Shadows Have Gone (12 page)

Justin picked up Miz Marson’s body again and carried her down to the living room, where they had set the coffin up on a pair of sawhorses covered in a tablecloth. The tablecloth made her smile a little, because she imagined Kaden insisting it was a necessary nicety and Justin being bewildered but willing.

Carly was impressed with the care they’d taken on the coffin itself. It was smooth, sanded, made of the unvarnished pine boards Justin had in his woodshop. The raw edges were covered with molding. They had taken care to make it look nice, and Carly was touched by it.

Kaden opened the lid, and Carly stared down at the bare wood interior.

“We can’t lay her in there on the bare wood.” She took a blanket from the back of the sofa and shook it out. It turned out to be a quilt, gently worn and faded, but an obviously homemade piece that had probably meant a lot to Miz Marson. She folded it to the proper size and laid it inside before Justin put the body into the coffin.

A bolt of inspiration came to Carly, and she went back upstairs to Miz Marson’s bedroom. From the closet, she took one of the seersucker jackets that belonged to Miz Marson’s husband.

She collected the photo from the dresser and glanced around the room one last time, her eyes lingering on the glass of unfinished water and the open novel. Carly closed the door behind her with a firm click and turned the old-fashioned metal key in the lock.

Downstairs again, Carly lifted Miz Marson’s head and slipped the folded jacket beneath as a pillow for her. She tucked the photograph in beside her and tugged the blanket up to conceal it. Carly carefully arranged Miz Marson’s skirt and folded her hands over her abdomen. Justin replaced the coins over her eyes.

It was done. Carly stepped away with a long, slow breath.

“Should we have the service with an open coffin?” Mindy asked. “As private as she was . . .”

Carly considered. “I think we should leave it open. She’s gone. As you said to Kaden, funerals are for the living, and some may need to see her for closure.”

Mindy busied herself arranging the chairs Veronica had collected after Kaden and Justin carried out the sofa and anything moveable from Miz Marson’s living room. There was still only room for about ten chairs, and throughout afternoon and the evening, those chairs stayed full as everyone in Colby came to pay their respects. People stopped by as time allowed, and a few even offered to let Carly go home and sleep for a few hours while they took her place, but she didn’t want to rest until it was all done. A few of their neighbors gave her abashed looks as they drew Justin out in the hall to whisper urgently about some issue they needed advice and guidance on, but she wasn’t bothered by it. Life had to go on, after all, and so did the work they all had to do to sustain it.

The room filled with flowers the townspeople brought, hardy perennial breeds that grew wild. They were placed in vases retrieved from the back of cupboards and Mason jars. Carly remembered Miz Marson telling her about the uses of each of the blooms, for salves, medicines, even flavorings. Miz Marson’s mother used to make violet jelly, she recalled as she touched a blossom.

They set up candles as it got darker. Those were becoming scarcer now, but this was a special occasion if they ever had one. As the hours passed, and the visitors became fewer, Carly only kept a few lit.

Sam got up from the corner and came to lay his head on her leg. He let out a long sigh, his amber eyes gleaming in the candle light.

“I’m okay,” she said. She stroked her thumb along one of his ears. “I’m okay.”

He snorted softly through his nose, and she could imagine him thinking,
No you’re not. I know when you’re lying
.

“I’ll be okay.” Carly gave a little sigh. Maybe that was a lie, too.

Dagny slept against Justin’s chest, her hand gripping the neck of his T-shirt. Part of Carly insisted a wake was no place for a baby, but it seemed harsher to separate Dagny from her family. The poor baby had experienced a few unsettling few weeks, first with her mother’s illness, then with them being gone for the battle, and now this. Dagny couldn’t understand what was going on, but she could tell her parents were upset. And they had no way of soothing her when they were unsettled themselves. Let her be with them and take what comfort she could from their presence.

Pearl and Stan had dug the grave that afternoon, after discovering the proper place from Veronica, who had piped up during their discussion of where Miz Marson should be buried.

“There’s a bunch of Marsons buried in Pleasant Acres.”

“What? Where’s that?”

“It’s outside of town. You know where that gas station is? It’s down that road—”

“Veronica!” Stacy’s eyes had widened. “I told you about roaming outside of town. You could be—”

“I’m careful,” Veronica had said.

“Why were you in the cemetery?”

Veronica shrugged. “I like it there. There are really old graves, and the stones are really cool. I dunno. I like reading them and imagining what the people were like. I found the Marsons there. Maybe we should bury Old Miz Marson with them. I mean, they gotta be her family, right?”

Pearl had made the decision of where to place the grave itself. She’d read the stones, and there were two men with the last name of Marson, both aged in their forties, who had died in the 1970s. Without digging into Miz Marson’s things upstairs, which Carly flatly refused to do, they could not be certain which of them was Miz Marson’s husband. Veronica had the idea of looking in an old phone book to see if they could find where each man had lived, and they did discover a shelf of old phone books in the courthouse but none dating back to the seventies. The rest of the courthouse records from that far back had been put on microfilm years ago.

Pearl finally decided to cut the Gordian Knot and dug the grave horizontally at the feet of both men, so they’d know she was beside her husband, whichever man that had been.

Carly thought that was the right choice. After all, the days of neat, orderly cemeteries were probably gone, too.

