Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (22 page)

“Yo-ho,” a woman calls from somewhere inside the house. “Keep walking, gals. You’ll run right into us.”

Which is exactly what happens as they move forward and enter a living room that looks as if it could be the inside of a small cathedral. The room is a cavern of greatness that stretches out to the edge of Lake Superior, so close to the shoreline it looks as if there are wave marks on the windowpanes. The view, a kaleidoscope of trees, water-washed rocks pushed flat by years of crashing waves so that the beach looks as if it is layered in colored pancakes, and windows that float into the clouds, takes everyone’s breath away.

“Oh,” they say in a succession of gasps that obliterate every other thought from their minds, including the not-so-soft voice of Lou that bounced through the house just a moment ago.

When Lou, all 232 pounds of her, comes around the corner and sees the women standing in a row like the wild ducks she loves to watch each morning as they seem to be discussing the weather on the beach, she starts laughing.

No one can say anything. Lou is a vision. She bounces when she breathes and her well-stocked frame is poured into a pair of jeans that would be tight on the Jolly Green Giant. Her gray hair, braided into two long strands, swirls down like snakes. This Lou woman has her hands on her ample hips and a smile that could knock the lights out in a football stadium, and to Rebecca, Jill, Katherine, Laura and Balinda she looks stunningly beautiful and confident.

“Come here, girls,” she commands, opening her arms and the women walk into her as if they have just been hypnotized and begin a kissing and hugging frenzy that they will later remember as terribly wonderful.

Then they stand back and they ask her who she is and why they are there and what in the living hell is going on.

“Oh,” Lou snorts, laughing again. “Annie told me you’d all be like this. I bet you are about going crazy wanting to know why this part of your journey has landed you in Minnesota.”

Then she holds up her hands as a woman who can only be Marie comes around the corner and says a simple “Hello.” The women move to meet her and then stand back to size her up as if to say, “Let’s see if she fits in.” Marie does the same thing. It laughingly looks like a face-off for a few moments, with Marie and Lou on one side of the room with their hands on their hips, and the rest of the funeral brigade on the other in the same position and then they embrace, moving together to form a mass of genuine warmth.

Marie looks nothing like any of the women, except those who know her, have imagined. She is the opposite twin of Lou—a tall, very thin willow of a woman who has let her hair grow gray and lets it twirl however it cares to around the tops of her breasts like dancing strands of corn silk. Her dark eyes are alive and bright and the laugh lines that move in circles from the edges of her eyes in every direction come from a place, so it seems, that is much deeper than the skin that holds it in place.

The line closes, they all embrace again and because Marie has been talking to them constantly since the funeral began, she hops into the traveling funeral, into the day, into this phase, as if she has physically been there all along.

“So?” they all ask Lou. “Tell us.”

She will tell them, she promises.

But first they must wash up. Then they must sit around a table that looks as if it has been dragged in for the largest family that has ever existed. The table seats sixteen and is tucked into a dining room that was designed for a table that seats eight. Then they must drink coffee and tea and eat huge quantities of home-baked sweet rolls, sweet breads and some northwoods pastries that do not need to be chewed because the moment they sit on a tongue they disintegrate and make anyone who inhales one sigh with joy. They must wait. They must wait while Lou asks them about their trip and who they have met. She claps her hands as they spill out the history of the traveling funeral. “We met the father of Annie’s children.” “We were seconds away from meeting her husband.” “We met this young woman in New Mexico who is about to move in with Jill,” or “Balinda flew into our lives at the last moment because she put her mother in a facility that has a Polish-speaking attendant for only three more days,” or “I finally just said to myself that if I didn’t go now, if I didn’t just leave, the entire funeral would be over and I’d still be sitting at the nursing home filled with regrets.”

All of that and then Lou leans into the table, which only means about half an inch of leaning, and says, “I’m Annie’s grandma’s sister, which means I was sort of Annie’s grandma as well. I watched that little thing grow up.”

The women gape at Lou as if she has just told them she pulled the winning lottery ticket out of her right sock twenty minutes ago. Why this news is astounding is unknown but it’s not what they expect. They pelt her with a verbal collage of who’s, what’s, why’s and when’s that immediately bring Lou right back to her originating point of laughter.

“You are all something,” she exclaims, slapping her hands on the table. “Let’s clean up this mess and go sit by the big window and I will tell you what you are in for. Did you bring the ashes?”

