The Hearse's Driver

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“Mary, my wife, used to go.  I hardly ever went to the shop though; I was always at the hospital or at home with Mary and the kids.  Well, Anne took some time out from the shop; I don’t know if it was too dull or scary or what.  She went on a mission last year to a pueblo village in Arizona, caught a pulmonary infection, and came home early.  Ever since then, Mary has been sitting with her.  The other doctors weren’t quite sure what the infection really was, not until a couple of weeks ago; it was too late by then.  She had been living in a hospice for two weeks by that time.  Every week though, while Anne was sick, Mary would either sit with her or make hogsheads for the church.  Now that Anne’s dead, I thought. . . .  I thought. . . .  I don’t know what I thought.”

The driver had nodded his head, taken his hands off the silver handles, and patted him on the shoulder.  He had stood in front of the Catholic family, wondering whether the Catholic with the pulmonary infection went to heaven or insentient sleep.  Shortly after that, the undertaker had come out, and he had beckoned to the family, and they had gone. 

Now the pallbearers came to get the casket, their feet crunching the snow.  They were six men, of different sizes, all of them white.  Five of them wore black suits, and only one of them, the odd duck, wore anything different.  He was wearing a sky blue colored suit, with a white dress shirt underneath, and blue pants to match.  The man had short blond hair, which was receding at the forehead’s corners.  His mustache was yellow too, and the hair dribbled over his lip, so that the driver had to hear his voice clearly to understand what the man was saying, and he couldn’t pay any attention at all to the way the lips moved. 

Perhaps there were forty other people milling about beyond the driver and pallbearers; these people were covered in furs and thick coats, and many of them wore hats, like the driver’s, with muffs to protect their ears from the midwinter temperatures.  The police escort was driving away, their lights off.  The driver suddenly felt inside himself a gay hope like a beach ball on gentle ocean waves, a hope that the dead woman really had found her Christian heaven.  He could imagine her actions clearly, just from the short biography her father gave.  The driver considered her dedication to work, her piety, the way that the girl must have searched for Biblical truths and applied those truths to her life when she was in ordinary places, like the grocery store, searching for pickles or handling the carrots, the onions, sacking the tomatoes.  As the driver rolled the coffin from the maw of the hearse, he ran his fingers over the slick teak.  He could feel through the gloves the fine grain and the frictionless surface which was smoother than silk. 

The pallbearers stood three on each side of the coffin, and when the coffin was rolled from the hearse, they picked it up and took it away.  The driver closed the doors of the hearse with the finality of finishing a long, tasteful novel, and he looked at the backs of pallbearers.  The driver realized that the man in the blue suit looked like a sad clown, not at all like a fashionable statement or a thing to be replicated.  The blue suited man walked with the same somber stride as his fellows, but the driver sensed that the man had no sense of purpose or meaning, and that the blue suited man was always scraping against the world.  The driver let his eyes follow the man, and the buoyant hope swelled again in his chest, two match strikes in the open night.

That night the driver sat at home, typing a poem about the blonde in the blue suit, and drinking a glass of ice water.  The heater hummed in the background, a sort of high whine, and the driver could hear his neighbors’ TV set through the thin walls.  The driver was trying to incorporate curry into his poem, because that scent had permeated the carpeted stairwell on his walk upstairs.  The scent came, no doubt, from the Indian family who lived at the far end of the hallway.  They always kept their door closed, and the driver suspected they had two families living there—he had seen at least ten or eleven different faces, plus a couple of infants.  The driver stood up, stuck on his writing, and meandered to the small coffee table in the middle of his living room.  There was a statement from the bank and a receipt for a contribution to his Roth IRA; the driver, single and gainfully employed, was both in the red and better off than most South Dakotans in his apartment complex.  He picked up the receipt and glanced at it.  A knock on his door distracted him, and he walked to the peephole and looked through.

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