The Funeral Makers (4 page)

Sicily was thankful that Marge's lapse hadn't occurred earlier when the harvest was in full swing. She could see the lineup at the coffin: the elderly, one or two cripples, and children too young to walk. But now that the harvest was almost over, most of the families had packed up their potato money and belongings and come home.

Sicily passed the houses of her neighbors, the yellow lights of their windows, the night sounds of their lives. A radio played in one house, a television in another. The supper forks and knives were being put away in one kitchen. Laughter came from a backyard. The sound of a baby crying floated down from a screened upstairs window. “These are my neighbors at night,” she thought, and she wondered what sounds, what clues might issue from
her
house at night to a passerby.

At Marge's there was no porch light on. In the yard Sicily picked up an empty potato chip bag that had been thrown on the ground. There was no doubt that it was Amy Joy's. The house was quiet. She opened the front door. In Marge's room the nurse was knitting by the bedside. Sicily waved to her from the door.

“Any change?”

The nurse shook her head. The lamp by Marge's bed had a sixty-watt bulb. In its light, Marge's features were gray as marble. Sicily felt as though something was about to burst out of the closets or pound on the ceiling. Something that needed to break the awkward silence. After a few seconds her ears became accustomed to sounds she hadn't heard before: the soft clicking of the knitting needles, the curtains moving in a faint breeze, crickets beneath the window. An occasional car passed and disappeared in its own sound around the turn.

“It's very lonely in here tonight,” Sicily said, putting a few strands of Marge's hair in place. She was struck with how very white her sister's eyebrows were. “She must have penciled them,” Sicily thought.

“It's always lonely when someone is dying,” the nurse said.

Amy Joy's room was empty. It was the guest room on the south side of the house. Sicily was shocked at the condition of the room. Dirty panties lay in a pile by the bed. A bra and two belts hung from the door handle. Clothes lay on the bed and covered the wicker chair. Dirty dishes were piled on the nightstand, and by the bed an empty box that had once held a pint of chocolate whirl ice cream sat with a spoon in it. Next to it, an empty Coke bottle holding a deflated straw lay on its side. On the bed a
True
Confessions
magazine was opened to a story called “My Husband's Ghost Saved Me from My Neighbor's Lust.”

“This is the last straw,” Sicily said and kicked a pair of blue flip-flops that had been discarded in the middle of the floor.

In the kitchen she found dishes on the table with food drying on them. But no Amy Joy. Taking a flashlight from Marge's utility drawer, Sicily went out the front door and walked past Marge's dried hollyhocks to the backyard. She listened in the dark for noises. A giggle came from behind the garage. Few people in Mattagash owned garages. The indoor bathroom ranked higher as a necessity than did a warm house for cars and trucks, so if any extra money was found, it went toward indoor plumbing. And if a creature as indispensable as a car didn't rate a house in Mattagash, a dog might as well forget it.

Sicily walked quietly over to the upper end of the garage and stood there listening. There was more girlish giggling and then something rustled. She got the flashlight ready, waiting for the cue that only a mother knows.

“Amy Joy, loosen up a little,” Chester Lee was saying. “Honey, you're too stiff.”

“There's a burdock sticking in my butt,” said Amy Joy.

“Here, put my John Deere cap under you,” Chester Lee said, in what seemed a wonderful display of gallantry to Amy Joy.

“Ouch! It's still pricking me!”

Sicily swung around the corner of the garage and blasted the lovers with a beam of light. Their retinas lit up like tiny comets. Amy Joy's pants and panties were down to her ankles. Her blouse was unbuttoned, bra unsnapped. Chester Lee quickly zipped up his pants and stood, squinting his eyes and holding his hands above his head as though Sicily were wielding a rifle instead of a flashlight.

“OK, miss. Get those clothes on,” Sicily said. In her hands the flashlight did, indeed, exert a gunlike power.

Amy Joy stuck one feeble hand up to shield her eyes. Pulling her blouse about her, she burst into sobs.

“Caterwaul until you wake up the whole town,” said Sicily. “That's all we need.”

“Me and Chester Lee are getting married,” Amy Joy said tearfully.

“Get to your room. I'll deal with you in there. Chester Lee, just wait right there a minute,” Sicily said to a retreating Chester. “We got something to talk about.”

Amy Joy was still buttoning her blouse as she trudged toward the house.

“Don't let her scare you, Chester Lee!” she bawled.

