The Funeral Makers

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Am I dead?” she wondered. Thinking surely that a McKinnon would be met at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter and not Batman, Marge lay in a state of confusion. The figures moved in, one on each side of her bed. It was Marvin Sr. and Junior, both with arms outstretched.

  “We’re gonna get you,” Junior said to Randy.

  Marge, quite cognizant now of her circumstances, recognized the two faces that lunged toward her, heard the deathly, occupational threat, and knew that she was very much alive.

  “Oh, Jesus, the undertakers have come for me,” she thought.

  “I’m alive,” she whispered, too inaudible for the room to catch and then she was lost again down the black tunnel as the room and its trifling people spun away from her, a little universe, detached, while her own world burned softly down and threatened to flicker out.

  EAST OF MATTAGASH: JAMES DEAN MEETS LUCKY LINDY

  I know that it is quite all right,

  There are no tigers here at night

  And if there were they wouldn’t bite

  But somewhere lurking out of sight

  There may be tigers and they might.

  —from “Faites vos Jeux,” by Herbert J. Warren

  In Mattagash the road stops. Dead ends. A dirt road takes you farther into the wilderness of northern Maine and Canada. There is no passing through Mattagash. A strange car with an unusual license plate that drives through town will eventually turn around, usually just past the Mattagash Bridge where the tarred road stops. And it will come back giving all of Mattagash a second chance to see if the plates are Rhode Island or Connecticut. In Mattagash your back is up against those trees like they form a wall. To get out of Mattagash you must first go farther back into Mattagash territory, following the river northeast until it turns and dips south, like a drunken dancer. To get out of Mattagash, you must first trick her, let her think you’re heading north. Then at Watertown, you drive directly south, down a twisting road, but always south, as fast as you can drive, never looking back for fear the brittle hand of every McKinnon before you, of every Gifford, of every dead ancestor who went into the earth there will reach out, catch you by the coattails, saying, “I saw my only days on this earth right here and so will you,” and pulling you back into town where you will stay until you die. To escape Mattagash, you must be very cunning.

  Chester Lee turned the Packard into the forgotten driveway of the American Legion Hall, mowing down the goldenrod and mustard that had established themselves there over the years of nonuse. He turned the engine off but sat inside the car, listening to the rain against the roof and remembering the summer he was nine years old. Bert Gifford had taken him along with a party of canoers he’d been hired to guide down the tricky Mattagash River. After driving miles up into the Mattagash territory, they had waited in a rusting school bus for the rain to let up so they could put their canoes in the water and begin the three-day journey back to Mattagash. But the rain had gone on and on, coming down in torrents that set old-timers to speculating as to when it had ever rained so hard and so long before.

  Chester and Bert Gifford had been given bunks on the bus since a few were vacant, and sleeping in the old Ford was unnecessary. On the bunk above his father, Chester Lee had lain close to the ceiling as the tin fists of the rain hammered all night, all day, all night again, ringing in his ears until it massaged him, kneaded him, like tiny hands pressing over his body. That was the summer he was away from Mattagash for the first time. He was away from the people he had grown up with. And he had discovered a new sensation that summer in the company of men from out of state who did not look upon him as a Gifford, but just another person from Mattagash. Back in Mattagash he was born no good. Born to steal and cheat and spend his days escaping jail.

