The Funeral Makers

by Cathie Pelletier

  Ed had always been afraid of guns. He purchased this one on a spur of the moment, when Amy Joy was just a few years old. He and Charlie Ryan, the school’s janitor, had gone into the hardware store in Watertown looking for some chairs for the teachers’ lounge. Together they had loaded the chairs onto the back of a borrowed pickup truck. And when Ed went back inside for his receipt, the clerk pulled out a box and said, “This little beauty just came in this morning,” and Ed, for no reason, bought it, hid it from the janitor, from Sicily, from himself for years. He had even tried to forget he owned the gun, or at least avoided telling himself why he had bought it in the first place. And then the day arrived when he admitted the truth, that he had purchased the gun the way some people buy a bus ticket.

  The first time—drunk and feeling a bit maudlin—that he realized the gun was an expedient, he became so frightened of it when he woke the next morning, sober, that he wrapped it, hands shaking, in an old T-shirt, drove up to the American Legion Hall, and threw it down over the bank and into the bushes along the river. But that night, calmer and looking to the future with a steady eye, he went back and found it there. He carried it back to his study and hid it behind the paperback copies of Walden Pond and Leaves of Grass and some Hemingway novels. Books that Amy Joy and Sicily would never read, so it would be safe there.

  When he placed the gun on the desk, the metallic sound made him jump, as if it had prematurely discharged. His hands steady again, he took paper and a pen and wrote a letter to Sicily and then one to Amy Joy. It wasn’t that he meant what he wrote. He would let the living have their peace. It would be his legacy to them. Something Sicily could arm herself with to face her neighbors. Something Amy Joy could give her children one day, crumbling and yellow, and say, “This was your grandfather.” How could he tell them the truth? How could he say to Sicily Jane McKinnon: “I never wanted to marry you. I looked at you on our wedding day and knew I’d never love you.” How could he say to Amy Joy, “I never knew how to love you because I hadn’t learned to love myself.”

  He told Sicily he loved her. That the fault was not hers, but his. It was his own failure. His inability to survive the onslaught of old age without realizing his early ambitions. He told Amy Joy she would always be his little girl and to study hard and be a big success someday and help her mother all she could and he loved her dearly. It was a letter written countless times before by many shaking hands. “They probably all lied, poor bastards,” he thought and left the two envelopes on his desk. Putting the gun inside his jacket pocket, he turned the desk light off and left the study, closing the door behind him. He listened to the sound of his own footfalls coming down the stairs, the last time he would descend those steps. He almost stopped at the refrigerator for something to eat then laughed at the useless notion.

  “It’ll make the coroner’s job a little less unpleasant,” he said to the empty house.

  The screen door slamming behind him was as loud as a gunshot, the sound of the car door closing enough to give him goose bumps. The whole night was pulsing and swelling with sounds and noises, and the air was heavy, so difficult to inhale that he became aware of the very act of breathing. It was almost dusk when he backed out of his driveway. For a few minutes he sat there in his car, out on the main road, looking at the yellow lights of his home, studying each shingle on the roof, the brown shutters, the shrubs in the yard. It all seemed like a dream to him now, like it was someone else’s home and he had only been renting it until the owners returned. A car came up the road, slowed to go around Ed’s, and he saw Bert Fogarty and his son Ernie, who was in the seventh grade, looking curiously into Ed’s eyes, wondering what he was doing sitting in his car in the middle of the road in front of his own house. Ed waved, and they waved back and went off until they disappeared around the turn near the American Legion Hall. Ed knew he had made them a part of Mattagash history, that the next day Ernie could excitedly tell the story of seeing the principal in his car, embellishing it for effect, and Bert could tell a thousand times how he and Ernie were the last ones to see Ed Lawler alive and how strange he had been acting, just sitting in his car in the middle of the road. And it would be passed on to their descendants how their grandfather, then great-grandfather, then great-great-grandfather had come upon the principal of Mattagash Grammar School just before he shot himself. “They’ll have me dancing on the hood of the car wearing nothing but a lamp shade before the week is up,” Ed thought and drove on down the snaking road, along the Mattagash River, to the black building of the school. No one would be surprised to see his car in the yard. Many nights he worked there late, or simply sat in his office and drank whiskey.

