The Funeral Makers (5 page)

“Hello,” Pearl said suspiciously.

“I'm Violet La Forge. I'm renting here on a permanent basis.”

“You
live
here?”

“Until I decide what I want to do with my career. I might become a psychologist, but right now I'm a modern dancer. I dance in the ballroom of the Watertown Hotel.”

“When did they turn that little saloon into a ballroom?” Pearl asked, thinking they must be talking about two different buildings. The downstairs bar at the Watertown Hotel wasn't any bigger than the mourner's room at the Ivy Funeral Home. Violet ignored the slight. Isadora Duncan, she reminded herself, put up with countless insults and innuendoes before being accepted as a true artist.

“If I decide to study psychology, I'll give up dancing.”

“That's smart,” said Pearl. “What kind of dancer did you say you were?”

“A modern one,” said Violet. “Trained in the school of modern dance.”

“Well, you'd need a ballroom for that all right,” said Pearl.

Violet drew on inner strength to rise above this rude neighbor. As a believer of reincarnation, she knew all about accepting and abiding bitches in the present life. Otherwise, she'd be tested again, somewhere down the line. And although they'd just met, Violet La Forge didn't want to encounter Pearl again. For karma's sake, she smiled.

“Are you here for just one night?” It was her sweet voice, the one Violet had been trained to bring forth when her male customers wanted to touch beneath the flowing scarves of her dancing costumes.

“My sister is on her last breath. She's a McKinnon from here in Mattagash. We'll be here until the funeral.”

“Don't think of it as dying,” Violet said. “The spirit is leaving the physical body that is no longer needed. Artists like myself believe that we shouldn't fear death.”

“Don't tell that to my husband,” said Pearl and nodded at Room 4.

“Sometimes though,” Violet said, as she resumed her sit-ups. “Sometimes the spirit isn't ready to depart the body but is pushed out by unhealthy living. In that case, one should fight death. There's all kinds of ways to do that if your sister's spirit isn't ready to leave her earth body.”

“You don't know Marge,” Pearl said. “If her spirit isn't ready to leave her body, believe me, honey, it won't.”

Pearl went back into her room. She closed and locked the door. Rather than chance walking past Violet La Forge's room to get to the bathroom, she would wait until the morning to freshen up. She crawled into bed beside Marvin. A long piece of twine, which was tied to the little silver chain that pulled the light off and on, was hanging by the bed. Albert had thoughtfully run it across the ceiling from the lightbulb and tied it around a nail that he hammered into the ceiling above the head of the bed. The end dangled in easy reach so that the tenant would not have to get up to pull the string. Pearl pulled it and the light went out.

“Is anything wrong, Pearly?” Marvin asked after a few seconds of darkness.

“We're next door to Aimee Semple McPherson,” said Pearl.

“Taking a Gifford to court is like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. You don't want to wake up any sleeping giants.”

—Mattagash Resident

Who Prefers to Remain Anonymous, 1956

Chester Lee Gifford was the sixth child in a family of ten. He was the youngest of the five sons born to Bert Gifford and Ruth Gifford. Ruth Gifford was a skinny woman with a long, cranelike neck and small, hard eyes. Her children had inherited from her the dark curly hair and ski-slope nose. She was a vicious woman, lashing out at her neighbors and daughters as though they were responsible for the conditions of her life. The Giffords were poor, living on the support of the town and a monthly disability check. The latter was in compensation of a mysterious back ailment that Bert Gifford was suffering from, although no one in Mattagash had ever seen signs of his ailing back. Bert supplemented the family's illegal income of reselling stolen goods, the disability check, and town support by hiring himself out as a guide in the Mattagash territory and on organized canoe trips down the Mattagash River. He could easily load a canoe onto the canoe rack of his fenderless green Ford, unload it, then carry it on his shoulders several miles over a treacherous course through the woods to one of the many lakes in the Mattagash territory. Bert Gifford knew where the fish were likely to be biting, and when Ruth's tongue proved too much of a whip, he would retreat, canoe on his shoulders, into the woods to spend the day fishing. All of Mattagash agreed those were not the symptoms of a man suffering from disability due to a back injury. But the check came from Augusta, and in faraway Augusta Bert Gifford was just another statistic.

