Spooner (49 page)

Doing all this chewing on his person, he would, by evening each day, have accumulated long, crescent-shaped glops of hair
behind his lower front teeth, soaked in the saliva of his poor infected gums, and every night while Mrs. Spooner warmed his—Spooner’s—dinner,
Spooner would sit on the floor with the dog, pry open his mouth and pick out the day’s accumulation of hair. Usually it came
out all at once, like a dentist’s impression of your teeth, and lately on occasion one of his teeth came out with it.

Yes, Harry was all his.

No one would take his dog.

S
pooner walked behind his sister and her husband toward the funeral home. Calmer, Darrow, and Phillip were up ahead, waiting
near the door. Another family was emptying out of the place, happy to be loose again and free, nobody exactly skipping, but
no dawdlers either, about like the unloading of an airliner.

Some of the mourners in this group nodded to Spooner as they passed, a few even stepping off the sidewalk into the grass to
let him by, perhaps an acknowledgment that they’d made it out and Spooner was just going in. Or that they were all in the
same boat. For whatever reasons, half a dozen small connections were struck and extinguished, all in the same moment.

The business office was small and warm and smelled of the press of flesh, not as neatly kept as Spooner would have predicted—an
ashtray had been left on a chair, and there were others here and there around the room, half full of ashes and gum wrappers
and ground-out cigarette butts, some blotted with exotic shades of lipstick, and the trash can beside the old man’s desk was
stuffed full with papers—but remarkable in its size and seating capacity. There was a sofa, a love seat, nine leather chairs;
fifteen people could be right at home. Sixteen, if you moved the ashtray.

“Please,” the old man said, “make yourself comfortable. Call me Junior.”

Now that Spooner looked, the old man was a very old man, and small; the desk was enormous. An old man in an old suit, a freshly
cut flower in one of his lapels. Junior’s suit appeared to be four sizes larger than Junior, but he was old, and Spooner supposed
he might have shrunk.

“May I begin,” Junior said, “by offering my deepest condolences.” He distributed business cards, looking from one member of
the family to the next expectantly, as if he’d offered to fight anyone in the bar.

The card identified Al Hershey, Jr., co-owner of Hershey’s Funeral Home with Ralph Hershey, Jr., serving the needs of Falling
Rapids since 1939. Dignity at Reasonable Prices. Two Hersheys and each of them a junior. Cousins?

It was hard to say how long ago Al Hershey, Jr., might have been born—eighty-five, ninety-five years—his head was strangely
shaped, disproportionately large on top, like a muffin. And lying sideways across this muffinlike head was a patch of hair
as black as the Bible but apparently constructed for someone with a narrower pate than the old man’s. It lay up there like
a house cat, and gradually an unthinkable thought slinked into Spooner’s consciousness, and once that thought rolled in, Spooner
speculated that Junior might have gotten the suit the same way. And the shoes! Nobody of Junior’s stature had feet big enough
to fill the shiny new wing tips he was wearing.

Junior was talking business; bereavement, respect, sacred memory, comfort, dignity, waterproofing for the ages. Spooner wondered
if words like these had the same meaning for the old man as they did for everybody else, or if they lost their meaning over
the years, or had come to mean something else. And if that were true, he wondered how the two undertakers, Junior and Junior,
would comfort each other when the time came.

Junior said, “A viewing in the chapel is always nice. It’s a little extra but it gives everyone a chance to say good-bye to…”—and
now he ran a shaking finger down a sheet of paper, finding her name—“a chance for all of Lily’s friends to say good-bye in
a religious setting, which was so important to her during her stay here on earth.”

He stopped abruptly, as if he sensed he’d said the wrong thing, and then rechecked his paperwork. For the few seconds the
name checking required no one spoke or moved, and then, satisfied, Junior simply stood up and headed for the door, motioning
them with a wobbly roll of his head to follow along. Another eight ounces of weight up there, and his neck would have snapped
like a pencil.

The display room seemed to be a place full of good memories for the old man. Around the perimeter were ten demonstrator caskets
in an assortment of models and colors, and at the center of the room was the crown jewel, a box that seemed in the half-lit
room to glow.

The old man entered first, finding the light switch. The lights were dim and fluorescent, and the boxes lay tall, dark, and
handsome all over the room. The room had four windows, hidden from view by heavy off-red curtains, and Junior went to the
curtains now, taking his time, and drew them open one after another, and a layer of foreboding and mystery dropped away from
the caskets as each new wide shaft of light fell across the wooden floor.

When the last curtain was opened, he paused a moment to look over the room in its new, brighter mood, and smiled with the
morning sunshine at his back, and his teeth were huge and as white as wet paint, seeming almost to spill out of his mouth—whose
teeth could they have been?—and the cuffs of his trousers lay on the carpet around his feet, as if he were sitting on the
commode. It gave Spooner pause, imagining the old fellow looting Lily.

Now Junior moved from one casket to the next, opening the lids. Most of them caught some glint of the light coming in through
the room’s southern windows. A small satin pillow had been placed inside each box, and across each pillow was a small white
tag, where the price was written in elegant script.

