The Funeral Makers (3 page)

“I tell them to mind their damn Ps and Qs,” Pearl said.

“Women shouldn't discuss a man's business anyway,” Marvin said from the backseat. He had begun to slur his words. Then he remembered a business idea Pearl once had after the old man died and Marvin Sr. took over the business. He laughed out loud, just thinking of a woman's lack of business sense. The more he thought of it, the funnier it became, until he was laughing uncontrollably. Thelma glanced nervously into the rearview mirror.

“What's so funny?” asked Pearl.

“Remember the time you wanted to…” But Marvin Sr. lost control again. He pressed a hand into his stomach. Tears filled his eyes.

“Well, for heaven's sakes, tell us,” said Pearl. “The time I wanted to do what?” Junior had slowly inched his way over until his head was lying on his father's shoulder. He was snoring now, mouth open.

“Are you laughing at Junior?” asked Pearl.

“I'm laughing at the time you wanted to turn the back room of the funeral home into a beauty shop,” Marvin finally said. “You wanted to call it
The Ivy Funeral Home and Beauty Parlor
!”

“It wasn't that bad an idea. Women can't always get an appointment right away when someone in the family dies.” Pearl was indignant, especially when she saw a trace of a smile on Thelma's face.

“What do you think, Thelma? Men don't understand these things, do they?”

“No, Mother,” Thelma said quickly. “They sure don't.”

By this time Marvin Sr. had remembered a joke one of his employees had told him and left the image of a huge blinking sign that said
The
Ivy
Funeral
Home
and
Beauty
Salon
behind him. The joke was now all-encompassing to him and very funny. Pearl assumed it was still her beauty salon he found so amusing. After a few more minutes of his guffawing in the backseat, she turned to tell him that either he stop making fun of her or she would have Thelma drop her off at the next bus station. That's when she saw the sign in the camper window. There was no mistaking it, and her heart pounded in recognition of what it clearly meant: FIRE. When Pearl screamed, Thelma had been trying to imagine a row of women sobbing beneath hair dryers in the back room of the funeral home. The Packard swerved into the gravel at the side of the road as Thelma fought to keep it in control. A pickup truck coming at them in the opposite direction left the road to avoid Thelma's recovery of the car, which sent it wildly into the territory of southbound traffic. The brakes screamed. Pearl looked back, expecting to see flames engulfing the camper at any minute then spreading to the gas tank of the Packard. The entire Ivy family would be wiped out in one fell swoop. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” she began. Marvin Sr. opened his door, thinking Thelma would soon bring the car to a halt.

“The kids are burning!” screamed Pearl.

Thelma
had
slowed the Packard down and had it almost under control until she heard Pearl say that the babies she had brought into the world, the children she had born to this family of death, were on fire. Thelma put her face in her hands and screamed uncontrollably, leaving the car to steer itself. The Packard took an alarming plunge for the ditch, threatening to tip the camper, which was swaying dangerously by this time. The door Marvin Sr. had opened, in order that he might rescue his grandchildren from a fiery inferno, rocked on its hinges, then closed on his leg.

Pearl had wanted to slap Thelma from the moment they first met, so she delivered one across the side of Thelma's head. Then she grabbed the wheel herself, steering the Packard with her left hand, a task Pearl would never have attempted with two hands since she didn't know how to drive. But she was a religious woman and, not about to play with fate, she began to pray. “Yea, though I walk through the valley…” Unable to open the heavy door, Thelma had rolled down her window and was attempting to climb out. Pearl reached over with her right hand and caught one of Thelma's winglike arms and held on. In the backseat Marvin Sr. was still trying to extricate the portion of leg that his door had closed on.

“This is worse than the war!” he shouted. Then, “Step on the brake, Pearly!”

Pearl struggled to get her left foot past Thelma's and onto the brake. She managed, but not knowing the complexities of the automobile, she pushed the clutch instead. The big green Packard, with Pearl steering by means of her left hand, snaked down the highway. Thelma's crying was out of control when Marvin Jr. woke up with the full effects of the scotch upon him. By this time Pearl had figured out which pedal was the brake and slammed her left foot down on it. The brakes screamed again, and the weaving Packard, complete with a camper of innocent children, slowed down.

