Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (12 page)

“Sad?”

“Bud Johnson was his friend.”

Clemmie smiled. “They used to play in the hayloft when they were kids. They'd swing out on a rope and fly into the hay. Those boys would do anything for one another. ” She punched the switch, and the vacuum cleaner roared across the carpet of the front parlor.

Sandra remembered Bud Johnson playing softball with her father—with the Kentucky Lakers, a local team. When her mother died, Bud was around all the time; he brought ice cream on the day of the funeral. Sandra remembered it was chocolate chip. Yet she couldn't recall her mother's voice.

The funeral home was a maze—a scattering of rooms, furnished over the years with pieces from the furniture store—dark velveteens and brocades, dim lamps with romantic scenes painted on the shades, Early American tables. The place looked dilapidated, but strangely home-like. Sandra remembered her mother lying in the parlor, her head resting on a blue satin pillow, with her hair looking nicer than it ever had, and her lips bright and glistening, almost alive. Her eyes were shadowed uncharacteristically, her face deeply rouged. Sandra had seen so many dead people by then, she barely gave them a thought, but when her own mother lay there, she felt a deep betrayal, as though her father had been preparing all those bodies in anticipation of displaying her mother there one day, in a hairdo too perfect to tease her about. She vowed she would never forgive him.

As Clemmie vacuumed, Sandra peeked into some of the closed rooms. She entered the one with the cold metal table that cranked up like an elevator. Once, she and Kent had played doctor/nurse on the table, until their father caught them. He was there now, cleaning out a sink.

“Bud had that prostate trouble for seven years, and it finally got him,” Claude said as he squeezed out a sponge.

The hearse arrived then, and some men deposited the body of his friend in the refrigerated room—what the family used to refer to, crudely, as the meat locker. Claude had turned on the refrigeration and it was already getting cool.

Sandra didn't sleep. In the early-morning hours she heard a car drive up, then a tapping on a door downstairs. She heard her father talking to someone. She remembered many times when deliveries arrived in the night. She remembered the quiet hearses. She remembered her father up at all hours, working secretly in the closed rooms. She was forbidden to enter the back rooms when he worked, and he always warned her and Kent to stay away from the Dumpster behind the building. For years, she had nightmares about her mother's ice-cold, bleached body. Again and again, Sandra dreamed that her mother was still downstairs, wandering through the rooms, a prisoner. Now she was afraid to sleep.

During the morning, flowers began arriving, and Clemmie and Sandra kept busy dusting and arranging chairs and vases. Sandra was quiet. Sleeplessness had aftereffects that were like grief, she thought. Claude and John had finished the preparations on the body, and some men had moved the casket into the front parlor.

“What a handsome devil!” Clemmie said when Claude appeared in a dark suit. “Claude, with that cane, you look like somebody in vaudeville.”

“I don't even need it anymore,” said Claude with a smile. “It's just for show.” His step was sure and his voice stronger. He disappeared into a back room.

A boy brought an arrangement from the florist down the street. More flowers—the inevitable gladiolas and mums—arrived from another town.

“I hate this,” Sandra said to Clemmie.

Clemmie brushed a wisp of hair away from Sandra's forehead. “I know, honey,” she said.

Sandra plunged ahead. “What always bothered me was the way people always came to the funeral home and acted like it was some party, a social occasion. They always laughed.”

“Now, Sandra. People do what they have to do,” Clemmie said. “They can't just go around with a long face.”

“They say the wrong things. They gossip and tell jokes.” Sandra was agitated, her head spinning. She might blurt out anything.

When her mother lay dead in this parlor, Sandra saw her father in a corner talking with Bud Johnson. Her mother lay on display in a casket, and Claude stood smiling, trading fishing stories with Bud. Sandra told Clemmie about it now. “I remember exactly what they said. Bud said, ‘I caught forty bass in that pond, and I didn't even know it had bass in it.' And Dad said, ‘That was
all
of them, wasn't it?' And he laughed. They went on like that. I remember it!” She pulled distractedly at her hair. “Everything about funerals is inappropriate,” she said.

“Now, honey,” Clemmie said, wrapping her fat arms around Sandra. “What should people say, Sandy? What would you have them say?”

