I watched Mr. Beckett’s left hand fumble in a pocket of his cutaway, then extract a small black, white and red can with white lettering, which had a spout on top. Instantly I recognized it as the container of Three-in-One oil. After pulling off the cap, Mr. Beckett withdrew a crumpled tissue, which looked like a dried white rose, from the pocket of his striped trousers. Stooping over the coffin and raising Oscar’s deadweight left hand in his right, he separated the fourth finger from its fellows and placed the tip of the spout on top of the knuckle, then wormed it under the ring. When he delicately squeezed the can, it spurted oil. After performing the same procedure on the hinged back of Oscar’s finger, he reverently laid the hand on Oscar’s chest, immense though breathless. Apparently confident of success, he wiggled the red cap back on the spout and, giving the top of the can a swipe with the white blossom of tissue, shoved it back in the pocket of his cutaway.
Again he raised Oscar’s hand. Holding the tissue under the fourth finger, Mr. Beckett twirled the ring. With the tips of his own immense fingers, he slid the ring toward the fingernail. Over the tubercle knuckle it went as easily as a quoit that has just made a ringer is removed from the peg it encircles. Then, using the tissue, he meticulously cleansed the defeated member of oil. When he’d finished with the hand, he carefully laid it on top of the right wrist, again forming a cross but with the position of the hands reversed. For some reason the Ancient Mariner’s skin looked even more tallowy than it had before Mr. Beckett’s assault.
Glancing at me standing just behind him, Mr. Beckett winked, then, leaning toward my ear that was farthest from the quartet of women, he half-whispered, “Just one of the tricks of the trade, sir. You’d be surprised how many of them change their minds when we’re about to close it.”
“No problem,” he then announced to the family in a voice that proclaimed self-satisfaction. As they wheeled around, he beamed a smile at Aunt Bess while striding toward her. Bowing over her from his great height, he pressed the ring into her doll-size palm, which instantly clasped it, as if holding on to a cliff for dear life.
Contrary as it might seem, I’d found myself rooting for the Ancient Mariner, in spite of the bombardments he’d visited upon me. Then he was alive. In his present state his means of resistance were severely limited. And Mr. Beckett’s falling back on a trick learned through his professional experience struck me as being grossly unfair.
“All set, Guido,” Mr. Beckett snapped at the stocky man, who had been permitted to watch his handiwork from a distance. Lowering his voice, he went on, “Now you can close the box, call the boys in, and get going so you beat the late afternoon traffic on your way back.”
As Guido closed the door on Oscar’s last little sleeping room, so quietly I couldn’t hear a sound, Aunt Bess, courageously watching, let out a single great sob. Debbie turned her head with a shriek, while Sarah looked on from a distance without emitting a sound or moving a muscle in her face.
Gwen and I were fourth in the caravan of vehicles heading for the burial ground. In front of us were the hearse, driven by Guido; a black limousine, driven by a black-suited chauffeur, in which Aunt Bess, Debbie and the minister were riding; and a tomato-red convertible sports car, in which Sarah drove herself. On this sunny May afternoon, its roof was down so that, when she went screeching off, her flaming red hair streamed out from her head like a Viking’s at sea in a stiff wind. Until Guido had lined us up on the parking lot just inside the gates of the cemetery, I‘d been surprised by the number of cars that made up the cortege. In them, I’d assumed, rode fellow members of the flock Uncle Oscar had been a sheep in, fellow Rotarians, neighbors, co-workers in Uncle Oscar’s realty company, and business rivals. Death is the finale of all competition. Or it should be.
