The Undertaking Read online

  Still, no one regarded it as much of a hardship—this rerouting of funerals from a primarily domestic route to a primarily commercial one. And, washing the hearse afterward I’d content myself that it was somehow good for business to take our shiny black parades through town, all flags and flashers and police escorts, letting the locals get a look at how well we directed funerals.

  Except for a fellow who wrote a really fine auto parts manual, I was the only published writer alive in town for several years. Then a local Vietnam veteran wrote and published his memoir of that war and there were three of us literary stars in Milford’s firmament. But I was the only poet. And like most poets who want to live amiably among their neighbors, I had avoided any temptation to read them my poems. For their part, my townspeople, like the population at large, were pleased to have a poet living among them, in the way we approve of good infrastructure and school systems, so long as we don’t have to pay too close of attention. And a poet in the environs is handy if you need a poem for a special occasion—the in-laws’ anniversary or the retirement of clergy, or the matriculation of high school students every June. I drew the line on such activities years back when the owner of the local Dairy Queen asked me for something to commemorate the opening of a satellite location by the entrance to the metropark. “No” is what I told him and was resolved to tell any others evermore. No amount of coaxing could change my mind.

  Then Mary Jackson called.

  Mary lives in Milford half of each year in the house on Canal Street, two blocks from the funeral home, that her parents and her grandparents lived in. The other half of every year she lives and works in Hollywood in the movies and TV and theater. Maybe her most memorable part was of Miss Emily, one of the spinsterly Baldwin sisters on “The Waltons,” which was popular in the seventies and early eighties and still can be seen in reruns on cable. Mary was the tiny smiling sister who would spike the punch at Christmastime with their father’s recipe and make John-Boy and Susan and Grandpa and Gramma all a little tipsy in a way we approved of in horse-andbuggy days.

  When Mary isn’t acting or living in Hollywood, she comes home to Milford as she has for years. Friends visit from New York and London and L.A.—theater types of all ages and persuasions who probably think of themselves as “on location” here. It makes Mary seem ageless, which, of course, she is. She takes them to dinner uptown and introduces them to friends and neighbors over teas in her parlor.

  All of Mary’s people are buried in Oak Grove. There’s a bench made of Barre granite, hand cut in Vermont, with JACKSON on it. And a stone with Mary’s own name on it—her married name actually, “Mary Jackson Bancroft”—the details of the marriage and its end, unknown to us. But Mary has staked her claim in Oak Grove and has every intention of being buried there.

  When word first got to Mary about the collapse of the bridge, she was disturbed. When it became clear that no plan for its repair was in the works, she was quietly outraged. The Village and the Township offices proffered “money problems” in answer to her first inquiries. The county road commission could not promise action. Its budget had been pushed to the limits by boom times in the county. As country roads became major thoroughfares, old farms turned into subdivisions, how could they spend money “on the dead” when the living needed to get to school and to work and to church and to the shopping mall? How, they argued, convincingly, could a case be made for the dead’s convenience, when the living lived with such inconvenience?

  Mary came to see me. She said she wanted to make her “arrangements.” She brought a list a pallbearers and alternates—stunt doubles she called them. She said I should read a poem—“The Harp-Weaver” by Edna St. Vincent Millay—and that the Methodist minister should do the rest. That she trusted me with the ultimate theater I took as high praise. She said it was a shame about Oak Grove. “The bridge, you know. Something should be done.” Then she told me she had made a decision. She steadfastly refused to be buried by way of the back door of Oak Grove. In all of her eighty plus years, she explained, she had seen, in her mind’s eye, the tasteful little procession leaving the funeral home by First Street, detouring slightly down Canal and right on Houghton, thus passing her house (the hearse pausing briefly according to custom), then left on Atlantic, right at Mont-Eagle, then down to the river, crossing by the bridge under the high gate of Oak Grove to rest in the companionable earth there. She would not, she insisted, be a “spectacle,” processing down through town while strangers shopped in the dime store or browsed in the sale racks of Arms Brothers or Dancers Fashions.

  I am not ashamed to say that for a funeral director, the refusal of one of a town’s most cherished and well-heeled citizens to be buried in the ground intended for her, is a threat to be taken seriously. It’s the kind of thing that could catch on. I tendered other options for crossing the river. Perhaps a barge, Viking style, with the mourners ferried back and forth, à la Dante? “Like Elvis on that ridiculous raft?” she said. “Floating around those man made lagoons in Blue Hawaii?—Never! Not even over may dead body!”

  We could drive a little east, I lamely suggested. The Garden Road bridge was still intact, wonderfully remote—“far from the maddening crowd,” I said—but Mary would not hear of it. No detours, no barges, no catapults, no excuses. She was going the way she intended to go, the way her mother and father and her uncles and brothers had gone, over the Oak Grove Cemetery Bridge. It would have to be repaired.

