NEITHER ARVO NOR ANYONE
else in Portuguese Creek knew whether Martin would have wanted a modest local funeral or the ceremonious sort of event his fellow parliamentarians in Ottawa might have planned if they’d still regarded him as a colleague. But Martin’s friends could give him only the sort of funeral that felt both natural to them and faithful to their memories of Martin. This began with a decision not to consult with Ottawa or the local branch of Martin’s political party. The fact that no one from either the party headquarters or the local branch had written an appreciation for the local paper, or a brief letter to the editor, or even contacted Martin’s friends to ask about funeral plans, suggested that he had been pretty well forgotten by his former colleagues.
Arvo’s arrangement with Henderson’s funeral establishment allowed David Henderson to cremate the body according to legal requirements and then to drive up to Portuguese Creek and turn the ashes over to Arvo at his workshop. Nothing more. That was to be the end of officialdom’s role in the death of Martin Glass.
So far as Arvo was concerned, once he and the Cadillac hearse had delivered the cylinder of ashes to Martin’s house at the end of Stevenson Road, whatever else might happen was to be left to those friends and neighbours who chose to attend. They had known Martin best, and they had united to contribute a sizable number of the votes that had sent him to represent the entire valley in the national parliament.
Arvo had arranged for an item in the valley weekly to make it clear that anyone who remembered Martin with respect or affection was welcome to attend the modest event at Martin’s seaside home. Of course he knew that nothing would prevent the merely curious from following Henderson’s long, sleek, modern hearse down the main street of town, across the river bridge, and then north on the Old Highway as far as Portuguese Creek and Arvo’s workshop, so they might as well know they’d be welcome to follow Martin the rest of the way as well — down Stevenson Road to Martin’s house on the water’s edge.
Myrtle Birdsong hadn’t promised to attend. She hadn’t shown up the evening before, and hadn’t phoned this morning to say she was on her way. Of course she had not given him reason to expect her, but he’d hoped she might reconsider, in order to witness her father’s hearse once more in action.
While they waited for Henderson to deliver the urn, Bert Peterson and Herbie Brewer joined Arvo in his workshop where the hearse, gleaming from a fresh wash and a wax job, sat waiting for its return to active duty. Each of them wore a white dress shirt with the top
button undone, and had stuffed a rolled-up tie in a pocket just in case they were later made to feel that a tie was expected even at the beach. In the meantime they would put off for as long as possible the sensation of being strangled.
Herbie had stepped down off a coach-lines bus this morning, frowning hard. He’d come, he said, not just to attend the funeral but to claim the rest of his belongings. Once he learned that Lucy had returned to her chicken ranch rather than stay for the funeral, he agreed to spend the night at Peterson’s and catch the morning bus south. He made this sound like a big concession to Peterson.
Arvo had brought out three vinyl kitchen chairs so that he and Peterson and Herbie would not have to sit on overturned oil cans or an old
CIL
box while they waited. But Herbie chose to stand in the open doorway so he could be the first to witness the arrival of Martin’s urn.
“You hear anything from that city woman you looked up?” Peterson said. He kept his face turned away, as though he wasn’t sure this was a safe question to ask. “Since we got back, I mean.”
Arvo shrugged, to suggest indifference. “I thought she might want to see her old man’s hearse in action, but maybe not.”
“She should damn-well want to check out the man that rescued it and brought it to her too,” Peterson said. “She looked pleased enough to see you on her doorstep. If she shows up you make sure you take her inside your house. Once she gets a look at them shiny floors and perfect rooms she’ll beg you to let her stay — a house with its own perfect housekeeper of the male species.”
When Arvo growled and frowned and turned away to tidy the tools on his workbench, Peterson added: “You forget I was inside once? If any woman gets to see what I seen, you’ll be dragged down the aisle with a blue ribbon hanging from your neck. She’d think a
man who keeps a house that perfect would probably cook her meals and wash her hair and even cut her toenails for her. Don’t let Lucy inside or you’ll have her on your hands for good. She
hates
housework.”
“I’ll never try to steal Lucy from you,” Arvo said. “I’m pretty sure I can promise you that.”