“She don't scare me,” Chester Lee answered. Then he dodged under the lilac bushes and was lost, like a leprechaun, in the black cover of the night. Sicily did not, in fact, scare him. But the thought of Ed Lawler was enough to make him leave his scarcely used green-and-yellow John Deere cap on the damp ground behind him.

In Amy Joy's bedroom, there was no sound. Sicily switched on the light. Beneath the blankets and magazines, beneath the discarded clothing and candy bar wrappers, Amy Joy pretended to be asleep.

“You ain't fooling me one bit,” Sicily said. “A bear in the middle of winter couldn't sleep after that mess outside.” She poked at the pile on the bed but it didn't move. She stripped back the covers and found Amy Joy cowering there.

“You'd be in good shape if all I did was beat you, Amy Joy. But you're not getting off that easy. The kind of bruises you're gonna get out of this scrape ain't the kind that'll go away in a week or two. You'll carry them inside you for as long as you live.”

Amy Joy uncovered her head to let Sicily see the tears in her eyes.

“We love each other.”

“Is that sordid scene I was witness to your idea of love, little girl? My own daughter in a bed of sin out behind my dying sister's garage.”

“It wasn't really a bed, Mama.”

“I told Marge not to build that damn garage,” said Sicily, sitting on the end of Amy Joy's bed. “She doesn't even own a car. It's a statement of the times, is what it is. Modern living breeds sin.”

Amy Joy had never before heard her mother use even the mildest of swear words. She sat up, forgetting her tears, to watch this new development.

“Mama, you just said damn.”

“I'm a changed woman,” Sicily said as she aimlessly flicked the trigger of her flashlight on and off.

“We
are
getting married,” said Amy Joy.

“Amy Joy, you been reading too many magazines.”

“Are you telling Daddy?”

“What do you think?”

“I guess.”

“You guess what?”

“I guess you're telling.”

“You just hit the nail on the head.”

“I'll kill myself if you tell.”

“If I tell, you won't have to kill yourself. Daddy'll be glad to do it for you.” Sicily turned to look at the frightened girl.

“It wasn't very long ago, Amy Joy, that all you cared about was collecting material samples out of the Sears and Roebuck. Now look at you.”

The two stared at each other. Amy Joy sensed the sadness in her mother, the betrayal she felt by her only child. Sicily saw a confused little girl. They were both tied to a man neither of them could turn to. A man who attended nonexistent meetings on a night when his wife and daughter needed him most.

“It's just the two of us, Amy Joy,” Sicily said softly, knowing, as her child did, that Ed Lawler would not be told about the activities that night.

“I guess.”

“Come here, honey,” Sicily said and took the tearful Amy Joy into her arms.

“It used to be that young folks had to drive all the way to Watertown to get themselves a room on their wedding night. Now it's just a skip and a hop over to Albert's place.”

—Donnie Henderson, Lumberman

The Albert Pinkham Family Motel was a one-story structure built onto the end of the owner's two-story house. Pinkham had seen progress encroaching on the town line when a six-room hunters' lodge was built in neighboring St. Leonard. So amid his wife's protestations, he went to work on a four-room capacity motel. Albert's architectural design was not the best, drawn out of penury rather than creativity. Each room had a separate entrance, two in front, two in back. A bathroom consisting of a single tub and commode was added to the upper end of the motel so that the tenants had to leave their rooms to reach it. Having an indoor hallway leading to the bath would have been a great convenience to his customers and would have provided them with privacy as well. But it would also mean added expenses. Nonetheless, not wanting to be outranked by the hunters' lodge, Albert mixed his own cement and ran a three-inch-high walkway around the entire structure. It made a nice porch for his rocking chair. In the evenings he usually sat in front of room numbers 1 and 2 in the front, if they were empty, and smoked a few cigarettes while watching cars pass.

Hot running water was another matter. No one in Mattagash, not even Marge McKinnon, had pushed that far into the twentieth century. But Albert Pinkham was a man of foresight. Hot water for a quick wash or shave in the mornings was easily available to each tenant by boiling his own on the hot plate in his room. Albert arranged to save a few dollars at the hardware store by buying out the entire stock. Four hot plates made an impressive sale.

Sarah Pinkham was furious at what she considered her husband's excesses. The night he came home with the four boxes and stacked them on the table, she broke down and wept. It was not until Albert's plan was laid out before her on paper that the tears in her eyes were replaced with dollar signs. Each hot plate cost, with tax, $9.42. The total purchase of four was $27.68, with ten dollars knocked off for the quantity bought. Albert's idea was to charge each room a quarter a day if they wished to use the hot plate for heating water or cooking purposes. Not only would the hot plates be paid off in no time, but they would continue to make money as time went on. And residents would be supplied with a makeshift kitchen that would save them money at the diners in Watertown.

