The Hearse Page 1

The Hearse’s Driver

by David

The hearse, tied to death like England to India, rolled through the city on its way to the cemetery. The atmosphere frosted the black shell of the hearse with crystalline snowflakes, and, as it drove, the car’s tires crunched and compacted ruts of snow. Black leather driving gloves gripped the wheel of the car, at ten and two, and the hearse’s driver—wearing a waist length coat and a leather cap with fur earmuffs—hummed Silent Night. When he came to “All is bright”, he began singing out loud: “. . . .All is bright, ’round yon vir-gin, mother and child. . . .” Then he lapsed back into humming. The buildings of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota, flashed by like colorless models of Gamla Stan, in Stockholm: a place that the driver had been once, on a Scandinavian vacation some ten years ago.

Between two buildings, in a grass parking lot with weeds, stood a crackerjack box-like fireworks store with walls as thin as dimes. It was preparing for the New Year, but was unopened, this early on a Sunday. Across the wide road—its breadth had space enough for angled parking and two lanes—stood a JC Penny’s with a magnetic sign advertising cut rates, now that Christmas had come and gone. The driver, to the tune of his own humming, was rolling his head like an orchestra conductor. He swung his hand up, his thumb and index finger touching: punctuation for each note. The sidewalks were empty, the shop windows were mostly dark.

Turning off the road, the driver passed a spiked, round wrought iron gate, and the automobile shifted from right to left, up and down like piano keys, as it negotiated the ruts of the cemetery drive. The overcast, snowy sky and the tombstone tundra lay before the driver, who was one of many in the funeral procession. At the procession’s head and tail were the police—their lights flashing, their sirens silent—accoutrements to the tradition of honoring the dead. The driver, who everyday observed the bereaved, nevertheless still viewed death as something more than professional, and he still found graveyards to be eerie places. Parking the car, the driver got out. He was near a small mound of fresh cold earth. Beyond that was the hole. He pulled down on the edges of his gloves, and watched his breath form a white crisp fog.

It was not often that the driver of the hearse met the family, but he had this time; caring folk, they were, odius with an essence that reeked of family. They had come in a big group, the father leading the way: short and wide, a pointy dark brown beard, glasses, a surgeon in the emergency room. Behind him, like ducks, were his wife (even shorter) and their brood of seven or eight children. The driver didn’t need to hear the deceased’s story to bet that the family was Catholic, but the father’s story took all the gambling out.

“You see,” the father had said just a half hour before, “This woman in this coffin—she was our oldest daughter. A lovely Spanish Catholic girl like us.”

The driver had waited, wondering at the decision to define a daughter that way. The Catholics had caught him loading the deceased into the rear of the hearse, his black gloves still on the silver handles.

“Anne used to make wooden casks for the offeratory wine—they have an orthodox way of doing things at St. Mary’s—and she was the woman who would put the barrels together: fixing staves to hoops, punching out tap-holes, and doing all the other stuff to make the barrels. Sometimes, she’d ask me if I’d help her. We had coffee on Wednesday nights—at our house, the whole family together—and once she said, ‘Come help me; it’s dull in that shop. And what with all the pliers and awls and saws and punches hanging about, the shop can be sort of frightening. Come by tomorrow, just for an hour.’

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