Marge’s foot, then her hand, as he dived for the head of the bed to give Junior the slip.

  “Get that child off my patient!” the nurse shouted. She was so accustomed to talking in soft tones from years of administering to the dying that she was surprised at the punch in her words.

  ***

  The house had been quiet since the day
Marge had slipped out of the reality of Mattagash and into the pleasant tones of nontime. The years were hers to play with. A day in 1947. One in 1930. Time had no dimensions, but existed to her now in pictures and images that paraded themselves before her like an endless 3-D movie. Montages: the calendar from Blanche’s grocery in 1948 that had as its picture a basket of puppy dogs with red ribbons around their throats. The Reverend’s Bible flapped its pages in one memory. In another, her mother’s face, sickly and forlorn, came and went. The laughter of Sicily and Pearl she had heard a thousand times as they dressed and undressed their dolls on the front porch. But the one image that she tried so desperately to hold a bit longer, just to study it once again, as one would study a rare painting in a museum, knowing it’s yours only to look at quickly, was the angelic, satanic, marvelous face of Marcus Doyle. The man smell that was locked in her memory suddenly flooded her nostrils. But the face lost its delineations, became a blur, then again came quickly into focus, then was lost again. It was as though her mind were a pair of binoculars she was having trouble adjusting. Or that Marcus Doyle lay so distant in the past that precise focus was no longer possible. Memories pushed themselves against each other. Marge squirmed inside the prison of her body. She struggled to free herself of its weight. She had carried it through life like a knapsack full of rusted relics and unfinished dreams.

  There were sounds now to go with the disjointed images, external sounds, noises of the outer world. The face of Marcus Doyle came to her once again, a wisp of a smile about his mouth, then gone. For the first time since she’d lost consciousness a week earlier, Marge struggled to come to the noises outside, to follow the blurred face of Marcus Doyle toward the light, like the surface ring of water to the diver, to grab him up again to her bosom and take him back with her into the warm darkness, into the summer kitchen of 1923, onto the soft cot that November night when her woman’s soul had fluttered high above Mattagash to meet his. She opened her eyes, expecting to see Marcus Doyle and focused on a miniature Batman hovering above her head, one bat foot on her pillow, the other kicking at someone.