  For the two days of rain while the party waited on the bus and for the three days it took to complete the canoe trip, Chester Lee felt like a burden had been lifted from him, as if the stones of his ancestors’ faults had been rolled away and he was resurrected to be the person he chose to become. He walked straight and stopped hanging his head. He tried hard to please. Once, when a man named Bob passed him an Orange Crush, Chester Lee said “thank you,” then turned crimson at the sound of his words, at “you’re welcome” coming back to him. It was a brief interaction he had never shared before with another human being, and it both embarrassed and pleased him. He felt an affiliation with the rest of mankind, a sense of belonging to the whole, of being one of the many creatures responsible for the working of the planet. He went back to Mattagash with this newly found self-respect. But on the first day of school, he was made to empty his pockets before the fourth-grade class because twenty-five cents of lunch money was missing from the teacher’s desk. He could still feel the lint inside one pocket as the tip of his finger touched it before pulling the pocket inside out for the spectators. Fear built up inside him that perhaps a quarter had been hidden all this time beneath the lint and it would not be the same quarter but they would say it was. The teacher would say, “There now. We knew, didn’t we?” turning it in her fingers before the class like a prize. Back in his seat Chester Lee felt the expressionless mask return to his face, a mask Giffords are all born with, a sneer of contempt to hide behind. The teacher had instructed the class to search their desks for the quarter in case “someone might have hidden it there.” Chester Lee did not lift his desktop, did not move, but pressed the lint firmly between his thumb and forefinger as desks slammed all around him like trumpets on Judgment Day and papers rustled in his ears like angel wings. It was then she said, “Never mind, class. Here it is. I must have slipped it into my lesson plan and forgot about it.” And then the class filed out, each child caught up in the incidents of his own life, eager to be out of school, the case of the missing quarter already a memory to them. Chester Lee had stayed in his seat until the last lunch pail disappeared through the classroom door, giving her the opportunity, expecting something back for what she had taken. But when she glanced up and saw him frozen in his seat, she quickly said, “I found it, Chester Lee. You can go now.”

  Without a word he left the room, left her rifling through the papers on her desk. Mrs. Florence Carpenter, who died ten years later when a load of pulp she met in front of Albert Pinkham’s house broke the stakes and cascaded down upon her car like Tinker Toys.

  That was the same day he unwrapped the sheet of the Watertown Weekly that held his molasses sandwich and saw that the black ink had embedded itself on the bread, little backwards letters on the bread. Before he could wrap it up again, some of the girls in his class saw the sandwich. From then on, when she thought of it, Patsy Fennelson circled around him at recess saying, “Let us read your sandwiches, Chester Lee. Tell us what the news is before you eat it.”

  He wanted to tell those girls what he had learned, that to Bob and the other men from out of state, all of Mattagash was poor. That Patsy’s dress wasn’t the city dress she thought it was. That her tuna fish sandwich was nothing compared to what some kids must have in the city. But instead he said nothing. For years. And if a quarter was missing, by God chances were it was in his pocket, if they found it at all before he got away and spent it or hid it in the tree behind the Gifford outhouse. And when the eighth grade finally came and went, Chester Lee took his books and went down to Mrs. Carpenter’s room and threw them on her floor. Then he walked out past his classmates whose arms were loaded with pine boughs to decorate the new gymnasium for commencement, and whose talk was about diplomas and gowns and futures. He knew then that futures were inherited, that chances were passed down from father to child, and that Bert Gifford had left no will for his sons, that Ruth Gifford had no trousseau to give to her daughters. That’s when Chester Lee decided that the world owed him something and that he should set about collecting it. He was no different than the man from the bank who came after cars and houses and chain saws when someone couldn’t pay the bill. If the town had taken it upon themselves to make him a
Gifford, they would pay a fee for his being one. It was a contract, and the same that his ancestor, Joshua Gifford, had signed the day he stole the ax and oats.

  At the American Legion Hall, Chester Lee found Amy Joy’s letter wrapped in Saran Wrap and pinned to the door. She would be waiting for him by Sicily’s lilac bushes. The envelope was damp but the note inside and the money were safe. Chester Lee quickly thumbed through the stack of twenties. Two hundred sixty dollars. The letter didn’t interest him, but he read it quickly to see if there were any new developments he could make use of. There were none, so he crumpled it up and tossed it over his shoulder. He threw everything that caught his eye into the pillowcase he had taken off his pillow. It had yellow flowers and had been sneaked out of Sicily’s linen closet by Amy Joy, who wanted to better her lover’s boudoir. In went a pair of pants, two shirts, socks, his gum rubbers, the alarm clock, mirror, comb, a few cans from the larder of the grocery truck robbery, as well as two pairs of monkey-faced gloves that had once dangled happily from a dusty corner of Lyman’s truck.

