Night Freight

by Pronzini, Bill

  The Coffin Trimmer

  I'm scared.

  I have never been so scared.

  No one in Little River shares my terror. They refuse to listen to me, to open their eyes to the terrible truth. They call me a superstitious fool. Or tetched, or downright deranged. One day they will realize how blind they've been—the ones that are left. But by then it will be too late.

  Lord have mercy on us all.

  It doesn't make sense that Little River was chosen. Ours is no worse nor different than any other small northern California town. Dairy and beef cattle is what supports us; agricultural crops such as alfalfa, too. We have six saloons, a gambling house, and a whorehouse, compared to only three churches, but that doesn't mean there is much sin or even much impiety. There isn't. We haven't had a killing or any other major crime in nearly twenty years. Rowdyism is confined to Independence Day and once in a while when a cowhand off one of the ranches gets liquored up of a Saturday night. We're a God-fearing town of thirteen hundred and sixty-eight souls, according to the 1892 census. Good souls, with no more than a bucketful destined for a handshake with Satan on their judgment day.

  Doesn't make sense, either, that it would start when Abe Bedford put up his new undertaking building. But it did, and no mistake. I used to believe everything that happened in this life had its clear-cut purpose and meaning, and if you studied on it long enough, looked at it in just the right way, you'd come to know or at least suspect what it was. Not this, though. No one can figure out the cause or reason for this—no one mortal, anyhow. And perhaps that's a blessing. I know too much already; I'm too scared as it is. I reckon I couldn't stand to know the rest of it too.

  Abe Bedford buys all his rough pine boxes and fancier coffins from a casketmaker in the county seat. He used to store them in the barn back of his house on Oak Street. Had the coffins trimmed there, as well, by his wife Maude before she passed away and then by the Widow Brantley; he buys them without lining because it's thriftier that way. His embalming room and viewing parlor were in a rented building down on lower Main, near the train depot. He'd been the only undertaker in town for some while, but Little River was growing and Abe took to fretting that before long some other mortician would move in and open a fancy establishment and take away a good portion of his business. He came to the idea that what he had to do was build his own fancy establishment first, in a better location than lower Main—a place that was big enough for embalming and viewing, and to show off and store his caskets and rough boxes.

  So he had a new building put up on the other side of his Oak Street property, close to the street. It had a large plate glass window in front so folks walking or riding by could look in and see the trimmed display coffins with their satin linings and silk pillows and shiny brass fittings. Abe also laid in shrubbery and a lawn and a brick walk and a wide brick drive to accommodate his black hearse and team of four. When it was all done, everybody agreed the new undertaking parlor was a worthy addition to the community.

  Abe had been open for business in the new place less than a week when the woman who called herself Grace Selkirk came to town.

  No one knew where she came from, or even how she arrived in Little River. She simply appeared one day, and took a room overnight at the hotel where the drummers and railroad men always stayed; and the next day she was living in Abe Bedford's house, keeping it for him and working in the Widow Brantley's stead as his coffin trimmer.

  Tongues started to wag right off. Gossip's a major industry in any small town, and in Little River the women and members of the Hot Stove League in Cranmer's General Merchandise Store work harder at it than most. I hear more gossip, I reckon, than just about anyone in town. Cranmer's General Merchandise Store is mine, inherited from my daddy when he passed on fifteen years ago. George Cranmer is my name.

  Abe Bedford is a widower and reasonable handsome for a man in his late forties. Grace Selkirk looked to be about thirty-five and was not too hard on the eye, in a chilly sort of way. Before long, folks had Abe and the Selkirk woman sharing a bed. Some even went so far as to claim he had met her on one of his trips to San Francisco, where his son lived, and brought her back with him on the sly so they could live together in sin.

  I didn't believe any of it. I've known Abe for four decades; there is no more moral and God-fearing man in this state. He'd heard the gossip, too, and it hurt him. He wouldn't have anything to do with Grace Selkirk, he said to me one night, not that way, not if she was the only woman in a thousand miles. She made him shiver just to look at her, he said.

