The Funeral Makers (20 page)

“I got to get those big boys out of prison so they can get us some offspring that we know about and are legal. If I don't, and with Chester Lee dead, the Gifford name's gonna die out. Just like the McKinnons.”

—Bert Gifford, at Chester Lee's

Funeral, September 1959

The original McKinnon homestead had stood on the same site as Marge's house. The summer kitchen, shingled inside and out and attached to the back of the house, was closed off during the winter months. It was the only remaining part of the original house. Marge had been hesitant to see the last vestige of the old homestead disappear. But instead of completely remodeling the structure, she maintained it by replacing an occasional floorboard or shingle or pane of glass. Sicily once told her that if she went around with a piece of chalk and marked each shingle or board or nail that was new, she would find that nothing was actually left of the old materials. That it was
all
new and the old kitchen was indeed gone. But Marge insisted that the spirit of it was still intact. That tearing it down all at once would allow its memories to escape like butterflies into the open air.

“The summer kitchen is all that's left of Mama,” she would say, tack in mouth, as she steadied a new shingle to be nailed onto the gray spot where the old one had crumbled. And each year she sealed it off to save heating it during Maine's long winter months. When spring finally came back, she opened the windows, gave the floor a good scrubbing, put up clean curtains, and pretended the old kitchen, once used for canning and pickling, and keeping the cooking heat out of the main house in the summer months, was still a functional part of her world.

The house itself had been rebuilt. Marge had stayed on in it, unmarried, while her sisters were safely installed in houses of their own. But it was still this house that represented home to Pearl and Sicily. The same river flowed behind it, the same hay fields surrounded it, the same forest edged the fields, and except for a few deaths and a few births, the same neighbors remained a respectable distance up and down the road.

There had been the usual land changes. In the spring of 1947, when a particularly heavy buildup of large ice chunks in the Mattagash River thawed and came tearing along its banks, young trees were uprooted, bushes destroyed, even parts of the road washed out. The shoreline was greatly altered. And some of the older trees on the mountain or along the fields had given in to budworm or old age.

One favorite landmark of their past had been a huge pine tree near the side of the main road that they had always simply called
the
old
pine
. Many summer evenings someone would say, “Look at the sun in the old pine,” and everyone knew where to look, and when they did, they found a red ball of sun caught in the pine's needles until it dropped off beyond the horizon.

When the main road was tarred in 1955, the highway department cut the pine down. They said it had only a few years left. That it was dying. That it had never recovered from the lightning bolt that split its trunk years before.

Sicily had been to Watertown that day for her groceries and to take her Green Stamps to the redemption center and pick up the canister set she'd been saving for. On the bumpy ride back to Mattagash, she was thinking of how wonderful the new road would be when they finished with it. She had driven on tarred road the few trips they'd made downstate to visit Pearl, but until that year the tarred road had only come as far north as Watertown and it stopped. As if no one lived beyond it. Or as if no one
mattered
who lived beyond it.

She stopped at Marge's to drop off her medicine and when she looked up the road and saw the sun going down in plain view, with nothing to hide it, nothing to filter its reds and pinks, she went inside and said to Marge, “I've been looking up the road as if I'm trying to remember something. There's something different.”

“You're trying to remember the old pine,” said Marge. “They cut it down.” And together they stood looking up the road at the pile of sawed blocks that had once been a landmark to their youth.

“They just wanted something to cut down,” said Marge. “It was fifteen feet from the road.” Sicily had brought them each a cup of tea and they sat in rocking chairs and sipped the tea and watched the men loading up their equipment for the night onto the backs of trucks. When the last of the trucks had disappeared around the turn and the land was quiet again, without the noise of machinery and voices, a small breeze came up and sifted through the branches of the trees that still had branches, and Sicily wondered if the old pine still felt it had limbs, like the stories you hear of people having arms or legs amputated and still feeling pain where they once were. Like they were ghost arms and legs. And she wondered if the old pine felt its branches were still moving with the wind and aching with age from having borne all those cones and held all those nests and children who had climbed up into her just to look down. And she had felt the sadness in Marge, who rarely showed her sadness to the rest of the world.

