What Won't Take Paint
| 16 min read
The fourth one was Rudy Nance, and Dinah found it when she rolled him to get at the shoulder.
It sat on his left flank below the ribs. A palm and four fingers and a thumb, spread the way a hand spreads when it takes hold of something that is trying to go the other way. The color was wrong for a bruise and there was no bruise under it when she pressed, no break in the skin, nothing to it at all but the color, which was somewhere between rust and the inside of a plum.
She got the casket tape off the hook and measured it, thumb tip to the tip of the little finger. Nine and three-quarter inches. Her own spread hand is seven and a half and she is not a small woman.
The notebook was in the drawer with the eye caps. She wrote Nance, R. — L flank, 9¾, same, and under it the date, and then she stood with the pen for a minute and wrote four and circled it, which she had not done for the other three.
She had tried the cosmetics on the second one. That was Bern Kovalcik in August, and his was up high on the shoulder where a suit would cover it anyway, so it had cost her nothing to experiment. She used the heavy corrective first, the kind that will bury a Y-incision on a summer drowning. It went on and it slid. Not smeared. It gathered up and came away from the skin like water off wax, and she did it four times and cleaned it off four times, and then she put his shirt on him and did not tell anybody.
Rudy Nance was sixty-one. He had a new metal roof on his place out on Bittner Run and a Ram with 6,000 miles on it, and his daughter had done ninety days at a facility in Erie that costs more per month than Dinah takes home, and none of that had been true a year and a half ago. Everybody in Cawley knew it and nobody in Cawley thought about it, the way you don't think about somebody's ramp or somebody's oxygen. It was just a thing about him.
The certificate had come over from Hoyt Brannagh with cardiac written in his slanted hand and his signature, which is one long stroke with a hook on it, and the time of death set at 4:15 in the afternoon, which was a Tuesday.
Out the prep room window there was a yellow excavator on Dunlap Street working a foundation. The contractor's man had a hose going into the hole to keep the dust down and the dust came up anyway, the way it does with old plaster, gray and slow. That was the third house down since August and the seventh since the state got the money. When they finish a lot they seed it, and the grass comes in, and the curb stays, and the sidewalk stays, and the two concrete steps that used to go up to a porch stay because nobody has been paid to take out steps.
Dinah covered Rudy to the collarbone and washed her hands twice and went up the back stairs to the office to call Marlene Nance about hymns.
He came to the viewing Thursday at about half past six, when the line was down the hall and out onto the porch.
Dinah was at the guest book end of the room and she knew he had come in because of what the room did. The talking did not stop. It came down, the way a radio comes down when somebody turns the knob a little and not because anyone asked. Then Fritz Uhaz and Bobby Sipe and two of the Kovalcik boys got up off the folding chairs at the back, and Fritz Uhaz has a knee that takes him eleven seconds to get up on and he got up on it, and none of them went anywhere afterward. They stood there by their chairs.
He was tall enough to have to think about doorways. The coat was black wool down below the knee and he had it on in a room where the furnace was running, and it was cut for him, which you could see from thirty feet because everything else in that room was cut for somebody else. He was the best-looking man anybody in Cawley had ever stood next to. Dinah watched three separate people put a hand up to their own face after he passed them, and not one of them knew they had done it.
He went up the line and nobody minded, and he stopped at the casket and looked down at Rudy Nance for as long as a man looks who is not performing anything, and then he went to Marlene in the front row and took her hand in his left, turning his shoulder in to do it, and bent down and said something short to her.
Marlene said, "I know it. I know it. Thank you."
The other hand stayed in the coat pocket the whole time.
The right side of that coat had a mark on it. Dinah has spent her life looking at what fabric does, because half the job is a suit that has to lay right on somebody who cannot help you, and she knows a stain that has been worked at from the outside and she knows the other kind. This was the other kind. The wool around the pocket had gone a shade off and the edge of it was not a splash edge, it was a soaked edge, the way the ceiling looks under a slow leak, and it had come out of the pocket and into the coat and stopped where it stopped.
He was at the door by ten of seven. Fritz Uhaz got the door for him.
