The Funeral Makers

by Cathie Pelletier

  “He never did say what war,” Pearl went on. “Someone would say, ‘Palmer, what war did you lose that leg of yours in?’ and Palmer would lean back and spit out some tobacco juice wherever he could get away with it and he’d look real sad and say ‘The Big One, boys, I lost it in the Big One.’”

  Pearl was full of the past now. The days before adolescence came and brought the message that something was terribly wrong. The days when playing in the fields or along the river was enough for any child and at night, if you walked to the store on an errand, you could listen for a minute or two to the men who had gathered around the big Warm Morning stove to spit and talk, and you took all the time you could filling the grocery list. You would have taken forever if you could. You would have stayed with your back to that stove, over in the corner by the shelf that held the spools of thread and buttons, as the back of your legs grew warm, and the men were so near you could smell the sweat of their day’s work, and outside the snow coming down in thick white gusts that threatened to bury you there, inside that store, with those shelves and shelves of lovely things you might buy someday if you saved your money. And then those men told the stories of horses pulling logs in the moonlight and whose team was best, and who cut the most logs and who drowned in 1873 on a log drive and who could stop blood and who crossed the river once while the ice was breakin’ up, and the warmth moved up your legs and spread over your arms until you were drowned in it and you wanted to shout “Yes!” to the snow coming down. “Yes! Yes! Bury me here. Let me stay in this minute forever!”

  If you were a girl, you picked out your items quickly and went home. It wouldn’t look good any other way. Even if you were only ten or eleven. If you were a good girl you took your things and went on home, maybe once or twice looking back in envy to catch the face of some boy in your class sitting by the stove, listening with rapture, knowing he’d grow up some day and be a part of it all, would inherit the old stories, then become a story himself. So you left them there, gathered around the heat, their red and black jackets hanging from nails along the wall and mittens thrown down to dry. You left them sitting beneath the mushroom cloud of smoke from their pipes and rolled cigarettes like it was an umbrella. Like no rain would ever fall on them. Because they were men. If you were a girl, you went home.

  “There were some good times,” Pearl said softly. “Some good memories of the old days.”

  “That was the only dead person I ever saw,” said Sicily, now no longer enjoying the merriment. “I just stay out in the kitchen where the food is. I never go in where the body is being waked. I don’t think I ever got over seeing Ben McMahon like that. I don’t think I’ll even be able to go in and see Marge when they bring her home.”

  “That’s OK, Sissy,” said Pearl. “Just remember her the way she was in life.”

  Amy Joy came into the kitchen and took some things from the refrigerator to make a sandwich. She’d been crying all afternoon over Chester Gifford. For once, Sicily was glad to see her interested in food again. Before long Chester Lee would be just a childhood memory, lost among the birthdays and Christmases and puppy loves that were still to come.

  “I suppose we should wake her here in her own house. I think that’s what she’d want,” said Sicily.

  Amy Joy piled a slice of bread on top of a trapped tomato, piece of ham, and some cheese and slapped the sandwich twice to make it hold together.

  “I thought Aunt Marge didn’t want to be waked,” she said and took a bite of the sandwich.

  “For heaven’s sake, child. Where did you get an idea like that?” Sicily was being very careful how she handled Amy Joy. There had been a slight confrontation between them as to whether or not Amy Joy could go to Chester Lee’s funeral. It wouldn’t help any at all, Sicily told her. If she kept away, the gossip would eventually die down and things could get back to normal. Besides, her father would never hear of it. But if Amy Joy wanted to ask him herself, she could certainly do so. This had put a damper on Amy Joy’s funeral plans.

  “Where did you hear that?” Sicily asked her again, noticing that Amy Joy’s eyes were puffy.

  “That’s what she put in her will,” said Amy Joy and left the kitchen with what remained of the sandwich. Sicily and Pearl looked at each other.

  “Amy Joy!” Sicily shouted toward the living room. “Get back in here!”

