Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  Maude told Doug, “I’ve got to get these papers to the funeral home.”

  “I’d have thought the womenfolk would have tended the corpse at home.”

  “We’re not that primitive,” Maude said. She wondered if the cosmetics and filler clays of the undertaker would trap her grandmother’s soul, keep her from making a ghost. What did embalming do? Normally, Maude hated ghosts, their ectoplasmic confusion and babble, but if she saw her grandmother’s ghost, she’d know that Betty hadn’t won, at least not completely.

  Doug drove her to the funeral home, but stayed in the car while she went in. She arranged for visitations at the funeral home, and checked to see if the paper had all the facts right for the obituary. The mortician asked, “Do you want to see your grandmother this evening when we’ve laid her out?”

  “How late will you be open?”

  “We’ve got another visitation this evening, so we should be here until nine or ten.”

  Maude wondered what she’d get out of it and said, “My cousin and her husband invited me over for dinner. I don’t know how late we’re staying.”

  “Your aunt suggested a coffin. I assume what she says goes.”

  “I want to see it,” Maude said.

  The undertaker led her back to a display room. Maude ran her hands over the lacquered wood, the real metal coffin handles, the satin interior. “Is it real silk?” she asked.

  “Your aunt brought us real silk. My wife will take this out and tack in Betty’s fabric.”

  Maude wanted to tell him to use acetate, polyester, machine fabric, but since she couldn’t explain why she didn’t want her aunt’s silk around her grandmother, she nodded.

  “Partridge lived a good life,” the man said, as though he knew Partridge could have lived longer at others’ expense.

  “Is it difficult being a mortician in this county?”

  “I guess it’s hard to come back to a place like this, just to have your grandmother die.” A good Southern conversational swerve.

  Maude felt on the verge of tears then and said, “I trust you’ll make sure the burial goes well.”

  “I understand there might be a sacrifice.”

  “I’m shocked that you’d speak so openly about that,” Maude said, hearing tones of her aunt in her voice.

  “It’s better if you cremate that body.”

  “Are you a witch, too?”

  “I bury all the bodies,” he said. “I work with what’s the custom here.”

  “My grandmother wanted to save her soul. Remember that.”

  “We’ll honor her memory,” the undertaker said, not promising anything about her soul. “Miss Maude, I’m not the one carrying a revolver.”

  “You are a witch.”

  “I looked in your purse,” he said, bowing slightly to her. Maude nodded and went out.

  Doug’s luminosity seemed corny. He smiled at her and started the car again. “Everything’s been arranged,” she said.

  When they got back to Kobold, Maude saw Esther’s car parked in the driveway. Esther was on the porch swing, holding the finished quilt.

  “Betty gave them some silk to line the coffin with,” Maude said.

  “She needs to be wrapped in this,” Esther told her.

  Maude took the quilt. “Come on, Doug, we’ve got to go back to the funeral home.”

  Esther said, “I’d come to the visitation, but I’m not sure all your people would approve.”

  “Nonsense, you’ve got to come.”

  Esther didn’t say anything, but turned and went to her car. Maude followed her. Esther sat behind the wheel crying. She said, “Some folks think we nurses try to keep their people alive so we get more money, maybe a payoff from the doctors.” She dabbed at her eyes. “And if we come to the funeral, they think we’re angling for a tip or that we…”

  “I couldn’t take care of dying people for a living.”

  “I’ll do something else for a while, clerk in a store,” Esther said. “Then I’ll call the agency and get someone new to take care of. You will take the quilt to your grannie, won’t you?”

  “Yes.” Maude decided she’d go in after supper and ask to be alone with her grandmother. Then she’d open the lower half of the coffin and wrap the quilt around Partridge’s body.

  Esther said, “Drop by sometime and see me.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ve got some good people on your father’s side.”

  Maude didn’t like either side, not the embarrassing and intense country Christians or the witches who thought they duped their entities. “Neither God nor the Devil. That’s the cynic’s motto.”

