Grandma's Funeral
Copyright© 2010 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 6: The End
Conclusion
Michael: that’s a wrap. people are going home
Christine: now that they can. shit’s been moved
Michael: Y. boringest funeral I’ve ever been to
Terry: it wasn’t even a funeral
Suzanna: what WAS that thing
Michelle: grandma threw a party dressed up as a funeral
Fiona: that was grandma outdoing us
Michael: yes. the whole premise of us, made real
Terry: grandma is the boss
Nick: well. she was
Fiona: maybe. has anyone heard anything more. is she. you know
Michael: nah. still nothing more. Gerald sent something but
Suzanna: yeah Gerald’s “she didn’t make it.” sure Gerald. like this morning when she “didn’t make it.” we’ve seen this one
Terry: twice now. fool me twice
Michael: talking about fools. those mafia guys. are they our faves or what
Suzanna: lots of faves to choose, but they’re the peak idiots
Terry: we set a magpie on a gangster and he SHOT AT IT and MISSED
Fiona: old Col dragged one out by the LEG
Michael: and took his gun off him like a child
Michelle: right. don’t fuck with us
Terry: ... or we’ll turn you into one of us
Christine: so much to choose from the day. just incredible
Suzanna: I’m using one of my votes for the bra. hot shit, that one
Michelle: indeed. that one can’t even cover your nips, Christine?
Christine: just. I can’t believe I told you that. but mum figured it out
Fiona: you get thrown out of the house?
Christine: no. he’s allowed to sleep over now
Michelle: right. you’re 21. soon, with practice, you’ll be grown up enough to join us for a rave. and he’s crazy enough that I might try him out myself
Christine: 🖕
Jonathon: no one has mentioned the kiss? why not
Michelle: it was ok
Michael: I saw it. it was more than ok. it was the boss
Nick: what kiss is this. tell me tell me tell me
Jonathon: Steph laid it on Michelle right in the middle of the lawn. it was more than “ok”
Nick: shit. shit. I missed that? I’m never drinking again
Michelle: one good outcome from the day. that promise might last a whole hour
Michael: ok but can we just take a moment
Michael: today was, and I want to be precise here, the single most insane thing that has ever happened to this family
Michael: we’ve had some insane weddings. but no. this is the new number one. this is the everest
Nick: I found a body in a wine cupboard and it was ALIVE
Christine Not alive for long. Should’ve left it there
Suzanna: the manure. there was so much manure. it bogged the FIRE ENGINE
Terry: and we did it all OURSELVES. that’s the thing. no outside help. all in-house
Michael: that’s exactly it. fully self-catered disaster
Suzanna: self catered, self funded, self incinerated
Michael: and we got everyone out. don’t forget that. two hundred people, one door, on FIRE, and we got every single one of them out
Terry: we were actually incredible at that bit
Michelle: we were. genuinely. give us a fire and we are UNREAL
Christine: so good in a crisis, so bad the other 99% of the time
Michael: that’s the family motto right there. put it on the crest
Michael: ANYWAY
Michael: the point is. the POINT is.
Michael: other families have NOTHING on us
Terry: nothing
Michael: the Hendersons think they’re so wild because Bruce drove the ride-on into the dam
Suzanna: lol Bruce
Michael: the Hendersons could not survive ONE HOUR of being us
Terry: put it out there. challenge laid down. to every family in the district
Terry: TOP THAT
Michael: TOP THAT. burn down your own church AT a funeral FOR a woman who isn’t IN it, with gangsters, and then ALSO save everybody. we’ll wait
Christine: we’ll be here. being legends
Suzanna: we be legendary
Michael: honestly this thread saved my life today. god tier thread. soul-saving work in here
Michelle: fun. the best.
Christine: 🏆
Suzanna: I still want to find that money though
Michelle: well, everybody. work calls
Steph: right, go off and shovel all that shit
Michelle: 😋 you stick to shovelling that shit to your customers
Steph: my customers pay for the shit
Michael: reckon we can sell the livestream?