  Standing at the kitchen door, Amy Joy wiped a ring of milk from her mouth.

  “What will?” asked Sicily.

  “The one the lawyer wrote for her,” said Amy Joy.

  “What lawyer?” asked Pearl, sensing trouble.

  “Aunt Marge’s lawyer.”

  “Marge had a lawyer?” Pearl asked Sicily.

  “I never heard of one,” said Sicily. “Amy Joy, is this another one of your True Confessions stories?”

  “He came to Aunt Marge’s one day last year and they did her will. I came in from school and asked her what they were doing and she said drawing up her will and not to tell anyone and she would leave me her television set.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Sicily. “A will! What’s this world coming to? The living dividing up their treasures for when they’re dead!”

  “It’s true. When I left I heard her telling him I could have her television set and to be sure and write it down. Do we have any doughnuts?”

  “Do you know the lawyer’s name?” asked Sicily.

  “He’s that same man from Watertown that Daddy talks to about school stuff.”

  “That’s a Mr. Levine. He just moved to Watertown about five years ago. From Portland, I think, Pearl. Or somewhere down in your neck of the woods,” said Sicily.

  “Can you just imagine what Marge and a Jew lawyer from the city must have cooked up?” said Pearl.

  “Why wasn’t I told about this?” Sicily asked, more of Marge’s ghost than of those still among the living.

  “There’s a letter all written to the family members in the bottom drawer of her dresser telling about her lawyer and all,” Amy Joy said.

  “Well, how was we supposed to know that?” asked Sicily. “Why didn’t she just tell us about it? Does she think we can read minds?”

  “Oh, Sicily, come on,” said Pearl. “I know Marge McKinnon well enough to know she’d expect the whole damn world to go to hell in a basket before she’d really believe she was going to die. Sacrificing for the missionary cause, my foot. Marge always did what she could to get attention. Like a cat walking on your newspaper while you’re reading it. She just carried this little charade too far. Yes, sir, this is just one little stunt that backfired on her.”

  “I’ll call up that lawyer right now,” said Sicily, picking up the phone book on Marge’s rosewood desk. “Amy Joy, go get that letter. Why do you suppose she never let us know about it?” Sicily asked Pearl.

  “She said the first place Aunt Pearl would look the minute she was dead would be among her personal papers,” said Amy Joy, thinking that Marge was referring to Pearl’s business qualities and not her weaknesses.

  “Doesn’t that sound like her tongue?” asked Pearl. “Even in death it’s still wagging.”

  “Now, Pearly, she liked picking at you more because you were like her oldest daughter. It’s 433-2769,” said Sicily and began to dial.

  “What about me?” asked Amy Joy. “I’m your oldest daughter and we get along OK.”

  “Amy Joy, wake up and dream something else,” said Sicily who hung up the receiver. “It’s busy,” she said.

  “A Jew’s phone is always busy,” said Pearl.

  “Imagine that. A will,” said Sicily.

  “I got a good mind to go right down to the morgue and let her have a piece of my mind,” said Pearl.

  “Pearl McKinnon Ivy, don’t you dare talk about your deceased sister that way. You ask God to forgive you tonight when you say your prayers and don’t you forget,” said Sicily.
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  “I’m sorry,” Pearl said and patted Sicily’s arm. “I won’t say no more. And I’ll talk to God tonight.”

  “Thanks, Pearl,” Sicily said and took the letter from Amy Joy. She opened it carefully, as if it were an ancient manuscript that might crumble when exposed to air, and read it silently.

  “Well, that old bat,” she said and handed the letter to Pearl.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Pearl, going down the letter. “Boy, don’t this sound like Marge drawing water from a Jew’s well? Listen to this: ‘Funerals are too expensive and a waste of money. There will be none. Instead of flowers, mourners are asked to contribute to the Widows of Missionary Brothers fund.’ Mourners all right. She’ll be lucky if a minister shows up. What in hell is the Widows of Missionary Brothers fund?”