  I asked him why he hired her and he said he didn't rightly know. She'd showed up on his doorstep the morning after she arrived in town and asked him for the work; he was about to refuse her, for he'd had no trouble doing for himself since Maude died, but he couldn't seem to find the words. Couldn't bring himself to let her go since, either. She was a good cook and housekeeper, he said, and the fact was, she trimmed coffins better than Maude or the Widow Brantley ever had. Why, some of her finished caskets were funerary works of art.

  Nobody liked Grace Selkirk much. She never made any effort to be neighborly and little enough to be civil. Stayed close to Abe's home and undertaking parlor, and on the few occasions she came down to Main Street and into my store, she hardly spoke a word. I could surely understand why she made Abe shiver. She was the coldest woman I'd ever laid eyes on. Ice and snow weren't any colder.

  One blustery day when she walked into the store, old Mead Downey was occupying his usual stool by the white-bellied stove, and he tried to make conversation with her. She wouldn't have any of it. Went about her business and then walked out as if old Mead wasn't even there. He spit against the hot side of the stove, waited for it to sizzle, and allowed as how he'd never believed those rumors about her and Abe and now he knowed for a fact they weren't true.

  "Why's that?" one of the other loafers asked him.

  "He's still alive, ain't he?" Mead said. "First time he stuck his pizzle in that woman, him and it would of froze solid."

  All the boys laughed fit to choke. I laughed too. I thought it was a pretty funny remark then.

  It isn't funny now.

  The one thing about Grace Selkirk that you couldn't fault was her coffin-trimming. As Abe had said, she was an artist with silk and satin, taking pains to get the folds in the lining and the fluff of the pillows just so. She did her work right there in the showroom, in plain sight behind the plate glass window. Most any time of day, and late some evenings, you'd see her at it. She spent twice as much time working in the undertaking building as she did keeping Abe's house for him.

  It wasn't that she was readying caskets for future use. No, all the ones she trimmed were for fresh business. More folks than usual had commenced dying in Little River. Nobody worried about the increase in fatalities; births and deaths run that way, in high-low cycles. A feeble joke even got started that Abe had done such a bang-up job on his new establishment, people were dying to get into it.

  Grace Selkirk had been in town about six weeks when Charley Bluegrass came rushing into my store one night. It was a chilly fall night with a touch of rain in the air. I'd stayed open late, as I often do, because I am a confirmed bachelor and I'd rather be in the store playing checkers and dominoes and shooting the breeze with members of the Hot Stove League than sitting alone in my dusty parlor.

  Bluegrass wasn't Charley's true last name. Everyone called him that on account of he'd planted a Kentucky Bluegrass lawn for Miss Edna Tolliver a few years back and it had come up so rich and green, half the women in the county took after him to do the same job for them. Which he did. He'd given up his handyman chores and taken to working as a gardener full-time. Charley was a half-breed Miwok and liked his liquor more than most men. He'd been liking it pretty well on this night; you could smell it on him when he blew in.

  He was all set up, his eyes sparkly with drink and excitement. "That new woman, that Grace Selkirk—she's dead!"

  The Hot Stove League and I all came to
attention. I said, "Dead? You sure, Charley?"

  "I'm sure. I seen her through the window at the undertaker's. All laid out in one of them coffins, deader than a doornail."

  Frank McGee crossed himself. He was new in town and a freshman member of the League, a young clerk in the Argonaut Drugstore who drove his wagon all the way to the county seat of a Sunday so he and his wife could attend what he called Mass in the Catholic Church over there. Old Mead said, "What killed her? Frostbite?" and commenced to cackling like a hen with a half-stuck egg. Nobody paid him any mind.

  "I don't know what killed her," Charley Bluegrass said. "I didn't see no marks, no blood or nothing, but I didn't stop to look close."