The graveyard in which the Stulls owned a plot was located beside the highway defining the northern edge of the city, some twenty miles from the town near which Oscar had lived with his wife and daughter. When the cemetery had been established on both sides of what had been a cow path and was now a major artery, it had surely been fields. On the far side of the road stood rows of modest split-level houses, some of which Uncle Oscar might have had built and sold. Next to the cemetery, within the city limits, some planning authority, either ignoring or defying incompatibility, had situated a yellow-brick school building and a macadam-covered play-ground. Lining the sides of the road winding through the graveyard stood rows of sycamores, very old if their height, spread, and the sparseness of foliage were reliable indicators. The hearse crept along beneath them and finally eased to a stop behind a parked station wagon. As we walked past it on our way to the grave site, I saw some sort of government license plate on the rear bumper. The instant I cut off the engine of my Honda and opened the door, I could hear the high-pitched shouting of children’s voices coming from the playground. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was two thirty-five, probably just the beginning of recess.
Guido, “the undertaker’s understrapper” (as William Carlos Williams dismissively dubs him in a poem about the proper way to conduct a funeral, which had suddenly popped up in my brain), was carrying the head and three pallbearers were bearing on each side of the coffin as it was conveyed maybe two first downs from the hearse. We followed over grass-covered graves, between weathered gray headstones, to a rectangular hole, over which hovered a crane, on which Guido and his fellow bearers laid the box. Above the crane was a canopy. Given what it was to protect, I concluded the canvas was intended to run up Aunt Bess’ account payable to Mr. Beckett. At the foot of the grave was a mound of reddish-brown earth, beside which slabs of sod were piled. The color of the soil suggested that, before serving as a burial ground, the field had been shale, not very fertile farmland.
After the casket had been loaded on the crane, Guido, his derby jammed down on his head, escorted Aunt Bess and Debbie, followed by Gwen and me, as family, to a place at the head of the hole. Bible in hand, the minister was ushered to a place at the foot. He assumed a commanding posture in front of a gray stone, of the size and shape to fill the arch of a chapel window. Inscribed on its surface were the names and birth and death dates of generations of Stulls and their spouses and progeny. After family and the minister were in place, other mourners congregated along the sides of the coffin.
As Aunt Bess confronted the hole, I could see her gasp, then her shoulders danced a little jig. Competing with the shriek and protracted wailing of Debbie were the shouts and laughter of children on the playground, the fence of which was only yards from Oscar’s resting place. Although I’d parked directly behind the bumper of Sarah’s convertible and watched her get out of her car and start across the lumpy grass, I’d lost sight of her as we’d trekked toward the grave.
When the tail end of the mourners had taken their places, a silence came over the assembly, making the sounds coming from the playground seem all the louder. You might say at that solemn instant a selfishly fearful awe had paralyzed the vocal chords of the gathering, including even Debbie, who now was smothering sobs in a handkerchief. Aunt Bess’ shoulders had stopped jiggling. Suddenly someone coughed, almost surely a man. It was not merely a hm-hm clearing of the throat but a prolonged hacking, coming from ominously deep in the lungs. It was loud enough to compete with the cries and laughter coming through the wire fence separating the land of the living and the land of the dead.
Perhaps it was this memento mori that prodded the minister to clear his throat, take a step forward, and lay one hand on top of the coffin. After fumbling his Bible open, which I could see had a marker in it, with the other hand, he turned his head and cast a forbidding but ineffective glare in the direction of the playground. Finally he commenced reading. Straining to hear, I was able to make out occasional familiar phrases—“them which are asleep”… “rose again”…“shall rise first.” Letting his head drop, seemingly conceding he’d fought a losing battle with the children, who he wished would go anywhere else, but not “come unto
me,” he muttered, “Let us pray.” Reinforcing his defeat, he mumbled the prayer so inaudibly that only the final “Amen,” which put a seal on his funereal mission, could only possibly be heard even by those who were closest to him.
I suppose they had been standing behind the mourners, with their equipment set to go, waiting for the minister to abdicate in their favor. To my dismay, for I had felt certain that the ceremony graveside had run its dreary course, I heard, holding its own with the shrill voices of the children, a brass rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Since no such band of instruments was anywhere in sight, I concluded I was hearing another recording, at much greater volume than that at which the canned hymns had been played in the mortuary. To compete with the bursts of sound from the playground, whatever mechanism was projecting its sound had to be at full volume. Scanning in the general direction my ear told me the music was coming from, my eyes lit on what had to be a battery-powered machine and two small black speakers, one standing in the grass on each side of the pedestal of the Stull tombstone.
