by Thomas Lynch
ANGELA, THEIR daughter, was lovely and bright; their lives seemed full of possibilities. They had a manageable mortgage, good credit, good friends, made love twice a week, belonged to the local Congregational church where Elizabeth sang in the choir and was known for a casserole she brought to funeral luncheons and potlucks. Harold ushered for Sunday services. They were the happy young couple with the pretty child.
When Elizabeth turned thirty she went back to school to finish the degree she’d abandoned when she got pregnant. Angela went to day care. Elizabeth commuted to the university and took classes in English and Women’s Studies.
Harold was gone a part of most weeks working his way up and around the state, calling on northern and western accounts. Other times he worked Detroit and the suburbs. He’d go as far west as Lansing, as far north as Saginaw, and still be home in time for dinner. He’d check the death notices in the Sunday papers to try to get a sense of who’d be in their offices and when. He’d try to see his best accounts every other month, others once a season, others twice a year, some just at convention and some he’d call or send a card to now and then. Some bought better over lunch, others after a few drinks, some over coffee in their offices. Harold had learned to cultivate his relationships with the primary buyers—most often the owner or the owner’s son. He’d listen to whatever he had to listen to—their theories on why one unit sold and another didn’t, their bad-mouthing of the competition, worries over the cremation trend, stories of the latest strange cases: double suicides, remarkably obese cases, multiple fatalities at industrial sites or on the interstates, anything. One week he’d work the city among the ethnic firms—Poles and Romanians, blacks and Jews—then the cushy suburbs of Grosse Point and Bloomfield Hills, up through Pontiac to Flint. Another week he’d work the firms in tri-cities and all the small farm towns in between, spending as much time with the Woolevers in Midland and Cases in Saginaw and Penziens and Stapishes in Bay City with their multiple rooftops and hundreds of calls as the Struthers firm in Reese who did forty funerals a year, but all of them copper or bronze or premium hardwood, paid for in cash by old German farmers. Then he’d take a run out through Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor and Jackson along I-94 to Kalamazoo and Muskegon, then up to Grand Rapids and up the west side of the state through the rich resort towns, Traverse City and Charlevoix, Petoskey and Harbor Springs. Once in the spring and once in the fall he’d try to make it through the UP. He’d buy drinks for his accounts at their district meetings and their yearly golf outings and pop for lunches and dinners with his best accounts. He loved the long hours alone in the car and the vacant landscape and the open roads. He’d been through the CB radio craze—his handle was “Boxman”—and car phones and cell phones, all the gadgets. The drive along Route 2 to the west, then north to Seney, then up to Munising, then west to Marquette was a favorite drive. His accounts up there ordered caskets by the truckload and were accustomed to infrequent deliveries. They’d back up their best units in basements and garages and keep six months’ worth of inventory on hand and borrow from their colleagues in the next county if they ran short of a particular unit. And the drive along the east side up the Lake Huron shore from Pinconning and Standish where he’d always lunch at Wheelers for the way it hadn’t changed over the years, still serving malted milkshakes in big silver tins and burgers with fried onions and real French fries. Then through Au Gres and Oscoda, Greenbush and Harrisville, all the way up to Alpena and Rogers City along the long blue edge of the state. He’d listen to radio preachers or farm stations that gave the price of sugar beets and alfalfa. Or Paul Harvey or Rush Limbaugh or public radio—it hardly mattered. He called on every firm in every town, promising each to keep their “line” of Clarksvilles “exclusive” to prevent comparison shopping between competing firms. If one bought a Tuscany 20-gauge, with lilac crepe for little old ladies, he’d sell the other firm a Silver Rose with pink velvet. If one took the Pietà or Last Supper, the other was pitched the Praying Hands or Old Rugged Cross. He kept sales charts on them all and pushed them to beat last year’s averages, convincing them that the more they spent on caskets, the greater return they’d eventually realize on their “investments.” He left stacks of notepads, pens, and packets of breath mints, each with Clarksville’s logo and his contact particulars imprinted. He gave his best accounts custom-made coffee mugs and playing cards with their firm’s name embossed next to Clarksville & Keehn—A Winning Team!