  "Some of you gents better go on over to the undertaking parlor and have a look," I said. "And then tell Abe."

  Toby Harper and Evan Millhauser volunteered and hurried out. Charley Bluegrass stayed behind to warm himself at the stove and sneak another drink from the flask he carried in his hip pocket. I don't usually allow the imbibing of spirits on the premises—I don't drink nor smoke myself; chewing sassafras root is my only vice—but under the circumstances I figured Charley was entitled.

  We all thought Toby and Evan would be gone awhile, but they were back in ten minutes. And laughing when they walked in. "False alarm," Toby said. "That Selkirk woman ain't dead. She's walking around over there livelier than any gent in this room."

  Charley Bluegrass jumped to his feet. "That can't be. She's dead, I saw her laid out in that coffin."

  "Well, she just got resurrected," Evan said. "You better change the brand of panther piss you're drinking, Charley. It's making you see things that aren't there."

  Charley shook his head. "I tell you, she was dead. The lamplight was real bright. Her face . . . it was all white and waxy. Something strange, too, like it wasn't—" He bit the last word off and swallowed the ones that would have come next. A shiver went through him; he reached for his flask.

  "Like it wasn't what?" I asked him.

  "No" he said, "no, I ain't going to say."

  Toby said, "I'll bet she was lining the coffin and laid down in it to try it for a fit. You know how she is with her trimming. Everything's got to be just so."

  "Tired too, probably, hard as she works," one of the others said. "Felt so good, stretched out on all that silk and satin, she fell asleep. That's what you saw, Charley. Her sleeping in that box."

  "She wasn't sleeping," Charley Bluegrass said, "she was dead." And nobody could convince him otherwise.

  The next morning he was the one who was dead.

  Heart failure, Doc Miller said. Charley Bluegrass was thirty-seven years old and never sick a day in his life.

  Citizens of Little River kept right on dying. Old folks, middle-aged, young; even kids and infants. More all the time, though not so many more that it was alarming. Wasn't like a plague or an epidemic. No, what they died of was the same ailments and frailties and carelessness as always. Pneumonia, whooping cough, diphtheria, coronary thrombosis, consumption, cancer, colic, heart failure, old age; accident and misadventure too. Only odd fact was that more deaths than usual seemed to be sudden, of people like Charley Bluegrass that hadn't been sick or frail. Old Mead was one who just up and died. The young Catholic clerk, Frank McGee, was another.

  When I heard about Frank I took over to the undertaking parlor to pay my respects. Mrs. McGee was there, grieving next to the casket. I told her how sorry I was, and she said, 'Thank you, Mr. Cranmer. It was so sudden . . . I just don't understand it. Last night my Frank was fine. Why, he even laughed about dying before his time."

  "Laughed?"

  "Well, you recollect what happened to that half-breed Indian, Charley Bluegrass? The night before he died?"

  "I surely do."

  "Same curious thing happened to my Frank. He went out for a walk after supper and chanced over here to Oak Street. When he looked in through Mr. Bedford's show window he saw the very same as Charley Bluegrass."

  "You mean Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins?"

  "I do," Mrs. McGee said. "Frank thought she was dead. There was something peculiar about her face, he said."

  "Peculiar how?"

  "He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was, it bothered him some."

  Charley Bluegrass, I recalled, had also remarked about Grace Selkirk's face. And he hadn't wanted to talk about what it was, either.

  "Frank was solemn and quiet for a time. But not long; you know how cheerful he always was, Mr. Cranmer. He rallied and said he must've been wrong and she was asleep. Either that, or he'd had a delusion—and him not even a drinking man. Then he laughed and said he hoped he wouldn't end up dead before his time like poor Charley Bluegrass . . ." She broke off weeping.

  Right then, I began to get a glimmer of the truth.