Jonathon: we might actually be able to. it’s got the evacuation. Steph last out
Terry: Steph. legend. only because you were stuck
Steph: 🖕
Jonathon: then it’s just smoke. and briefly, flames
Michael: we livestreamed the church burning down
Terry: legends forever
Nick: cannot top that
Jonathon: and it took the Katherine mob another 30 minutes to call and ask what happened
Suzanna: that. THAT. peak. I have no words
Steph: that’s what we do. reduce the best to total gobsmacked stupid
And Steph lay in the grass with her phone on her chest, and found she was smiling, and didn’t entirely know why, and didn’t entirely want to look at why. Because it was awful. Every word of it was awful — the dead-or-not grandmother waved off, the burned church scored like a footy match, the whole catastrophe metabolised into a trophy by a family that would never once, not in a hundred years, admit it had lit half the fuses itself.
And it was also the only place she’d felt like herself all day.
Both. At once. The way everything was, in this family. And she was in it, wasn’t she — she’d replied, she’d thrown her own lines on the pile, that’s what we do — she was one of them after all, the thing she’d spent the whole day standing at the edge of. The chat had her too. It always had.
She didn’t fight it. She was too tired, and anyway it was true.
To conclude
There was one more thing, and Steph saw it because she happened to be lying where she could.
The priest had not gone home. Everyone else was drifting away — cars pulling out now that the manure was shifted, the crowd thinning, the day folding itself up — but the priest was still there, sitting on the grass at the edge of the carpark, alone, looking at the ruin of his church. It was still smoking. There were still, here and there, small flames working through the black timber. And he sat and watched it, a man with nothing left to do but watch the thing he’d given his life to finish burning, unable to look away from it.
And Amy went over to him.
Steph watched her go. Amy, who’d risen today without quite knowing it, who’d spent the afternoon as righteous as anyone, who had heard the thing in the chat — fun fact, grandma had an affair with the priest — and filed it as fact the way the family filed everything. She stood over him, and her voice carried across the grass, and it had in it all the cold certainty of a woman who has found, at the end of a terrible day, someone she is permitted to blame.
“Are you proud of yourself?” she said.
It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict. You. The adulterer. The hypocrite in the collar. Your church, your sin, look what it came to. The whole day’s worth of fury and grief, with nowhere to go, finding a target at last.
And the priest answered her.
That was the thing that made Steph sit up, slowly, in the grass — because all day, every direct word had been shouted down or talked over or drowned or disbelieved, every question swallowed by the noise before it could land, and now, for the first time in the whole impossible afternoon, somebody asked somebody something and got an answer. A real one. Whole. He turned his head and looked up at Amy, and he wasn’t flinching, and he wasn’t ashamed, and he said:
“Yes. I am.”
Amy hadn’t expected that.
“I’m proud that I tried,” the priest said. “I’m proud that I served this town, for as long as it would let me.” He looked back at the smoking ruin, and didn’t hide it — let her see it, the grief on him, plain. “And I won’t pretend losing this hasn’t hurt. Everyone here today has seen exactly how much. I’ve not been able to look away from it.” A breath. “But it isn’t the building. The building can be rebuilt — stone and a roof, money and time, it can be done. That’s not the loss.”
He turned back to Amy.
“The loss is what it does to the next one. There’s always some struggling soul out there who wants to make something better of their life than this —” a small movement of his hand, taking in the whole lawn, the wreckage, the family, the day “— who wants to come and serve, and give something, and be of use. And every one of them who hears how this ended, how a whole congregation burned down its own church at a funeral and walked away counting it a win — every one of them thinks, well, why would I bother. That’s the damage. Not my roof. Their hope. That’s what I grieve.”
Amy had no answer to that.
“And as for Grandma,” he said, more gently, “I had no affair with her, and I think you know it, and I think you know better than to repeat the sort of thing that gets said in a chat like that for the joy of saying it. Not when you live in your own glasshouse. You’re cleverer than that. You’ve all of you forgotten how to be, today, but you are. But perhaps, you can be better than that in the future.”
Amy stood there a moment longer, with nothing to throw and nowhere to throw it, the cruelty she’d carried over meeting something it couldn’t dent. Then she turned and walked back to her family without another word.
And then the priest looked across the grass, and found Steph.