The Sipe boy had left the flower van across both handicapped spaces, and there was a trooper in the lot writing it up when the man came out onto the porch. Dinah watched it through the glass in the door. The trooper looked up. He put the pad away inside his jacket, and got into his car, and backed it out of the way to make room, and then sat there with both hands on the wheel until the man had walked by and gone on down Dunlap. In January she asked him about it at the Sheetz on 21 and he said he did not remember any of that, and he was not lying to her, and it bothered him enough that he stood there working at it for a minute before he gave it up and asked her what she knew about a stairlift for his mother.
Outside the porch light was on and the Legion sign across the street was on and past that there was nothing lit at all on that side of Dunlap, because there is nothing on that side of Dunlap.
Afterward, folding chairs, Bobby Sipe said, "That was good of him to come."
"He thought a lot of Rudy," Fritz said.
"He did."
Nobody said the name. Dinah stood at the guest book and went back through the whole night in her head, and not one person in that room had said it out loud, and they had all been talking about him for an hour.
She caught Hoyt Brannagh in the lot Friday, between his car door and his car.
"Four," she said.
"Four what, Dinah."
"You know what four."
Hoyt Brannagh is not a doctor. In this county the coroner is elected and Hoyt sold farm equipment for thirty years and he is not a stupid man, and he has been decent to her twice when he did not have to be. He stood with his keys in his hand and looked over the top of his car at Dunlap Street, where the excavator was parked for the weekend with its bucket down in the grass.
"Rudy Nance was sixty-one years old and had the blood pressure of a man in a fistfight," he said. "He'd been told. Everybody's been told."
"I'm not arguing his heart. I'm telling you what's on his side."
"I saw it."
"You wrote cardiac."
"He died of his heart stopping." Hoyt got the door open and stood in it. "You want me to write down a handprint? On a form that goes to Harrisburg? And then what, Dinah. Then what happens. You tell me the next part and I'll do it."
She did not have a next part.
He put his bag on the passenger seat. Then he stopped and stood back up out of the car and said, in a lower voice than the one he had been using, "Bring me your book sometime. Not here."
She got the certificates out that night and laid all four on the desk under the lamp. Kovalcik, Ferro, the Dutcher woman, Nance. On the line where Hoyt notes who identified or who was present, he had put a name each time. Four times, and four different spellings of it, and no two of them the same length. She sat there with her finger going from one to the next and could not make her mouth do it, and she is fifty-eight years old and alone in a building with three dead people in the basement and she has never been afraid in that building in her life.
The maps were on the county site. She had looked at them in July when the buyout letters went out and she looked at them again that night. The subsidence field runs under the whole east side and the pool under it is going, and what the engineers wrote is that the surface expression will continue to develop. Dunlap and Furnace and both Marys. In February there had been steam coming out of the hillside above the Legion, a seam of it about nine feet long, and people took pictures of it and put them on Facebook and then it snowed and covered it and everybody quit talking about it. Nine years, is what the letter to the borough said, for the residential grid.
From the office window she could see the conveyor bridge. It runs from the tipple foundation across Furnace Street forty feet up on steel legs and stops in the air over what used to be the yard. There is nothing on either end of it. There has been nothing on either end of it since 1979, and it is not going anywhere, because taking it down would cost more than the borough has ever had.
Wesley is in Marietta, Ohio. He does something with fleet accounts. He has a daughter who is six, and Dinah knows her name because Wesley's wife sends a card at Christmas with the name printed by hand under the signature, which is a kindness so exact it takes the breath out of her every single year. Eleven years in April. It started over her father's business and the way she handled it and it has gone on so long past that that neither one of them could get back to the original argument now if they tried.
He came in on the Tuesday after, at twenty after nine at night, through the front, and she had locked the front.
She heard him in the hall and she knew the walk before she saw him because it does not hurry. He came into the arrangement room where the casket corners are mounted on the wall in two rows like samples of anything else, oak and poplar and the steel in three colors, and he stood in front of them with his back to her the way a man stands in front of a menu.
"You've kept your father's board," he said. "Nobody keeps the board."
"People want to touch it."
"They do." He turned around. "Sit down, Mrs. Croy. It's your office."
