At the graveside service in place of a funeral that they are throwing for her grandfather: I am standing on the sprawling hill in the late June sunshine. Below us the ground rolls gradually down into the cool of a forest and then, beyond that, the slow sliding river which we cannot see. People are arriving, hugging, shaking hands. The dead unites us all now, although I barely know anyone here. Even the actual person who died. But the sky is blue and the summer has erupted across this land and it is as good a day as any, I suppose, to be remembered- formally- one last time.
The funeral home guy is younger than me. I know he’s the funeral home guy by the way he greets everyone under the canopy tent and by the way he fluffs and smoothes the velvety deep green covers that go over the folding chairs and cover them completely, making them look fancier than they are. The immediate family settle into these. Today, that’s the dead man’s adult children and his adult step-daughter and their partners if they have them. The step-daughter seems single, I notice. She is the only one of his three kids cut in on the will. She got his red Jeep. I don’t know what kind of Jeep though. I don’t even care.
The funeral home guy has a wedding ring on and it sparkles a little in the bits of sun that dapple his hand where it moves at times in and out of the shade. I wonder about this dude. I wonder if he likes seeing the bodies. I wonder if he ever does weird shit to them. Not like climbing up on top of them or anything crazy like that, but you know. Does he ever push his finger down into their eyeball and just press and press until it would almost seem that the Jello would pop? Or does he ever tap his silver instruments on their front teeth and sing a little strange song to them as he does? This is the moment you’ve been waaaaaaiting for……you know you’re succcccccch a bore….even now in death as you were back then, baby! What does the funeral home guy’s wife think of all this, I wonder. Is she a big believer in the Holy Spirit or does she not give a crap? I wonder if they ever go down together, into the freezer, to look at car accident people, to sip their evening drinks in the pale light of the cold, cold room and glare down at the shocking head wound on a young through-the-windshielder?
I don’t even think it’s against the law for them to do that, is it? I don’t think there are any laws about if funeral home families can have cocktails around the bodies in the basement. It’s too specific. There’s just not enough hours in the day for laws like that.
Overhead, I see some shady songbirds flitting around and I’m always tempted to think that maybe this is the dead returning to us to say hello. It’s a dumb generic notion. A cardinal on a bush. A yellow finch in a scrubby pine over by the hearse. It’s bullshit but I like to think about stuff like that. No harm, no foul, you know? These are small birds though and the dead man was a rather large person, although he shrunk considerably from the cancer this past year or so, so it does occur to me that him fitting himself entirely into a sparrow or a chickadee might not work. But then again, these are issues I’m not entirely competent about. Who is, really? No one knows. No one knows jack shit about what kind of bird you’re allowed to be when you go flying around over your own funeral. For the record I would choose to be a seagull that takes a lot of squirts, but that’s just me and like I said, I don’t know how any of this works.
Eventually things get started. It’s hot as balls too. Only a few people are able to get in on the shade of this canopy. The funeral home guy probably put it up while I was still home brushing my teeth. It was cooler then, I’d imagine, a soft dew and maybe a mist rising here off the river. Now though, it’s 10 am, full sun beating down, and the grass is dry and there’s a subtle groaning moving up from the Earth and into our dress shoes and our sneakers like some guys are wearing. It’s the planet making itself heard. It is uneasy in this smashing blaze coming off the sun. The ground is miserable. The people aren’t great.
Two young folks, a man and a woman, both in their 20s, are dressed in their Air Force blues. They move to position at the side of the tent and the man talks a bit. He says that they are there to honor the dead man’s military time. He did four years in peacetime, that much I know. He was stationed in Wisconsin. I don’t know if he ever went somewhere else. I hope he did. I mean, Wisconsin is OK and all, but come on. The duo perform a well-rehearsed routine with the American flag. It’s dramatic and impressive as they move their arms like robots and grip the flag like they mean it. And as they unfold it, the woman steps back with each bit of unfurling that happens. At some point her movements reveal a small section of the skin on her wrist.
It’s then that I see she has a tattoo there.
Immediately I think to myself one thought.
“She must like to party.”
This, of course, is a ridiculous notion on my behalf founded upon nothing but old cliches and stereotypes. Once, long ago, a woman with a visible Stones tongue on her rosy sun-peeled upper chest or a dodgy Bart Simpson on her overly muscular calf, were seen as outsiders. Riff-raff. Girls who might be wilder than the others. People who weren’t super great in school. Trouble, if nothing else. And one could- and would-assume, back then, in days gone by, that down at the tap room, around 11 on any summer Friday night, the lady with the Zoso tattoo on her notable right bicep was a lady who, almost certainly, liked to party. Me then, growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I remember the tail end of the old tattoo scene before the onslaught of this new one. Back then, the ink came directly from the lapping little waves of the same legendary pirate ships that had sailed on by centuries before. The swashbucklers had changed lanes by then, and the real roustabouts were no longer found upon the seas but rather in the VFWs and on the Sunday league softball teams, their prison ink homespun anchors and parrots over-colored on the forearm and smeared into the back of the hand. But despite the altered appearances, one thing could still be counted on.
Rum is fucking rum.
And those biddies liked to party.
Not anymore though. For better or for worse, depending on who you talk to, tattoos don’t mean anything anymore. School teachers have them. Cops are covered in them. And so are the people down at the bank. It’s all something very, very different. So when I announce to myself that the female Air Force cadet skillfully handling the flag in front of me must like to party simply because I note a little permanent cursive writing showing above her dress gloves, I immediately shoot that missile down with my own modern sense of things. I went there with my old times intact, but I blasted it away with my new progressive viewpoints.
I’m going to admit this to you right here right now though. I kind of hate it, this new change stuff. I want to connect lady tats with likes to party. I know it’s not necessarily always true and maybe even it’s wrong in some ways, but I like it. I like the old pizzeria women from when I was 12. The pizza makers’ girlfriends. Little skeletons on their arms. Cokey red noses, answering the hemorrhaging phones with their smoky cig voices. I miss wishing they were mine. Even if they would have eaten me alive.
The Air Force people finish the flag unfolding by folding it back up. Then the man takes the flag and presents it to the dead man’s bio daughter, Arle’s mom. It’s moving, this whole scene. Every soldier can have it too, I guess. You don’t even have to have fought in a war or been a hero or anything. If you were a soldier you can get this flag show when you’re dead.
I wonder if I could get a KISS Army flag when I die. I never served the country per se, but surely my years on the rock ’n’ roll front must count for something, no? Maybe not. People like war, or at least the potential for it. They don’t like peace and music and love and sharing and knowledge or any of that shit for celebrating formally at a death.
You taught a thousand second graders to spell and read?
Nicely done, but no.
No American flag for you.
You changed oil filters in Army trucks for four years in Nevada?
Hero.
Flag for you, bro.
I ponder this as I watch the flag being placed by the dead man’s ashes in a vase. How long had it been since he’d been in the service? 60 or 70 years? Jesus. That’s a long time removed. Just food for thought, I guess. Either way, Arle is weeping now and I get it, so I put my arm around her waist to show her I’m here. I don’t know if it helps at all/ I don’t even think she needs any help, actually. She is a grown-ass woman. She has her own tattoos, too. I don’t have any. What do all these things say about me?
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