  “Marge probably meant to form it before she died,” said Sicily.

  “That’s what WOMB is,” said Amy Joy.

  “WOMB?” said Sicily, twisting Amy Joy’s plump wrist until she dropped her handful of mints from the candy tray.

  “I heard her talking a lot of times to someone on the phone about WOMB. That must be it, see? Widows of Missionary Brothers. WOMB.”

  “You tell me if that’s not an example of an unsound mind,” said Pearl. “Who in their sound mind would want to give money to something called WOMB? She’ll be leaving the house to Madalyn O’Hair next.”

  “Was she in Gone with the Wind?” asked Amy Joy.

  “It says here,” Pearl went on, “that WOMB has five members and is headquartered in Bangor. Now don’t that sound like a good place for it? This address is probably at the mental institute.”

  “Bangor?” asked Sicily. “Who does Marge know in Bangor?”

  “Number 287 Pine Street,” said Pearl, handing her sister the letter. “Right in the heart of crazytown.”

  “I just don’t understand,” Sicily said, running a finger up and down the letter as though it were a map.

  “Why would anyone even want to die if they ain’t going to have a funeral?”

  “She just did this to upset us. Trust me, Sicily,” said Pearl. “Have you ever known me to be wrong?” Sicily stopped reading and looked at Pearl.

  “Didn’t you want to turn the spare room of the funeral home into a snack bar or something?” she asked her sister.

  “A beauty salon, Sicily,” said Pearl. The headache that announced itself earlier had fully arrived. “I wanted to open a beauty salon.”

  THE LAST STONE UNTURNED: ANOTHER POET BITES THE DUST

  The last of the red-hot lovers

  is leaving town today.

  The girls who adored his running board

  all cry as he pulls away.

  The first of the next generation,

  a sweet little bundle of shame,

  comes squalling in with the April wind,

  but without a father’s name.

  The last of the old Old-Timers

  is tarrying near the door,

  but I’ll make a bet he’ll never forget

  who is and who isn’t a whore.

  —Ed Lawler, submitted to The Maze,

  College Magazine. Rejected, 1932.

  There was a deadness about the land at that season of the year. It wasn’t just the idea of autumn being a time of death so that spring could come with her rebirth. That was just the typical literary theme he had learned in college, soft words on paper, a kind of pseudophilosophy that pimpled students stayed up all night memorizing, sure they understood its meaning. In Mattagash, autumn came like a knife, slicing leaves off the trees, embedding itself in Ed’s gut with a thrust that left more fear than pain.

  When the trucks loaded down with family belongings began to leave town for the harvest, it was a very real kind of death. Left behind were the old, the very young, one or two crippled or feebleminded, Sicily, Amy Joy, and Ed Lawler. Some mornings he would drive over to the school and sit alone in his office. And he would listen for the sound of voices in the classrooms, footfalls in the hallway, erasers being hit together, bells ringing, laughter from the playground. For a month there would be just creaks in the old furnace and pipes clanging in the basement. He felt the way the sheriff of a ghost town feels.

  It was all illogical to Ed. You had children in school for three weeks, had them settled finally into the routine of a school year that lay ahead, had the teachers settled in, the schedules memorized, and then came the potato harvest and four weeks’ vacation. That’s when children could join their parents in picking potatoes and bringing in a sizable paycheck each week. When they returned to school the process had to begin all over again of settling into the school year. What a waste of time. Why not start school after the harvest, he’d ask the school board, and extend school for three weeks in the summer? But that would entail change and Mattagash was not eager to change. The school board couldn’t be blamed. They were all victims of their own circumstances. One member signed his name by rote, another with an X. One member, new to the school board, voted for a prospective teacher with a bachelor’s degree over one who had done work toward his master’s, saying, “This out-of-the-way place is better for a bachelor. They resettle quicker than the married ones.”