“A fire in the camper!” Marvin Sr. shouted to his confused son. Marvin Jr. grabbed the tumbler of scotch and melted ice that was still between his legs. He had heard his father in pain, his wife crying uncontrollably, his mother finishing up a hurried rendition of the 23rd Psalm. In an instant Marvin Ivy Jr. knew that he had before him the means to become the hero of his family. He leapt from the Packard with the tumbler of watered-down scotch, shouting “Daddy's coming!” Behind him went the sack of egg-and-tuna sandwiches Thelma had packed for the occasion. Wondering why the earth was moving, Junior bounced along the road. The tumbler followed, leaving a wet, dark trail in the gravel.

“My God, we've lost Junior!” shouted Marvin Sr., who had just managed in his newfound drunkenness to retrieve his leg from the clutches of the door. Pearl, who was on her second recital of the same psalm, looked back in horror, sure her husband meant that the flames had reached the backseat and engulfed her only child. She forgot about steering the Packard and let go of both the wheel and Thelma. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…” Pearl shouted as the bewildered Packard left the road and careened through a field of hay and clover. It came to rest rather abruptly against a huge rock pile, only because it did not have the speed to climb it.

Halfway out her window, Thelma looked up expecting to see her maker, but saw instead a state trooper looking suspiciously down at her, then at the half-killed bottle in the backseat.

Pearl glanced back to see if the camper had been blown to smithereens, leaving behind only bits and pieces of her grandchildren. But it was still there. In the window Regina Beth's small hand was holding up the sign: FOOD. Cynthia Jane was standing near the trooper at her mother's window, tugging at her panties.

“Regina Beth can't spell at all, Mama. She held up FIRE instead of FOOD. Are we going to have a picnic right here?”

“Cynthia Jane,” said Thelma, struggling to recapture her dignity. “Please don't tug at your panties in front of strangers.”

“We're hungry, Mama. Can we make a fireplace out of them big rocks and roast hot dogs?”

Pearl was examining the bruise on Marvin Sr.'s leg. “This is some way to go to a funeral,” she said to the trooper. “We're lucky it isn't our own.”

“Regina Beth is holding her breath again,” said Cynthia Jane.

“Good for her,” said Pearl.

Marvin Jr. lost both knees of his gray Sunday slacks, including most of the skin beneath. Limping through the field to catch up with his family was a painful endeavor. Each time weight was applied to his left foot, he winced. The ankle, he was sure, must be broken or sprained. There was a great deal of pain in his elbow, which was badly scraped. He stuck his head inside the camper door, expecting to find the charred remnants of his children. Instead, he found only Regina Beth, who was sitting on the floor holding her breath and the SORRY! game. Junior scooped the child up into his arms and hobbled painfully around to the Packard. They were all there, including a state trooper who was questioning a tearful Thelma. All except for Marvin Randall Ivy III. When Cynthia Jane saw her father, she ran to him, stepping on his painful left foot.

“Get off!” shouted Junior, putting down Regina Beth, who had begun to breathe again when she saw the policeman.

“Daddy,” Cynthia Jane pleaded. “Can we camp out right here? Can we? Please?”

“Where's your brother?” Marvin Jr. asked.

“He got off at the last gas station to pee and Mama left him,” said Cynthia Jane, still chafed.

“Why didn't you stop us?” asked Pearl.

“We didn't have a sign that said STOP,” said Cynthia Jane, now tugging on her father's sore arm.

“I'll give you a sign,” Pearl said, holding up a fist.

“If you keep your eyes shut tight and recite the Lord's Prayer, you won't get pregnant. If you swim in the same river with a boy who has just done it with someone, you
can
get pregnant, though.”

