 Mourning
the Departed
L. Annette Binder
2nd Place Prizewinner
Filipina ladies made the best funeral dishes. Sausages
and beef with bananas and garlicky noodles, and once he
went to a funeral where they cooked a pig up whole and
people stood around and fought for the cracklings. The
German widows did a nice job, too, with all their butter
cakes. His choice today was limited, though. Mexican and
Korean, and he wasn’t going to eat that spicy Korean
food again. He’d gone once to a funeral at their Baptist
church up on Academy, and all they had was fishy balls
and little silver fish that still had their heads. He
was sick afterwards for days, and he’d go to his own
funeral before another Korean one, that much was
certain.
He stood by the buffet and plucked tamales from the pot
with a dented pair of tongs. It was a teenager named
Marco who had died. The driver was drunk probably when
he hit the boy. It happened at three in the afternoon
right by the Citadel mall, and he kept on going and
didn’t stop and all the police were searching for his
truck. The young ones were the hardest. They were
students, some of them, or newlyweds. They left babies
behind and pretty wives who swayed beside the coffin. It
was easier with the vets from his Korean War group. They
were dropping every other week now, and people were
sorry but they weren’t surprised. He looked around the
room, at the high schoolers in their dress shirts and
the parents who couldn’t be forty yet judging from their
faces. All those funerals he’d gone to, for kids and old
soldiers and mothers who died too young, and those
grieving relatives who filled their plates but didn’t
eat. He took it all in. He swallowed their sorrows
whole, and sometimes he tried to cry but the tears
didn’t come.
He found a chair in the back of the hall. They’d set up
card tables near the front, and that’s where the family
sat and the mother was weeping again and the other
ladies gathered around her to rub her shoulders and
stroke her curly hair. They weren’t at the funeral hall
this time and there’d be no graveside ceremony either,
not with the snow still coming down and the ground
harder than marble. They’d need jack hammers to break
through. He balanced a paper plate across his knee, and
another lady sat down beside him and fumbled in her
purse. She pulled out a wrinkled Kleenex. She looked at
him while she blew her nose. Loud as a trumpet the way
she sounded. She eyed him like a bill collector, and for
a moment he wanted to stand and leave.
“It’s a shame,” he said. He shifted in his chair. “Not
even eighteen and he’s gone.”
“I was his teacher,” she said. “Three years I taught him
piano.” She set her purse down.
He looked at her fingers. They were long as a surgeon’s,
but the knuckles were already beginning to show and
they’d be knobby before she was old. They’d be crooked
like his mother’s were. That’s why she’d worn gloves
every day, even in summer time. Thin white cotton ones
with lace around the top, and he didn’t go to her
funeral, but his sister told him that’s how she was
buried, too. In her prettiest summer pair. “It’s a
shame,” he said again.
“I taught him on the day he died.” She pulled another
tissue from her pack. “I was running late. Three years
and I was always on time and that Tuesday I was late.”
“Let’s hope they find the driver.” He poked around the
tamale and found a stringy piece of pork.
“If I’d been on time that day, he’d be here still. He’d
be home with his mother.”
“That’s not how things work,” he said. “If his time was
up then it was up for sure, and it didn’t matter when
your lesson ended.” The car would have found its way to
him, he wanted to say. If not that one then another one
and the ending would have been just the same.
She looked at him, but kindly this time, and her eyes
were pale as his Evelyn’s. “You look familiar. Are you a
teacher from the school?”
“I’m retired,” he said. “On Thursdays I volunteer at the
DAV.”
“I have a memory for faces.” She tilted her head a
little and squinted. “I remember yours.”
“You might have seen me at Safeway,” he said. “Every
Wednesday I go for the coupons.” He looked at his plate
and not at her. It was time to move to another chair.
Time to leave and soak his feet because they were
beginning to burn again. Another half hour and he’d be
limping to his car, but he stayed where he was because
he wanted to hear her voice some more. She was a music
teacher, and he wanted her to sing.
She looked over his shoulder at the streamers and
balloons that hung from the ceiling tiles. “It’s strange
having balloons at a funeral.”
“Maybe that’s how they do it down in Mexico. Maybe they
like it festive,” he said. “I went to this funeral once
where they had sparklers and firecrackers and a bar with
champagne.”
He stopped then, and his cheeks went hot. It wasn’t
right to talk about his hobby, how he went to funerals
instead of visiting Evelyn, who lay alone in a private
room. Just last year she’d stopped recognizing him and
she loved another man in the unit anyway, a retired
policeman who still had all his hair and he was as
forgetful as she was, God help him. They were perfect
together how they sat in their wheelchairs and held
hands over the lunch table. Those pale eyes she had were
clear again, and she laughed at all the old policeman’s
jokes. It was easier going to funerals than visiting
her, than reading paperback books or calling his sons,
who didn’t want to hear from him and they were never
home anyway. He went to funerals and comforted the
mourners and ate their food, and when he came home the
tightness was gone from his chest. He was contented
again, and he sat in his kitchen and soaked his feet in
Epsom salts to keep the sting away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like you’ve lost a lot
of friends.”
