Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (24 page)

The fire becomes a roaring blaze and Annie has a place of honor, far enough away from the snapping flames and poking sticks, resting in the shoebox that rests atop of the largest log.

Lou, who is used to taking charge and monitoring the cadence of those around her, becomes the proverbial program director. She tells the women it’s okay to cut some sticks for poking and roasting and she tells them water stories and tales of her own life growing up in a place that was even more remote sixty-eight years ago. Stories about ore ships sinking and storms that whipped across the lake and grabbed babies and grown men in singular motions of vio-lence that rocked the small communities who clung to its shores.

“This is the kind of place you either love or hate very quickly and those of us who were born here, who came to this land from inside of our mothers, have some kind of magical connection to it,” she tells them, standing in front of the fire so she can look out into her beloved “northern ocean.” “It’s funny how many of us try to leave and then end up coming back to scrape a living off a land that seems to reject us every chance it gets.

“Stamina,” she informs them, is the key word for survival in the north woods, and Annie, she quickly adds, had stamina in spades.

Lou passes out her plastic cups and offers a dab of brandy for anyone who wants to join her in a toast for what is apparently the kickoff of the Lake Superior portion of Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral. They sip the bitter alcohol that warms them quickly from the inside out as they all sense a shifting in the air, a subtle increase in the wind, and a movement of clouds that Lou immediately tells them means something is about to blow in.

“Reading the weather up here is like reading the newspaper in the places where you gals live,” she says, sipping her drink and turning her head into the wind. “It can mean everything, just everything, if something moves in fast and you happen to be in the wrong spot.

“So,” she continues and then stops as her voice catches in her throat.

The women freeze for a second and both Laura and Jill, who are standing next to Lou, reach to put concerned hands on her arm.

“So, I know we are here to spread some of Annie’s ashes in a place that meant a great deal to her throughout her life and especially as she grew older and wiser. But before we do that, however in the world we do that, there is something I would like to do,” Lou tells them.

She reaches over to set her glass on a log behind her and then straightens and puts her hand inside of her front pants pocket. When she removes it she is holding six keys in her hand. They point toward the water and glimmer and shine in her palm when the flames flicker and soar.

“Annie did not ask me to do this. In fact, she only sent me a fairly short note that didn’t detail this portion of the adventure at all,” Lou explains. “But this is something I know that she would love. And it is something that would mean a lot to her and to me.”

The quiet, she told them, sometimes consumes her. The absence of laughter and the slamming of doors, and feet on the stairs, and kids throwing balls onto the roof. The clink of ice cubes in glasses filled with gin before noon and a dozen people talking around the dining room table, and sandy footprints across the wooden floors.

“I fill my own house with guests to help pay the heating bills but I also do that because I like people and what the familiarity of family brings to a life,” Lou tells them, closing her hand over the six keys. “Family does not mean people with the same last name or the same DNA. It means people who care about you, who you trust, who you care about—people you can count on.”

Like Annie counted on each of you, she shares.

Lou tells them that she is giving each one of them a key to the Freeman family northwoods home. She is giving each woman a key and clear entrance into her life as well. A place to vacation, a way to stay connected with this part of Annie’s life, a chance to explore a part of the world that is as fine as it is frigid.

“Oh, hell,” she tells them. “I’m a lonely old bat up here and those damn cousins of hers never come up and I keep the heat on and the refrigerator stocked and Annie and my sister made certain that I was taken care of and her boys will help me too so it would mean a lot to me for you to take these keys, use them, call me sometimes, become a part of my life the way that you were a part of Annie’s life.”

The women are astounded by her generosity and as she walks around the fire circle and places a key in each one of their hands, they rise to hug her and thank her.

“This is something,” Balinda says, holding the key up against her heart. “No one has ever done anything like this for me before.”

“Oh, honey,” Lou says. “You, more than anyone, need this. You are close enough so that you can come visit anytime and if your mother ever gets mobile you just throw her in the car and bring her right along with you. Do you hear me?”

They all hear Lou who has a heart of gold so thick that it glimmers under her skin as if she is a walking mine. Lou who hiked with Annie up to this very spot and listened to her sorrows and joys and held her like a baby when she came back from the hospital and then the New Mexico desert after her suicide attempt. Lou, who they know looks out across the ocean of her own life to recapture the times of sweetness that they all know can come back to her in the form of the new faces she has now embraced.