This woman knows everything, they think. She even knows we have Annie in the shoebox. She’s a wizard. A large, gracious, and absolutely lovely wizard.

First they brief Marie, who knows just about everything anyway from all of their phone conversations, and then Lou tells them what she knows of Annie. The steam from their coffee cups forms a ribbon of warmth around their faces as they gather around Lou as if they were watching a campfire or the last movement of a symphony or the chorus line of a Broadway musical. This they absolutely have to hear and Lou tells it all as if she is on stage, moving her hands in ever wider circles as she tells them a series of stories from front to back.

Annie called her every day the last week before she died.

Annie let her know about her funeral plans and talked to her about every single one of them—in great and glorious detail.

Annie wrote and stayed in touch with her, especially after her grandma died.

Annie spent two weeks, almost every summer, at the family cabin.

Annie once nearly drowned off Gopher’s Point when she swam out too far because she wouldn’t listen to anyone.

Annie once had such a horrific crush on a neighbor boy she almost quit school and moved north to this fine wilderness.

Annie used to sneak outside, under the roof of the back shed, to smoke cigarettes and drink beer that she stole from the grocery bin behind the kitchen table.

Annie loved watching the water here, started writing poetry when she was ten, and had a special place where they would often find her asleep or just sitting but mostly always reading.

Annie’s grandpa died tragically, when his truck went off an icy cliff. Two years after he died, a photo of Annie, the one that was clipped to the visor of his pickup truck, was picked up on a beach by a stranger who spent two solid days trying to find Annie and he did.

That’s when they finally stop her.

“You have got to be kidding!” Laura shouts, unable to be silent any longer. “Are you making this up?”

“Honey, the last time I lied is when I told a man I loved him. This is the real deal.”

Marie, who is far from quiet, is mentally jotting down the synergy of her fellow funeral women. She is smart enough to realize that her absence up to this point has given her a bit of an edge. She knows she can ask spicy questions. She knows she is a new set of eyes and ears and she also knows she won’t hold back for a second. Marie can barely breathe from the excitement.

Katherine scoots in closer to Lou because she thinks that she is acting so much like Annie that maybe this is her real grandmother. The way she is so sure of herself, her extraordinary sense of humor, her graciousness. Everything but the hips.

“Are you sure you are not her real grandma?”

“Oh, honey, no, like I said, I was her grandma’s sister, but we are a close bunch up here. It was, up until a few years ago, kind of like a big old commune what with everyone coming and going and kids here and there and everything all commingled,” Lou explains. “But as you know, things change. People die. Everything changes.”

There is a moment then when everyone recalls why they have come to this house by the big lake. They remember that what is left of Annie, their tie to this corner of the world, is resting on the table right behind them and that their red shoes and tattered funeral book and this very conversation is leading them to another moment when they will have to tear open whatever emotional package Annie has left here for them.

Lou turns from her chair as if she is judging a beauty contest and she looks at Katherine, Marie, Laura, Balinda, Rebecca and Jill with such seriousness that they are expecting a great announcement.

“How are you girls doing? I know you all loved Annie so much and played a very special role in her life. This isn’t all easy. Are you okay?”

They tell her. One by one they tell Lou about each ceremony and about the secrets of Annie’s life that came with each location and about their own personal revelations. They tell her and Lou listens as if she has known each one of them her entire life and she looks like she wants to grab each one and put her in her lap where they will talk about the hard parts and rest their heads against her chest. She wants to do that and they want to let her. The women, Annie’s pallbearers, feel as if they have fallen into the womb of something warm and wonderful and they never want to leave.

“It ain’t easy,” Lou says, slapping her knees and standing, when they have finished. “I’ve had a world of loss dropped into my hands, including our Annie, but we’re women and we deal with it and we do it in a way that somehow becomes a gift. Isn’t that something? Isn’t it something how we can take something that is so painful it makes you drop to the floor and turn it into a life lesson that makes you actually glad it happened? That’s what women do. We get on with it. It sure is something.”

The women know it’s something. It’s been something since the moment they met Annie. It’s been something since she became ill and then really something since the box of ashes arrived at Katherine’s home and then something even wilder after that when they were assigned the duties of the official pallbearers. And now this.

“What about the photo and the guy who found it?” Marie begs Lou. “What happened?”

Lou smiles. She’s got them eating out of her hand and she loves every second of it.

“Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you but I’ll tell you this evening because I have to get back to work and you have to get over to the cabin and get settled and figure out what to do with those ashes in those red tennis shoes, which are hilarious by the way. Annie loved those damned things, didn’t she?”