  Esther said, “Sounds bad to me.” She rolled up her window and drove away. Maude put the quilt in Doug’s car and went back to the house.

  She fucked him because fucking, in the past, relieved tension. “Whoa, you’re a little rough,” he said, pulling away from her teeth.

  Maude’s teeth ached to bite his cockskin. “Isn’t this magical,” she said. He tried to pin her down, but she was slippery and he wasn’t fully committed to all-out wrestling. “I’m the priestess and you’re Adonis.”

  “I don’t think so,” Doug said. “Maybe you’re the maiden who gets thrown into the volcano.”

  “Not a virgin,” Maude said. Her teeth snagged his nipple and she had to resist biting it off. makes me do Did he piss her off because he was such an easy victim?

  They rolled off each other and quickly chilled in the sixty-five degree house. “We could turn the thermostat up,” Doug said, “or build a wood fire in the dining room and make love in front of the flames. But gently.”

  “I think we ought to get dressed.”

  “I don’t mind love nips, but I was afraid you’d really bite down. I might have hurt you back. A man’s so much stronger than a woman.”

  “Physically.”

  As Maude dressed, Doug stayed sprawled on the bed, head back, throat exposed, pulse beating visibly in his neck. His loin muscles bulged slightly above his groin—thrust muscles, Maude thought, rape muscles. One leg bent outward from the hip, tendons pulled to visibility. Maude hooked on her brassiere, still staring at his body. “I might as well go back to the funeral home with the quilt now,” she said. “Can I drive your car for once? I let you drive mine.”

  “I would rather stay here,” he said. “The keys are in my pants.”

  Maude fished them out and threw the pants over him. “Is your foot healed now?”

  He laughed. “Were you working magic on it?”

  “No. I just wanted to know.”

  “It’s still a little stiff.”

  Some entities wouldn’t take a scarred sacrifice, but Maude doubted imperfection mattered in Doug’s case. “I’m sorry if I bit too hard.”

  Doug moved his hand to cover his cock. “No, I just wasn’t sure.”

  “Women don’t know whether guys will hurt them or not.”

  “But you weren’t trying to give me a sensitivity lesson, were you?”

  “No.” Maude found her coat and purse with the gun in it and left him draped with his pants.

  She drove back to the mortuary with a suspicious lack of problems. What if Betty tricked her, got Partridge’s soul despite the Christians. Maude didn’t believe in Christians. The mortician was surprised to see her again so soon. “I thought you would come later.”

  “I want to put this in her coffin,” Maude said, clutching the quilt against her breasts. Since she hadn’t bathed, she suspected she stunk of cunt and come. Maude watched the mortician’s nostrils. He seemed oblivious—perhaps embalming fluid ruined his sense of smell.

  “We’re tacking in Betty’s silk now.”

  “Put it in over Betty’s silk,” Maude said. “Please. It’s what my grandmother wanted.”

  For a second, Maude thought the mortician was going to say, but your grandmother’s beyond wanting. Instead, after a pause, he said, “Follow me.”

  He led Maude to a workroom. The coffin lid was on o
ne table, the coffin on another. The acetate lining lay in large shreds on the floor. The mortician’s wife was fastening down Betty’s silk with a small hammer and brass-headed tacks. She looked up and said, “Hello, Maude. Do you want to see your grandmother?”

  “No, I’ve come to put this in her coffin. We worked on it while she was dying.”

  The mortician and his wife took the quilt from Maude and held it up between them. The quilting stitches made embossed crosses across the pattern squares. Maude said, “Perhaps you ought to wrap it around her down in the coffin.”

  “We don’t want to offend anyone,” the mortician’s wife said.

  “Or fold it and put it under her, between her and Betty’s silk.”

  “Does Betty know how it’s quilted? With the crosses?”

  “No. Esther, my grandmother’s nurse, took it to her church circle.”

  The mortician’s wife took the quilt away. Maude wondered what she’d do with it. The mortician said, “We can’t afford to offend anyone, not your grandmother’s people, not your father’s.”

  “You just open a third of the coffin, so I’m sure you can arrange it so it’s not visible.”