Of the five Gifford daughters, Lorraine, Debra, and Rita were teenagers and still living at home, having mothered four illegitimate children among them. The oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married to Ronnie Gifford, a first cousin, and had established herself a hundred yards down the road in a four-room log cabin. At the age of thirty-one she was the mother of five children, as well as a grandmother. Her oldest daughter, Stella, had given birth to a son and moved to St. Leonard, fifteen miles away, with the father of her child, but afraid of losing her welfare eligibility, she did not marry him. Elizabeth's four other children were at home sleeping in two sets of bunk beds piled into one bedroom.

The second-oldest of Bert's daughters was Rosie, the only attractive Gifford. Rosie was a quiet girl who was quite intelligent and somewhat embarrassed of her background. When she was an eighth grader, her teacher tried to convince Bert and Ruth to let Rosie move to Watertown and go to high school there. The teacher offered to make room for the girl in her own family and take care of any expenses. But Ruth Gifford stood on the steps of her front porch and ordered the terrified woman never to step foot on Gifford ground again, unless she wished to have both her eyes blackened. The Giffords did not, Ruth told the teacher, accept charity. And in the Gifford mind, they really didn't. They accepted the disability check as something the government owed them, and the town help as something Mattagash owed them, and the goods they stole from lumber mills and contractors as something the rich landowners owed them. It was a philosophy passed down to them by a long line of Giffords.

A few weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Rosie Gifford became pregnant. Two months after a hasty wedding, she was killed instantly when logs fell from a loaded truck that she had pulled out to pass on the road to Watertown. It was the first time that the Giffords, in their many years of lawsuits, had a legal right to sue. But they didn't. Mattagash knew why. The owner of the truck was Robert O'Malley, the sheriff from St. Leonard, who bent and twisted the law as he saw fit. There was rumor of a large payoff. Some said O'Malley had collected enough things on Chester Lee over the years that he threatened to put him behind bars if the Giffords pursued the matter. Whatever the reason, the Giffords did not sue. And Rosie, the first genetic combination who might have stepped out of the murky slime and onto solid ground, took her place in the Mattagash Catholic graveyard and was soon forgotten.

Chester Lee held the family honor of being the only son not in jail in downstate Thompson Penitentiary. He had learned well from his older brothers who were serving individual sentences for an assortment of crimes. The oldest son, Bert Jr., was convicted of raping a waitress while on a trip to Bangor to take his physical for the armed services. He later bragged that it was one way of staying off Pork Chop Hill. The second-oldest son, Andrew, was sentenced for armed robbery and assault on an aged grocery clerk in Watertown. And the last two sons, twins Ernest and Lawrence, were convicted together of theft. They convinced the salesman at Homer's Car Sales in Watertown to let them test-drive a new 1959 Plymouth. The salesman, who had already heard of the notorious Giffords from Mattagash, was terrified of the two brooding men and handed them the shiny set of keys. Ernest and Larry were apprehended three days later at the Houlton State Fair. The Plymouth, which by this time had a dented rear fender, no radio or hubcaps, and a backseat full of stuffed teddy bears and beer cans, was returned to Homer's Car Sales. Asked by the judge if they had anything to say for themselves, Ernest Gifford said that the Plymouth was one hell of a car.

One reason that Chester Lee was not incarcerated was because he felt overshadowed by the illegal accomplishments of his older brothers. He became somewhat of a coward, intimidated by those whom he considered the best in their profession. His crimes tended to fall more in the misdemeanor category, and few victims bothered to pursue the issue in lengthy court procedures. Another reason was that Chester Lee confined his actions to Mattagash, where he could operate with a certain amount of safety. The whole town knew him personally, knew the Gifford family's record, understood that prosecuting any of them to the full extent of the law meant that the plaintiff would incur the family wrath from then on. A five-pound bag of sugar would disappear into the gas tank of the plaintiff's car, his tools stolen, his pets shot, his mailbox pilfered, his windows shattered in the night by rocks. Even arson was not unlikely. To rile up the Giffords was not a prosperous move.