Even his ears were burning now. “I’ll be eighty next
March.” He looked at the window, and the wind was
blowing flakes sideways against the glass. It was cold
as Korea outside but not as damp. All those nights along
the reservoir and the sky was bright with flares, all
light and no warmth, and almost sixty years later his
legs were still wrecked from the cold and from those
shoe pacs that had frozen and torn away his skin. “We’re
dropping like leaves.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she said. “But look at Marco.
There are no guarantees not even for the young.”
He looked at her hands again, at her ring finger. She
wasn’t wearing any band, and he looked at her face and
that’s when he saw the two hammered bands on a chain
around her neck. He straightened up in his chair. He
drew his shoulders back. “Are you married?” He asked the
question without meaning to. He was watching those two
yellow rings, and he needed to know.
“My husband died,” she said. “It’s been four years.” She
reached for the bands and clasped her hand around them.
She’d changed her hair since the funeral, he could see
it now. She’d let it go to gray and her face was thinner
and not as round, but even from the back of the funeral
home he’d seen those eyes and he remembered them still.
He felt a little queasy. His stomach rumbled, and he
regretted eating the pork and especially those greasy
beans. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She tilted her head again and looked at him, more
closely this time. “What about you,” she wanted to know.
“I bet you’re a grandpa.”
He nodded. “Two sons and four grandsons I never see.
They’re out in Wisconsin and too busy to visit.”
“Well maybe you should visit them.” She was
smiling a little now. “If those folks at the DAV will
cut you loose for a Thursday or two.” She got up and
straightened out her skirt, brushing it with her palms.
She went to the mother and crouched beside her chair.
She stayed there for a long while and the mother began
to rock again, but without sobbing this time or making
any sound. The teacher stood back up. She set her hand
on her hip and stared at him.
He needed to stop with the obituaries. Start up his
trains again or the radio Evelyn had bought him years
before. His antenna was still up though old Schneider
next door fussed about how it took away his mountain
view. I don’t want to see wires and metal, he’d
say, I just want to see my Pikes Peak. They
stopped talking after that and he let the weeds grow in
the back alley just to spite Schneider and his wife, the
chickweed in the spring and the carpetweed and curly
dock in the summertime, and all the sprays and
fertilizer they used couldn’t stop the spread.
She came back to him, carrying two cups of punch. “Just
look how it’s coming down,” she said. “No wonder people
get sad this time of year. They need those special lamps
to remind them there’s a sun.”
“Nothing wrong with the cold.” He took a cup from her.
“So long as you’ve got the right clothes for it.” His
feet were starting to tingle now. He couldn’t feel his
toes.
“I went to India once,” she said. “Everything was
brighter there. The sky and the clothes and even the
food. Three weeks and I didn’t see any gray.”
“I’ve been to Korea. That was enough for me.”
“My husband liked to travel. Every year we took a trip.”
He nodded. He remembered all those slides she’d had at
the service, from India and Egypt, too, and even
Vietnam. They were drinking from coconuts and swimming
on beaches where soldiers had died thirty years before,
and the water looked beautiful, he had to agree. It was
blue as Evelyn’s eyes.
“Even the funerals are bright there. The ladies wear
colors and not black.” She drank from her cup. “And
there are these mourners that the family hires.
Strangers who come to pay their last respects.” She
smiled at him, and he was certain that she knew.
“I’d better be going,” he said. “I’m hobbling already.”
He was distracted when he said good-bye, and he took the
wrong way home. He took Academy which he never did
because he didn’t like the traffic and the lights
weren’t synchronized right. He was home already before
he realized he’d never learned her name.
He filled his soaking tub right away. He poured the
salts in and sat on his chair, and after a while the
numbness turned to burning just like it did the first
time he froze his feet. He looked at the phone and the
curtains Evelyn had sewn years before for the narrow
window above the kitchen sink. It’s no work doing the
dishes when I can see the mountains, she always
said. Those millionaires in Kissing Camels don’t have
a better view. His sons were probably home already
and watching their evening shows, and Evelyn was
laughing with her policeman in the nursing home, and
somewhere in the city the music teacher was thinking of
India where it didn’t snow and the sky was never gray.
Slowly, slowly the feeling came back to his feet. The
burning became a tingling, and he could move them now in
the water. He reached for his towel. He reached across
the table and saw his reflection in the dark window
glass, and he cried.
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