People don’t like attending funerals for the same reason many people don’t like caviar.
It’s an acquired taste.
Fear is an acquired taste.
In actuality, it’s something one feels more than tastes, a pulsing in the very back of the throat.
Jack’s hands push against the steering wheel. The angry red color of his knuckles contrasts against the pale nothingness of the overcast sky. The funny thing about overcast days is the way the light hits things. There are no shadows because the light doesn’t come from one place, but from every water particle that makes up the cloud cover. In some ways, the lack of shadows is more frightening than being in the dark.
He turns into the cemetery. The perfectly manicured grass looks incredibly green in the light, so full of life. He recalled the humorless smile his father regarded him with at times like this.
No worries, Jackie Boy, the cemetery’s a prime hangout. Everybody’s dying to get in.
Jack had never really found it funny, and his mother had openly disapproved. His father had not repeated the morbid joke on the drive to Jack’s mother’s funeral.
He stepped out of the car door and noticed how the heavy, moist air settled in miniscule water droplets on the fabric of his suit. Hands in pockets, Jack solemnly made his way to the awning under which the funeral directors always spread that awful green felt. He hated how it ran smoothly over headstones and rose in places where graves had just been filled.
Jack picked his way superstitiously around the concealed headstones and saw that any of the cheap, plastic folding chairs were empty and briefly wondered if maybe he had come too early. He walked to the wearing a black veil and shuddering quietly in the front row. She looked up at him upon hearing the sound of his wingtips sliding over the slick grass. He reached for her hand and held it in his own. She would recall years later how his hand had felt abnormally hot. Feverish.
“I’m very sorry,” he whispered to her in hushed tones. He did not say what he was sorry for.
His tone was so sincere that it caused the woman’s eyes to well with tears even though she had thought to herself only moments before that she had none left to cry. Jack thought he saw a glint of unrecognition in her eyes before he released her moist hand and allowed it to fall back into her lap.
Jack sat in one of the chairs; it creaked in complaint as he settled into it. He watched silently as the hearse brought the coffin, followed by a long line of headlights dulled by the fog. There are more attendees at funerals when the deceased is a child.
The pall-bearers lowered the coffin onto the straps which would later sink it into the ground accompanied by a final cacophony of sobs. It was powder blue with metal hinges.
The pall-bearers all took their seats as the priest took his place before the grave, regarding everyone present with harsh and judgmental eyes. He turned to sprinkle holy water on the coffin and the grave. The water hit the surface of the coffin with a strangely hollow sound, like rain on an opened umbrella. This was due to the fact that there was no body in the coffin.
The funeral was that of Daniel Abraham West. He had gone missing at age seven and had been missing for an equal number of years. No body had been found.
After these seven years, it was decided that the child should be given a funeral in order for the parents to receive proper closure. A coffin was chosen and the funeral was held at the church Danny grew up attending, St. Timothy’s. The coffin contained nothing but a copy of the children’s book If You Give A Pig A Pancake and a Tonka truck. These had been Danny’s favorite things.
Jack sat respectfully as the priest read from the Bible and conducted the ceremony for a child’s burial. Jack listened as the Catholics responded in unison and as family members spoke about Danny, how he was a wonderful boy who had deserved to live a good life. Not a single person mentioned how he whined and begged, or how he had a tendency to pee his pants when he was panicked or scared.
Nothing bad is ever said about the dead.
The funeral was ending. The funeral directors began to turn the hateful cranks that would slacken the straps and begin the coffin’s slow descent.
The woman Jack had consoled earlier, the woman whom he could only presume was Danny’s mother, began shrieking. There were no words in her screams, simply blind, animalistic anguish. The sound reminded Jack of Danny.
Jack smiled humorlessly to himself. It was the kind of smile his father would have grinned had he been with Jack on the drive over. He would have told Jack that awful joke and looked at him with that vapid look in his eyes, hoping for laughter and ease in return. He hated how his father called him Jackie Boy.
Danny’s mother fell forward, making no effort to catch herself. She crawled frantically to the empty coffin and threw herself upon it, looking almost comic because of the way her torso was lower than the rest of her body. The coffin sounded with a hollow thump and Danny’s mother continued to scream aloud to anyone who would listen. Her cries dissolved into words, prayers, and Jack wondered if she remembered that the coffin was empty. It was only a vessel on which she could focus her pain.
In a moment she would be restrained and dragged forcefully to her car, its door open and waiting to receive her, but Jack would neither see nor hear any of this, because he was busy remembering.
He was busy re-living.
Jack closed his eyes and recalled how the boy had screamed.
“Let me out! I want my mom! Please, mister, I’ll do anything you say, just please, let me out so I can see my family again. I won’t tell anyone!”
The boy was a smart one, yes. He had grown up on a diet of crime dramas and TV dinners, but he knew when to discern reality from fantasy. The boy knew this was no fantasy. He recalled an episode of Law and Order in which a character said that sometimes if predators see their victims as real people, they sympathize. Danny tried so hard to make himself real, but in the end, he just secured his non-existence.
“Please, mister. I’m just a kid. I need my parents.”
He was a smart one, that boy.
“Please. Please, please, please…”
His cries were interrupted by a monumental sob. It might’ve torn his body in half had it manifested itself in the form of a physical force.
Jack remembered how in his last days the boy’s vocabulary had dwindled down to that one word, please, repeated in the dry, tortured tones of someone who hasn’t had a sip of water in a long time, the voice of someone who knows his next word might be his last.
Jack remembered how the boy struggled against the ropes that restrained him to the wall, chafing the thin skin of his wrists and embedding fibers in his skin. He struggled while Jack ran his fingers through Danny’s hair, all the while talking to him, telling him of his own childhood, calling him Danny Boy.
Jack had killed Danny.
He held the boy prisoner in a room hidden behind the back wall of his closet. Boy, oh boy, wouldn’t the police like to know that? And wouldn’t they just love to interview him? Because he knows things that wouldn’t ever be in the papers. He knows things that no other person will ever know.
He knows what happened to Chris Chambers, Gordie LaChance, Vern Tessio, and Teddy DuChamp.
He knows what really happened to his mother, how she really died.
He saw what his father did to her.
Oh yes, Jack knows what happened to all of them and more.
And he’s been to all of their funerals.
One might say he’d acquired a taste for them.