  Out at the car, Chester Lee opened the back door and threw his makeshift suitcase into the backseat. The rain was heavier, with fog thick as soup, and the damp chill of autumn had crept into the air. The Packard purred quietly when Chester Lee turned the key in the ignition. He sat behind the wheel and took a deep breath. If only there was a good enough road to get him into Canada through the woods, he could be sure of not being caught. But only trucks could manage those roads full of potholes and fallen trees. That meant trying to get past Watertown. It was such a trap. All of Mattagash was a big mousetrap where someone had taken the cheese years ago. It was an empty trap waiting to spring its rusty mouth shut.

  His only chance was getting past Watertown. He could spend the night in Houlton, pick up a few cans of spray paint and paint the car a different color. Blue would look nice. The Packard climbed onto the road leaving the American Legion Hall behind and sped toward Watertown, its red taillights barely noticeable in the fog.

  In an instant, Chester Lee realized he was leaving Mattagash forever. He thought of Ruth and Bert Gifford. Would they look for him in the morning? And when the sheriff finally followed his scent to their door, telling them their son had escaped in a stolen Packard, would they miss him? He knew the answer. Bert Gifford would slap his knee and say, “Son of a bitch! A Packard!” and Ruth would mix less eggs for breakfast and at bedtime Debbie would move her two little girls off the couch downstairs and put them in Chester Lee’s bed. In a few days, after the excitement of what he’d done had died down, there would be little talk of him. Family life would go on as it had before. Bert Gifford would curse the mail for being so slow in bringing his disability check. Ruth would continue to curse her neighbors from behind the fly-covered screen door of the Gifford house. Soon Chester Lee would be a dim memory. They would forget him, he was sure, the way dogs forget the puppies taken from them.

  In the Packard he felt lonely. The night was black around him and the winding road seemed to trick him at places where he thought, after years of driving over it, there were no tricks left to play. The Packard had a radio but in Mattagash the reception allowed for only static with an occasional line of song here and there coming out of a dip in the road. He was alone and was reminded of the movie he’d seen at the Watertown Theater about Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic.

  “This must be how he felt,” thought Chester Lee and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a Lucky Strike.

  Two deer that had come to the edge of the road to lick the salt raised their heads out of the fog and stared blindly into the Packard’s lights. Chester Lee slammed the brakes on, afraid they would cross the road in front of him, but they both jumped over the ditch behind them and, white tails flashing in surrender, disappeared beneath the trees as the Packard roared by.