“We’ll have the funeral graveside,” Justin said. “And Stan is going to make her a stone, but Carly, what do we put on it? No one knows her first name.”

He was right. She shook her head. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She’d always just called her Miz Marson and never really thought about what her first name was. It was strange, but it had never seemed like an important detail.

“Carly, maybe you could look through Miz Marson’s papers. You know how older people are. They save everything. She saved his clothes . . . she probably saved their records, too.”

Carly shook her head. “I don’t think so, Justin. I know it’s silly, but I feel like I ought to preserve her privacy. If she wanted us to know, she would have told us. Just bury her with them. And let her keep the name she chose to go by. That would make her happy.”

He nodded. “All right.”

“How’s he doing it?” Carly was curious.

“He’s using one of the flat stones that used to be the steps of the church. We hooked a rotary tool with a grinder bit to the generator, and he can use it to inscribe a name into the stone. It’ll be simple, nothing fancy.”

“Just the way she would have liked it.”

They held the funeral shortly after sunset on the day after the wake, in the cool of the evening and at the end of the work day. The town gathered around the grave in a wide circle, most of them dressed in their Sunday clothes. Many of them were crying, including the Reverend, who had to pause a few times until he was able to get his voice to stop shaking as he spoke.

The Reverend spoke of how much Miz Marson had meant to the town, but the words did not come close to expressing how much she had meant to Carly.

“
And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow . . .
”

Yes, they had all walked through that valley. And it felt like more shadows kept coming.

They lowered the coffin using ropes, straining to lower it slow and level. They pulled the ropes away after it came to rest on the bottom of the grave, and Mindy cast in the flowers that had been brought to her funeral, blanketing the wood top of the coffin. The earth looked so raw next to the smooth, sanded boards. Carly thought of the vaults that used to enclose coffins before they were interred, separating the person from the earth and furthering the illusion of eternal preservation.

The Reverend nodded to Carly, and she picked up a handful of earth to sprinkle into the grave. She stepped back and gazed down at the crumbles of soil that stuck to her palm. She remembered the funerals of Before where sometimes a tiny silver scoop was passed around to the mourners for this task. No, let them do it with their bare hands. It felt more connected this way. She saw Mindy close her eyes, as if she were saying a prayer or making a wish, and then blow the earth off her palm into the grave.

Justin stepped forward with his shovel, but Stan took it from his hand. Justin nodded and stepped back as Stan dug the point of it into the loosened earth. Pearl helped him. The crowd began to filter away, but Carly remained to see it through. She wished they’d thought to bring a third shovel.

They set the stone in place when the grave was half full, packing the earth around the base, which was set several feet into the ground to keep it in place. It was a simple white slab, unadorned except for the name ground into it with angle cuts.

OLD MIZ MARSON

Carly thought it was perfect.

They finished mounding up the earth over the grave. Pearl and Stan lowered their shovels. Carly glanced up at her and saw Pearl rub the back of her wrist over her sweaty forehead. Her skin had a dark pink undertone from working too long in the sun earlier that afternoon.

“You should have been wearing a hat,” Carly said.

Pearl smiled. “Miz Marson would be pleased her nagging is going to continue.”

And so, when they left the grave site, they were sad and sore-hearted at the loss of their friend but smiling at her memory, which Carly thought was probably the best kind of eulogy Miz Marson could have had.

“
I will always love you
!” Justin sang, tossing his head back to howl out the extended note.

“Oh God, stop . . . please . . . stop!” Carly gasped between laughs. She was doubled over and had to clutch hard at the branches she was carrying in order not to drop the armload of wood.

“What I lack in vocal ability, I make up for with enthusiasm,” Justin said.

“No, no you don’t.” Carly put the pile of wood down by the fire ring Justin had built and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. “No one can be that off-key, even intentionally.”

Justin grinned. “Man of many talents, I am. Anyway, I have a present for you. I found it at that gas station gift shop.”

“What is it?”

“Something very special.” He stood before her with solemn gravity, his hands behind his back.
“Close your eyes.”

She did. She heard a rustle. “What is it? Come on! I’m dying here!”

“Open.”

His hands were full of plastic.

“Bubble wrap!” Carly squealed with delight. “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

He laughed. They sat down by the fire, side by side in their chair and both took a corner to begin the pleasurable task of popping it. Carly tugged, insisting he was hogging too much of it, and they began a race to pop more, laughing until it was finished. Carly popped the last bubble with ceremonial finality.

“Hard to believe stuff like this won’t exist anymore in a few years. That may have been the last sheet of bubble wrap in this part of Canada.” Justin wadded up the used sheet and put it with the rest of their trash.

Her smile fell.

“Ah fuck, Carly, I didn’t mean to . . . shit.”

“It’s okay.” Carly picked up a stick of the wood she’d collected and tossed it into the fire. Sparks flew up into the twilight sky. “It’s just something that I’m . . . I’m still trying to get used to.”

“I know.”

“Is it all gone? Forever? I mean, at least as far as we’re concerned? Will we ever see electricity again in our lifetime? A working telephone?”

Justin added some more wood before he brought over the unfortunate rabbit that had darted across their path that evening and had been brought down by one shot from his pistol. Sam had contributed a squirrel, and now he came over to lie down beside Justin, eagerly awaiting his share after Justin finished skinning it.