Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  “Oh my gawd,” Laura had said so slowly as they drove earlier in the day toward the Keys and the other women wondered if she’d ever get it out as they crossed over a long bridge that seemed architecturally impossible and then dipped down so close to the water it looked as if the van would end up as a submarine. “I had no idea it was this gorgeous here.”

  “Paradise, from the looks of things,” Katherine agreed, pulling over at the edge of the bridge so that everyone could get out and put their toes in the water. “Let’s go feel the water.”

  Rebecca says it first, daring to break their moment of delicious nature loving. She bends down to splash the salty water on her face and to run her fingers in the sand and then she asks, “Does anyone know why we are here? Does anyone know what this place meant to Annie?”

  The other three women turn to look at Rebecca as if they are waiting for her to answer her own questions. Rebecca doesn’t move. She lets the sun warm up her face and her closed eyelids but she doesn’t speak.

  “Until the trip I didn’t even know she had been down here,” Katherine says, verbally deepening the idea that none of them knew as much as they thought they did about Annie. “That doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think, because there are those gaps in all our lives when we were doing things like having babies, going to graduate school, trying to decide what was up and down. I’m not sure when Annie would have been down here and why.”

  “Something romantic,” Jill suggests. “Look around. Everything reeks of romance. Either that or you’d come here in the dead of winter to get away, especially if you grew up someplace that was cold.”

  Laura tries to act like she doesn’t know anything. But dozens of images have seeped into her mind. She looks at each one of the women as they wonder about Annie and this place and she trails her hands back and forth in the soft waves until Jill realizes she hasn’t said anything.

  “What?” Jill demands to know, throwing water from her fingertips onto Laura’s face. “What are you seeing when you close your eyes that we don’t see?”

  Laura braces herself for the way her mind floats as if it is suspended when she sees something. From her perch at the edge of her own mind she can see the past and present in frames that present themselves like old movies—dark shadows, swift movement, the cloudy film of white gauze hanging over faces and places and tiny pieces of the future. This is how she sees. This is how worlds come to her. This is how she is able to know some things and parade into places that she is certain others could see if they would only try hard enough.

  She doesn’t know everything about Annie’s Florida wanderings but she tells the other women that it feels to her as if it was definitely romance. She tells them she thinks the details will fall into place when they get to where they are supposed to stay and she thinks that is going to be someplace where Annie once stayed, too.

  “How the hell do you know these things?” Katherine asks her, more than slightly astounded by her often-perfect perceptions. “Do you have psychic blood?”

  It is hard for Laura not to tell the others everything. It is hard for her not to tell them things they do not even know about themselves. It is hard for her to explain how she has worked to place her own hands on the inside of herself, like continuous fingerprints on the kitchen walls, so that she can feel who she is all of the time. It is hard for her to explain that yes, some of what she has was passed down to her from wise aunties and a great-grandmother who loved to tell fortunes by reading the lines on the palms of people’s hands. It is hard to tell them that she knows there are worlds close to them that they cannot even see as they sit at the ocean’s edge and ponder the mysteries of Annie’s life.

  It is hard, but she tells them in a way that does not make her sound as crazy as she sometimes feels and her fellow pallbearers rise as she finishes her story and then they want to know more. More about Annie and what it could have been but then she rises, too, and tells them that she doesn’t know everything. She tells them that the rest of the story, if it even matters, is theirs—all of theirs—to discover so they’d better hurry and get back into the van and get there.

  That’s why Annie Freeman’s entourage is in such a hurry to get to the edge of the pier on which John Chester is now standing. It looks as if they are trying to locate Annie’s body floating off the shoreline when they charge poor John. That’s when Jill points out they have an entire day to figure it out and to grill the living hell out of him, so they back off and John is relieved but also terribly happy to see all of them.

  John introduces himself as half the owner of the fine establishment they are in the process of taking over. The other half, his work and life partner Ben Cluskey, attorney-at-law, breakfast cook and fisherman extraordinaire, is scheduled, he tells them, to man the pontoon boat at 5:30 P.M. for a cocktail cruise, hors d’oeuvres and conversation that could last all night.

  “One of those men knows something,” Laura whispers to Rebecca as they climb the stairs to their rooms on the second floor of an old beach home that has been renovated to look as if it is a wild Italian villa. Laura has seen a musty version of something dangerous, emotional and a bit saucy.

  “Wow,” Jill tells John as he opens the door to her room and her vision explodes with colors that have been blended to match one of the sunsets she expects to see outside of her window in just a few hours. Her room is a kaleidoscope of oranges. “This is lovely.”

  “My sister did it,” he says, laughing. “If I decorated this place it would look like the inside of the storage shed, which is kind of a neat idea, now that I think about it. My grandfather built half the houses in this town and this is where my parents lived.”

  Jill knows right away by the way he looks at her that John is the one here who knew Annie. John and Ben maybe both knew her but John surely knew her if she’d been at the house, stayed here or close by. She was dying to ask him but didn’t dare to do so without the other women in the same room to hear all the answers.

  He tells her without her having to ask. He stood by the door as she dropped her bags on the bed, then asked her if she was the retired professor.