The strains of what would be “home of the brave,” if the national anthem were being sung, died into a silence that told me the playground had suddenly emptied of children. Instantly two uniformed Waves, as they had been called during World War II, the insignia on their upper right arm proclaiming they were petty officers, one black, one white, doubtlessly selected to declare the racial blindness of the military, emerged from the front of the gathering along one side of the grave. The black, exercising her authority by taking the lead at each juncture, bore a folded national ensign over her right forearm, which she held high to keep the sacred cloth from dragging on the ground. Given the bigotry I’d heard come from the Ancient Mariner’s lips, I confess to feeling some gratification that his country was sweeping aside the prejudice of the veteran it was honoring at his burial.
Marching to an unheard cadence, the two Waves halted graveside as if on command. Together they unfolded the flag. Carrying one end, the black Wave draped the cloth over her arm, which she held high as she marched to the head of the coffin. Carrying the other end in the same way, so that between them not a stitch of the ensign ever touched the ground, the white Wave draped her end over the foot. When they pulled it smooth, the flag neatly covered the casket. The precision with which the Waves carried out their mission bespoke the thoroughness of their discipline and suggested that despite their youthfulness they were old hands at their specialized function.
The black Wave marched to the now silent player, bent over, keeping her knees straight, and threw a switch on the device. The emptiness of sound as the national anthem had ended had come so suddenly that it had produced the aftereffect of a sonic boom. Searching the sky, I half-expected a squadron of fighter planes to come roaring in as they swooped just above the tops of the larger monuments. Or in lieu of air power, I wondered, might a crew of scantily clad cheerleaders, in the youthfulness and with the verve they must have had when they celebrated Oscar’s prowess and triumphs on his high school’s gridiron, diamond and court, come prancing and dancing across the grass between gravestones, waving their arms as they belted out, “Stull, Stull, Stull”?
What shattered the silence was a bugle playing taps. So sudden and imperative was the first blast of notes that I had to hold my right hand back from rendering a salute, either by snapping it up over my right eyebrow, thumb tucked under the palm, or pressing it flat against my heart. The instant the protracted final notes had died into another silence, the two Waves in lockstep, evidently obeying another unheard command, stripped the flag from the top of the coffin, neatly folded it, taking care again that not a shred be desecrated, and draped it over the forearm of the superior of the military detail. While the inferior in rank stood at attention facing the coffin, the Wave carrying the ensign high marched to the family end of the grave.
As she was extending it, lowering it from shoulder to breast so it was face-high to the widow of the hero who was receiving military honors in death, a figure came breaking through the ranks of those gathered on the far side of the coffin from where Aunt Bess had positioned herself. Glittering scarlet in the bright midafternoon sunlight, she was taking long steps, almost running, a daringly precarious feat given the roughness of the turf and her treacherously frail stiletto heels. The timing was perfect. At the precise instant the black Wave was about to lower the folded flag onto Bess’ outstretched arms, Sarah arrived at the family end of the coffin.
“Here,” she demanded, throwing out her arms, “I’ll take that for her.”
The straight-backed Wave snapped her head toward the woman in red, who had not been with the little family group and had come breaking in at a critical instant. Fixing a cold eye on Sarah, she hesitated.
“It’s perfectly okay,” Sarah went on, modulating her tone from demand to explanation. “She doesn’t sort of walk so well like and the grass’s so uneven and like I’d hate to have her fall carrying the flag. See, I’m her eldest daughter.”
The word eldest carried the day. Without replying or even moving a muscle in her military-conditioned face, the Wave surrendered the national ensign, then abruptly pivoted and went marching to the unsounded cadence back toward her sister-in-arms standing at attention beside the equipment they had brought.