—Amy Joy to Her Friend, Beneath the Mattagash

Bridge, with Sicily's Old Medical Book, 1958

At breakfast Sicily sat across from her husband. She twirled the lazy Susan that sat between them and watched the bottles go around like glass horses. Edward Lawler mopped up the yellow of his soft-boiled egg with half a muffin. He drank some coffee.

“Ed?” said Sicily, still twirling. “How old should Amy Joy be before she dates?”

“Eighteen,” Ed said as he finished off the muffin and reached for another.

“Eighteen?” If he had said sixteen Sicily might have conceived a way to deceive him for two more years. But four years? This nasty thing with Chester Lee was sure to ruin her health.

“Most young girls start dating at sixteen. Some very respectable ones start at fifteen.”

“Then my daughter will be two or three years more respectable than the rest,” Ed said and pushed back his chair. The belly beneath his striped cotton shirt strained against the buttons. Sicily looked at his beginning bald spot and wondered if Ed was too old at forty-nine to be the rational father of a teenaged girl. Especially one as developed as Amy Joy.

“Is that your final word?” She gave the carousel one last spin and watched the dizzy bottles come to a slow stop.

“It is.”

He finished off his coffee and ran water into the cup, then set it in the sink.

Sicily was always thankful for these small household acts that Ed performed. Not that they were especially timesaving, but Ed had been born in Massachusetts and spent his formative years there and that showed up in her husband. City-raised children had much more class. Ed never called soda “pop” or dessert “sweets” or anything that wasn't homemade “boughten,” like the rest of Mattagash did. Sicily overlooked a lot in her marriage to Ed because of these little extras.

The Lawlers moved to Mattagash when Ed's father was offered a job teaching the fourth grade. It was a long way for him to come, but rumor had it he couldn't get a job teaching anywhere else. There was some hint in his letters of recommendation of irregular activity involving a young female student in his Current Events class. In Mattagash, nevertheless, he was offered the principalship at the elementary school. Later, Ed Lawler inherited the job from his father. He was teaching fifth-grade history at the time and was really the best successor, having lived with the job of principalship just by being his father's son.

“When she graduates from high school,” Ed said, “we'll send her off to some professional school that will take her. She might even manage to find a husband who has a job.”

“Oh, Ed, I don't know. Pearl went off with that goal in mind. She thought she'd bagged a lawyer and ended up with an undertaker. You just can't tell what you're marrying nowadays.”

“Pearl couldn't tell bird shit from bear shit,” Ed muttered.

Sicily silently compared the two substances. Other than the obvious difference in quantity, she herself wondered where the demarcation lay.

Ed went out to mow the lawn. Sicily watched from the kitchen window as he lumbered back and forth with the push mower, a tinker toy in his big hands. He stopped to light up a Lucky Strike and wipe the sweat from his forehead. She worried about his health. The fat that had gathered around his middle must surely be taxing his heart. He smoked two packs of Lucky Strikes a day, and the only exercise he got was an occasional outing with the lawn mower. Sicily had always believed that Ed Lawler was a victim of his environment. He didn't fit in with the rest of Mattagash. The other men in town made their living in the woods, cutting and selling lumber to contractors who sold it to the big paper companies downstate, which in turn sold it to furniture companies in New England. The trees around Mattagash saw a lot more of the world than the people did.

Sicily was sure that if Ed were living in the city with a good office job he would be a different man. He would be around city men who weren't ashamed to wear Bermuda shorts and sunglasses. In the city Ed would have the opportunity to develop as a sportsman, playing tennis and golf each week with other men. In Mattagash, if they even mentioned golf, they called it “gulf,” like the gasoline, and all they cared to do was pitch horseshoes in the field above the gas station. The main entertainment occurred each year at the Fourth of July picnic when the festivities included log rolling, log sawing, tree limbing, pulp peeling, and pulp stacking. And Sicily couldn't see Ed Lawler running atop a moving log, much less climbing a tree.