Lou tells them that Paul is about to take them over to the Freeman family home, a cabin more isolated than the lodge, further into the heart of the North Shore. The kitchen is fully stocked, she tells them, there’s wine on the counter, she explains, winking, and she’ll be over to share dinner with them—they have to cook—as soon as she’s done preparing for the group of lodge guests who are due within the next few hours.

While Paul drives them to the cabin they wonder if they could just keep going like they are—moving from place to place, from adventure to adventure for the rest of their lives. Chicago, Toledo, some tiny town in the plains, someplace way north. Just drive and fly and travel, call home occasionally, drink wine every night, talk until dawn, spread ashes from one corner of the world to the next.

“I should have come sooner,” Marie sighs, sticking her long legs in between the front and back seat. “I feel like I’ve missed most of my own life. I feel like I could have left sooner but needed to stay and help another dying patient or a dozen of them, but I should have come sooner for Annie and for me.”

Paul listens as if he’s an undercover agent. He likes these women who apparently are unafraid to say anything, go anywhere or do anything, and he wonders, as he listens to them, what it would be like to just pick up and go and have a life that does not revolve around the shifting tides of the big lake and the changing seasons. He wonders but then he thinks about how his heart feels every morning when he wakes and looks through the bathroom window at the lake and isn’t sure if his heart would survive the separation.

“Annie would be laughing now,” he finally tells them, shyly. “She’d love what you are talking about and you know she’d want to go along. That would be Annie.”

“You knew Annie?” The women never thought to ask him.

“Heck, everyone knew Annie. We had a big ceremony up here last week for her. About a hundred people came and we had a party out on the beach and it was a wonderful thing. Sure, we knew Annie.”

The pallbearers think, “My gosh,” just “My gosh” as Paul turns into an unmarked driveway and the van bumps across a small bridge spanning a stream that rushes under them like the fine wind of Annie’s laughter that seems to be getting louder every single day.

24

Paul wonders if he will ever see anything like this again the rest of his life.

Before he can stop the van the women have opened the side door and are jumping from the vehicle as if they have just spotted a ghost. By the time he parks the van, gets out and takes two steps, he can see them all running through the cabin and he can catch bits and pieces of what they are saying through the windows they are opening and because in their excitement they have left the front door open.

“Holy crap,” “Cool,” “Come look at this. . . .” Their words make him laugh softly and he imagines this is exactly what it must have been like every time Annie and her family pulled into the driveway and the doors were flung open and the kids ran to claim their favorite bedroom.

After he sets down their bags in the kitchen he calls them together, shows them how everything works, and hands them his telephone number. “Cells don’t like the north woods,” he explains, and tells them that Lou will be back by six
P.M.
and they better have dinner ready or she’ll kick them out.

“All set, kids?” he teases them as he backs out the door. “Go check out the beach. You will love it.”

The pallbearers are beside themselves with excitement and not just because the cabin is actually a fabulous and very ancient log home that has been added on to, updated and taken care of with what appears to be more than loving care, but because this was Annie’s home, because they have discovered yet another part of her world, and because they know, without hesitation, that they are about to discover even more of her.

The women gather in the kitchen to make plans. Marie, who is used to a fairly fast-paced life, with teenagers and a sixty-plus-hour workweek, is about breathless with the activity. She’s also jealous as hell because the women have been together for days and have a friendship that seems about ready to combust. First, they agree unanimously, before they go to the beach, look in the refrigerator, before they do another thing, they must first figure out which bedroom was Annie’s favorite.

“There could be some clue, something fascinating,” Laura laments as if she’s the one who has hidden something there. “She could have been back here after she found out she was dying and she knew we would not be far behind.”

Marie stops them.

“Wait,” she demands. “We’ve all talked on the phone for hours but I need a once-over. Give me something here before we take another step.”

Marie points, which Katherine finds hilarious, and demands that each one of them give her a synopsis of their individual life’s challenges.

Laura: “Kind of psychic. Have this missing-daughter thing. Not happy in Chicago. Husband stuff okay.”

Rebecca: “You know me, Marie. Stuck in reverse. Filled with loss. Tired of people dying. Feel as if the world has betrayed me. Have not been laid in way too long.”

Jill: “You know me a little bit, too. A professor. Wallowing in self-pity. Closeted lesbian—My God, Marie. That’s enough. I’ve never even said that out loud before.”