  Jill smiled and he confessed quickly. “I knew Annie,” he admitted. Maybe it was because they were the same age or maybe it was because she was letting him do it in his own way and in his own time but he told her that yes, he had known Annie G. Freeman and they had stayed in touch for years and that he had indeed helped her arrange this part of what he had just learned from Jill was now a traveling funeral.

  “Can you wait a few more hours until Ben gets here and we take our boat tour and I’ll tell you the entire story?”

  “Does anyone else know that you knew Annie?”

  “Laura. But then again Laura knows everything from what I hear.”

  “I’ll just tell the others that you knew our Annie because if I don’t I’ll burst and yes, yes I can wait and we can wait but it won’t be easy.”

  The women have captured the entire bed-and-breakfast, much to the delight and relief of John, who throws them a bone with the words, “Annie would love to know that you are in there messing the hell out of Ben’s kitchen and every other room in the joint. So go. Do. I’ll be on the dock where I belong.”

  They each have their own rooms and while John goes back to his fishing lines and his whistling they descend on the house in pairs—Katherine and Laura and Jill and Rebecca following a fast call from Marie, and another from Balinda to ask them to keep a light on and the door unlocked because she is going to get there terribly late. Marie has missed the last possible flight and will now try and surface at the Miami airport or during the next leg of the funeral.

  Katherine decides to take over the kitchen and make them a late lunch but Rebecca shoos her outside with the funeral book and reminds her she is way behind in taking a turn. Rebecca joyously embraces the refrigerator and the yellow dishes and the huge wine rack as if she has just bumped into a long-lost friend. “Alleluia,” she shouts as she opens every single drawer and touches
every hanging pan in what is obviously a kitchen manned by a real cook.

  While she writes, Katherine is surprised that she feels so tired. She grabs a pillow off the wicker chair, slides it under her head and begins writing with the funeral book propped on her chest.

  * * *

  KATHERINE THOUGHT: I suddenly feel exhausted. It’s odd almost and close to overwhelming to have this much time to dissect emotions that I did not even know I had. Well, I knew I had them but they’ve been sleeping quite soundly for a long time. And Annie—such remarkable and wonderful women you have picked for this funeral, which is loaded with surprises, like the two gay men and now this woman from Chicago who is joining us and the guessing games we play about the probable reasons for these funeral service locations. The Florida Keys. Why have I never been here and what did this place mean to you? Were you on this porch? Did you lie on this couch and look out across this bay? It is astonishingly beautiful here and I had no idea I was this tired. Come take a walk with me, Annie.

  * * *

  ANNIE THOUGHT: Oh, Katherine, you are tired because you never stop. You are exhausted from planning and working and sharing and taking care of half the world. That’s okay—just remember once in a while to stop and purchase new underwear. Watch the sky here, Katherine. Let go of something. Listen and for crissakes have fun. Do you hear me, girl?

  Katherine hears but what she hears is their kind host whistling and Rebecca moving through the kitchen as if she has just won the lottery and Jill and Laura talking while they dangle their feet at the edge of the pier. She turns so that she can wedge her back up against the seat cushions on the couch and catch a piece of the breeze that is slipping around the corner of the house and she thinks for just a moment that she hears her daughter as she drifts into an easy and sweet sleep.

  Sonya, who balances a schedule and a life that would make two racehorses tired and who has in her seventeen years already witnessed through life with her own mother the stress and hurt of the loss of love and the death of a grandmother whom she saw disappear in every possible way right before her young eyes.

  “So much,” Katherine murmurs, rocking in and out of sleep and finally allowing herself to fall into a slumber that only deepens her thoughts about her daughter. Thoughts that turn into a raging dream that she will later describe as a memory of something that must have really happened once.

  Her daughter, hair dangling in braids and small enough to be clinging onto her knees. Katherine has her hand resting on top of Sonya’s head and she is winding her fingers in and out of her braids. They are watching a parade that seems to grow larger and larger with each item that passes.

  First there is a truck and then there is a tank. First there is one boy playing a trombone and then there is an entire band. First there is a small float being pulled by a bicycle and then there is a float that goes on and on for so long they cannot see the end of it and Sonya looks up at her mother and says simply, “That’s enough, Mama.”

  That is what Katherine will remember and toss around in her own head after Rebecca shakes her gently and tells her that she has been sleeping for nearly two hours and has missed lunch. “Wait,” Katherine begs, grabbing Rebecca’s arm to wriggle up into a sitting position. “You have to hear about this dream. . . .”

  Rebecca smiles and then she sits next to Katherine and they rock together on the couch that can also be used as a swing and they share Katherine’s dream.

  “Katherine.” Rebecca turns to swing her legs up so that they are touching Katherine’s knees. “What do you think about the dream? Do you get it?”

  “Don’t let the parade pass me by?”

  “Like that would happen.”

  “What?”

  “There are so many things to grieve. Think about it. We all did the animal thing—all those dogs and cats and birds and snakes we have loved and lost—and we’re all supposed to talk about old lovers sometime while we are here. But what else?”