  “Do you know what you’re trying to do?”

  “My grandmother wanted to have her soul dissolve.”

  “Have you considered that hell could be a possibility?”

  “I’m trying to protect her from Betty’s silk.”

  The mortician’s wife came back in with the quilt and declared, “It didn’t blister the body.”

  The mortician told Maude, “If Betty notices, we’ll say we left you alone with the coffin. We don’t want to offend anyone.”

  Maude said, “Neither God nor Devil.” She wondered if they really would put the quilt in the coffin. The woman lay the quilt beside the coffin and went back to tacking in Betty’s silk.

  “Trust us,” the mortician said.

  Maude didn’t want to drive back to Kobold immediately. She wanted to abandon Bracken County, drive to Boulder, drive to New York. Get a typing job, learn computers, forget all this. Let Betty have Doug, her grandmother’s soul. Steal this car.

  No, Maude didn’t want to do those things. She wanted Partridge to be alive and dying for fifty years, Esther to help Maude and Doug, and no witches to bother them.

  The mean allochthon seemed to fold up at the corners, trapping her. Standing in the funeral home parking lot, she felt its malice. The sky overhead was another mineral. Perhaps, in this car, she could drive out of the county. Nobody, not even Doug, would be surprised if she turned car thief. They’d bury Partridge after stealing her soul, sacrifice Doug to John’s weirdness.

  Welfare would tempt her. My lost life, Maude thought. While Maude stalled in her escape dreams, the Reverend Springer walked up to her car. He said, “Can you give me a ride home?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came for a visitation,” he said. “The bodies here get integrated even if the other stuff is a bit backward.”

  Maude wondered why he didn’t ride back with the people who brought him, but decided she wasn’t going to escape to New York before the funeral.

  “I’m thinking about driving to New York,” she said. “Just leaving this mess.”

  “Maybe you should take me home first.”

  “Sure.” Maude unlocked the car and Reverend Springer got in.

  “You were awful irresponsible in Berkeley,” he said. “Making a mock of real madness.”

  “Sorry.” Maude suspected she deserved this.

  “But you’ve been good here.”

  “Paint thinner got your nose?”

  “I never considered sex as a hideous sin. Sort of like eating pig. You can always quit or marry the man.”

  Maude flushed. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Oh, yes, you do. We been allied in this struggle.” He looked at Betty’s house as they passed it. The Essex wasn’t in the driveway. “They’re preparing the man who killed the Richmond people’s boy.”

  “Doug and I are supposed to go over there for supper.”

  “You’re doomed to conclude this.”

  Maude said, “Let’s park somewhere where people won’t know I’m at your house.”

  “Park behind the house,” he said. Maude pulled up on the grass and pulled behind the shack. She followed him in the back door. He flipped on a bank of lights in the tiny kitchen. Maude saw he’d painted the walls here, too. She saw a painting of herself confronting Betty and Luke, with the two women ghosts behind her and the Reverend Springer shielding her with a translucent paintbrush.

  “I felt like a paintbrush went up my brain,” she said. “You can kill the magic. You ought to for keeping Doug alive.”

  “If I kill the magic, won’t that make you crazy again?”

  “Lord wanted me. But to paint, not preach. God makes it so his toys go crazy if they don’t do his will.”

  “I don’t believe in that, either.”

  “No, you don’t believe in that. But you do believe in magic and the pagan gods. Only you don’t like them. Quite rightly.”

  “But you’ll go crazy.” And after the magic’s dead, I can’t be good by simply abstaining.

  “I’ll be okay. People take care of me.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You started right with the quilt,” he said. “The murdered boy’s people want to take care of John. But they’re not strong enough.”

  “When?”

  “At the funeral.”

  “They can’t attack him at a funeral.”

  “He stole their boy.”

  “It will just make things worse,” Maude said. “John will eat them.”

  “You’re right. You’re the only one who can stop it all.” Maude knew she could slow time, but would that slow her own mind, too? “All I have is one stupid trick. And I don’t want to be a witch.”