Chester Lee did make one ill-planned effort to rank along with his brothers in the annals of Mattagash's best criminal minds. But he ventured only as far as the town line separating Mattagash from St. Leonard. There was a small field at this spot and it was in this small field that Lyman Cole pulled over his traveling grocery truck at twelve o'clock each Tuesday and Friday to eat his lunch. The truck had originally been an old moving van that Lyman converted into a small store and painted an army green. He built shelves inside and stocked them with canned vegetables, sugar, flour, candy, and cigarettes from his store in St. Leonard. As a service to his customers, and knowing that most of the lumberjacks' wives had no means of transportation after their husbands went off to work before sunrise, Lyman discovered it was lucrative to peddle his wares twice a week in his rumbling truck. Each Tuesday and Friday the housewives posted a child at the window as a sentinel. When Lyman's truck rolled into view, the child ran to the road, arms waving to stop him. Then the woman of the house came out, climbed up the two steps on the back of the truck, and stepped inside to do her shopping.

Lyman was a Christ-like figure to the women in Mattagash as he sputtered down the road in his mobile establishment bringing them packages of yeast. And it
was
a religious service he performed. Through him bread was able to rise like Lazarus from the dead. And if the bread had not come out of the oven there would have been trouble when the men came out of the woods at night for their supper. Lyman was an
institution
, and Chester Lee chose him for his symbolic assault on Mattagash.

Waiting behind hazelnut and chokecherry bushes one Tuesday afternoon until Lyman was halfway through his tuna sandwich, Chester burst into the open, riding the Gifford's old white workhorse that had seen its better days yarding logs. With one of his sister's nylon stockings pulled over his face and a shotgun in his hand, Chester Lee Gifford held up the immobile traveling grocery truck. Lyman, who suffered from high blood pressure, nearly collapsed, allowing the scofflaw to escape with a potato sack full of canned goods and Lyman's entire stock of cigarettes. There was no doubt that it was Chester Lee, since the Giffords had the only white workhorse in Mattagash. Bert Gifford told his son later that the nylon stocking should have gone over the
horse's
head.

Rather than risk another equestrian assault, Lyman renewed his prescription for high blood pressure pills, began eating his tuna sandwich in the safety of the grammar school's yard, and left the assailant to answer to God on Judgment Day.

Undoubtedly, the Giffords held Mattagash in the dirty palms of their hands. They were the antithesis of the McKinnons. If the McKinnons stood for etiquette, the Giffords were bad manners. If it could be said that the McKinnons stressed the need for education in Mattagash, then the Giffords stressed the need for truant officers. And Chester Gifford, hovering in the shadows at Marge's house in hopes of procuring Amy Joy as a wife, had in his power the means to bring the House of McKinnons crashing to the ground. Amy Joy, locked in holy union with a Gifford and living in their menagerie, would cause McKinnon ancestors to roll over in graves two hundred years old back in County Cork, Ireland. It simply would not do.

“If you pee on that electric fence, the electricity will come straight back into your body and you can give people shocks for the rest of your life, but only boys can do it because girls can't aim and would be too sissy anyway. There's a man down by Bar Harbour who works in a lighthouse and doesn't even have to turn on the light. That's 'cause he pees on his electric fence every day and gets charged up. Just like a glow-in-the-dark Jesus.”