Now here was Amy Joy, about to become involved with Chester Lee Gifford, who not only was a lumberjack but could barely hold a job lumbering for more than a month without being fired. Chester Lee had gone so far as to buy himself a chain saw on credit and then went off to work for himself as an independent cutter on some wooded acres of Gifford land. He lasted two days. The joke around Mattagash was that he had fired himself. But what really happened was worse. He sold the chain saw after having made only one payment and bought a bus ticket to Bangor so that he could buy Elvis Presley's latest record and get a professional massage.

Sicily envisioned Amy Joy living in the Gifford house that was already bulging with daughters and grandchildren, the latter of which were not all legitimate. Her Amy Joy, helping to bring more little Giffords into a world of petty crimes and occasional arson.

“I should go on
Queen for a Day
and tell this,” thought Sicily. “I'd make that little needle go straight through the floor.”

Having Pearl around for a few days would be a consolation. She needed someone to lean on. A sister was the best answer to problems like these, and Marge wasn't the type to confide in even before her illness. Sicily loved Marge because she had been told it was a sin not to love your family members. She never questioned this. Marge had been something of a tyrant all her life, growing worse as the years went by. Ed used to say all she needed was a bottle of whiskey, a room in the Watertown Hotel, and Paul Bunyan for one night. But it was deeper than that, Sicily sensed. There had been a young man at one time in Marge's life, and then he wasn't there anymore. Sicily, thirteen years younger than Marge, was only seven the summer he stopped coming to court. But she sensed, as a child can, that a change had come over Marge. Something took hold of her and never let her go again. Even now Marge was in its grip.

Sicily had never been told the circumstances of Marge's young man, and she had never asked. Now she was sorry for that. Maybe Marge had been angry all these years because no one bothered to talk about the one thing she wanted to talk about. That happened in small towns. Everyone discussed a person's business with everyone but the person in question.

When Edward Elbert Lawler came into Sicily's life, he seemed to her a godsend. But Marge battled to have him removed from the picture forever. It was the only thing Sicily ever fought Marge about, and she fought her by retreating from her. She stopped speaking, stopped going outside the house, even to get the mail. The day she called Daigle's Hardware Store and ordered a sack of rat poison to be delivered to her door, thirty miles away, Marge sensed a malady too big to handle and relented. Ed Lawler became the brother Sicily always wanted, the father she hardly knew.

The Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon had not been a good father to his daughters because he thought of them as members of his congregation. His religion was a delirium he caught from his own father at the age of seven, and he never shook it until it killed him. Dying of kala-azar in China was the high point of his life. It was the rare bone archeologists spend their careers digging for. The experiment that finally pays off for the scientist. When the Reverend left for China, he left twenty-four-year-old Marge as mistress of the house and she answered the call with vigor. The girls found a peacefulness in their lives after their father disappeared down the road, sitting stiffly in a neighbor's horse and carriage.

Edward Lawler was a good prospect for a young girl. He was a class apart from the men in Mattagash. He once took Sicily to Watertown to see a college play and then to look at a photographic exhibit at the library. It touched her deeply. It brought a world to her doorstep that she had only imagined, and the taste of it was enough to turn her head. She was too naive to realize that he knew almost as little of plays and photography as she did, that he borrowed those things to impress her. But impress her he did. Sicily gave in to Ed Lawler on the soft sawdust that had piled up behind the Mattagash Lumber Mill, gave in to talk of the
New
York
Times
and the Statue of Liberty and Broadway. He promised to marry her and did when she was eighteen, not because he had really meant to, but because she told him she was in the family way. During her regular menstrual period she came up with a story of wicked cramps and a heavy flow, saying, “I must have lost the baby.” But she never doubted that Edward Lawler had guessed the truth. She was almost thirty-three when Amy Joy was born and it was only then that she stopped being afraid. The first time she picked up her baby daughter and held her, she knew that it would be
them
against
him
. And it was. He drifted further into obesity and school board meetings that lasted until one o'clock in the morning.

With Amy Joy for an ally, Sicily found it easier to digest Marge's rantings and what the McKinnons considered a lack of culture amid the mosquitoes and horseshoe tournaments in Mattagash. But now she was faced with losing that ally, and not because Amy Joy had turned into a woman and was ready. She was losing her because Amy Joy had turned out so badly, because it seemed there was nothing hopeful to be found inside her.