  This was what Ed Lawler was up against when he tried to bring innovative ideas to minds that had not progressed since their forefathers constructed the very first outhouse and set about life concerned more with the bodily functions than those of the mind. Eating, working, and making love. Those were the three Rs in Mattagash and nothing anyone could do would change that. At least Ed saw no change approaching in his lifetime. And if the burden of social and academic advancement was to be placed in the hands of Amy Joy and her peers, it was likely that the machine set in motion would come to a grinding halt.

  This was the year Ed Lawler gave up, stopped beating his head against the stone minds of Mattagash, threw the gauntlet back down into the heap of rubbish, and turned his back to it.

  “Some of us go to our graves with our dreams,” he thought, unable even to remember what his had been. Was it a boy’s camp? Was it a school for gifted children? A community center that offered courses in art and photography and dance? Were these all just random thoughts he had had over the years, or were they his lifetime goals? He could no longer remember if they had been very important once or if all he had really expected from life, wanted from life, was to not be unhappy.

  Ed walked to the window of his study and looked out at his view of Mattagash. The neighbors were not close. Houses were scattered up and down on either side of the road that followed the river. Most of the houses had small grassy fields or trees as natural boundaries between them. From Ed’s window, Bert and Martha Fogarty’s house sat on the same side of the road as the river. Beyond that, an eighth of a mile farther up the road was Tom and Wilma Fennelson. Beyond them, and out of sight of the Lawler house, sat the abandoned American Legion Hall. A half mile more was the congested part of town, twenty houses or so whose yards were joined, the school, grocery store, Albert Pinkham’s Family Motel, and then back to scattered homes here and there, some close to the road, some farther back. It was a town he had hated ever since he moved there. And the more he lived in it, the more he lost sight of who he really was, where he was really from, and what he was really capable of achieving.

  He looked out his window at the leaves that had dried after the rain and were sparkling with color again. He had seen them turn from green on the tree to brown on the earth for so many years that he was sick of them. And he was tired of hearing every woman in Mattagash who stopped by the school or met him at the store say, “I think the leaves are prettier this year than they’ve ever been.” Year after year he had heard this until he wanted to say, “Isn’t there a limit? Can’t the goddamned leaves just get so pretty and then they can’t get any goddamned prettier?” It was this blind sense of optimism floating vaguely over Mattagash
that he disliked the most. He could take a good old pessimist any day as long as he was in touch with reality.

  When winter came with six feet of snow and temperatures that fell to 30 and 40 degrees below zero and stayed there for days at a time, he wondered if it would be his last. The liquor helped some, but couldn’t keep him numb forever. Spring was easier, even if it arrived late, bringing slush and muddy roads that never seemed to dry. It was usually around late June and July that a peacefulness would settle in and he felt he could survive another year in Mattagash, maybe the rest of his life. He would go off with a fishing rod, a can of earthworms, and a cooler full of beer long before the sun was up. And in a boat on Falls Lake, he could almost believe that life was not as bad as he thought. A sharp tug on the line, the sound of birds in the trees, the warm sun on his back, a wild deer standing on shore gazing out at him were all signs that he was alive. That his heart, buried beneath all those layers of fat, was still beating.

  What are the last actions a man takes when he knows he can no longer function with the living? Do those actions become overly important to him? Does the pencil he touches to write good-bye with become like a gem to him because it’s the last one he’ll ever touch? Does the envelope against his tongue taste like honey? Is the ringing telephone he dares not answer a symphony?

  Ed took the gun from his drawer, from behind the paperbacks that hid it from view, and put it on the desk in front of him. He used to say that a gun was the pen used by the men in Mattagash, the only pen they knew, the only method they had to communicate. During hunting season he had seen their moist eyes as they looked upon the dead deer tied to the tops of their cars or sprawled in the backs of their pickup trucks. It was the closest they could come to expressing themselves. What they felt looking upon the animal they had killed, he knew for a fact, was an appreciation of beauty, pride in a hunt well done, and a sadness for death. The way a woman looks at a beautiful vase she has bought on sale, just as it slips from her hands and scatters broken on the floor.