—Randy Ivy to His Sisters,

Vacationing in Northern Maine, 1959

Mattagash was deluged every summer by hordes of tourists from all over the country who made their way north for fishing, camping, and canoeing in such an isolated spot. Sometimes as many as thirty in a group, they went through Mattagash with the canoes loaded onto trucks on their way over miles of dirt roads through the woods until they came to the headwaters of the river. Here they put their canoes in the water and, camping at sites along the way, they made the Mattagash River canoe trip that lasted several days until they arrived sunburned and mosquito-bitten to the flat field near the Mattagash Bridge, where the trucks had returned to wait for them. Loading the canoes back onto the trucks, they were happy to leave Mattagash for the safety of the concrete buildings and business suits they knew so well. They had paid their dues. They could sit over martinis and tell anyone who would listen about the wilderness in which they had survived.

Often a tourist unwillingly provided the town with excitement by not wearing a life jacket and ending up another drowned casualty of the fast-moving rapids. To the tourists, the townspeople were strange, narrow-minded bumpkins. To Mattagash, the tourists were greenhorns, city slickers, sandwich eaters. Mattagash had nothing to gain from them. With the population dwindling there was only one business in town, a gas station, that sold a few items—candy bars, soda pops, fly repellent—so the tourists did not bring much money into the town coffers each season. In return, the town did nothing to better the situation. There were no makeshift showers, no cafés. There were also no outhouses. The tourist went into the privacy of the woods and braved the situation each in his own individual way. Those who had the foresight to bring along rolls of tissue paper braved better than those who didn't.

It was into this world of unwelcomed tourists that Junior brought his citified family. Camping out on the Mattagash flat was not what he had expected. The flat was isolated in the autumn and it was really too late in the year to be camping out at all. No facilities took the zest out of it for Thelma, who could not imagine such a thing. Steering one of her children in among the red and orange trees to a spot where the poor little waif could squat for bodily relief was too much to bear. She wished Junior had used the foresight in buying their camper that he used for the Packard. They would have a mobile commode with them if he had.

Junior was not an outdoorsman. He had been born and raised in Portland, a big city at the opposite end of the state. Vacations back to his mother's place of birth became more and more infrequent as he grew older until finally, after his thirteenth birthday, he quit accompanying his mother, who rarely returned herself. Now here he was, back in Mattagash and setting up camp for his family.

Because of the chilly nights, the children, despite their cries of disapproval, would sleep in sleeping bags on the bunks in the camper. Randy commandeered the top bunk and the two girls shared the bottom. Outside in the weaving, tilting tent that Junior had erected, he and Thelma were bundled in long johns and heavy socks as they burrowed into sleeping bags.

Their first night of camping out had gone smoothly, and the next morning brought more good omens as Thelma made coffee and Junior cooked the family breakfast. The children then discovered a wild field and spent the morning picking goldenrod and searching for animal holes. A game of tag kept them occupied for a while, as did leapfrog and kick-the-can. Finally, under Thelma's watchful eye, they skipped rocks into the river, then threw dead leaves into the steady current where they became boats and were carried off. It was raw nature to Thelma who, despite the lack of facilities, saw it as an initiation for her children.

Loaded down with Audubon Society field guides for trees and birds of North America, the family hiked along the river in the afternoon. Thelma had caught the bird bug and bombarded her family with cries of “There's a white-throated sparrow, Randy!” or “Look, girls, it's a red-winged blackbird. See the colors?” To her husband she said, “Now according to this guidebook, this should be a tamarack.”

Junior, meanwhile, snapped countless pictures of his family at harmony with nature. In one shot, Thelma pointed out a deserted field sparrow's nest to the children whose awed faces were frozen on film, caught for posterity by their father's roving camera. It was a scrapbook day. A collage of memories. Regina pointing out a rabbit in the foliage. Click. Cynthia and Thelma inspecting the last withered petals of some shore roses. Click. Click. Junior and Thelma's children munching sandwiches and apples atop a huge rock. Click. Click. Click.

By late afternoon the terror of the day before was almost forgotten. Junior unhooked the camper and made a quick trip to the Albert Pinkham Family Motel to see if there had been any change in Marge. He really expected her to have died by now. If she had, he could get the funeral over and on with his family vacation. But stalwart Marge, his mother assured him, was the same.