  Truth told, Mary Jackson had the wherewithal, no doubt, to write a check and have a new bridge done—still working in her eighties and the royalties still coming in has its rewards. But being a good American, she formed a committee, knowing that the problem was not only one of finance but of perception. She called Wilbur Johnson, her neighbor and old friend. His own darling Milver had suffered the indignity of the Main Street route just months before. Wilbur agreed something had to be done.

  Wilbur Johnson knew everyone in town. It was his style. For seventy years he’d worked in the produce section of the local market, proffering welcome to newcomers and old timers over heads of lettuce and ears of sweet corn. The market first owned by his father and then by his brother had changed hands a couple more times since Wilbur’s youth. But Wilbur always went with the deal—an emblem of those times when people came away from the market with more than what they’d bought. Once known by Wilbur, you were known. Unafraid of growth and change, he thrived on the lives of those around him from children in shopping carts, their young mothers, husbands sent to market with a list, bag boys, and cashiers. His own life, perfectly settled—he never changed jobs or wives or churches or houses—gave him an appetite for changes in the lives of others. He kept an open ear for the names of newborns and newlyweds, news of setbacks and convalescences, the woeful monologues of the jilted, the divorced, the bereaved. He remembered the names of children, visiting in-laws, friends of friends. He had a good word for everyone and everyone knew him. Nowadays we call this “networking” and the store of information Wilbur kept on the lives of others, a “data base.” But Wilbur called it “neighborly”—the attention we pay to each other and each other’s lives.

  Mary and Wilbur became the co-chairs of the committee. They called some of the other old timers in town—descendants of the Ruggles brothers who founded the town in the early nineteenth century, Armstrongs and Arms, Wilsons and Smiths. Meetings were scheduled, mission statements made, pictures taken. Articles began to appear in The Milford Times. An account was opened in the bank. Appeals for matching funds were faxed to county commissioners and state representatives and senators whose staffs sent back well-worded letters full of good wishes and intent that, all the same, managed to thread the needle between a certain Yes or No. They wanted to make it perfectly clear, though what “it” was remained a mystery.

  The effort, in the minds of most of us, was noble but doomed to failure. Teenagers and young marrieds never thought about cemeteries, being immortal. Folks in their thirties, busy with starter homes and credit-ca
rd debt could not be counted on for cash. And the baby boomers in their forties planned to be buried in Milford Memorial—a sumptuous and well-kept memorial park with flat markers and easy maintenance—the commemorative equivalent to the lackluster subdivisions that sprouted in the fifties where every house looked like the next and the lawns were well maintained in a purgatory of sameness. Or they planned to be cremated and scattered in some far-off and really meaningful locale—a favorite fishing hole or golf course or shopping mall. Or they simply did not think of it at all, trying to keep, in the parlance of the generation, “their options open.” Among fifty-year-olds, trying to maintain the fiction that they were still in “middle age” and would all, accordingly, live to be a hundred, the mention of cemeteries was strictly taboo, conflicting as it did with those old lies about life beginning at fifty and it being such “a great time to be silver!” A bridge to reconnect us to an old cemetery, rarely used for new burials, occupied the nethermost place on the totem-pole of worthy causes. Public and private beneficence seemed better spent on the homeless, the addicted, the battered and disenfranchised; the living not the dead.

  So when Mary called to ask me to compose a poem to be read at the dedication ceremonies she saw in the future, I told her, “Yes, yes of course, I’d be honored etc….,” breaking my long-standing ban on occasional poems with the thought in mind that she would never get it done. The bridge, the poem, the whole project would lapse, in time, into the rosy realms of well-intentioned but never realized dreams. The good old days, like the lives of Miss Emily Baldwin and John-Boy Walton, of Mary and Wilbur and the rest of the sepia-colored characters that populate the home towns of our memories, were gone. Gone forever. No money would be spent on metaphor while real needs were so great.

  All the same, Wilbur kept talking and Mary kept lobbying and those of us who loved them hadn’t the nerve to prepare them for the eventual disappointment. “Keep up the good work,” is what we’d say when we saw them. “Something good will surely come of it.” To be sure, Mary and Wilbur began to look like ambassadors, emissaries of a time long gone when folks took seriously their connections to the dead, their access to them, their memories. Memories, after all, were what they were peddling—good old days, or so it seemed—when the dead were somehow different from the dead today.

  Of course, those days, like the ones we occupy, had no shortage of heartache in them. At the turn of the last century, more than half the deaths recorded were the deaths of children under twelve. The life expectancy was forty-seven years. Men marched off to war and died. Women died in childbirth. Everyone was born with a dose of mortality. In this way they were terribly modern. And the parents of children dead nowadays of AIDS bear more than passing resemblance to the parents of cholera victims a few generations back, or small pox or the flu. And the widowed then, like the widowed now, trade passion for remembrance of passion. But somehow, memories of the dead seemed more accessible, the dead themselves not so estranged.