Spooner had not been in the room a minute before fixating on the most luxurious model—the Eternity—and was now peering down
into its green velvet bed. The sides of the casket were heavily cushioned and had the billowy look of clouds, and pockets
had been sewn here and there so that small objects could be stowed for later on.

“You’re looking at the very finest casket ever made,” Junior said. He reached up and took Spooner’s bad elbow, and the grip
was sharp and unbalanced, like a parrot had landed on his arm. “In my opinion, there is no finer tribute to the person who
brought you into the world.”

Spooner continued to stare, and now Calmer walked to the foot of the casket and stared in too.

Behind them Darrow said, “We were looking for something modest. It would be more in line with her wishes.”

The old man pretended not to hear him and continued on with Spooner. “Totally watertight,” he said. “Comfort for the ages,
and you can see the craftsmanship for yourself. Classic lines.”

Calmer leaned into the box and sniffed, and then he patted the floor and the sides. The casket was narrow and steep, much
deeper than it looked from the door, and Calmer leaned so far in as to nearly disappear.

“Don’t worry,” the old man said to Calmer, “it doesn’t look so lonesome once the body’s inside.” A moment passed and brought
Margaret to the edge of the coffin too.

“A thousand years will go by,” the mortician said, “and this casket won’t leak a drop. Guaranteed. No water, no rodents, no
roots. Roots grow around this casket, not through it. All money-back guaranteed. A redwood will not grow through this casket.
Think of it, these trees have been out in the forest since the time of Christ, and the Eternity will outlast them all.”

There was another long moment of silence, which the undertaker, thinking the deal was now as good as closed, completely misunderstood.
“Of course, it’s your loved one—”

Which was when Calmer climbed in and lay down. He turned sideways, away from them, and fluffed the pillow and lay his cheek
against it and closed his eyes. And for a long time he simply lay still.

Looks passed, one of them to another, some uneasy current in the room, nobody knowing what Calmer intended. Or if he’d broken
down for good. He issued a noise that could have been a sigh of contentment, or could have been the last straw.

“Sir?” Junior said. “Your shoes, sir?”

M
argaret was quiet most of the way home. After Calmer had climbed out of the casket (“It’s a little hard on the back,” he’d
said), she and Darrow and Phillip had gone into the back to see the body while Spooner sat in the waiting area with Calmer,
reading a six-month-old copy of
Sports Afield
magazine. It wasn’t clear what was going on with Calmer, but something had changed and as far as Spooner could tell, it was
all for the good.

“If that was supposed to be funny,” Spooner had said to Calmer, speaking of his climb into the Eternity, “it was.”

And Calmer had smiled and leaned back until his head touched the wall and hadn’t said a word.

Now Spooner slowed the car and pulled to the curb, leaned out, and vomited. “You know,” he said to his sister, when he was
back inside, “it’s strange, but I never threw up that night when Calmer called to say Mother was dead.” She looked at him
a little oddly, and he wiped at his mouth and said, “Usually I would. That or go outside and cut the grass in the middle of
the night. I don’t handle stress well anymore.”

Margaret studied him a little longer and said, “Have you ever thought about therapy?”

And like that Spooner was braying like Stanley Faint. Therapy! Had he thought about therapy? It was the idea of bringing a
psychologist into it now, at this stage in the game, that had set him off. It would be like picking up a hitchhiker out on
the interstate without slowing down.

He looked at his sister, who had been seeing psychiatrists since college, hoping he hadn’t insulted her. “It’s just that every
time I bust up a knee or an elbow or something, I have to see a therapist.” Which sounded lame even to him. “You know, just
a different use of the term.”

Worse and worse.

That night, back at the house, some of the cousins were sitting in the living room, talking about Aunt Lily. Getting their
stories together, things to tell their children when they returned home. The children, of course, wouldn’t care if their Aunt
Lily could tinkle and play the harmonica at the same time; it was nothing to them.

Later on, seven relatives from Calmer’s side of the family arrived from Conde in two Ford pickups, each truck with extra wheels
on the back axle to accommodate heavy loads. The men carried the suitcases and clothes for the funeral and Arlo’s wife brought
in a keg of beer that must have weighed a hundred pounds. The other woman was holding six dead pheasants by the feet. Gutted
and partially plucked.

Spooner picked out Arlo right away, just the way he’d pictured him; gone were the index finger, the middle finger, and the
pinky, right down to the knuckles. Unaccountably, the bear had left the ring finger intact.

Arlo had picked off the pheasants on the way to Falling Rapids, and the woman who brought them in had gone right to the kitchen
sink to finish cleaning them. Arlo’s dog Dick was in the bed of the truck outside. The pickup belonged to Arlo’s wife, Arlene,
who hugged Calmer, lifted him off the floor, pumped herself a beer and sat down. She pointed at Arlo. “I’ll tell you this
much, none of you characters are driving home. Not my rig. You want to hunt pheasants, use your own truck from now on.”