Balinda: “Tired. Tired of sacrifice. Have also not been laid in a very long time. Desperately seeking my own life.”

Katherine: “I’m going to laugh, Marie. Let’s see . . . Supporting the entire world has ruined my back. Missing my dead mother. Settling into life when nothing should be settled. There. That’s enough. Are you happy now?”

“That was terrific,” Marie jokes. “We’ll have another session later this afternoon.”

“Wait,” Katherine commands. “Your turn.”

“Damn it,” Marie says. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

“We’re waiting,” Laura tells her.

Marie: “Obviously always very late. Can’t let go. Too hard on myself. Need to take a course in spontaneity.”

“Now can we?” Jill asks. “Can we please?”

They explore. They move from the kitchen and through an attached dining room that opens onto a porch that takes up the entire front of the house. The porch slopes toward the water and is large enough to hold a high school band. The living room has been enlarged and includes an old piano, five chairs circled around a huge fieldstone fireplace and three couches placed together to form a U at the far window. Every single window has a view of the water. There is one downstairs bathroom, and a back room that has a desk and looks like it must have been used for an office or as a writing studio by someone—maybe Annie, they think, as they race up the steps again and examine the six bedrooms, three in front and three in back, and wonder which one was Annie’s.

They agree that it’s probably the middle room in the front that has an unobstructed view of the lake and a bed that’s been positioned in the corner which at first doesn’t make sense until Laura lies in it and discovers that she can see a wonderful blend of forest, water and sky.

But then they head around the corner and they discover the last bedroom. There are books everywhere. They are stacked on top of the dressers, tightly packed into three bookshelves, lying on top of both windowsills and when Rebecca opens the closet she discovers more of them. They discover lots of things.

“My God, look at this,” she says, from inside the closet. “I think these are Annie’s old notebooks. Look, doesn’t this look like her handwriting?”

They all look, shoulders touching, at stacks of spiral-bound notebooks that indeed once belonged to Annie G. Freeman. Some of them are obviously old school notebooks, but many of them are also filled with notes, her compulsive drawings and doodles—long lines and flowers and intricate drawings of buildings and whatever else was inside of her head when she was sitting in front of the pages.

“I think we should take them all out and read them,” Jill announces.

The rest of the women hesitate but only for a moment.

“She wanted us to come here,” Katherine says. “She knew what we would find, she wanted us to read these, to read about this other part of her life.”

Laura reaches in back behind the books and finds other boxes filled with clothing. There are shoes too, an old sleeping bag, things—Annie’s things—and when Laura discovers a bucket of rocks she knows for certain that this is, without a doubt, Annie’s favorite room.

“Did she ever tell anyone else about how obsessive she was about rocks and picking up things and doing this one funky thing every time she left a place she loved?”

Of course, the women laugh—especially Rebecca, who tells them she carried more than a few rocks from Annie’s car trunk and into her backyard.

“She told me once,” Laura shares with them, “how every time she left a place she loved she’d do something like put a stick someplace odd, or leave something special under a tree or in a drawer because it would be like a part of her was still there. I bet she did it here. . . .”

Before she finishes, the women have scattered to every corner of the room as if they have been shot out of a cannon and they begin opening drawers and peering under the mattress and tossing back the curtains. It is a scavenger hunt into the past and they find pieces of it everywhere.

“Here’s a rock. . . .”

“There’s a bird’s nest in this drawer. . . .”

“Oh, look at this . . . there’s at least a dozen magazines under the mattress that have leaves pressed inside of them. . . .”

“Look at this . . . what is it? Shells . . . and a silver bracelet . . .”

Inside this snug room, they find an entire slice of Annie’s life. Sticks and stones and bird feathers. They pile the treasures onto the bed and kneel around it, touching everything as if they were bowing down before an altar. They pass around her stones and they make certain that the leaves stay pressed in all the right places. They fence with the sticks and each one of them admits that they did the same thing—saved and savored special places with notes or treats from the earth.

“I used to bury notes,” Balinda admits.

“I would sing goodbye songs very quietly to places I loved,” Laura shares.

“I would write something, just a word, and put it into my pocket,” Jill tells them.

“I would leave tears if it was someplace I truly had a connection to,” Katherine reveals.

“I’d say something remarkable and think that I would always remember it the next time,” Marie admits.

“Pennies. I always left pennies under rocks. I would say to myself that I would come back, remember the exact spot and get the penny back one day,” Rebecca confesses and then tells them she never ever found one hidden penny again.