“They’re here!” Herbie shouted.
Peterson and Arvo joined Herbie at the doorway to watch Henderson’s sleek hearse turn off the Highway and pull up in front of the shop. David Henderson got out from behind the wheel and went back to open the rear door and remove the urn. Apparently it had not travelled on the seat beside Henderson as you might have expected of something hardly larger than a milk carton, but had made the journey where a casket would have sat if there had been one.
“Here you go,” Henderson said, handing the cylinder to Arvo. “Martin Glass himself. Well, he’s not exactly ‘himself,’ but I take it this is what you’re waiting for.”
Then, before turning back to his hearse, he said he would stay here and take up the rear of the procession. “Having had my hand in this business, so to speak, I’d like to see ’er through to the end.”
Before crossing the highway to start down Stevenson Road, Arvo could see that a long column of cars had either followed Martin from town or joined the parade somewhere along the way — all waiting now alongside the pavement for him and the Cathedral hearse to take the lead for this final stage of the journey. Martin would be pleased to see that some trucks were pulling boats on their trailers. Being something of a fisherman himself, he’d always enjoyed seeing boats on the water. Because Martin’s place was on the water’s edge, some naturally assumed the funeral celebration would be an opportunity to sail, or to water ski, maybe even to put a line in the water for
an extra salmon to wrap in foil for the barbecue. Ed Forrester was fourth down the row, with his twenty-foot catamaran behind his truck. Mario Lopez’s
SUV
was pulling his brand new speedboat on its yellow trailer. And the Young family had a small rowboat in the bed of their pickup truck — a
GMC
from the fifties that Arvo had rescued from the bush out behind Woodsons’ sawmill.
Martin would be happy to see that people were planning to take advantage of the usually calm water in his protected bay. He’d kept a small boat himself, as well as a canoe for exploring the nearby coves and inlets up and down the coast. Occasionally he’d dropped a line in the water just to see if anything would bite, and invited friends to come down for a meal whenever he’d caught and baked a salmon of a decent size.
As soon as the Cathedral hearse started across the highway with Peterson’s Henry J behind it, drivers who’d stood talking on the roadside grass hurried back to their vehicles. Doors slammed shut all down the row. The first few cars and trucks began to move up, ready to follow down the narrow road to the beach.
For a while Arvo led the way alongside property where Cynthia and her husband had operated their drive-in movie theatre on weekends. The field was overgrown with scrub willows and alder whose summer foliage made it impossible to see what was left of the wooden frame behind the long-disappeared screen. Henry and Cynthia had talked him into driving down to see Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in
Magnificent Obsession
many decades ago. Also, much later,
Cannery Row
, which may have been one of the last movies before they closed down the business and let the bush grow up through the abandoned gravel and narrow strips of pavement.
Cynthia was standing outside her gate. When Arvo got close enough, she stuck out the thumb of one hand while lifting a leg of her white slacks to show him one slim calf and ankle.
Arvo stopped beside her. “That’s not a bad-looking ankle you’ve got on offer there, but I have to tell you I’ve got two of my own already. Is there something about it you wanted me to notice, or is it just that the Honda has let you down?”
She climbed in beside him to sit on his mother’s row of little Suomi trees. “I delivered a carload of flowers down to Martin’s place this morning and got myself stuck in the sand! I could kick myself. Had to walk home. I wasn’t looking forward to walking all the way back. Let’s go. I always wondered what it feels like to drive dead people around.”
Arvo imagined that not too many people spent time wondering about such things. “Quieter than teaching a classroom full of teens, I’d guess.”
“But not as much fun.” She hummed a moment, then added, “You know, Arvo, I miss them. The students, I mean. When I see one of them in town, or up in the Store, I feel a little sorry they had to grow up. I really enjoyed them when they were teens, though you might be surprised to hear that.”
“They might be a little surprised to hear that themselves. I imagine they’d also be a little shocked to see you showing off your naked ankle back there, hustling for a ride from the first man that came along.”