Clemmie enveloped her like a down sleeping bag. Sandra pulled away.

“I don't care what they say. It's how they do. How could he have done what he did? How could he—how could he work on her? How could anybody do anything like that to anybody?” Sandra might have been crying. She wasn't sure.

“Get that out of your head,” Clemmie said sharply. “He didn't do anything to her body that wasn't love. Maybell Cox fixed her hair, and I did her clothes. He got Roy Hicks over here from Hopewell to do the work.”

“He did?” Sandra held on to a door facing. “I didn't know that.”

“We told you that, but I guess you forgot. Why, you know Claude wouldn't treat Sally that way. He
couldn't
have.”

“I always thought he did.”

Clemmie hugged her again and Sandra didn't struggle. Clemmie said, “Why, Sandra, we had no idea you were bothered about that.” She paused, pushed back, and gazed into Sandra's face. Her hands clasped Sandra's shoulders firmly. She said, “But you never know what might be bothering a child.”

Sandra said, “I didn't know she was going to die. Dad didn't even take me to the hospital except twice.”

“Well, nobody knew she was going to die,” said Clemmie, wiping tears from Sandra's cheek. “Besides, you said it depressed you to go to the hospital and see all those sick people. You were just a child. And you were busy. You were in the twirling competition, and you didn't understand.”

“Twirling?” Sandra said. “I was
twirling
?”

In the afternoon, when the friends of Bud Johnson gathered, Sandra went to a dark nook upstairs where she used to hide out. Back then she couldn't escape totally from the laughter; now she had a small radio and earphones. She curled up in a nest of musty old cushions and tried to read, listening to some kind of New Age music that sounded like a stuck record. The station, broadcast from the college, called itself “the difficult-listening station.” She forced herself to concentrate on the meaningless sounds until her head vibrated with the yelps of excited sled dogs racing in the bright snow, and she fell asleep. Eventually, Clemmie found her there.

“I'm all right,” Sandra said, stumbling into the light.

“O.K., honey, I just wanted to know where you were,” Clemmie said. “I saved you some chicken and some squash casserole.”

Sandra crept down the carpeted stairs into the funeral parlor. It was empty, except for the casket. The lid had been lowered. Sandra heard her father speaking on the telephone in his office. “Now, Daisy,” he was saying. “I knew Bud as well as anybody, and he wouldn't have wanted to stay hooked up to those tubes.”

When he came out, Sandra said, “Hi. I fell asleep upstairs.”

He laughed. “I'm surprised you could sleep in all this racket. Damn phone's been ringing itself silly.” His fist opened and closed. “Now what?” The telephone was ringing again. Clemmie, who had followed Sandra, rushed to answer it.

“Are you feeling O.K., Dad?” asked Sandra as she straightened a wall carving of a youthful Jesus. It was made of plaster, with glitter scattered on it.

“That's one of those things I'm going to get rid of,” he said. “Damn stupid crap.” He grinned and stepped toward her. “I'm not leaving it for you to inherit.”

“I don't want it,” said Sandra.

“I don't want you to have it,” he said. Leaning on his cane, he reached his free arm around her and squeezed her tightly. He whispered accusingly in her ear, “You ran off from home and didn't think about us.”

“I came back, didn't I?” she mumbled, letting him hold her, more tightly than Tom had ever held her. She started to cry. She knew she could never explain herself to him, but that didn't seem so important now. It seemed more important to be kind. She said, “Dad, why don't you show me that old furniture you wanted me to have?”

He grinned. “How will you get it back to Alaska?”

“I don't know. FedEx?”

“Some of Bud's people are coming down from Akron, Ohio,” Clemmie said, hanging up the telephone.

The next morning, the mail brought a letter from Tom. He wrote, “A bunch of us took a drive up to Murphy's Dome the other night, up beyond that old D.E.W. system with that white phallic tower. The wildflowers are all out. The lupines are as blue as your eyes. When I was up there, I thought about the time you and I were there and the wind came up and we almost got hypothermia. We were rushing around naked, and I realized I was sorry I'd accused you of having Southern blood.”