Sarah was less than pleased to learn how the hot water for bathing in the tub would be made available to boarders. On large index cards left in each room (Albert's nearsighted daughter Belle was given the task of writing them up) appeared the following information:

“How will I get supper for us and boil water for the boarders at the same time? I only got that one stove,” Sarah Pinkham complained to her husband. “Can't we start the bath time later?”

“If we get done at eight o'clock we can watch Milton Berle each week.”

“Well, why don't we have the time earlier on Tuesday nights only?” Sarah asked.

“Consistency,” Albert Pinkham told his distraught wife. “We gotta be known for our consistency.”

“Sounds more like stupidity,” Sarah later said to Belle.

“Well, there's no more room on the card anyway,” said Belle, who picked a doughboy out of the chicken stew, mistaking it, due to her eye condition, for a potato.

Albert's luck after six months in business ran in spurts. First of all, his best room, number 3, which faced away from the road and had a window opening on Sarah's flower garden, was permanently rented by a young woman who said she was a modern dancer and would be studying psychology one night a week at the high school in Watertown. The room soon took on the atmosphere of hominess. A window box full of geraniums appeared the second day of her arrival. A small clothes rack sat outside her door on the third day, decorated with delicate female underthings, and was taken in only when the dainty articles were dry. The addition of a braided rug on the cement outside and a bowl in the window with two shimmering goldfish catching the sun convinced Sarah that the attractive young woman meant to stay for a while. The last thing Sarah wanted encamped beneath their bedroom window was the likes of Violet La Forge. Albert behaved like a silly puppy whenever Violet came into the living room to inquire about certain fixtures in the room and to ask permission to make changes in the decor.

“She's painting the room pink,” Albert told his wife after one such visit.

“What's wrong with the beige? I just painted that room.” Sarah was testing Albert to see how quickly he sided with the new tenant. Aware of her tactics, Albert said simply, “We'll have to get used to spoiled clients.”

Sarah tried another approach, one even dearer to Albert's heart than an attractive young woman.

“It'll cost us money to repaint that room,” she said.

“She brought her own paint with her. She said she had it left over after she painted her bed.”

“She's got a pink bed?” Sarah asked in disbelief.

“Our bed,” Albert said. “She painted our bed pink.”

“Well, of all the nerve!” Sarah began listing the reasons it would be in the best interest of the motel to ask Violet La Forge to leave, but Albert stopped her.

“I won't have you throwing out a paying guest during such a slack time of year. We're lucky to get someone that permanent with the harvest still going.”

With that he went out to talk with fishermen who had just pulled in for some last-of-the-season fishing. Looking out the window as Violet La Forge unloaded a small orange tree in a wooden bucket from the backseat of her little Volkswagen, Sarah said nothing. “Let him go,” she thought. “I'll find out what Miss Modern Dancer is all about. I'll rattle the skeletons in her closet. Oranges this far north.”

The fishermen brought their wives with them to stay behind at the room and enjoy a few days of girl talk while the men fished. The two couples rented rooms 1 and 2, facing the road. There was only one room left, number 4, next to Violet La Forge, when the sorrowful Packard limped into the driveway of the Albert Pinkham Family Motel. But it was not a happy family that pulled up to Albert's front door. Drawing from a primitive instinct for survival, Thelma had ridden in the camper for the rest of the trip, where she kept the children in tow. Marvin Sr. drove while a bewailing Junior was hospitalized in the backseat by his doting mother. Pearl saw to it that even old wounds were securely bound and had finally calmed Junior down from the exasperating day. With Thelma riding herd over the children, the rest of the trip had passed uneventfully, which was fine with the disgruntled passengers of the Packard.

Since there was only room for Marvin and Pearl in the Albert Pinkham Family Motel, and since there was still enough daylight, Junior decided to pitch camp for his family. Pearl called Sicily to announce their arrival and ask about Marge's condition. Hearing that Marge was still on her last breath, they carried their suitcases into Room 4.

“That's one hell of a long breath,” said Marvin Sr. “She's been drawing it since the phone call yesterday afternoon.” Pearl flopped down onto the bed.

“A nice hot bath,” she told Marvin. “All I want in this earthly life is a nice hot bath.”