“There’s probably a few of them behind us — middle-aged by now, mostly overweight, all asking each other if that was really me climbing into the hearse and how come I wasn’t dead yet. If they’re shocked that I’m alive you can imagine what they’d think if they knew what I have up my sleeve.”
Arvo was not anxious to hear what she had up her sleeve, but of course he had little choice. And there was a chance he might find it entertaining
“You don’t plan to go back to the classroom.”
“Be serious. They wouldn’t let me anywhere near a classroom now, you know that. But I think I might have mentioned thinking about re-opening the drive-in.”
“In all that grown-back
forest
? I thought you would’ve come to your senses by now.”
“Bulldozers’ll make quick work of that. I could have the place cleaned out in a week. Paved over soon afterward.”
Arvo felt a little dizzy. It took some effort to shift his thoughts away from Martin — riding right behind him in a cylinder — to fully take in Cynthia’s plans. Had no one ever told her that most people over seventy took it easy?
Of course she would consider him a poor example.
Arvo had now and then stopped on his way home from visiting Peterson or Martin Glass to watch a few minutes of a movie from behind his steering wheel while parked on the side of the road — distracted by an urge to lip-read conversations happening on the screen.
From Here to Eternity
.
Giant
. According to Cynthia, cars had been crammed with high-school students for the James Dean movies. She’d neither confirmed nor denied a rumour claiming she’d handed out free passes to every student driving a car with more than four paying customers in it.
Cynthia’s concession booth had been dismantled years ago by vandals salvaging the lumber for their own purposes, leaving nothing but the concrete blocks the small building had rested upon. It was here, for several years, even while she was still teaching high-school English, that Cynthia had sold her home-brewed coffee, home-baked brownies, and home-made buttered popcorn on weekend evenings. She claimed not to be doing it for the money but to enjoy this convenient way of feeding her appetite for Hollywood movies at no cost to herself. She’d arranged to have a speaker installed in her booth “so
the customers could come back for more of my brownies without missing a word.” When her own students approached to load up on popcorn and drinks, she recognized the signals that told her when it was okay to be friendly and when it was wise to pretend she was blind to everything but their money. She’d admitted once that it nearly killed her not to warn some girls about the boys they’d come with.
Now she was planning to re-open?
“You haven’t noticed there
are
no drive-in movie theatres any more? There must be a reason for it.”
“Well, it’ll be a novelty!
Retro
! Isn’t that what they say? Of course it can’t be the same as it was. Maybe we’ll have to find a way to play
DVD
s on a gigantic TV screen.”
“You going to do everything yourself? You don’t have Henry to help you any more.”
“I
had
noticed this, thank you. Well, I was hoping to have a word with you about that. I just didn’t expect the topic to come up so soon.”
“You were the one who brought it up.”
“I got excited. I saw you coming down the road in this old hearse and found myself thinking a man who gets a kick out of bringing old cars back to life might like the idea of resurrecting an ancient projector.”
Arvo didn’t quite laugh. “If you go ahead with this, what you’ll want is someone handy with a computer.”
“Well ‘projector’ was just a metaphor — a synecdoche in fact. I meant to suggest the whole shebang! A concession stand would have to be built and wired to meet the latest standards. And I’d have to put out money for new equipment.”
After a few moments of silence, she suggested that once they had things up and running he might be convinced to donate a half-dozen
of the most hopeless car wrecks for a permanent back row — so people without cars could come on their bikes and still have a vehicle to watch from. “We could become famous as a drive-in theatre for people who have nothing to drive.”
“You could become famous as a drive-in theatre without an audience. We’ll have to talk about this again.”
“Well, it’s your fault I even thought of it,” she said. “Watching you get all those old car wrecks back on the road got me thinking.”
First she had imagined them going on a cruise. Now she wanted him to help her rebuild the drive-in theatre. Was she serious about either of these? What he needed was to come up with something himself that he could imagine agreeing to.
Once they’d passed beyond Peterson’s fields and barn and two-storey house flanked by a pair of flowering hawthorns, and then his back acres of second-growth fir, a long cleared field made it possible to see a wide expanse of the blue Strait and the mainland mountains beyond. Far out, a white ship moved almost imperceptibly north.