Kneeling there, around the twin bed that must have been Annie’s as she grew up, the women pull back the covers of their own lives and fall into a discussion about the tumultuous years when the simplicity of childhood gave way to the perilous passions of adulthood.

They rest their elbows on the bed, tuck their hands under their chins, and they imagine all the dreams Annie Freeman designed while lying in this very bed and looking out into the often stormy skies of the lake. Did she see her life splayed out in the way it actually unfolded? Is this where she went into her horrible despondent spin and crashed before trying to take her own life? Could this be where she dreamed of boys who turned into men and danced with her under the canopy of trees that arched their way across the driveway? Did she sit in that chair and read herself into oblivion? Did she scream at her mother when she was called down to dinner or asked to go pick up the toys scattered across the beach?

They wonder as they select a small rock for Marie’s growing collection and then agree to put everything back just the way they found it—except the notebooks, which they will share as they sip their wine on the beach.

Downstairs they discover an entire world inside of the refrigerator and a clearly defined dinner path. Fresh whitefish, rice, salad, rolls, drinks, vegetables, breakfast food—the refrigerator is filled to the brim and Lou has filled at least a dozen vases with fresh flowers and placed them on tables, in the kitchen window—just about everywhere they look.

“Fabulous energy,” Laura reports happily after she riffles through the house with her magic mind. “Lots of good stuff happened here.”

“Let’s keep it up then,” Katherine commands as she cracks open a beer for each one of them, pushes a piece of fresh lemon into the opening of each beer bottle, and orders them outside for a hike to the beach.

They exit onto a wide piece of grass that has been left to go wild. Tall grasses wave to them as they walk straight down a path that is lined with rocks and heads directly to the beach. And it is a real beach. Here, at the Freeman northwoods home, they find a stretch of sand that is long and white and as seductive as anything the women have ever seen.

“It’s beautiful,” Balinda says, dropping to grab some sand in her left hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Actually,” she adds, standing and turning toward the women, “I’ve never seen much. Chicago. If I try really hard, I can actually remember what Poland looked like when I was a little girl.”

“This ain’t no Poland,” Laura shoots back as she sets down her beer and runs to see how cold the water is.

Minutes later the women turn as she screams at the top of her lungs, “It’s frigging freezing! Do you think they ever actually
swam
in here?”

Of course they swam, Balinda tells them. She’s a Chicago girl and she knows that men and women and boys and girls who are raised in places where it snows think that it’s warm when it’s 50 degrees and there is no snow on the ground.

“Those guys on the plane weren’t kidding, this is hearty heaven up here,” she tells them.

They walk and talk. They watch the sky consume itself and fold small clouds into bigger clouds until the sun comes back and blows everything apart. It is a beautiful, warm and rare day in early summer along the shore and they decide to set up camp in front of the home, assign some cooking duties, read Annie’s old notebooks, and catch up on writing in the funeral book.

Then they sit.

Marie needs to let her limbs relax, she tells them, and perhaps her mind will follow. She admits that it has been months since she has taken more than half a day off.

A parade of changing light covers them as they turn pages, drift into conversations that float as wide and as high as the sky that seems to stretch from one end of the world to the next. They doze in the sun, they read Annie’s high school poetry, they fight over who will cook dinner, and they add another page to the funeral book, there on a beach where Annie roasted marshmallows, went skinny-dipping, and threw sand into her cousins’ eyes.

K
ATHERINE
T
HOUGHT:
How lucky you were to be here, Annie. How lucky am I to have known you so that I can now be here too. Thinking, I am thinking, about the unopened gifts of life. About how some people try so hard to give us gifts—not the physical ones—but the real gifts—you know, time and energy and love and all of that—and how sometimes we ignore them and what a mistake that was. You were always remarkably generous with your gifts, Annie. Thank you.

L
AURA
T
HOUGHT:
The energy here is an astounding blend of fun and intensity. I can dip through this house, this summer palace of your past, and feel you in every single room. I imagine yelling matches by the fireplace during Monopoly games, snowball fights outside in the yard when you came up for Thanksgiving, and the enviable time you must have spent with your mother in the kitchen. And something else, Annie. What was it? What did you struggle with here? Is this where your teenage demons were hatched? Is this where you danced with the dark shadows in your mind? Maybe the stones in your room fell from your heart. Maybe you healed yourself every day at this beach when the sun rose and the water rushed over your bare feet and you started again. Maybe . . . Maybe . . . Maybe.