She didn't get to finish Tom's letter—her father appeared, ready to show her the furniture in the basement. He had been too tired yesterday. As she followed him down the hall, Daisy Johnson and a swarm of kin arrived at the door.

Daisy said, “Claude's looking so well, Sandra. I didn't know it was you on the phone the other night. I never expected to find you at home.”

“Did you think I would never come back?”

Daisy smiled. “Sandra, if you had a husband, you could take over this business from your daddy and let him rest some.”

Sandra stiffened but held her tongue.

“I imagine I'll be closing the funeral home for good after this, Daisy,” Claude said. “A little place like this isn't fancy enough to suit most folks nowadays. And some of them want to be cremated.”

Daisy nodded knowingly. “Bud's sister-in-law in Florida is bad off and said she wanted to be burned and dumped in the ocean. I told Bud I wouldn't go all that way to Florida for the funeral if they didn't have the body.”

“That's the trouble, Daisy,” Claude said. “People don't want to do things right anymore. I was telling Sandy about her great-great-great-granddaddy. There was a man who did things right—because he was a carpenter. And if you're a good carpenter you're liable to do things right, don't you imagine?”

“Dad's threatening to give me some old furniture handed down through three or four generations,” Sandra explained.

Claude said to Sandra, “I'm going to show you that furniture right now. Come on, Daisy. You'll appreciate this.”

“Where is it?” Daisy asked. She was a small woman who didn't look strong.

“In the basement.”

“Are you sure you can get down the stairs, Dad?” Sandra asked.

“Positive.” He twirled his cane playfully.

“I'll stay up here if you don't mind, Claude,” said Daisy. “It would be disrespectful to Bud.”

“Well, if you think so,” Claude said.

“Here, hold on to my arm,” Sandra said to her father.

“You've done him a lot of good, Sandra,” Daisy said. “I know he's missed you.”

Sandra guided her father down the stairs, his cane clattering. Funerals bring out the best in him, she thought—and she was immediately ashamed. In her mind was a swarm of scavenger birds hovering around a wolf kill in Alaska.

In the basement, Claude turned on lights. He asked Sandra to move aside some boxes and picture frames. The furniture was arranged in a corner, set out as if it were a furnished room. A dining table with ladder-back chairs, a sideboard, a china cabinet, a washstand, a rocking chair, a hope chest. Sandra had half expected to see a child's coffin, but there wasn't one. The modern simplicity of the furniture surprised her. It resembled something in a Sundance catalog. It was beautiful. Her father must have gone to some trouble to arrange it here for her benefit. And now she saw he had restored it. The finish was smooth, and the wood was oiled and fresh, not dusty. The pieces were set out carefully, and so lovingly refurbished.

“When did you do this, Dad?”

“Oh, off and on for a few years. I needed something to do. Your mother always wanted me to fix it up.” He started toward the stairs, then turned toward her. “I never got over your mother,” he said. “When she died, it was like I disappeared for years. I thought nobody could see me.”

Sandra was startled. She didn't know what to say, but she let him hold her again. Then he turned away. She lingered in the basement while he made his way up the stairs. Daisy was beckoning him. Sandra studied the furniture, trying to imagine why her father, late in life, took up Thomas McCain's calling, as if his ancestor were in fact calling him. Was there a time in life when one's forebears suddenly insisted on being acknowledged? She imagined her father and Thomas McCain having strange conversations. Shop talk, she thought. The pieces were lovely, worn through time and use.

She could see her father at the top of the stairs, chatting with Daisy. Daisy had on an improbable pink pantsuit. She was smiling. Maybe they were laughing over old times, something funny Bud had said. Sandra could imagine Daisy and Claude becoming lovers. She remembered what her father had said about Thomas McCain and all his wives, how he quickly replaced the wives lost in childbirth. She pictured old Thomas jumping straight from the burial service into the urgency of courtship. But her father hadn't done that when her mother died. He was loyal to her memory. Sandra herself hadn't felt the need to honor tradition and continuity. She had gone off on a tangent from her history. Life seemed to her so strange, suddenly—the way people carried on, out of necessity, and with startling zest, at the worst of times. It was the stamina required by a bold adventure, a trek into the snow.