As he was, past the World War I monument and onto 22nd Avenue, headed down 7th Street. He could see the jumpy reflection of himself and the cart in the plate-glass windows of the old Kress Building, where the town boys boxed these days, building gutted and adorned in the center of the old floor with an elevated ring. He honked his claxon in front of the fire station, where the boys all flung an arm up from their lawn chairs and hailed.
Looming now in a sort of plantation palatial splendor and unavoidable, Grimes Funeral Home basked in the morning’s heat, its tall white columns like silent sentries, half a dozen large white rocking chairs on the veranda. He parked the Cushman at the curb and went on in. The air-conditioning quickly turned the sweaty parts of his shirt to coldpacks and Finus peeled it loose from his skin and jiggled it while he cooled.
He hated how funeral parlors went for opulence in the grand lowbrow middle-class fashion as if we all were shooting for such a parlor in heaven, but it served us right after the hymns about streets of gold. Here in Grimes’s old foyer the windows were either leaded and colored glass supposedly from Italy, as in the front door and side panels, or clear and wavy with antique imperfection, as in all the other windows, and when one stood in the hushed, sunlit rooms and looked outward through the warped panes, the view seemed appropriately distorted when one considered he was standing in the halfway ground, an earthly equivalent to limbo, the place where we stood between the worlds of the living and the dead. This idea, the situation, was appealing to Finus. If it weren’t for the pretentious furnishings, the Italian or Victorian fainting couch (a divan, he supposed, or maybe a chaise longue), the high-backed stuffed chairs done out in embroidered crimson silk, the dolorous presence of an ancient pump organ in the foyer complete with hymnbook open to “Come, Ye Disconsolate,” he would have thought Parnell’s place quite pleasant. But he couldn’t get past the ridiculous idea, reinforced by the luxurious Cadillac hearse, gleaming metal caskets with plush pillowy pink and blue linings, and the fat, florid, professionally mournful faces of Parnell’s two young assistants, stationed at the parlor doors like courtly eunuchs, that some poor truck farmer or frame carpenter who never felt comfortable in a suit his whole life should want to be trussed up, made up, displayed like a mannequin, and then paraded through town as if he’d been the third duke of Ellington or whatever. Ceremony was important, sure, but ceremony could be as simple as washing a body with cool rags and laying it out on a plank.
He’d thought Parnell’s place more interesting when his wife, Selena, was alive, her presence something like a silent screen tragedienne’s, intense and weird but it had seemed appropriate to the setting, at least gave it a little flavor in Finus’s opinion. Why shouldn’t the parlor of the dead be a weird place? Though the dead be among the living at all times, they are not in their bodies, which people paid such as Parnell to briefly preserve as a strange totem to their own finite forms in a way not so different, as far as Finus could see, from the way in which they preserved sported beasts on the walls or in museums or, in a more subtle sense, the way they kept the images of those they loved or thought interesting preserved on little pieces of photosensitive paper. And the thing about photos was that as truly as they recalled the way light struck and rebounded from the object of our bodies at the time the camera’s shutter blinked, it was still a lie. A piece of photosensitive paper was not a retina, was not attached to a brain, so the image was at best secondhand and all the immediacy of the image’s vitality and meaning to the viewer was lost, reincarnated as a kind of art. There was its value and its limitation.
Here now came the little footballish shape of Parnell Grimes, these days looking partially deflated with his advancing years, advancing slowly toward Finus in the warbling light of the room, arm and tiny mottled pinkish greeting hand outstretched. He was bald on top but for a little tuft of down at the front of his head that he kept oiled to a dull silver and pulled to one side instead of straight back like anyone with a smidgen of self-awareness would have done. Well I can’t criticize the bald, Finus said, running a hand through his own thick white hair and allowing himself a cool and calming moment of mortal smugness.
Parnell clasped Finus’s large hand in both his own and drew close, looking up sympathetically, as if he couldn’t break the habit.
— Finus. Good to see you. Come on back to the office and sit down.
Finus followed his little waddling shape out of the main parlor, casketless at the moment, past the other arched and stuccoed entrances to mournville where space awaited other dead, to Parnell’s modest but beautifully decorated walnut-and-oak-furnished office in the sunny corner room back of the house.
When they were seated, Parnell leaned back in his chair, put his little hands before him in an attitude of contemplation or prayer.
— Now what can I do for you today, Finus?
Finus said well he thought he’d get the official word on the cause of death for Midfield plus an update on the services, and Parnell gave Finus his official grim nod, cleared his throat and shuffled through a few papers on his desk and said, well, it appeared to be cardiac arrest as he’d suspected, though just between you and me Midfield did have a fairly high level of alcohol in his blood and the cause may just as well have been liver failure, at least to some degree.
— Say he’d probably been drinking for a while.
— Quite a while, I imagine.
— Been on a drunk.
Grim nod.
— And Birdie? Her heart, too, I’m sure.
Grim nod. -A lot of fluid around it, as expected.
They sat in silence. A clock ticked on Parnell’s wall and Finus glanced up to see his favorite object in this place, a cuckoo clock mounted in a little birdhouse. He remembered initially fearing to see what might pop out of there upon the hour, perhaps some little rattly skeleton or a little body tray to slide out as if from a morgue, the corpse sitting up to say Cuck-oo! After all a skull paperweight lay on papers at the rear of the bookshelf behind Parnell. Didn’t look real, though. Too white. He’d never asked. Oddly indiscreet, it seemed to him, for an undertaker.
He wasn’t ready to get on, yet, but couldn’t think of much to say as Parnell was an odd one, not like undertakers Finus knew who were generally average citizens, interested in this and that, if possessed of a light-switch activation for maudlin gravity. Parnell and Selena had never had children, never went to a sports event, attended only the sermons at church and never Sunday school or Wednesday suppers, and never belonged to a weekend supper club. People said they’d often driven over to Jackson or up to Birmingham on weekends, to see movies and plays and so on, the occasional symphony concert. He supposed they were cultured, Parnell had that dignified air, and Selena, you’d have thought her an heiress if you hadn’t known she was just a postman’s daughter from Mercury, Mississippi, and married to a local undertaker there. The way she always had one of Parnell’s eunuchs drive her here and there in Parnell’s Lincoln while she sat in the backseat to one side, staring ahead or reading a book, and was not going to the grocery store or the drugstore but to get her hair done or for a manicure or out into the country, as it was said every now and then one of the eunuchs would drive her to a little spot out at the old springs where she would swim alone for half an hour, dry off and then come back, her hair in a white towel, herself in a thick white robe.