  “Be a witch to kill the witch in you forever. You want some coffee?”

  “What?”

  “You want some coffee? Sit down with me and pass some time. You don’t have to be anywhere soon.”

  Maude felt slightly dizzy. Coffee was too ordinary for this room with its painted ghosts. “Doug will worry.”

  “Bet Doug’s sleeping.”

  “I should call him.” The Reverend Springer had been insane in Berkeley, drugged to mute his inner demons, had hated her for her mockery of his real condition.

  “We’ve got to take things to a better way,” he said. “It’ll redeem you from Berkeley.”

  “I’ve never…” Maude almost said she’d never used her powers, but she had.

  “Take the powers out and break them. Would you rather have tea?”

  “Do you have any herb teas?”

  “Chamomile,” he said. “It’s a special nerve unwinder, even if it never stopped voices.” He went to the sink and filled a battered enameled pot, then set it on a gas burner.

  Maude sat down on an armchair covered with a polyester tablecloth. “I hope Doug doesn’t worry about the car.”

  “He knows you been cooped up. He might fuss, but doesn’t mean much by it.” Reverend Springer took out a square plastic box filled with dried chamomile flowers. “Greeks sell the best chamomile.” He rummaged through a drawer and found two tea strainers, the sort that look like miniature flour sifters. “I make it strong.”

  After he poured the boiling water over the chamomile, they sat quietly while the tea steeped. Reverend Springer took one strainer out and handed that cup to Maude. She took it and looked into the greenish liquid. He took the strainer out of his cup and said, “There’s honey if you want it.”

  Maude sipped the tea. It was hot and bitter, but honey wouldn’t be right. Taking tea with Reverend Springer had turned into a ritual, like Japanese Tea, but she didn’t want to break the mood by saying so. “No, it’s fine as it is.” Under the bitterness, Maude tasted other things.

  Reverend Springer didn’t reply. They sat drinking t
he tea. His paintings were crude and powerful. His tea was subtle. Maude wished he’d tell her what to do, but she couldn’t whine to him.

  After they finished the tea, she took his cup and hers to the sink and washed them. He said, “I can’t tell you how to work. You know them better than I do.”

  “Can’t you keep the Richmond people from the funeral?”

  “It’s the killed boy’s uncles and brothers now, not the women. They can’t see it’s a witch hate sucking them in.”

  “Sue’s ghost?”

  “Got to lay the magic down for all the ghosts, let them go out.”

  “Dissolve?”

  “Ghost is an insane spirit. God’s got to take it home and fix it.”

  The Reverend Springer was so much saner in this magic space. How could she send him back to a real biochemical madness? “You don’t deserve to be like you were in Berkeley.”

  “In that world, God’s mercy is that deserving has nothing to do with how things work. Rain falls on sinners and the righteous. Also, problems with neurotransmitters.”

  “Maybe there is no God.”

  “I’ll keep my God, thank you.”

  Maude said, “I don’t know what to do, what to think, how to stop them.”

  “It’s the after you’re really afraid of,” he said. “You ought go now or they’ll start working to find you.”

  Driving back and forth, Maude felt her tire vibrations shaking the allochthon. The land itself seemed opposed to her, waiting. Bracken County hadn’t had any earthquakes in centuries. A normal fault had dropped it down from its overthrusting and wedged it tight against the Blue Ridge, but it quivered under Maude.

  Doug was gone when she came back to the house in Kobold. Maude knew he was powerfully attractive to women who didn’t understand glamour charms for victims. He’s off fucking. She cursed herself for being such a fool to tell him victims got lots of sex.

  He hadn’t left a note. Maude went into the bathroom and washed his odor away. She stripped the sheets from her grandmother’s bed and ran them and her clothes through the hottest cycle the washer had.

  After the washing cycle ran for ten minutes, Maude realized she’d put the bloody sheets in there earlier. She’d cooked in her grandmother’s blood on the first set of sheets. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said, sliding down to sit, legs sprawled, with her back to the hot machine.