  Rebecca rocks them back and forth after she puts her legs back down on the porch floor, she rocks them and she tells Katherine about the day she was shopping at a grocery store near her house and she stopped, to this very day not knowing why, and looked out of the huge front window that faced a small café that was right across from the grocery store. There was a group of women sitting outside of the café drinking coffee and Rebecca watched them, thinking the entire time what a beautiful group of women they were.

  “It took me forever to see that one of them was my own daughter,” she explained to Katherine. “One of them was Marden, my baby, a young woman I thought of only as a girl, a child, and there she was suddenly a woman and I felt this ache gnaw at me as if I had not eaten in a year. I stood there in that grocery store, watching my daughter gesture and laugh and move with the grace of a grown-up and I just started crying like a baby. It was not unlike the same type of sorrow we all feel when we realize that something we once had that was very precious is no longer there. That it’s forever lost, changed, deceased.”

  “Like a baby,” Katherine repeats, finally getting the heart of the story. “Gone, except in your memory and now in my memory. Like my own baby is gone.”

  Katherine quickly recites a line from a book by one of her favorite authors, Eudora Welty, and she shares it with Rebecca and she touches her hand at the same time. It is a sweet phrase about the treasure of human memory and how at one moment it has the possibility of joining together the past and present, the living and the dead.

  “My own daughter is now a woman,” she tells Rebecca. “I get it. Another passage, another form of loss. Another reason to grieve. Another part of this life process. That’s my expanding parade.”

  “Maybe,” Rebecca agrees, pulling Katherine to her feet. “Or maybe it was just a nasty old dream because you haven’t had anything to drink yet today.”

  Rebecca, who is so used to being the caretaker she does not even blink, leaves quickly and comes back to the porch with two bottles of beer and a plate of lunch for Katherine. Then they keep talking. Their conversation roams and races into relationships and through jobs and loves and as they rock slow and sweet they dredge a foundation for a new friendship—“as long as you aren’t too bossy,” Rebecca half jokes, and “as long as you don’t try to take care of me all the time,” Katherine fires back.

  Late afternoon and several beers later, Jill comes around the side of the house to tell them that the boat driver, cook, house attorney and man-about-the-bed-and-breakfast is about to take care of the next round of drinks.

  Ben is too beautiful to be a man. That is the first thought that crosses the mind of all four women as he turns the corner and they see his blond hair, deep blue eyes, tanned face, and graceful walk. He’s wearing cutoff shorts, a button-down shirt and he’s barefoot. He embraces John first, kisses him on the cheek, says, “Hi, baby,” and then hustles over to meet the traveling funeral entourage who have been breathlessly waiting for the boat tour and the answers to about five thousand questions. They guess he is fifty-plus even though he looks ten years younger. Just like his partner, he is a consummate host. He kisses the hand of each one of them.

  It takes just minutes to load the boat with plates of the food he’d prepared earlier in the day—crackers and cheese and dips and finger foods that look like tiny pieces of art. Everyone agrees that white wine should be the drink of the night and John loads up a cooler with wine but not before he opens a chilled bottle and makes certain each of the women is handed a glass as she boards the boat.

  Ben captains the ship but it is John who talks as they move out into the bay about the history of Islamorada and its way of life when its residents are connected to the rest of the world by the cement bridge pilings and lengths of highway that can easily be licked up for dinner by an angry storm or a hurricane. He tells them about his family and how his grandfather helped put in the original rail system and yes, Ernest Hemingway really did stop at the Chaucer’s Bar all of the time and yes, Ernest did sign the book that’s in the fro
nt window and yes, Bob did meet him and has a photograph to prove it.

  “He was a great drunk, not unlike my own father and his father,” John shared, pointing to a hotel that Hemingway often stayed at when he couldn’t make it farther down the Keys and into Key West. “The stories my father told me were something else.”

  Annie Freeman’s traveling funeral quartet wants to hear another story. They want to hear Annie’s story.

  The boat is moving slowly about a mile off-shore and the night lights are blinking on one by one all along the shoreline. It’s a breathtaking display that goes well with white wine, budding friendships, and grieving.

  John turns to Ben and before he can say anything, Ben places his hands on his shoulders and says, “It’s time, John. It’s time for the story.”

  Not even Laura knows what to expect. She has felt the hint of romance and a desire from the past that has burnt a hole in the palm of her own hands but she has not been able to center her heart on anything specific and she is about to find out why.

  “Annie didn’t tell me what to say when she set this up,” John begins, motioning for Laura to pour him more wine. “She told me what she had planned for this funeral tribute of hers and knowing her the way I do the entire thing makes sense, but she never asked me to say anything or do anything special other than let you stay here and treat you like the goddesses that you are.”

  He stops to look past all of them, even Ben. He is resurrecting a tale that he has not told in a long time but a tale that is a very important part of who he is and where he came from.

  “I’m fifty-nine,” he tells them. “When I met Annie, I was young and struggling with the notion of homosexuality and coming from a family where a manly man drank, swore, drove railroad spikes, and made as many babies as possible. It was beyond exhausting.”

  John was determined to be the kind of man his family expected him to be. He met Annie at the university, dated her and loved her and then he tried, how he tried.