He knew her — of course he knew her, she’d stood up an hour ago and started the whole thing, said the first true things anyone had said all day before it all caught fire. He looked at her lying there in her funeral black with her phone face-down on her chest, and Steph braced, because she knew what he’d heard. The whole church had heard it. The raves, the drugs, the money, the rest of it, all of it broadcast over his own PA in his own church not two hours ago, and now here he was, a priest, looking at her, and she knew exactly which sermon was coming.
It didn’t come.
She watched him not say it. Watched him look at her and weigh it and set it down — visibly, deliberately, a man deciding not to fight on ground where he’d lose her in the first sentence. Whatever he thought about the molly and the raving and the rest, and he plainly thought something, he put it away, because he’d clearly worked out, in the few seconds of looking at her, that leading with that would shut the door, and there was something he wanted through the door more than he wanted to close it.
“I saw the phones going,” he said instead. “All day. You young ones, in there together.” He almost smiled. “You know we priests have our own?”
Steph blinked. She hadn’t, in fact, ever once considered that priests might have a group chat.
“It got me through the day. Not quite as funny as yours, but it helps. So I know how it goes,” he said. “And you have fun in there, and elsewhere. Yes.”
And she registered, then, what he was telling her — that he knew, that he’d always known, the kind of thing that lived in a chat like hers, the fun of it, the whole shape of it — and that he wasn’t going to make her defend a word of it. And he wasn’t just talking about the chat. He was thinking about the molly. And Michelle. And the things they did. And elsewhere. He’d heard all of it, this morning, over his own speakers, and he was telling her, plainly, that he knew, and that it wasn’t the point.
“I know,” he said. “You’re young. But it doesn’t last, love. The fun gets you through the day, and then the day ends and it’s gone, and you need something under it — something that holds when the laughing stops. And if you don’t build that — if you go on, year after year, just looking at what’s in front of you, just the next funny thing, or the money.” And there he stopped, and looked at her properly, and the gentleness stayed but something under it went level. “You were paid to do what you did today. We all heard — a great deal of money. Was it worth it? To do that to the family? I’m watching you, and at least you’re still here, but it doesn’t look like you’ve looked around, and seen the people you hurt today. If that’s all you have, what you see right in front of you, and never anything beneath it —”
He let her follow his gaze. Let her look at it with him. The church. The trophy-counting. The maybe-dead grandmother. The two hundred people who’d burned it all down and called it a win.
“— then this, ” he said quietly, “is what you turn into. This is where it goes. This isn’t some other family’s tragedy you wandered into today, love. This is a mirror. What you see is what’s at the end of the road you’re on, if you don’t, at some point, turn off it — stop being a girl who only looks at the next thing, and taking what you want, and instead become a working part of something that’s worth the building. Something that isn’t easily torn down. There has to be more than the fun. There has to be something you’re for. Or you end up here.” A small movement of his hand at all of it. “Like them.”
He looked back at her, and the hardness went out of it, and what was left was only tired and kind.
“Thanks for listening,” he said.
And he turned back to his church, and that was all he had for her.
Steph lay back down in the grass.
It didn’t fix anything. The church was still gone. Grandma was still dead, or not. The money was still a lie, and the family was still the family and nothing the priest had said changed one single fact of any of it.
But it had been true. Somebody, once, today, had said a true thing, all the way through, and meant it — and worse, harder, he’d said it to her, and he’d seen all the way through her, her bad decisions, and made her look at her own family and call it a mirror, and now it was in her, lodged somewhere she couldn’t reach to pull it out. This is what you turn into. There has to be something you’re for. She didn’t want it. She was nineteen and she’d had the worst day of her life and she wanted the chat and the rave and the next funny thing and nothing under it at all, thank you, not yet, not for years.
But it had gone in. She could already tell it had gone in, the way a splinter goes in — small, and not urgent, and absolutely not going anywhere. She’d looked at her family the way he’d told her to, just for a second, and she’d seen it, and she wasn’t going to be able to unsee it.
She’d be picking at that one for a long time.
She held onto it anyway, lying there, because it was more than she’d had all day, and it would have to do.
Actual conclusion
In the end they had the conversation nobody wanted to have, which was: what now?