Elizabeth hadn’t exactly left him. She’d put him out. She kept the house, their daughter, the newer of their two cars, and showed him the door.
“You’re welcome to stay if you want to,” she told him, “but I’m sleeping from now on with Eleanor.”
It happened so fast it was a blur to him now. He’d gone from the more or less happy paterfamilias to a man living at loose ends. They’d been married twelve years and it was over in months. Or maybe he was only the last one to know. Either way, he found himself paying the mortgage on a house he no longer lived in, payments on a car he no longer drove, and support for a daughter, now ten years old, he saw all too rarely. That he was paying alimony to a woman with whom he no longer slept vexed him especially at the time. His consortium had been replaced by Dr. Eleanor Dillingham, who taught a course in American Women Poets at the community college.
“Poetry,” she had been quoted as saying, “like suicide, is something more women attempt and more men accomplish. It is time we changed all that!” The required reading for the course was a book about a madwoman who lived in someone’s attic and began, “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?”
The thought of Dr. Dillingham making love to Elizabeth both excited and disturbed Harold. He could understand their attraction to each other and wondered at the time why they couldn’t include him. He found Eleanor oddly fetching himself. He moved out the first weekend in December that year.
One of his accounts gave him the use of rooms over the funeral home garage where he could put a phone and sleep when he wasn’t on the road. He took night calls and helped with the removals in trade. A grieving family gathered around the deathbed of a loved and lamented head of the household sent twinges of regret and anger through Harold, but the face he showed to mourners was commiseration. With no particular home to return to, his trips got longer and longer. His sales began to increase as he spent more and more time on the road. Money began to roll in again. He opened an account for his daughter’s college fund. He wanted her to go to Alma College, a Presbyterian school in the middle of the state, where he called on the Dewey Funeral Home. The male students there all looked like Young Republicans. Or Albion, where there were mostly Methodists and they didn’t teach Women’s Studies. Or maybe Calvin College, where modest Dutch Reform girls and boys were monitored for proper conduct.
Come Fridays he’d stay on wherever he was. He’d take a room in Grand Rapids or Ishpeming or Port Huron. He’d coax his last account out for a boozy dinner and offer to help out with the Saturday funerals and sit in the motel watching TV or in the lounge listening to the terrible music and hoping to get lucky with one of the local women.
He bought the house on the lake the year after the divorce. He’d heard about it from the account in Indian River who had buried the widow who had lived in it for years. It was old and a little ramshackle but it had a good foundation and two hundred feet of frontage and could be bought right from the old woman’s children, who lived in Ohio.
Harold saw in it a refuge from the rootlessness he felt—a place to bring his daughter for those summer vacations and winter breaks his visitation rights entitled him to. He envisioned her long into the rosy future, learning to fish and ski and name the species of things with him, then perhaps bringing a boyfriend up for the weekend. He saw her wedding on the lawn under a great tent on a blue day in July or August, and his eventual grandchildren gathered round the barbecue for family reunions, playing badminton or horseshoes, or paddling canoes out on the sparkling water, all housed in the dormer he would in due course build over th
e big garage—everyone together, all distance and divisions healed. He saw, however dimly, all of them circling his last illness, or bearing him to some proper disposition, then returning to the family home on the lake to toast his life and times and memory—a man, they would say, who had played the cards life dealt him, and played them well, and would be sorely missed.
Quality time, he told himself; less is more, if better spent.