Losing interest in the military who, without speaking a word, had executed their prescribed duty with a display of discipline and efficiency that would do the secretary of the navy and even the commander in chief of our armed forces proud, I fixed my eye on Aunt Bess, with her daughter Regan standing on one side of her and her daughter Goneril, with the American flag draped over her arm, on the other. Again Regan had gone into the half crouch that suggested she was about to spring. In fact, I noticed that her fingers were clawed, perhaps unconsciously, or atavistically.
Again Aunt Bess acted quickly, stretching out her bony arm in order to prevent physical contact between her two daughters. On a much smaller scale, and much more fragile in composition, Aunt Bess’ arm resembled the bar that confronts the front of a vehicle at a toll gate until the tariff has been paid. Aware that in this instance no toll was to be paid, I held my breath and squeezed Gwen’s hand. It felt limp as a shucked oyster, suggesting a dismaying helplessness. Just as an accelerating vehicle might easily go smashing through the inhibiting barrier, Regan could easily have brushed aside her mother’s frail little arm. I wondered how Goneril, hands fully engaged by the flag, would counterattack. Would she, heaven help us, allow our national emblem to fall to the ground? To my surprise and relief, Regan unclawed her fingers. Not a word or even a hiss issued from her mashed, bloodlessly pale lips. I found myself puzzled as to whether to ascribe her restraint to cowardice, prudence, respect for her country’s flag or for her living mother and dead father. Without wanting to, I found myself admiring Sarah’s daring, strategy and perfect timing.
Gwen broke the silent tableau and ended the threat of violence by throwing her arms around Aunt Bess’ neck, hugging and kissing her lip-sticked forehead. That took down the barrier and brought Debbie out of her crouch.
“You’re a dear soul and I love you,” I could just hear Gwen whispering in her aunt’s ear as gently she turned her away from the grave site and started her moving slowly back toward the limo that had brought her to the cemetery. Gwen’s use of the word soul, a term that is foreign to the thinking and absent from the usage of Aunt Bess’ niece and her infidel husband, was as graciously received as it was uttered. And her setting her aunt in motion induced Debbie to take her mother by the arm as escort. The most Gwen could give to Debbie was a “good-bye” nod and half-smile.
As Gwen and I ambled across graves, between tombstones, toward the Honda, Sarah pranced by with the flag now tucked in her armpit. A corner of it dragged on the grass. I could sense that Gwen’s refusal to acknowledge Goneril’s presence declared her conviction that it was possible for her cousin to exist without having any essence.
We watched Sara
h climb into her convertible, whiz by the hearse and stately limo in which her mother and sister were being carried away from their husband and father’s dead and buried body, miraculously without scraping the side of either vehicle, and streak off on the narrow dirt drive, leaving a trail of dust, like a comet ahead of its tail. When Gwen and I had settled into the Honda, neither of us uttered a word. I drove out of the cemetery with a respectfully meditative slowness.
“Well…?” Gwen finally asked as we turned onto the thoroughfare that would lead to the road that would deliver us to our home.
I gave her a sidelong smile and let out a little laugh.
“I knew it would dreadful, but I never imagined…” Breaking off for want of adequate language, she handed me an apology, then threw the ball back to me. “I’m really sorry I dragged you to it. But what do you think was the worst?”
“There’s no need to apologize, you know. It’s all in the family, as they say. What you’re asking me, I take it, is which of the three parts provided me the most entertainment.”
“That’s a bit perverse. But have it your way. What amused you the most?”
“The Navy damsels were impeccably military. Oscar certainly would have approved.”
“You know, I can’t imagine Aunt Bess getting the Bureau of Veterans’ Affairs involved. Or Debbie either. Are you suspecting what I am?”
“Yep. Sarah. And as well as they did, she outperformed them. I’m surprised she had the… I was going to say feelings or patriotism. Guess though, I’ll have to say guts. But what in God’s or our president’s name will she do with the flag?”