“She's becoming a real dipstick,” Sicily thought. “But I'll save that child yet, if I have to battle Chester Lee every inch of the way.”

Amy Joy called from Marge's to say that the doctor had phoned and would be late for his daily visit. There was a childbirth case that needed attending.

“Funny,” Sicily told Amy Joy. “They're dying in one place and being born somewhere else.”

“Can I go swimming?” asked Amy Joy.

“Where?”

“By the Mattagash Bridge where everyone goes.”

“With who?”

“Kids.”

“What kids?”

“Just kids. What are you? A cop?”

“I want to know
what
kids.”

“Cindy.”

“Cindy who?”

“Oh, Mama.”

“Cindy who?”

“Cindy Freeman.”

“Be home for supper,” said Sicily and hung up. Ed came in just then, his face red with exertion.

“Christ, it's hot for September!”

“You're overworking is all. I'm afraid you might have a stroke someday, Ed, pushing that mower around like you're still twenty years old.”

“I've got life insurance.” He dropped down into the beige leather armchair in the living room and lit up a Lucky Strike.

“You need to at least sharpen the blades on that thing.” Sicily brought him a glass of Kool-Aid.

“You could bury me in the backyard and find a new husband before the sun goes down.”

“Let me get Marge buried first.”

“Maybe you could get a discount from Marvin Ivy by buying two coffins at once.”

“Sometimes you joke at the blackest things,” Sicily said, thumbing through her
Hershey's 1934 Cookbook
. She needed to plan the menu for when Pearl arrived. There was no restaurant in Mattagash, and rather than see them drive the thirty miles to Watertown, she would take upon herself the responsibility of feeding them.

“Does Pink Tahitian Salad sound too gay for a time like this?” she asked Ed, who was watching television and didn't answer.

Sicily spent the afternoon baking. The kitchen table held pans of brownies, cupcakes, and cookies. A double layer chocolate cake sprinkled with glittering bits sat like a king in the midst of the other baked goods. Ed had gone upstairs to snooze, but at eight o'clock he came into the kitchen and took a beer from the refrigerator. He had showered and was dressed in a clean shirt and suntan slacks. Sicily could smell his aftershave.

“There's a meeting tonight about whether or not to raise the teacher's salaries,” he said and took his car keys from the corner shelf over the kitchen sink and a toothpick from the box sitting on the stove.

“Another meeting?”

“There's nothing I can do about it. It's my job.” Ed opened the door and looked back at his wife.

“I'll drop by Marge's then and see how she's doing,” Sicily said. “And make sure that Amy Joy is tucked in safe and sound.”

“I won't be long,” Ed said and closed the door. She listened to the car door slam, to the engine starting up, the car backing out of the driveway, and the last sounds until it disappeared down the road.

“Any woman but a McKinnon would follow him,” Sicily thought. “Another woman would ask a few questions.”

Sicily walked to Marge's. It was only a mile down the road and a few minutes to think was just what she needed. There was a harvest moon, a huge orange that dominated the night sky. The thought of Marge dying was brought home. It may have been the spectacular moon. It may have been Ed's disappearance on a night when she needed him home. Whatever it was, there was an aura of death in the air. For the past three weeks, Mattagash itself had been like a huge graveyard. It had emptied the last week of August for the potato harvest, because independent woodcutters could make good money by converting their pulp trucks to potato trucks with grapples to lift the potato barrels. The majority of families piled their belongings each year onto the backs of their trucks and left Mattagash for four weeks to work for the potato farmers in Caribou or Limestone, seventy-five miles away. It was hard work, but even the youngest children could bring in a salary picking potatoes. The Lawlers and McKinnons were among the very few families who didn't participate in the harvest, and Sicily was saddened each year when school stopped and the children left with their parents. “It's just like that story about the Pied Piper who piped all the kids away and left the town empty,” she once said to Amy Joy, who had stayed behind with a few adults for company.