They had it on the grass, in the late afternoon, what was left of them — the ones who hadn’t drifted home yet — in a loose ring near the cars, with the church still ticking and settling behind them as it cooled. Somebody started it.
“Well,” they said. “I’m glad that’s over.”
Nobody pointed out that nothing was over. That a church had burned and a woman had died, or hadn’t, and that being glad it was over was a thing you could only say if you hadn’t yet noticed that the largest part of it — the part where you had to do it all again, properly, with a body this time — hadn’t started.
“God gave us a weird one today,” somebody else offered, and there was a murmur of agreement, as if the day had been a spot of unseasonable weather.
And then, because it had to be said, somebody said it. “So what do we do? About — “ a gesture up the road, after the ambulance, at the whole unresolved fact of her. “About Mum.”
That was when the denial set in, hard and unanimous and completely understandable.
“I’ll tell you what we’re not doing,” said an aunt, with feeling. “We are not doing that again. Not for her.”
“God, no.”
“She had one. She had a funeral. We all came, we got dressed, we sat there — and look what she did with it. Burned the church down round our ears.”
“Her own funeral, and she ruined it.”
“So no. She had her chance. She doesn’t get another one. We’re not — we are not putting ourselves through that a second time for a woman who blew up the first.”
And they all agreed, fervently, with the particular righteousness of people who have found a way to make their exhaustion sound like principle: grandma had been given a perfectly good funeral, this very morning, and she had personally and deliberately destroyed it, and therefore — by a logic that was airtight if you didn’t look at it too hard — she had forfeited. No second funeral. Her own fault. You don’t reward that.
And Steph, lying in the grass a little apart, listening, knew they were wrong. Knew it the way she knew the sun would come up. They were going to bury her. She was dead — really dead, this time, Steph was nearly sure — and she was their mother, and you bury your mother, and in a month or six weeks when the shock wore off and the church-shaped hole in the district demanded filling, the forfeiture would quietly expire and they would put on their good clothes and do the whole thing again, properly, and probably argue about the sandwiches. The “she doesn’t get another one” was the wound talking, dressed up as justice. The funeral was coming whether they wanted it or not. They just couldn’t see it yet, lying as they were in the smoking ruins of the last one.
And as Steph lay there, listening to them argue about whether their mother had forfeited her own burial, it occurred to her who wasn’t in the ring.
Her own mother. Steph’s mum — who that morning had screamed herself hoarse about Steph’s sex life across a churchyard, who’d been jealous and difficult and impossible for as long as Steph could remember — wasn’t on this lawn deciding baloney with the rest of them, because she was up the road in the back of an ambulance, where she’d been since the turn, holding a dying woman together with her own two hands. Of all of them — the whole arguing, scheming, coup-counting, crate-hunting lot of them — her mum was the one who’d looked at grandma sliding sideways out of her chair and moved, first, without thinking, and gone with her, and was still with her now, doing the actual unglamorous work of someone’s death while the family sat in a ring on the grass and worked out how to get out of it.
Good on you, Mum, Steph thought, across all that distance, and meant it, and was a little surprised to find she meant it so completely. The morning’s screaming felt like another year. It would sort itself out, the two of them — Steph knew that now, lying in the grass — because whatever else her mother was, she was the one who’d been there, at the end, when it was real and nobody was watching and there was nothing in it for her but the doing of it. You could build something back from that. You could forgive a lot of churchyard screaming for that.
It was Amy who started, without anyone deciding she should, to actually run it.
Steph noticed that before she noticed anything else: that the loose furious ring had a centre now, and the centre was Amy — Amy asking the practical questions, Amy moving the thing forward, Amy quietly becoming the person the others looked at when they didn’t know what came next. It had happened sometime this afternoon, in the smoke, while no one was watching. Susan was gone now, uncommented by anyone, and the gravity of the family had simply slid, the way water finds the low point, to Amy. She didn’t announce it. She probably didn’t even feel it. She just started organising, and the family let her, because somebody had to, and because organising was what Amy did.
“All right,” Amy said. “If we’re doing something. Not a funeral, but — something. We need to think about it properly.”
“We could just — “ somebody started, and stopped, and then went on, because somebody always does. “You know. A bonfire. Big one. And just ... do it ourselves.”
A silence.