“We’ll make a kind of schedule,” Jill announces. “Oh my God, could I like come and stay for
weeks
at a time?” she wails.

Lou laughs because Jill finally realizes what this might mean even if she has a new housemate and suddenly the entire world has changed for both of them.

“Of course you can both come and stay as long as you want,” she tells her. “Anyone brave enough to come in the winter gets bonus points too.”

They imagine that, all of them at once, in a swirl of energy that almost makes it snow. Frozen water for miles and miles and icicles hanging off the gutters that need to be kicked down to save the roof. Paul shoveling until his arms ache and mountains of snow that grow deeper and wider every week. Brave birds wintering in the trees and the hungry deer loping down from the hills who search for tiny buds to nibble.

Then when the imagining stops it is time to dip into Annie’s tennis shoes and spread her ashes across all of those thoughts. Across the years when she was an innocent player in the sand and lay in the back bedroom at night drawing stars and hiding stones under her pillow. Across the walks in the forest along paths that led for miles into the back country and the fort she built against the rock cliffs with her cousins and the nights she stayed up until dawn drinking beer and skinny-dipping herself back into a sober state so her mother wouldn’t know she was the one who drank all the beer. Across the years when she did not come home because she thought it was a simple place and that she was done with her past and she turned her back on the people who had held her hands and helped her roast her first marshmallows and sang to her when she could not fall asleep. The years when she was busy at school and would drive all night with her sons in the back seat so that Lou and her grandma could cook and take the boys fishing and show them how the long boats disappeared off the edge of the water that was what they called “the horizon of tomorrow.” Across the days when she could not leave her job and when she became caught up in the swirl of business that comes with children and life and work and loves. And then the last visit—not so long ago—when she sat on the porch and rocked for hours and asked someone to help her walk to the beach where she lay in the cool sand for three hours and fell asleep with tears in her eyes and her hair full of sand that she refused to wash out for an entire week.

And then now.

Now when they each take Annie’s ashes and cup them in the palms of their hands and then count to three and toss them into the northern air where they are swiftly consumed by the breath of the millions of stars that shine through the increasing clouds and into the air that grows colder by the second.

“Goodbye, Annie,” they say one at a time, except for Lou who manages a very quiet “Welcome home, honey. Welcome back home.”

26

“Holy shit,” Rebecca is yelling from the back of the dipity-do-dah plane that is rolling and rocking them toward Minneapolis.

Holy shit indeed, as they are about to discover, when the same baby-voiced pilot who took them to Duluth struggles to get them back to Minneapolis in the middle of a storm that has gained speed as it has cruised across the country. He gets on the intercom and says without hesitation, “Folks—well, you women anyway— this is one hell of a ride. Don’t get up. As you recall from our ride the other day, this plane is a tiny thing and today’s wild weather has us at a bit of a disadvantage.”

“Disadvantage my ass,” Marie, who does not care for small airplanes in large storms, seethes through her clenched teeth. “We’ll be lucky to land.”

As if he is reading her mind the pilot buckaroo says, “I’ll get her down, ladies, don’t worry. I’ve flown through worse than this. Be patient. We’ll be in Minneapolis before you know it.”

I hope so,
they all think mutely as they drop a few hundred feet and the pilot wrestles the plane into a small pocket of quiet air.

The storm, they read in the newspaper they found lying on a seat, has pretty much paralyzed half the country. There’s snow in the mountains, rain in Seattle, and a pattern of moisture that is barging across the United States as if it’s been kept in a holding pen for the past fifty years.

Airports from San Francisco to Kansas were backed up, and if they had thought to check the weather, made a phone call or come down from their campfire high, they would have stayed at the cabin until the skies cleared and it was not only a bit safer to fly but possible to get from one end of the country to the other without spending part of the day spinning in an airplane like a top.

“Once,” Laura shares with them at a moment that makes Marie want to take off her shoes and fling them over the back of the seat, “my husband and I were flying back into the States from Mexico and we kind of got sucked into this horrible storm that left us totally in the hands of the airplane pilot and at the mercy of the weather gods.”

“Is this story necessary?” Marie shouts back to her.

“It’s got a happy ending.”

“But is it
necessary
?”

“Yes!” everyone else votes. “Tell us the happy ending!”

There was not enough gas, Laura explains, for the plane to go anywhere else but into Chicago even though the airport was mostly closed—except for one solitary runway that was being held open for renegade airplanes. She told the women that just as the plane neared the airfield it almost dropped out of the sky because it got sucked into a wind sheer.