  At the LEAVING MATTAGASH, COME AGAIN sign that the women’s auxiliary had one of the high school students paint, Chester Lee tipped an invisible hat and said, “No thanks,” to the extended invitation. He stubbed his cigarette after just a few puffs, for his hand was now shaking. This was not galloping out of the trees on a workhorse with a gun and scaring the daylights out of poor old nervous Lyman who had a weak heart anyway. This was the big time. This wasn’t homemade. It was store-bought. And if only his gamble paid off. If only he could get past Watertown. But maybe he was worrying for nothing. Maybe no one even knew the Packard was gone. Maybe that skinny little woman was screaming and yelling so loud no one heard him drive off into the rain. He had barely unzipped his pants before he had to get out of her damn bedroom. Otherwise, she’d have had J. Edgar himself in there to investigate. He hated not finishing. It was like sowing the kernels, then not bothering to pick the corn. If only he had known the Packard was there before he climbed into the window. He had seen it at a distance at Marge’s, and on the flat by the river, and he had admired it. Wanted it badly. But stealing it outright had not been something he planned. To get the money from Amy Joy and then the Greyhound out of Watertown were his only intentions. But when he saw the sleek car there in the driveway, so close he could almost hear it breathing, he had to get inside it, to get away from the woman, from the frustration of uncompleted sex, to satisfy the adrenaline pumping over screams in the dark and the touch of a new body. Before he analyzed the situation, before he reckoned with the reality that stealing the Packard would almost certainly assure him a cell next to his brothers’ in Thompson Penitentiary, it was too late. He had the Packard now. Should he abandon it? He could stop right there, just a few miles south of the town line, and run it into the trees by the river, then get to Watertown the best way he could. What could they prove? Maybe he should just run it into those hazelnut bushes above Lyman’s store. Then there would be no cops to worry about. But the smooth Packard beneath his hands was a sensation no Gifford had ever known before. The Packard had needed no salesman singing its praises as to how it held the road, how plush the seats felt. It sold itself and Chester Lee could no more ditch it than he could abandon the girl in the lingerie section of the Fall–Winter issue of the Sears and Roebuck catalog if she suddenly materialized all warm and naked before him. The Packard was his dream come true. His tuna fish sandwich inside a shiny lunch pail. It was his pockets bulging with his own silver quarters, like a pocketful of trout he himself had caught. It was the five-day feeling of self-respect he had found the summer he was nine. And now, twenty-three long years later, it had come back to him like a boomerang, like words he had shouted down the Gifford well that had been in echo all those years and just now managed to break through the dark water and come back. Words like thank you and you’re welcome and please. Words that almost hurt his mouth to form, so foreign they seemed to him. Like Italian. Or French. That’s what the Packard did for him. And that’s why he drove her on through the rainy night, over the twisting, foggy road to Watertown.

  When Chester Lee saw the young doe in the road, saw it jerk its head, frantic for a direction to run, it flooded his memory in a flash, the boiled white skull that had hung on his bedroom wall. It was the first deer he had ever shot. He was thirteen and downed it with four badly placed bullets until it could no longer run but crawled under the boughs of a young cedar that were heavy with snow. He had broken the boughs away, exposing the injured animal, whose blood lay like rose petals on that thin layer of snow that hunters love and bleeding deer dread. It’s a white sheet of paper spread out over the woods to collect the dots of blood that drop, so that the hunter, using his gun like a pencil, slowly, easily connects the dots.

  Chester Lee had stared down at the animal and felt remorse at what he’d done. He could not bring himself to unsheathe his knife until he heard his father and brothers catching up to him. Before they could see what would be a weakness to any man in Mattagash, Chester Lee had pulled out his knife and slit the creature’s soft throat, shouting back at the men behind him, “The little bitch put up a good fight!”

  Later, as they dra
gged the dead deer away, he saw the cedar boughs scattered about on the snow and knew that in Mattagash, as it was in nature, everything you put up to protect yourself, to shelter yourself, would be broken away by somebody, sooner or later. Your very hide would be stripped from your bones, leaving you naked and shaken beside the red drops on Mattagash’s white snow.

  And later, when his brothers showed him how to push a wire up into the cranium and pull the brains out so that the skull could be boiled, then varnished and hung as a trophy on the wall, he had felt the same remorse return. Digging out the animal’s brain was like stealing its secrets, its memories of the fresh, deep woods and the soft belly of its mother. Simply because it had been born a deer.

  Because it was his first deer, and although he couldn’t give words to his emotions, he felt they were kindred spirits. That Mattagash had robbed him of his past simply because he had been born a Gifford. And many times over the years when night had settled about the house and darkness rolled in around his bed, he would come awake in a sweat and see the gleaming skull, the eyeless sockets, the horns like a crown of thorns on its head. He would think of Jesus and the blood that spilled from the cross and he was afraid of hell then, afraid of his sinfulness, and of the skull that hung like crossbones on his wall.

  He could not stop the Packard in time. The deer didn’t run, but stood, stunned by the invention of headlights, stood looking into them like mirrors, until its bones met the metal of the machine and crumbled inside its skin like pieces of chalk as the body slid gracefully across the hood and crashed through the windshield, leaving it in tiny bits of glass, like fragile blue tears.