The Funeral Makers (23 page)

The last of the red-hot lovers

is leaving town today.

The girls who adored his running board

all cry as he pulls away.

The first of the next generation,

a sweet little bundle of shame,

comes squalling in with the April wind,

but without a father's name.

The last of the old Old-Timers

is tarrying near the door,

but I'll make a bet he'll never forget

who is and who isn't a whore.

—Ed Lawler, submitted to
The
Maze
,

College Magazine. Rejected, 1932.

There was a deadness about the land at that season of the year. It wasn't just the idea of autumn being a time of death so that spring could come with her rebirth. That was just the typical literary theme he had learned in college, soft words on paper, a kind of pseudophilosophy that pimpled students stayed up all night memorizing, sure they understood its meaning. In Mattagash, autumn came like a knife, slicing leaves off the trees, embedding itself in Ed's gut with a thrust that left more fear than pain.

When the trucks loaded down with family belongings began to leave town for the harvest, it was a very real kind of death. Left behind were the old, the very young, one or two crippled or feebleminded, Sicily, Amy Joy, and Ed Lawler. Some mornings he would drive over to the school and sit alone in his office. And he would listen for the sound of voices in the classrooms, footfalls in the hallway, erasers being hit together, bells ringing, laughter from the playground. For a month there would be just creaks in the old furnace and pipes clanging in the basement. He felt the way the sheriff of a ghost town feels.

It was all illogical to Ed. You had children in school for three weeks, had them settled finally into the routine of a school year that lay ahead, had the teachers settled in, the schedules memorized, and then came the potato harvest and four weeks' vacation. That's when children could join their parents in picking potatoes and bringing in a sizable paycheck each week. When they returned to school the process had to begin all over again of settling into the school year. What a waste of time. Why not start school after the harvest, he'd ask the school board, and extend school for three weeks in the summer? But that would entail change and Mattagash was not eager to change. The school board couldn't be blamed. They were all victims of their own circumstances. One member signed his name by rote, another with an X. One member, new to the school board, voted for a prospective teacher with a bachelor's degree over one who had done work toward his master's, saying, “This out-of-the-way place is better for a bachelor. They resettle quicker than the married ones.”

This was what Ed Lawler was up against when he tried to bring innovative ideas to minds that had not progressed since their forefathers constructed the very first outhouse and set about life concerned more with the bodily functions than those of the mind. Eating, working, and making love. Those were the three Rs in Mattagash and nothing anyone could do would change that. At least Ed saw no change approaching in his lifetime. And if the burden of social and academic advancement was to be placed in the hands of Amy Joy and her peers, it was likely that the machine set in motion would come to a grinding halt.

This was the year Ed Lawler gave up, stopped beating his head against the stone minds of Mattagash, threw the gauntlet back down into the heap of rubbish, and turned his back to it.

“Some of us go to our graves with our dreams,” he thought, unable even to remember what his had been. Was it a boy's camp? Was it a school for gifted children? A community center that offered courses in art and photography and dance? Were these all just random thoughts he had had over the years, or were they his lifetime goals? He could no longer remember if they had been very important once or if all he had really expected from life, wanted from life, was to not be
unhappy
.

Ed walked to the window of his study and looked out at his view of Mattagash. The neighbors were not close. Houses were scattered up and down on either side of the road that followed the river. Most of the houses had small grassy fields or trees as natural boundaries between them. From Ed's window, Bert and Martha Fogarty's house sat on the same side of the road as the river. Beyond that, an eighth of a mile farther up the road was Tom and Wilma Fennelson. Beyond them, and out of sight of the Lawler house, sat the abandoned American Legion Hall. A half mile more was the congested part of town, twenty houses or so whose yards were joined, the school, grocery store, Albert Pinkham's Family Motel, and then back to scattered homes here and there, some close to the road, some farther back. It was a town he had hated ever since he moved there. And the more he lived in it, the more he lost sight of who he really was, where he was really from, and what he was really capable of achieving.

He looked out his window at the leaves that had dried after the rain and were sparkling with color again. He had seen them turn from green on the tree to brown on the earth for so many years that he was sick of them. And he was tired of hearing every woman in Mattagash who stopped by the school or met him at the store say, “I think the leaves are prettier this year than they've ever been.” Year after year he had heard this until he wanted to say, “Isn't there a limit? Can't the goddamned leaves just get so pretty and then they can't get any goddamned prettier?” It was this blind sense of optimism floating vaguely over Mattagash that he disliked the most. He could take a good old pessimist any day as long as he was in touch with reality.

When winter came with six feet of snow and temperatures that fell to 30 and 40 degrees below zero and stayed there for days at a time, he wondered if it would be his last. The liquor helped some, but couldn't keep him numb forever. Spring was easier, even if it arrived late, bringing slush and muddy roads that never seemed to dry. It was usually around late June and July that a peacefulness would settle in and he felt he could survive another year in Mattagash, maybe the rest of his life. He would go off with a fishing rod, a can of earthworms, and a cooler full of beer long before the sun was up. And in a boat on Falls Lake, he could almost believe that life was not as bad as he thought. A sharp tug on the line, the sound of birds in the trees, the warm sun on his back, a wild deer standing on shore gazing out at him were all signs that he was alive. That his heart, buried beneath all those layers of fat, was still beating.

What are the last actions a man takes when he knows he can no longer function with the living? Do those actions become overly important to him? Does the pencil he touches to write good-bye with become like a gem to him because it's the last one he'll ever touch? Does the envelope against his tongue taste like honey? Is the ringing telephone he dares not answer a symphony?