“We were going sideways down the runway,” Laura recalled, closing her eyes as she told the story. “I could see people inside drinking coffee as we cruised so close to the terminal I swear I could feel someone’s breath on my neck.”

“Well?” they all demand, beyond breathless for more than one reason.

“Just as I thought we were about to die, and people were screaming, and the stewardesses were on the floor, the pilot pulled us up out of it, but that wasn’t the last of it.”

“What happened?”

“We had to circle and come back and do it all over again.”

“How in the world did you ever get on an airplane again?” Jill asked her.

“I didn’t for three years and it took me three years after that to do it sober. I used to take my water bottles, fill them with vodka, and get totally buzzed the entire time I was flying.”

“Thank you for sharing,” Marie shouts back with a face that is the color of the snow they imagine flying into the high mountains of Colorado. “If Annie was here right now, I’d
kill
her.”

Exactly eighteen minutes later they land, not sideways, but surely not in the most gentle and professional manner ever seen at the Minneapolis airport. They are greeted by a fine thank-you from the pilot who also informs them that they should be proud because their little airplane is going to be the last one in or out of the airport for what looks like more than a few hours.

While they file into the main terminal that is already churning with restless travelers, they cannot stop talking about near-death experiences and the sometimes taken-for-granted gifts of safety and the bliss of second and third chances. They join a long line outside the agent’s desk and the talk escalates in gusts, like the winds they just rode across the state of Minnesota.

“Nothing is leaving.”

“Airports backed up across the country.”

“Impossible to tell what will happen.”

“What do you think?” an elderly woman asks them as they stand in line.

Katherine laughs because asking this group of funeral-goers what they think could unleash a storm all of its own. We, she wants to say, think about everything and have discussed just about everything during the past week. We’ve hashed out Annie’s life and our lives and the fascinating intersections where the past and present and future cross. We’ve cried and swum naked and tossed back more wine than some of us—that’s just some of us, she laughs to herself—drink in a year. We’ve danced in the desert and dipped our feet into the other side of the ocean, tossed Annie’s dusty bones in more places than some people ever get to see in a lifetime. It’s not over either, she adds in her mind. Something beyond the weather, beyond what has happened or what Annie planned to happen is apparently brewing at this very moment.

“We have no idea,” Marie tells the woman. “We just fell out of the sky moments ago. What’s the weatherman saying, do you know?”

Not so good for today, the woman tells them all.

Katherine decides to check at the desk anyway. She can’t help herself.

“It’s not like we can do much,” Jill says with a shrug. “Apparently we’ve lost touch with the rest of the world in such a lovely way we never bothered to pay attention to the winds that whisked around our embers last night.”

“That sounds a little dirty,” Laura laughs, not caring that she’s twenty-third in line and looking at an evening on the terminal floor, a long night in an airport hotel, or hitchhiking to Seattle in time to make the last portion of the funeral and catch the plane out of Seattle and back to San Francisco.

They wait.

They wait as other airplanes fall out of the sky.

They wait while they drink the dwindling supply of airport coffee.

They wait while the terminal television screens blink “canceled.”

They wait until there are no more planes moving from east to west or west to east and then cruising to the Minneapolis runway so that 50 or 60 or 170 more men, women, and children can be dumped into a building that may explode if one more airplane descends upon it and opens up its doors.

Laura has cleared a spot for them. Their carry-on bags and Annie’s shoebox are under a huge window that is flanked by chairs, newspaper stands, and ever-increasing hordes of travelers who begin setting up their own camps. Within an hour, it looks as if the Minneapolis airport has become a refugee-holding center.

They sit on the floor, place Annie in the middle, cross and uncross their red tennis shoes, wait out the tempest and observe the storm of humanity that has clustered near gate B-46.

“We must look like we are sitting around a campfire at Girl Scout camp,” Jill says, as she stretches out her legs behind her, rests on her tummy and puts her chin on her elbows. “Who would think we’d get stranded in Minneapolis this time of the year in the middle of a traveling funeral?”

“I bet there isn’t a contingency plan for this in Annie’s papers,” Marie says. “This probably doesn’t happen much if it isn’t the dead of winter.”

“There’s that word again,” Balinda growls, rolling over to put her head on Jill’s rear end. “Dead. I’ve been thinking that I’ll have to take care of my mother’s funeral sooner or later. I’m not sure I’ll do this traveling funeral thing though, because I’ll have to go back to Poland to do it. That’s the only place that she loved, really loved.”