It had a stone fireplace in the main room and a good well and a wide front porch and a screened porch off the front bedroom upstairs from which he could watch the lake and the stars and the northern lights. The sunrise poured into the windows; he slept to the lapping of lake water. He compensated for fewer visits downstate by inviting his accounts up for a weekend’s fishing or snowmobiling or hunting or cards. He’d take them to the Breakers Bar in Topinabee, get them a little liquored up, buy them a steak, pitch the latest additions to the line, and take their orders. He’d write off the expenses on his tax returns. His market share kept getting better and better. His up-line in Indiana were all full of praise. There was talk of a job at headquarters, maybe something salaried in marketing.
The business was all about “protection” then. Just like diamonds and deodorants, tampons and defense budgets, caskets were sold on the Cold War notion that they could be “sealed” and “safe” and would “protect” the body more or less “forever” from leakage or embarrassment or unforeseen dangers. It was the marketing theme. Harold would spend hours extolling the virtues of Clarksville’s gum-rubber gaskets, “cathodic protection”—a magnesium bar than ran down the bottom of their heavier-gauge steels which was said to retard rust—and the 48-ounce Solid Copper Omega which “grew stronger through age by oxidation.” “Precious metals,” he called the bronze and the copper units. “Permanent protection.” The more product knowledge his accounts had, the more product they’d buy and the more they’d sell and the better he’d do.
The second summer after he and Elizabeth divorced, Angela came up to the lake and stayed with him for a couple of weeks. She was just on the brink of becoming a teen. Harold could sense the changes coming. He resolved to have her bedroom redecorated when she’d come up next year “for the whole summer.” But after he married Helen, she first demurred—a conflict with summer volleyball—and then refused. Angela said that her mother said that her father was an incurable heterosexual, bound to dominate women, a member of the patriarchy, a serial rapist, and a hopeless case. Angela told him all of this in a letter Harold figured her mother typed. She was turning thirteen. Elizabeth’s anger at his remarriage was something he never understood. That she passed it along to Angela was even more inexplicable. Harold called often but Angela was always “out.” He sent flowers for her birthday. He sent her cards and letters she never responded to. It hurt him, but he blamed it on her mother. He tried to stay in touch but figured he was best off leaving well enough alone. She had enough to deal with with all the changes in her little life. He didn’t want to pull her into a conflict. He thought the day would come when she was older, that she would understand her father better and they could reestablish a relationship. It never happened.
When she was sixteen, Angela was hit by a train. She’d been walking the tracks that ran between Main Street and the Mill Pond early on a Sunday morning. The autopsy showed that she’d been drinking and was pregnant. And though the death was ruled accidental, Harold wondered if she might have thrown herself in front of the train, and if so which of her parents should be blamed the most. It also occurred to him that maybe the man who had impregnated her pushed her in front of the train. He wondered if it was a man or a boy. Had she been looking for another father figure in her life or just playing around with one of the pimply jerk-offs she’d grown up with. Knowing the cause of death while not knowing the cause of the cause of death sent Harold into a spiral of such steep descent that he resolved to put it all out of his mind, void as that darkness was of any place names he could recognize; he feared the point of no return.
Elizabeth arranged to have Angela’s body cremated, to which Harold agreed, but he insisted on putting her in a Melrose Cherry instead of the cardboard casket they always used when there wasn’t going to be a public viewing. “A shame to burn such a beautiful piece of wood,” Elizabeth had said, when they went to the funeral home to identify their daughter’s body. She rubbed her hand along the deeply polished finish, averting her eyes from the body in the box. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to put his fist through her face and shut her mouth forever. But he only nodded and thought, Yes, a shame.
Angela’s face was unmarked, all the injuries apparently “internal.” He and Elizabeth divided the ashes. Each got a little cherub-shaped urn with half their daughter’s remains inside. He never knew what his former spouse had done with her half of their daughter. He never asked. He hadn’t spoken to Elizabeth since.
