Free The Watchman by Davis Grubb Page A

had been trying days of rude surprises, confounding changes, abrupt switches of program production, public announcements, phone calls, freighting orders, fresh staging requirements and potfuls of wreath-black coffee more bitter

    even than the limpid, simple preservatives which were, in a manner of speaking, the lifeblood of Peace the Undertaker's somber art. The executed convict, naturally enough, had no Viewing—he was boxed up and shipped away to his widow down state at Hundred. Thomas Peace had quite enough on his hands getting Cole Blake patched up and ready to be put on exhibit. Never before had his ingenuity risen to such heights of resourcefulness and imagination. The tricks of his trade with wax and wire and make-up had been the least of the problem.
    The awkward question was where the services might properly be held. Ordinarily the boy's funeral would have taken place in his home. But Cole Blake had no home—no house, at least. And so there was no parlor. As for holding the ceremony in that cramped, austere hotel room which was, in fact, his home, that was out of the question. It would not accommodate the throngs of Adena mourners who would come. Still, the Mound Hotel had been the place Cole Blake had lived. And funerals were always held where men had lived—it was a custom of inviolable, immemorial tradition. And so Peace racked his wits for two days and nights, pacing sleepless, chewing his thumbnail, pondering, until, providently, the answer came to him. And so on the night before Cole Blake's funeral Thomas Peace and his assistant sons went to work. The Rotary plaque, the calendar, some chairs, tables, and the merchandise of tourist souvenirs were stored away in the cellar beneath the big kitchen. The chromed, leather stools and the long marble counter were blanketed with sheets of gray muslin; the juke box by the door was softened and re-stacked with hymns. And so, on the morning of the third day after his murder the funeral of Cole Blake began in the dining room of the Mound Hotel. When the lobby clock struck eight o'clock the doors opened and Thomas Peace, after a showmanly bow to the enterprising faces of those first come, stepped back drily into the shadows to let the pilgrimage commence.
    Good morning. Good morning. Peck. Good morning. Miss Beulah. Good morning. Master Danny.
    His voice: the mannered, modulated baritone of his own school of theater. It was hke a bell toUing softly, muffled by distances.
    Good morning, Johnny. Morning. Morning. Good morning, Miss Octavia. Morning. Good morning.
    To the rear of the long dining room, flanking the kitchen

    doors and at a distance appropriately remote from the bier, aluminum tables groaned beneath their burden of food and drink, home-cooked and home-fetched. Since daylight they had come in ceaseless caravan: the food-bearers, until, at last, the two tables, teeter-legged and crying out beneath their towering load, threatened to collapse beneath the weight of so much bounty: chicken salad, pies, peach cobblers and meat loaves, chilled brown crocks of potato salad, muffins, biscuits, ham, apple sauce and enormous pots of scalding coffee, their speckled blue enamel spouts huffing steam like gigantic hens in the morning freeze of some bitter winter, while beside them stood willowware pitchers of thick, faintly souring cream. The front of the room was lavished with flowers and wreaths in such profusion that the atmosphere round about them reeked with a feverish fragrance, like the boudoir of a honeymooning gangster. And yet the room was in many ways ideal. Because it was, after all, a dining room. And because everyone of that morning's swelling mob seemed incessantly eating: seized with a savage, insatiable appetite. It would seem that it is not easy to look sad and to chew at the same time: between the stuffed cheeks and the mournful eyes there exists a certain paradox. Perhaps the trick of it is possible only at funerals. And perhaps only at funerals because