She sat down. She noticed that she had done it before deciding to and she stayed sitting anyway, because standing at that point would have been a thing, and there was already going to be enough of a thing.
He took the chair across the desk. He sat the way expensive men sit. Up close he was not young and he was not old and his face had the kind of order to it that you see in photographs of people from a hundred years ago who died beautiful. The coat stayed on. The right hand stayed where it had been at the viewing, and the wool around that pocket was worse in the lamp than it had been in the hall.
"Your note on the second mortgage is with a bank in Ohio now," he said. "They sold it in March. You're eleven thousand four hundred behind and they've been quiet about it, and they will be quiet until February, and then they won't. The Sipes have been mailing to the same nine families as you since their girl got her license, and there's not going to be work here for two funeral homes. There isn't work here for one."
"I know all that."
"You do. I'm not telling you news, I'm telling you I know it." He let that sit. "Marietta's an hour and forty minutes."
Her hands were flat on the desk blotter. She left them there.
"He's a proud boy and you're a proud woman and it's been eleven years, and the thing about eleven years is that neither one of you can start it now," he said. "I can start it. He'd call you Thursday. It would be about nothing, it would be about a car, and he wouldn't know why he called, and it would be real. It doesn't come out of him crooked. That's not what I do."
"What do you do."
He looked at her for a while.
"There's a hand that gives," he said. "It's not the same hand, and it isn't mine to explain to you, and every one of them knew what they were shaking. Rudy Nance knew. His daughter's alive because he knew." He put his left hand on the arm of the chair and stood up out of it. "You're the only one in this town who's ever looked, Mrs. Croy. Four times you've looked, and you got a tape out, and I want you to understand that I've taken that as respect."
He went to the door and stopped.
"There won't be a Cawley in nine years. There's no letter coming that changes that and there is nothing under this borough but water and a mile of old room-and-pillar. Everyone here is going somewhere and none of them have said so out loud yet. You'd be going to Marietta." He took his coat collar and settled it with his left hand, though he had not taken the coat off. "Think about it as long as you want. I'm not in a hurry and I don't have a form."
She sat in that room until eleven. At some point she got up and put her own right hand flat on the sample board, on the poplar corner, which is the cheap one and the one people touch.
Hoyt Brannagh came down on the ninth of December, in his own driveway, with the car door open and the dome light on and the groceries still in the trunk.
The state deputy coroner drove up from Washington County because a coroner cannot sign for himself, and she was twenty-nine years old and thorough and she wrote what she saw, which was nothing, and she called it cardiac.
Dinah washed him at four in the morning because she was not going to sleep. It was under the jaw. Four fingers laid up along the right side of his throat with the tips just short of the ear, and the heel of it down in the hollow above the collarbone, and it was that same color, and she got the tape and it was nine and three-quarter inches across the span even folded around the neck the way it was.
There is a way to handle that. You use the high collar, and you knot the tie up under the chin, and you turn the head three degrees toward the room and you set the light on the low side, and no one who files past a casket for four seconds sees anything but a man who looks better than he did at the end.
She dressed him in his good gray suit and the white shirt his sister brought over. She left the collar open, both buttons, and she did not put a tie on him at all, and she turned the head square, and she put the light where the light goes.
The viewing was Friday. It was the biggest room in the building and it was not big enough, because he had been elected four times and sold half the county its first tractor.
They came through in a line from two until four. Fritz Uhaz came through, and the Kovalcik boys, and Marlene Nance, and the woman from the borough office, and the man from the state contractor who had been knocking down Dunlap all fall and had gotten to know people. Every one of them looked. Dinah stood at the wall by the flower stand and watched their faces do it, the small stop, the going-on. Nobody said one word about it. Not to her, not to each other, not in the hall, not on the porch, not in the lot.
At about ten of four his sister Roberta came through the line the second time with her purse against her chest. She had his good tie in it, the maroon one, and she took it out at the casket in front of everybody and put it around his neck and turned his collar down over it herself, and her hands knew how, because she had done it for their father.
She pulled the knot up under his chin and got it straight, and got it tight, and went out to the car.