“Why not?” Rebecca asks.

“Why not?” Balinda responds. “What do you mean?”

“If the place was important to your mother, if she grieved every day for it, why not take her ashes back there and have your own traveling funeral for her? Hell, I’ll go with you. Poland isn’t exactly on my must-see list, but then again why not? We’ll all go.”

Everyone leans forward. They are thinking, “Poland.” They are also thinking how Balinda has woven herself into their lives and how, if they could, they would surely go to Poland or China or Ohio if they could help Balinda, Marie, Laura, or those cowboys from the bar in New Mexico.

“My friend Gracie flew over Germany on her way to Bosnia several years ago,” Katherine begins. “She said once she got past the terrifying thought that she was flying into a war zone she started looking out the windows as they flew over Germany and she felt as if she were flying over Wisconsin. That’s why so many Germans and Poles settled in the Midwest. It looks just like their homeland. I suppose it would be kind of neat, Balinda, for you to go back and find all your cousins and great-aunts and to look into the face of your own past.”

Imagining an international traveling funeral takes its own twists and turns as the six women joke about being stopped by border guards who want to sniff the ashes and make certain the girls are not smuggling drugs, questions about the matching shoes and bandanas and the funeral book which could be filled with code words for international espionage.

“How are the Polish jails?” Laura asks. “Maybe you’d meet some handsome soldier, fall in love and—”

“Love and funerals,” Balinda interrupts. “Not a good mix.”

The women are suddenly joined in conversation by a man who is sitting so close to them Laura could knock his teeth out if she moved in the wrong direction at the correct speed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bending at the waist to get even closer to them, “but it’s impossible not to hear what you are saying in these cozy quarters. May I say something?”

He gets to speak following a unanimous vote by all the members of the traveling, and now stranded, funeral, mostly because he’s polite but also because Laura, Ms. Know-It-All, feels that he has something important to say. She’s looked past his eyes, she whispers to Rebecca, and can tell he’s got a bowl of knowledge that he’d like to pass around.

He wedges himself in between Jill and Laura and tells them he’s an anthropologist who has done a ton of work surrounding death-and-dying issues. He’s mesmerized by the bits and pieces of information he’s picked up from the women’s conversation but he also has a story to tell.

“Death, as most of you know, really gives new life to many relationships,” he begins. “Families reconcile, people forgive each other, they say things they have kept hidden or buried or were afraid to say when someone was alive. . . . It’s like something springs loose beyond the grief and sadness and those feelings of loss that make you want to die yourself,” Dr. David ReNould tells them, speaking with his hands as if he were giving a noon lecture.

The women are focused on the professor and his lecture and they do not see that one and then two and five and then fifteen people have gathered to listen. The original circle, centered around Annie’s shoebox—which now has tattered edges and coffee stains and flowers drawn across its side—has grown so that it looks as if the women in the red shoes are holding court, preparing for a séance, ready to pounce.

“There are remarkable stories that drift from generation to generation and that cross cultures, having to do with astounding instances of the living having experiences of connection and transformation at funerals and during the grieving period that are always explained by giving power back to the person who died,” he tells them, focusing in on his own words in a way that makes the women realize he has had personal as well as professional experience.

“Tell us your story,” Jill, the professor, asks him. “You have something very personal to tell us.”

David studies her and smiles. His smile says,
She knows. She’s got it.

“It’s a love story,” he answers. “I was in college and had already decided on my professional path. I had been dating a woman, who by the way was and is still named Ann, isn’t that one hell of a coincidence, and we broke up, mostly because I was an ass.”

“Well, you are a man,” Rebecca interjects.

Someone in the third row back says, “You go, girl,” and it’s the first time they all turn to look and see that their circle has spread like a rising tide into the chairs and past the end of the windows.

Rebecca smiles, does a quick eye check with the other women to make certain what is happening is okay, and then nods as if to say “Thank you.” She smiles at David, blows him a kiss, and he continues.

“Then my grandma died and Ann, who happened to be in town, phoned on a whim to say hi to my mother and discovered the funeral was the next day,” he said. “My mother mentioned to Ann that the weather was horrible and they anticipated a small turnout because she didn’t expect elderly people to come out in a storm,” he recalled. “When I found out that Ann had called I could not sleep. I was still very much in love with her and all night long I hoped that she would show up the next day.”