“Men around here are like that,” Marge said finally, as dusk came up to the porch and listened. “They get those damn chain saws out and crank them up and feel them shaking and buzzing and before you know it they gotta cut something down. They said the old pine never recovered, but men don't give things a chance to recover. They don't have the patience a woman has.” And she had gone on that evening to tell Sicily for the first time how a doctor from Watertown had insisted that their mother had not recovered from the complications in birthing Sicily. He had kept her confined to bed for days on end, against her wishes, until finally, with nothing else to do, she died, too weak to hear Reverend Ralph's anxious prayers by her bedside asking God to save her sinful soul.

“They just want something to cut down,” Marge had said again before Sicily went on out to her car and Marge went inside her house, flicked the porch light on, and rolled down the Venetian blinds.

***

In Marge's driveway Sicily and Pearl sent the two girls inside to Thelma while they stayed outside, walking around the backyard, remembering the old house as it had been. The morning was brilliant and after the long rain the mountains glittered.

“Someone ought to come get these hollyhock seeds. They'll go to waste,” said Pearl, crushing a dried husk of seeds in her hand, then throwing them into the grass by the garage.

“Those'll come up next year,” said Sicily. “Hollyhocks spread fast.”

“God, how Marge loved these hollyhocks,” said Pearl. “Remember how we used to squeeze the flower to trap a bumblebee inside, then slip a jar over the flower and let go?”

“It worked every time,” said Sicily.

“Bert Fogarty used to get a full jar of bumblebees. Twenty or thirty in a big jar, then fill it up with water.”

“The boys were always cruel to animals and insects here in town. Most of them, anyway.” Sicily put a piece of hay in her mouth and bit on it.

“Now they're cruel men,” said Pearl.

“Not all of them are, Pearly. Hunting deer and bear always bothered you to hear about or see, but it's just that their daddies did it at times when food was scarce, and now, for the ones who really don't need it, it's just a habit to them.”

“I've seen them shoot sparrows off the barn roof and beat workhorses half to death in the woods.”

“Out-of-state hunters come up and kill the deer and animals, too. It ain't just men here.”

“I suppose,” said Pearl. “But it's still a hunger for blood I never could stomach.”

“Marge always had hollyhocks of every color up and down both sides of the house. You should have seen them earlier this summer, Pearly. They were just as pretty as when we were kids.”

“Remember how we used to gather up the seeds in a big bag and give them to anyone who wanted them?” asked Pearl. “Where did Marge ever get those seeds to begin with?”

“I don't know,” said Sicily. “From a seed catalog, I suppose. She used to tell me that the first hollyhock flower started out in China.”

“Imagine that,” said Pearl. “Starting out in China and ending up here in Mattagash.”

“I suppose that's just like Daddy starting out in Mattagash and ending up way over in China.”

“I suppose,” said Pearl. “Except it's bumblebees biting them and not whatever it was bit him.”

“A sand fly,” said Sicily. “And the bumblebees don't bite the flowers. They steal their honey.”

“Whatever,” Pearl said and opened the back door to the old summer kitchen. Inside were shelves of empty Mason jars, covered with a fine dust. A rocking chair sat motionless, a hand-crocheted cushion on its seat that said, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” There were packed boxes of old clothes in one corner. The stove had a poker still sticking up from one burner, and some sticks of hardwood were still in the wood box by the door.

“Looks almost as if somebody's gettin' ready to cook,” said Pearl and ran one finger over the oilcloth on the table.

“There's been a lot of dust gathered since spring. Marge got me and Amy Joy to clean it up in May. I don't know why she never tore this down and saved us all a lot of work. Look at those Mason jars just pickin' up dust. She hasn't canned a thing in years.”