  The office door opened with its usual squeak. He snapped on the desk light, although it was not yet dark outside. Papers were strewn about his desk, folders piled up. A cup half full of cold coffee and layered with mildew sat where it had been placed on the last day of school. A wooden plaque saying IF YOU DON’T WANT ANYONE TO FIND IT, PUT IT ON MY DESK was sitting on his dictionary. It had been given to him by the teachers and his secretary for his birthday several years before. He liked the plaque. It showed a spark of humor among his colleagues that was rare.

  Ed sat in his swivel chair and placed the gun on the desk. This time, deadened by the stack of papers, it made no noise. Sicily couldn’t get into his office at school to clean his desk as she did at home, putting things in places where he couldn’t find them.

  He drank directly from the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden in the top drawer of his filing cabinet. His secretary knew it was there but said nothing. After all, she was his secretary. What could she say? She’d been with him since the first day of his principalship at Mattagash Grammar School, had even been with his father, and where Ed was concerned she looked at him sadly, as a pious mother does her drunkard son. Wringing her hands beneath her desk where he couldn’t see them, she asked God every working school day to make the demon of alcohol leave him forever but said nothing to the earthlings around her. Especially the curious ones who asked her about the principal’s drinking habits.

  Ed thought of his father, a man with quiet intelligence who headed the school when it was a two-room wooden building and inaugurated the new brick building in 1940, coughing with tuberculosis but too stubborn to die until he saw the work done and his son safely enthroned as principal. It was a phenomenal feat, his managing to raise the money and the town’s consciousness high enough over the years to do what was thought to be nearly impossible. Even Watertown, with all its 2,000 people, had only acquired a brick building in 1938. But once a consciousness in Mattagash was raised, it was likely to fall with a thud. After they proudly finished a school they hadn’t even wanted until Lester Lawler came to town, they soon went back to their rackety gossip about him.

  Ed had none of the old man’s tenacity. He wasn’t as driven. He often wondered if the incident that brought Lester Lawler to grief had been the thorn in his side that kept him fidgety, kept him on his toes, an achiever. Ed himself knew little of what had happened. Sicily had asked him once, shortly after they were married, what his father had done to that young girl in his Current Events class that had made it impossible for him to continue as a teacher in Massachusetts. It was the first time Ed had ever heard of it. Sicily had heard it from old Mrs. Feeny, Sarah’s mother, who said teaching Current Events in school instead of the Bible was the cause of such goings on. It never came up again until Amy Joy came crying into his office one day because Raymond Caulder, who wanted the very swing on the playground that Amy Joy had gotten to first, had said to her, “Your grampie was a no-good womanizer,” and had sent the little girl to her father’s office in tears. Ed could do nothing. For another child, he would have brought the slanderer into his office and demanded an apology for the injured party. But he realized that for him, as principal, to insist on an apology to his daughter would only perpetuate the gossip concerning his father. He could see Raymond’s mother, Beatrice Caulder, a god-awful wo
man with a tongue that could level cities, banging on his door the very next morning, her ironing board beside her as a battering ram.

  If he had reacted with typical Mattagash strategy, he would have said to Amy Joy, “You go out there and tell him that his mother goes to the Watertown Hotel on Saturday nights and begs men to dance with her.” But he refused to become a part of their microcosm of social warfare. Instead, Amy Joy was told to turn the other cheek, to ignore nasty people, and was sent unappeased back to the playground, that land mine of past and present bombs that could explode at any moment, little Molotov cocktails made at home by their mothers and fathers and given to their children each morning as they left the house, like goodies in a lunch pail.