HAROLD DIDN’T know Larry Ordway, or even if Larry was his name. It might have been Lenny or Louie or Lester. All the sign said was L. Ordway Private, scrawled on a white board in blue paint and nailed to a tree stump at the end of the drive. Harold couldn’t remember when he settled on Larry or why exactly, or how he’d come to several conclusions about a man he had never met. There was the cross that went up in the woods one year, painted white and gold and ten feet tall and wired for lights, big bulbs, that shone through the dark eerily—a sign of the born-again Christian fundamentalist, Michigan militia type of head case he reckoned Larry Ordway must be. And there were the mean-spirited dogs always challenging him at the bend in the road, barking, baring their teeth, the current one now five or six years into its miserable life, looking like the hound of hell with its frothing muzzle and pointed ears. Harold had feared it and picked up his pace to get past its purview and kept an eye out even when he was out of range. He had even taken long detours through the woods to keep out of the dog’s way, his fear getting the best of him until once, the week after Joan had been diagnosed, Harold had waited for the dog, growled back at it as it hunched and snarled, and taunted it with waving arms and timed it perfectly so that when the cur lunged within kicking range, he caught it squarely in its yapping mouth, a perfect punt, flipping it on its backside and sending it yelping back up the drive. It hadn’t really challenged Harold since. Its barking was vicious but still it kept its cowering distance. Harold kept a stick handy, just in case, half hoping it would give him another go. Sometimes now, after he’d gotten past Ordway’s, he’d hear movement in the dense woods on either side of the railway easement, aside and behind him, and wondered if the dog was following along, waiting to pounce or wanting to make friendly. Harold didn’t know but didn’t trust the thing. He’d turn sometimes and look behind him. Once or twice he thought he caught a glimpse of the bitch crossing the tracks in a blur, maybe stalking him, waiting for its chance to settle the score.
At Hobo Beach, where the trail ran nearest the lake, Harold stopped to sit and watch the water for one of the eagles that nested nearby or the osprey that nested on a platform placed in the river mouth by the DNR, or anything else that might happen. The rapturous descent of fishing birds, the haunted call of loons, the hovering of kingfishers, the uncommon beauty of common mergansers—these incarnations now remembered, late in the day, late in the year, made him feel a fortunate pilgrim indeed. Above the treeline on the far side of the lake the fat face of the full moon was emerging. Harvest moon, he thought. No, hunter’s moon, then beaver moon, then cold. He ran through the names of moons such as he knew them. There would be moon shadows tonight and light on the water.
All the docks and boat hoists were stacked on the beach, waiting for the coming winter’s freeze and deep snows and next spring’s thaw—worm moon, he thought in March, pink moon April, May, the flower moon—before being hauled out and reassembled in the water for the high season. The boaters and sunbathers all gone south and the snowmobiles not yet thinking about coming north, the off-season vacancy of late October struck Harold as the best of all times of year.
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This golden harvest aspect of it all, a feast for all souls, the sense of finished work and jobs done well—“Autumn Oak” is what he named the clear-finished, hand-polished number with the fallen-leaf appliqué stitched into the cap panel and the tailored beige linen interior when he first beheld it, and his bosses at Clarksville had agreed with him. They even designed an urn to go with it—same wood, same finish, same falling leaves machine-etched into it—a package deal for the cremation crowd. “The Autumn Oak Ensemble,” they called it in the catalogue, and sold them by the truckload all over the place—the most popular of Clarksville’s hardwood line.
HE SHOULD have been better to Helen. She had never been anything but good to him. Maybe if he’d been more trusting, less damaged goods, not so angry. Maybe if Angela had lived. He didn’t know. He often wished he could do that over again, make it up to her.
They’d met at the convention in Grand Rapids. Her booth for Barber Music Systems was next to Clarksville’s on the exhibit floor. By the last day of the convention he worked up the nerve to ask her to dinner. She was younger, plain-faced, smarter and more pleasant than anyone he’d been out with in years. Her father had started the business, which sold background music systems for mortuaries—hours of hymns or new age music to “Break the Terrible Silence of Grief.” Under Helen’s guidance the company was marketing video memorial tributes.