Ed took the gun from his drawer, from behind the paperbacks that hid it from view, and put it on the desk in front of him. He used to say that a gun was the pen used by the men in Mattagash, the only pen they knew, the only method they had to communicate. During hunting season he had seen their moist eyes as they looked upon the dead deer tied to the tops of their cars or sprawled in the backs of their pickup trucks. It was the closest they could come to expressing themselves. What they felt looking upon the animal they had killed, he knew for a fact, was an appreciation of beauty, pride in a hunt well done, and a sadness for death. The way a woman looks at a beautiful vase she has bought on sale, just as it slips from her hands and scatters broken on the floor.

Ed had always been afraid of guns. He purchased this one on a spur of the moment, when Amy Joy was just a few years old. He and Charlie Ryan, the school's janitor, had gone into the hardware store in Watertown looking for some chairs for the teachers' lounge. Together they had loaded the chairs onto the back of a borrowed pickup truck. And when Ed went back inside for his receipt, the clerk pulled out a box and said, “This little beauty just came in this morning,” and Ed, for no reason, bought it, hid it from the janitor, from Sicily, from himself for years. He had even tried to forget he owned the gun, or at least avoided telling himself
why
he had bought it in the first place. And then the day arrived when he admitted the truth, that he had purchased the gun the way some people buy a bus ticket.

The first time—drunk and feeling a bit maudlin—that he realized the gun was an expedient, he became so frightened of it when he woke the next morning, sober, that he wrapped it, hands shaking, in an old T-shirt, drove up to the American Legion Hall, and threw it down over the bank and into the bushes along the river. But that night, calmer and looking to the future with a steady eye, he went back and found it there. He carried it back to his study and hid it behind the paperback copies of
Walden
Pond
and
Leaves
of
Grass
and some Hemingway novels. Books that Amy Joy and Sicily would never read, so it would be safe there.

When he placed the gun on the desk, the metallic sound made him jump, as if it had prematurely discharged. His hands steady again, he took paper and a pen and wrote a letter to Sicily and then one to Amy Joy. It wasn't that he meant what he wrote. He would let the living have their peace. It would be his legacy to them. Something Sicily could arm herself with to face her neighbors. Something Amy Joy could give her children one day, crumbling and yellow, and say, “This was your grandfather.” How could he tell them the truth? How could he say to Sicily Jane McKinnon: “I never wanted to marry you. I looked at you on our wedding day and knew I'd never love you.” How could he say to Amy Joy, “I never knew how to love you because I hadn't learned to love myself.”

He told Sicily he loved her. That the fault was not hers, but his. It was his own failure. His inability to survive the onslaught of old age without realizing his early ambitions. He told Amy Joy she would always be his little girl and to study hard and be a big success someday and help her mother all she could and he loved her dearly. It was a letter written countless times before by many shaking hands. “They probably all lied, poor bastards,” he thought and left the two envelopes on his desk. Putting the gun inside his jacket pocket, he turned the desk light off and left the study, closing the door behind him. He listened to the sound of his own footfalls coming down the stairs, the last time he would descend those steps. He almost stopped at the refrigerator for something to eat then laughed at the useless notion.

“It'll make the coroner's job a little less unpleasant,” he said to the empty house.

The screen door slamming behind him was as loud as a gunshot, the sound of the car door closing enough to give him goose bumps. The whole night was pulsing and swelling with sounds and noises, and the air was heavy, so difficult to inhale that he became aware of the very act of breathing. It was almost dusk when he backed out of his driveway. For a few minutes he sat there in his car, out on the main road, looking at the yellow lights of his home, studying each shingle on the roof, the brown shutters, the shrubs in the yard. It all seemed like a dream to him now, like it was someone else's home and he had only been renting it until the owners returned. A car came up the road, slowed to go around Ed's, and he saw Bert Fogarty and his son Ernie, who was in the seventh grade, looking curiously into Ed's eyes, wondering what he was doing sitting in his car in the middle of the road in front of his own house. Ed waved, and they waved back and went off until they disappeared around the turn near the American Legion Hall. Ed knew he had made them a part of Mattagash history, that the next day Ernie could excitedly tell the story of seeing the principal in his car, embellishing it for effect, and Bert could tell a thousand times how he and Ernie were the last ones to see Ed Lawler alive and how strange he had been acting, just sitting in his car in the middle of the road. And it would be passed on to their descendants how their grandfather, then great-grandfather, then great-great-grandfather had come upon the principal of Mattagash Grammar School just before he shot himself. “They'll have me dancing on the hood of the car wearing nothing but a lamp shade before the week is up,” Ed thought and drove on down the snaking road, along the Mattagash River, to the black building of the school. No one would be surprised to see his car in the yard. Many nights he worked there late, or simply sat in his office and drank whiskey.

The office door opened with its usual squeak. He snapped on the desk light, although it was not yet dark outside. Papers were strewn about his desk, folders piled up. A cup half full of cold coffee and layered with mildew sat where it had been placed on the last day of school. A wooden plaque saying IF YOU DON'T WANT ANYONE TO FIND IT, PUT IT ON MY DESK was sitting on his dictionary. It had been given to him by the teachers and his secretary for his birthday several years before. He liked the plaque. It showed a spark of humor among his colleagues that was rare.

Ed sat in his swivel chair and placed the gun on the desk. This time, deadened by the stack of papers, it made no noise. Sicily couldn't get into his office at school to clean his desk as she did at home, putting things in places where he couldn't find them.

He drank directly from the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden in the top drawer of his filing cabinet. His secretary knew it was there but said nothing. After all, she was his secretary. What could she say? She'd been with him since the first day of his principalship at Mattagash Grammar School, had even been with his father, and where Ed was concerned she looked at him sadly, as a pious mother does her drunkard son. Wringing her hands beneath her desk where he couldn't see them, she asked God every working school day to make the demon of alcohol leave him forever but said nothing to the earthlings around her. Especially the curious ones who asked her about the principal's drinking habits.