Pearl opened the cedar chest that sat near the boxes of clothing. Marge's hope chest. It was full of papers, old bank statements, business and personal letters, some war ration stamps, an empty lard can of buttons, and other items that may have had value once, to someone, but were now moth-eaten and smelly from years in a closed trunk.

“We'll have to go through that someday and throw out what's no good,” Sicily said.

“It's probably all no good to us,” Pearl said. “But to her it must've meant something.”

“Too bad she never had a family of her own,” said Sicily. “It seems like only your own kids should go through your belongings after you die.”

“I can see Thelma going through mine now.”

“It would've been so different if she'd only gotten married,” Sicily said and jumped as a spider fled from under a letter and burrowed deeper into the trunk.

“She almost did,” said Pearl.

“What?” said Sicily. “When?”

“You've forgotten about Marcus Doyle. You were real young. I was about thirteen back then.”

“I remember him a little, but not that much,” said Sicily. “I got a bad memory even as a grown woman.”

“He stayed with us two months or more and he and Margie loved each other. I used to spy on them. See them kissing and holding hands,” said Pearl, picking up a stack of handmade doilies that had become gray and fragile with age.

“What happened?” Sicily asked.

“I never really knew. I think Daddy might have done something to split them up.”

“That sounds like him.”

“Now why in the world didn't she ever use these? They just went to waste out here. And that's some fine handiwork in them too.” Pearl threw the doilies back into the chest. “Marcus Doyle used to sleep out here.”

“Out here?” asked Sicily. “In the summer kitchen?”

“On a cot right over there.” Pearl pointed.

“No wonder she didn't want to tear this old building down,” said Sicily, and her eyes filled a second time with tears for the older sister she had never come to know. “She's like the old pine. She just never recovered.”

Pearl put her arm around Sicily and said, “Don't cry, Sissy. Whatever it was happened in Marge's life to make it so awful, it's over now. And so is Mama's. And even Daddy's. And soon ours'll be too.”

“That ain't cheering me up none.” Sicily blew her nose on the tissue she had in perpetuity in her pocket.

“No, but it's true. At least Marge has got someone crying for her. I don't remember anyone crying when we heard about Daddy. We just stood around for a few minutes, shuffling our feet until it sunk in, then we went on about our day and that was it. The only difference was that Marge didn't make us write those god-awful letters to China every Sunday.”

“Why did Margie want to go with Daddy so bad? Especially if he stopped her from marrying a man she loved?” asked Sicily.

“It was her only way to get out of Mattagash. I don't think she wanted to get old in Mattagash alone. With no husband or children. Even dirty old China, full of short little heathens, sounded better to her than that. Or maybe she wanted to go off looking for Marcus Doyle somewhere in the world. He was a missionary, you know.”

Pearl pushed at the trunk with one finger to avoid dirtying her hand, and the cover of the hope chest fell with a thud, scattering bits of dust about that caught the sun before settling again. Unnoticed at the bottom of the trunk were precious letters, neatly stacked, letters with hearts drawn on them. In the center of each heart, which was pierced by a rickety arrow, was a hastily scrawled
M.D.
The lid to the hope chest fell, and the letters were left to the darkness, and the weather, and to time.

“If you're a homely girl and you happen to be Catholic, you're all set,” Pearl continued in one of the socioreligious treatises Mattagashers were well known for. “Have you ever seen a pretty nun? And it wasn't even that Marge was unattractive. There wasn't any men her age around here. She always used to say that she was the only baby born in Mattagash for seven years. A Protestant girl bound for spinsterhood is in big trouble. We got no convents to hide in.”

“Pearly, can we live in such a little town and still keep secrets from each other?” Sicily asked. “Can we live in the same family, in the same house, and still hide our pain from each other?”

“Some of us can,” said Pearl. “And there's some that can't hide anything about themselves in a small town no matter how hard they try. It's just a knack, I guess. Some have it. Some don't.”