  Amy Joy was born several years after her grandfather died. She had never met him, yet she was being taunted about an incident that happened in another state. In the 1920s. By a boy in Mattagash who was also born several years after Lester Lawler died. It was a strange inheritance. “No matter that Lester Lawler had built them a school, turning up early every morning, hacking and wheezing,” thought Ed. “No matter he watched every brick that went into the building to ensure their children a decent place to receive an education. The education they got at home, the oral histories and biographies, was more important.”

  Before Ed found the courage to ask his father about the incident, Lester Lawler went to his grave with the truth about the girl student. The truth may die, but the myth lives on, an evil vine sprawling and spreading, growing larger and longer. Ed surmised the truth couldn’t have been too serious, or there would have been legal consequences. An infatuation, he thought. Maybe some stolen kisses after school. What more could it have been? He felt a kinship to his father, realizing that he had very nearly followed in his footsteps. He understood what being trapped in a marriage for life before you were old enough to avoid it could do to a man.

  Ed was young during those years in Massachusetts, too young to remember the trouble. Or it had been cleverly hidden from him. He wondered if his father felt the same apathy toward him that he felt toward Amy Joy. Ed’s mother had grown old young, tight-mouthed with anger, her hands wrinkling before their time because of the fists she made. Only after she died did she allow herself to relax. Ed and his father had become bachelors again, but they kept a clean house and learned to cook for themselves. His father never remarried and it was difficult for Ed, after his marriage to Sicily, to readjust to a woman bustling about the house. A woman’s things were breakable and fragile, and he had come to think the same of Sicily. But he wouldn’t be responsible anymore if she broke with him not there in the house. He had broken himself and he hadn’t asked anyone to pick up the pieces. It wouldn’t be so hard on Sicily. Not as hard as a divorce would be. Any woman in Mattagash would prefer the suicide of her husband to divorce. Divorce might mean another woman.

  In his last moments, with only so many thoughts left inside his head before they ran out, Ed didn’t want to waste them on Mattagash. He wanted to think of other things, of other people, people who had given him strength over the years, given him faith that all mankind was not a huge, haphazard, biological mistake, that some lives had been worth the living, had given the world back something before they went out. So he thought of the poets, of Chaucer, and Shakespeare and Pound. Of the artists, Michelangelo, Raphael, Goya. Of Cézanne, bloated with wine and leaving his masterpieces to rot in the fields where he created them. And he thought of the composers who had given the world music, of Beethoven, Chopin, and Bach. Of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle. Of explorers, the discoverers of serums, planets, and dinosaur bones.

  For an hour he sat at his desk. Finally, he tore a sheet of paper from the scratch pad on his desk, wrote “I was here” on it, and tossed it among the clutter. It was what Amy Joy had written on the school building once when she was seven and was waiting outside for Ed to finish his work and take her home. His first reaction was to punish her. To take the chalk from her and demand she erase it. That she never write on the school again. But instead, he had simply taken her by the hand and led her home. “We’re not drawing pictures of bisons in caves anymore,” he had thought. “We’re out in the sun now and trying again.”

  The gun in his hands, he suddenly remembered vividly the man from Watertown who had sold it to him, saw each button on his shirt, the day-old growth of beard, the color of his eyes, saw him as plainly as preachers swear one sees his Maker just before death.

  As he held the gun to his head, he foolishly wondered if Kennedy would win the election, then hated himself for wasting a precious thought. Instead, he thought of ducks and drakes on the millpond behind the old house in Massachusetts, before the elusive girl in the Current Events class, who would be an old woman now if still living, before his mother’s hands took up their angry statements. He thought instead of the pebble, smooth and cool in his hand, thought of the action needed to skip it just so, the pressure of the thumb and index finger, the exact angle of the wrist, the quick release that sent it skipping, spinning soundlessly across the black water until it was gone.