“You'd better fill this out then,” said Marvin, who had been reading Belle's artwork. He passed the index card to Pearl, who read it slowly. She looked at Marvin.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“This ain't Portland, Pearl. There's no hot water.”

“What time is it? Quick!”

Marvin pulled out his pocket watch.

“It's seven thirty.”

“Quick, give me a pen!” Pearl shouted. “We still got time for the eight o'clock water if we hurry.”

When Pearl came back to Room 4, Marvin had taken off his shoes and was listening to the radio.

“How'd it go?”

Pearl slumped on the bed and said nothing. She appeared ready to cry.

“How'd it go, Pearl? What's wrong?”

“A fisherman's wife in number one just signed up for the last hot water tonight. We can't take a real bath in a tub until five forty-five tomorrow night.”

“There now,” said Marvin and took her into his arms.

“All day long, ever since the accident, it's all I thought of,” Pearl said, her voice breaking. “A nice hot bath and a clean bed.”

“Don't cry, Pearly,” Marvin said as he rocked Pearl back and forth on the bed. “I'll go get one of his hot plates and we'll freshen up a bit here in the room.”

“A French whore's bath!” cried Pearl. “I've driven three hundred seventy miles with birdbrained Thelma and those three heathens just to take a whore's bath!”

“It's better than nothing, sweetheart,” said Marvin Sr., whose usual endearment was simply
Pearly
. He knew
sweetheart
had calming effects on her.
Darling
was medicinal. That one he saved for the serious occasions, when he feared another breakdown like the one when they were first married. Earlier, when Pearl raised her hand to strike Thelma for asking, “Do you still want me to drive?” after the Packard had been retrieved from the clover field, Marvin Sr. almost brought out a
darling
. But the policeman's presence put a damper on Pearl's fiery temper. By the time he left, Thelma had wisely barricaded herself inside the safety of the camper.

True to form, Pearl stopped crying and said, “I suppose it could be worse.”

“Of course it could.”

“Junior could have been crippled for life.”

“Maybe never walk again,” said Marvin.

“And there really
could
have been a fire.”

“It would have blown us to bits.”

“The policeman said if it hadn't been for the rock pile we'd have gone into the river.”

“We'd have probably drowned.”

“Will you go for the hot plate, then?” Pearl blew her nose.

“Right this minute,” said Marvin.

“And put us down for hot water as early tomorrow night as possible?”

“I'll put us down. Where's the card?”

“I gave it to Mr. Pinkham and told him to stick it where the sun don't shine.”

“That could be just about anywhere this far north,” Marvin said. Pearl's bottom lip began to flutter again.

“I'll get a new one then. You just stay here and rest, sweetheart.”

“You're a good husband, Marvin.”

“You're a good wife.”

When Marvin came back, Pearly had undressed and was waiting in her housecoat for the hot plate. Along with the appliance, Marvin had brought back a small aluminum pan full of water from the bathroom.

“The bathroom's outside at the end of the motel. I'll carry this down for you when it's hot.”

“Didn't they give you a bigger pan?”

“Mr. Pinkham said he's trying to discourage people from heating their own bathwater. Seems a couple of hunters were doing that and he had to put a stop to it. He made a joke about it. Said he told the hunters he was losing money down the drain.”

“That's not very funny,” said Pearl.

“He thought it was.”

“Is there a flush in there?” she asked.

“There's a flush.”

“Do we have to fill out a card when we want to flush the damn thing?” Pearl almost seemed to blame Marvin for this predicament.

“Only rooms number 1 and 2 can flush it! Get it?” said Marvin, pleased that he had stumbled upon a joke. “Number 1 and number 2. Get it, Pearl?”

“Silly,” said Pearl, getting into a better mood.

“Funny thing next door,” said Marvin. He slipped off his loafers and socks, then held the socks to his nose to see if they would hold up one more day. He held them up to Pearl for her opinion, but as soon as they dangled within a foot of her nose she made a face and waved them away.

“What about next door?” Pearl stuck her index finger into the pan, waiting for a sign of warmth.

“There's a young woman in leotards doing exercises on the cement outside Room 3.”

“What?”

“I swear,” said Marvin.

Pearl opened the door. Violet La Forge was doing sit-ups. Her body suit was stretched across her large breasts, which seemed to hold her back like boulders when she sat up to touch her toes. After three more sit-ups, Violet saw Pearl in the doorway of number 4.

“Hello, neighbor,” she said, stopping the exercise.