Keith Minnion - Island Funeral

Story & Design
Copyright 2011 by Keith Minnion

Cover Illustration
Copyright 2011 by Steven Gilberts

This publication is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblence to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

FIRST EDITION

Cemetery Dance Publications
132-B Industry Lane
Unit 7
Forest Hill, MD 21050

www.cemeterydance.com

KEITH MINNION

CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS

Baltimore
2011

Thank you

Steve Gilberts
Nanci Kalanta
Andrew Monge
Norman Prentiss

Sarah whispered, "I want to be buried at home. In the family plot. On the mainland."

"...What?" I shook my head, blinking away sleep. "What did you say?"

On the morning of our honeymoon, Sarah was talking about dying, graveyards? "Promise me you'll do that, Tim," she whispered, just a ghost beside me in the blue dawn shadows.

"But honey --- "

She reached over and held my face in her hands. "Promise me

Tim."

"Since when do we talk about something like this?"

"Since never. That's why it's so important. Promise me Tim."

"Okay, sure." I kissed her, and it was only then that I felt the wetness on her cheeks, and knew she had been crying. "Hey, it's okay...really. I promise...."

Promises made.

Promises kept.

Promises broken.

Four years later, following the hearse that was carrying my Sarah home, the memory of that newlywed morning conversation played over and over in my head. "Promise me Tim.... Promise me...."

In that long, solitary drive up the Maine coast from the Portland airport to Arthur's house, I tried vainly to keep the grey and silver hearse in sight. I was fighting tourist traffic, sun glare and memories in equal measure. The memories were four years old: the first trip Sarah and I had made after our elopement to meet Arthur, Sarah's grandfather, her last living relative. We had passed countless kitchy antique stores, stopping at most of them, or so it seemed, looking for something to give Arthur, a peace offering for the elopement. Now those same stores just flashed by, as blurred as my recollections...something about boards...and whale-shaped hat-racks....

Rounding the last turn off the highway, emerging through a final stand of gnarly pines edging an ocean of ochre grass that swept in a single, inexorable wave to the black and grey rocks, to the real ocean, I slowed the rental car.

Large, weathered, unpainted clapboard farmhouse, framed against a chalky blue sky, its mantle of autumn fields folded carefully about it, and the sheltered cove beyond...the only thing missing was the cripple in the pink dress.

I continued up the road to the house.

Sarah's grandfather emerged from its shadows even before I parked. Arthur Hubbard, quintessential Down Easter patriarch, tall and lean, with a defiant shock of white hair above a handsome stone cliff of a face. Still scared the hell out of me, as usual.

Rather than coming around, he opened Sarah's door and reached across her empty seat to shake my hand. The cold air filled the car, and his rough, callused hand was like ice. "Tim," he said.

"Arthur."

"Glad you made it."

"I'm glad to be here."

His grasp was solid, lingering. Everything was in it: his daughter was dead, but no one was to blame; no one did anything wrong; I had done nothing wrong. Hell, she died too young from ovarian cancer, in a coma at the end, and didn't even feel it because dying in a coma didn't hurt ; that's what all the doctors had said, hadn't they? It was just changing one dream for another, from a dream that lasted moments to one that lasted an eternity.

That wasn't my fault, was it?

Yeah, right. Tell that to the old man, the very last Hubbard now, leaning across the cheap front seat of your rental Chevy, holding your hand like he never wants to let it go.

I finally broke the grasp. "I was following on the highway but I lost sight of --- "

"Don't worry. Agnes Walker at the funeral home called already. Sarey's here. She's safe. She's home." Arthur stood back, and looked into the back seat. "Where are your bags? Trunk?"

I pulled the trunk release, "I'll give you a hand."

Everything inside the huge old farmhouse was exactly as I had remembered it from our few previous holiday visits: spartan, vast expanses of creamy plaster, dark oak casements and moldings, and hard, spindled furniture as old and worn and solid as the house. There was nothing extraneous; everything was in its place.

Arthur put the bags he carried by the bottom step of the stairs in the central hall, then took my coat and hung it up on the only piece that didn't fit: the wrought iron hat-rack in the shape of a sperm whale, the one Sarah had bought four years ago, on our first trip north to meet her grandfather, her only surviving relative. Seeing that sperm-whale coat rack stopped me cold in Arthur's entry hall, and the memory it raised washed through me again, just as it had on the road not a half hour before....

We had decided to skip the big highway and take old Route 1, where the clear Maine summer sunshine and the cold Atlantic surf both shattered like crystal against the granite shoreline: "Stop here!" Sarah pointing across the steering wheel, "Here, quick, before we pass it!"

I looked left, my foot slipping off the gas. "Right here?"

"Quickly, Tim!"

Gravel sprayed into the cowslips beside the road as I brought the car abruptly around. We bounced off the pavement and into a cinder parking lot, stopping before a faded Victorian farmhouse that had been converted (protesting all the way, by the looks of it) into a typical Down East tourist-trap antique shop.

"Bellough's Antiques & Curios / Used Furniture & Tools" the painted sign said, grey on pink, with curlicues.

I turned the car off and set the brake. The engine ticked, and the cinder dust settled.

Staring through the windshield, Sarah said reverently, "I've always wanted to stop here."

I thumbed the buttons that lowered the windows. A hot July breeze, full of salt and pinesap and truck diesel, swirled through the car. Maine. I said, "We must have passed a hundred places like this since Portland. What's so special about this one?"

She rested her cheek on my shoulder. "Every summer, when Grandad would drive Grandmom and me down to Boston to shop and tour the Constitution one more damn time, I would always beg him to stop here so I could look at the dollhouse in the front window, and every time Grandmom would say something like, 'Places like this are for the summer people, Sarey. You're not summer people; you're regular folk.'"