  I often think about this schizophrenia, how we are drawn to the dead and yet abhor them, how grief places them on pedestals and buries them in graves or burns the evidence, how we love and hate them all at once; how the same dead man is both saint and sonovabitch, how “the dead” are frightening but our dead are dear. I think funerals and graveyards seek to mend these fences and bridge these gaps between our fears and fond feelings, between the sickness and the sadness it variously awakens in us, between the weeping and dancing we are driven to at the news of someone’s dying. The man who said that all deaths diminish me was talking about the knowledge at the edges of every obit that it was not me and someday will be. Thus, graveyards are a way of keeping the dead handy but removed, dear but a little distant, gone but not forgotten.

  No doubt the impulse to do this—to get the dead to their own quarters was, at first, olfactory. The Neanderthal widow, waking to the dead lump of her man likely figured he was only being quiet or lazy. Was it something he’d eaten? Something she’d said? It might have been hours before she knew something was different. Here was a preoccupation or an indifference she’d never seen before. But not until his flesh started rotting did the idea come to her to bury him because he’d been changed utterly and irretrievably and, if her nose could be trusted, not for the better. Thus the grave is first and foremost \ a riddance. But this other impulse—to memorialize, to commemorate, to record has a more subtle motive. I think of Bishop Berkeley’s tree, requiring someone to hear it fall. We need our witnesses and archivists to say we lived, we died, we made this difference. Where death means nothing, life is meaningless. It’s a grave arithmatic. The cairns and stone piles, the life stories drawn on cave walls, the monuments in graveyards, one and all, are the traces left of the species before us—a space that they’ve staked out in granite and bronze. And whether a pyramid or Taj Mahal, a great vault in Highgate or a name on The Wall, we let them stand. We visit them. We trace the shapes of their names and dates with our fingers. We say the little epitaphs out loud. “Together forever.” “Gone but not forgotten.” We try to reassemble their lives from the stingy details, and the exercise teaches us something about how to live.

  Is it kindness or wisdom, honor or self-interest?

  We remember because we want to be remembered.

  Mary Jackson can bring the dead to life. In reminiscences launched over luncheons or teas or walks through Oak Grove, she restores them to us. In her narratives, the dead become perfectly modern, given to the same fits of joy and sorrow as ourselves. As when her Uncle Nick Stephens, in Mary’s childhood, came across a stone on the Crawford lot that read: “Behold me now as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now soon you will be. Prepare for death and follow me.” A good Victorian epitaph, memorable and morbid, a jingle in the stonemason’s best script. To which Uncle Nick, never at a loss for words, replied on the spot: “To follow you I won’t consent until I know which way you went.”

  We buried Wilbur Johnson a few years back. He was put in the grave at Oak Grove next to Milver and his name and dates carved into the stone. I see him striding up the steps of my office twenty-five years ago to ask if I was the new funeral director in town. “Well you’re a man I’ll need to know,” is what he said and then he said I could pick him up on the following Wednesday and drive him to the Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Wilbur always went more than half way when it came to welcomes. And I can see him, in his last year, arm in arm with Mary Jackson in the ceremonial crossing of Oak Grove Bridge, the new bridge built by their determination, to cut the ribbon and open it to the general public. Bands were assembled, politicos, old soldiers from the VFW, the reverend clergy. It was a bright blue morning at the end of May—Memorial Day. Townspeople gathered at the river to watch the festivities. A microphone had been rigged up with loudspeakers in the trees. Wilbur thanked all of the committee for their tireless efforts. The Village President said wasn’t it a fine thing. The state senator was pleased to have helped with a grant from the Department of Commerce and read off the names of people in Lansing. Then Mary read the poem I’d written when it began to look like she’d actually get it built. And people stood among the stones and listened while Mary’s voice rose up over the river and mingled in the air with the echo of Catholic bells tolling and tunes in the Presbyterian steeple and the breeze with the first inkling of June in it working in the fresh buds of winter oaks. The fire whistle was silent. No dogs howled.

  Mary has the gift of voices. When she speaks the words, she sounds like one of our own. And the words, when she says them, sound like hers and hers alone.

  “At the Opening of Oak Grove Cemetery Bridge”

  Before this bridge we took the long way around up First Street to Commerce, then left at Main, taking our black processions down through town among storefronts declaring Dollar Days! Going Out of Business! Final Mark Downs! Then pausing for the light at Liberty, we’d make for the Southside by the Main Street bridge past used car sales and party stores as if the dead required one last shopping spr
ee to finish their unfinished business. Then eastbound on Oakland by the jelly-works, the landfill site and unmarked railroad tracks—by bump and grinding motorcade we’d come to bury our dead by the river at Oak Grove.

  And it is not so much that shoppers gawked or merchants carried on irreverently. As many bowed their heads or paused or crossed themselves against their own mortalities. It’s that bereavement is a cottage industry, a private enterprise that takes in trade long years of loving for long years of grief. The heart cuts bargains in a marketplace that opens after-hours when the stores are dark and Christmases and Sundays when the hard currencies of void and absences nickel and dime us into nights awake with soured appetites and shaken faith and a numb hush fallen on the premises.