The staked Goat

He said something, and she nodded. Then he walked graduation step to the slim podium next to Al’s coffin at the front of the room.
    He spoke for perhaps four minutes. Al’s birth, schooling, military service. Meeting Martha, marriage, life in Pittsburgh. No mention of work, means of death, or thinness of crowd. Acknowledged each in the audience by first name, correctly assigning us to one or another part of his or Martha’s life. Then a pause, then a moment of silence for Al. I recalled Beth’s hour-long high mass and eulogy. Religion be damned, tradition be damned, when my time comes, let there be a quiet, sincere professional like the elder Cribbs. To recount briefly and acknowledge accurately. No incense, no ritual, no organ music.
    Cribbs asked us to stand. We did so. Martha was seated immediately in front of me. Her shoulders rose and fell a bit more frequently than normal breathing would require, but no sound, no tears.
    Cribbs gestured toward Al. Larry, Dale, the younger Cribbs, and I positioned ourselves two on a side at the coffin. The younger Cribbs tugged and pushed the stretcherlike contraption upon which the coffin rested, and we wheeled it down the aisle. It was a symbolic journey only, the coffin stopping at the door. We mourners filed out of the room and the home, leaving Al with the professionals for maneuvering the coffin into the hearse.
    We had come from Martha’s house in Carol’s ten-year-old Buick four-door, but a liveried driver awaited us in the driveway. He stood at parade rest rather than lean against the black Cadillac limousine. We squeezed in, sitting close and salon-style in the facing seats. We pulled away from the funeral home, the hearse sliding behind us, headlights ablaze. Not even Dale attempted conversation for the next fifteen minutes.
    The cemetery had a graveyard’s gateway and ground plan. Given all the hills around Pittsburgh, the terrain was surprisingly, even disappointingly, level. I couldn’t help comparing Beth’s sloping view of the harbor to Al’s blind, bleak valley, even though I knew her site was more comfort to me than to her.
    The driver pulled to a stop at a landmark I couldn’t distinguish. He got out and yanked open our door. The comfortable if claustrophobic interior of the limo had insulated us from the winter outside. An icy blade of wind plowed through the salon, giving us the shivers. All exited, we males repeating our superfluous escort of Al’s coffin as we wended between already occupied plots to the open gash he would fill. I wondered what machinery was necessary to dig holes in this weather and how simpler generations managed in the old days.
    Two cemetery employees materialized at the grave.
    I paid not much attention to the details of what came next. I was watching Martha as we arranged ourselves, buffeted by the wind and cold, on one short end of the grave. I
    The ceremony consisted of a neutral reading by Cribbs and the slow, steady lowering of the coffin by the cemetery staff using strong sashes which were recovered as the coffin reached bottom. The younger Cribbs produced, magicianlike, a small bouquet of roses. Beginning with Carol, we each in turn broke a blossom off its stem, bent over the grave and tossed underhand the blossom onto the coffin. Martha was last. As she edged to the opening, I edged near her. When she let go her blossom, her eyes rolled back up into her head and her right leg started to slide forward, like a driver’s foot applying brake pressure in slow motion.
    Carol cried out, and Dale and Larry snapped their heads up. I caught Martha at the shoulders just as she unconsciously, and perhaps subconsciously, began her slide down toward Al.
     
    ”She’s still asleep. The boys too.”
    The television showed a boxing match silently progressing. The fighters were lightweights, neither seeing his tenth professional fight yet. But at five-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon in February, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I had turned the sound off during the first round to avoid some local ‘caster who modeled himself on Howard Cosell.
    Before she went upstairs to check on Martha and the kids, Carol had been in the kitchen, counting leftovers from last night’s deli spread. Before that, she’d been curled up in one of the two chairs in the room, thumbing through a magazine while I killed three vodka/rocks. Now she took the other end of the couch. Within touching range.
    ”That Ruthie is a great babysitter,” she said.