  SEA CHANGES: THE SIREN QUITS SINGING

  And they are gone: aye, ages long ago.

  These lovers fled away into the storm.

  —John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”

  The Greyhound bus left Watertown at nine fifteen each morning heading downstate, stopping in one forlorn, out-of-the-way place after the other, its final destination Portland. At eight forty-five, when the driver finished his coffee at LaBelle’s Drugstore and came outside to unlock his bus, Violet was standing there, the first to buy a ticket. She bought one to Bangor and then helped the driver lift her two suitcases and cardboard box of costumes and knickknacks into the belly of the bus. He kept his eyes on Violet’s breasts as much as he dared, letting her catch him once, just in case she was interested in a little frolic further down the line.

  Violet’s lips tightened as she pushed the box closer to her suitcases for protection. She worried about her Raggedy Ann on buses like these. Once, when she was scheduled to dance at a club in Paris, Maine, the box had been smashed by all the other luggage and the first thing she’d seen at the unloading was the doll’s arm hanging painfully from the side of the box, like the arm of a drowning child. That same night she dreamed of babysitting children, strange children she had never seen before, and that she began to dance and while she was dancing, all the children swallowed nickels or safety pins. Violet was worried by what their parents might say and she woke up afraid and held Raggedy Ann and fell asleep holding her.

  “Will you not pile any suitcases on that box?” Violet asked the driver, catching his stare this time.

  “Whatever the lady desires,” he said, flirting. She’d seen this routine a thousand times from clerks, gas attendants, bag boys, policemen, doctors. She had come to the conclusion years ago that she looked the part. The showy red hair, the loud clothes, the absence of a wedding ring. She had considered buying a wedding ring just to see if it might discourage these advances, but soon changed her mind. A friend who was married, another dancer, told her it was only worse. It was a safety device to men already married, and most of them were. A single girl sometimes frightened a married man. Before he knew it she was in love and wanting him to divorce his wife and marry her. Have their own family. They gave men a real hard time around Christmas and Thanksgiving. But a married girl was a different story. She had as much at stake, as much reason to keep things under the table. No, a wedding band would only make it worse.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” the bus driver asked her.

  “No thanks,” said Violet. “Can I board now? I’d like to get a back seat before they’re all gone.”

  “I can bring it out to you,” he said, opening the door of the bus for her. “I’m Larry Beecham. They got paper cups for carrying out.”

  “No thank you, Larry,” Violet said as, with her shoulder purse and the Watertown Weekly under her arm, sh
e made her way to the last seat on the bus and dropped wearily into it.

  It had been a long night. After leaving the Albert Pinkham Family Motel, she had driven to Watertown to quit her job and pick up her last paycheck. Then she got herself a room upstairs, and the bartender, Jimmy, who had always been nice to her for no ulterior reason, helped her carry her suitcases and cardboard box up the long stairs.

  From there she went to Al Mersey’s car lot. Al had been over to the Watertown Hotel often to see her dance. He reminded her of a stuffed toy, the way his stubby arms and legs jutted rigidly from his short, fat body, as though bending them in the act of drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette might cause them to burst and spew batting about the room.

  After her show was over and she walked past his table, he was forever pulling her down close to his round face and wheezing into her ear, “You need a car? You come see Al.” She had driven from the Watertown Hotel to Al’s lot and waited in the parking lot for him to finish with a customer. He beamed when he saw her, all of his teeth suddenly appearing beneath his thick lip like Chiclets. As if some higher power had summoned them all to show themselves.

  “I need to sell the Volkswagen, Al,” she told him. He put one arm on the car and leaned down to her. For one second, Violet thought the action might tip the car, and smiled at the thought. She looked up at him and listened to what he was saying, but she was struck by how many tiny hairs were growing inside his enormous nose, as though it were a terrarium. There were white ones and black ones, long and short, some reaching out, others turning inward. “Probably all cars he’s sold,” she thought.