  Almost everyone in Little River visited my store of a week. Whenever a spouse or relative or close acquaintance of the recently deceased came in, I took the lady or gent aside and asked questions. Three told me the same as Frank McGee's widow: Their dead had also chanced by the undertaking parlor not long before they drew their last breaths, and through the show window saw Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins, dead or asleep. Two of the deceased had mentioned her face, too—something not quite right about it that had disturbed them but that they wouldn't discuss.

  Five was too many for coincidence. If there was that many admitted what they'd seen, it was likely an equal number—and perhaps quite a few more than that—had kept it to themselves, taken it with them to their graves.

  That was when I knew for certain.

  My first impulse was to rush over and confront Grace Selkirk straight out. But it would have been pure folly and I came to my senses before I gave in to it. I went to see Abe Bedford instead. He was my best friend and I thought if anybody in town would listen to me, it was Abe.

  I was wrong. He backed off from me same as if I'd just told him I was a leper. Why, it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, he said. I must be deranged to put stock in such an evil notion. Drive her out of town? Take a rope or a gun to her? "You go around urging such violence against a poor spinster, George Cranmer," he said, "and you'll be the one driven out of town."

  He was nearly right, too. The ministers of our three churches wouldn't listen, nor would the mayor or the town council or anyone else in Little River. The truth was too dreadful for them to credit; they shut their minds to it. Folks stopped trading at my store, commenced to shunning me on the street. Wasn't anything I could do or say to turn even one person to my way of thinking.

  Finally I quit trying and put pen to paper and wrote it all out here. I pray someone will read it later on, someone outside Little River, and believe it for the pure gospel truth it is. I have no other hope left than that.

  She calls herself Grace Selkirk but that isn't her name. She has no name, Christian or otherwise. She isn't a mortal woman. And coffin-trimming isn't just work she's good at—it's her true work, it's what she is. The Coffin Trimmer.

  The Angel of Death.

  I don't know if she's after the whole town, every last soul in Little River, but I suspect she is. Might get them too. One other fact I do know: This isn't the first town she's come to and it won't be the last. Makes a body tremble to think how many must have come before, all over the country, all over the world, and how many will come after.

  But that is not the real reason I'm so scared. No, not even that. Last night I worked late and walked home by way of Oak Street. Couldn't help myself, any more than I could help glancing through Abe Bedford's show window. And there she was in a fresh-trimmed coffin, the silk and satin draped just so around her, face all pale and waxy and dead. But the face wasn't hers; I looked at it close to make sure.

  It was mine. A shadow vision of my own fresh corpse waiting to be put into the ground.

  I'm next.

  This little tale of psychosexual obsession brought yelps of protest from more than one faithful reader when it first appeared. The story seems
to push some people's buttons, and not because of the act referred to in the final sentence; the phrase containing reference to said act was left out of the originally published version. The yelps pleased me. I hope there'll be more from readers who catch "Funeral Day" here for the first time. Pushing buttons, after all, is what fiction is all about—from the writer's point of view, anyway.

  Funeral Day

  It was a nice funeral. And easier to get through than he'd imagined it would be, thanks to Margo and Reverend Baxter. They had kept it small, just a few friends; Katy had had no siblings others than Margo, no other living relatives. And the casket had been closed, of course. A fall from a two-hundred-foot cliff . . . it made him shudder to think what poor Katy must have looked like when they found her. He hadn't had to view the body, thank God. Margo had attended to the formal identification.

  The flowers were the worst part of the service. Gardenias, Katy's favorite. Dozens and dozens of gardenias, their petals like dead white flesh, their cloyingly sweet perfume filling the chapel and making him a little dizzy after a while, so that he couldn't concentrate on Reverend Baxter's mercifully brief eulogy.

  At least he hadn't been pressed to stand up next to the bier and speak. He couldn't have done it. And besides, what could he have said about a woman he had been married to for six years and stopped loving—if he had ever really loved her—after two? It wasn't that he'd grown to hate or even dislike her. No, it was just that he had stopped caring, that she had become a stranger. Because she was so weak . . . that was the crux of it. A weak, helpless stranger.