“Burn her.”
“Well. She’s not fussy now, is she.”
“Can you do that? Is that even legal?” — and that, Steph noted, was the only objection anyone raised: not whether it was decent, or right, or what their mother would have wanted, but whether it was allowed. Whether you’d get in trouble. The appearances-gospel surviving even its own apocalypse: you can’t just burn Nan in a paddock, somebody might say something.
“She’d have liked it, though,” an uncle said, quietly, and that one landed, because it was true. She would have. A great roaring mess, illegal and enormous, the whole district watching — it was exactly her. For a moment the bonfire stopped being a joke and became, briefly, the truest thing anyone had said about the dead woman all day, and they all felt it, and nobody knew what to do with it, so they moved on.
“And who’s paying for whatever it is,” Amy said, because Amy’s mind ran to the practical, and the practical, in a family, always comes down to money. “Because these things cost. Even a small thing costs.”
There was a small pause, and into it, with the unconscious instinct of a family that has spent its whole life knowing exactly where the money isn’t, every eye in the ring slid, just slightly, toward Jeffry.
And Jeffry felt it land.
Steph watched it happen — watched the cheap quiet man who’d spent twenty years being underestimated, being let be underestimated, feel two dozen pairs of eyes arrive on him at once with a new and dangerous knowledge behind them. Because that was the thing the day had done, underneath the fire and the gangsters: it had turned the lights on. The chat had leaked it, the secrets had spilled, and somewhere in the long catastrophe it had become simply known — known the way things become known in a family, without anyone quite saying it — that Jeffry had money. Real money. The supermarket money, the lottery that wasn’t a lottery, the loans he made to the chosen few and the quiet hooks those loans set into half the people standing in this ring.
“Jeffry can stand it,” somebody said. Lightly. Testing. “Jeffry can afford a funeral. Can’t you, Jeff.”
And the way they said it — not will you but can’t you, not a request but a fact, with the faint hard edge of people who have just worked out they’ve been managed — told Jeffry everything he needed to know about how the rest of his life was going to go.
“That’s —” he started.
“It’s all out, mate,” said someone older, not unkindly, but flatly, finally. “Whatever you and that lot had running — the lending, the supermarket, the rest of it — it’s out. Everyone heard it today. So you can do the decent thing here and pay for your mother-in-law, and you can have a good long think about getting ahead of the rest of it, because it’s coming. You know it is.”
Jeffry went a colour Steph had never seen on him. He didn’t argue. That was the tell — he didn’t argue, because there was nothing to argue, because the one thing his entire careful operation had needed was the dark, and the day had torn the roof off the dark, and a racket that everyone can see is not a racket anymore, it’s just a man everyone owes money to and nobody’s afraid of. He’d risen this morning, quietly, on Susan’s fall — the unseen winner of the whole disaster. He was finished by evening. He simply hadn’t finished finding out yet.
And it was Amy who answered for him — Amy, three feet away, already moving them past it, brisk and busy and in charge. “Well, that’s between Jeffry and his conscience,” she said. “Can we get on? We’ve a funeral to sort.”
And somebody — not unkindly, not even pointedly, just somebody, in the loose way the family said things — said: “You reckon you’re that different to him, though? Really? You and that committee?”
The ring went quiet for about a second.
And Amy looked at whoever it was, and something crossed her face that wasn’t quite an answer, and then she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m trying to bury my mother-in-law,” and turned back to the business of organising — which was, Steph noticed from the grass, exactly the move Jeffry had just failed to make, the brisk assertion of control over a question that had no good answer, and Amy made it without a flicker, without the faintest idea she’d just answered yes by answering at all.
She owns this now, Steph thought. The committee, the family, the whole running of it — Amy had picked it up off the lawn this afternoon while no one was looking, the way you’d pick up a set of keys someone had dropped, and she had no notion at all that the house they opened was already alight. The day had handed her exactly what Susan lost and Jeffry was about to lose, and she’d taken it gladly, briskly, blind as a kitten.
I hope that works out for her, Steph thought, and didn’t believe it for a second, and found she couldn’t even manage to mean it unkindly. It was just the truth, sitting there. Amy was grandma’s real heir — not the money, not the house, but the thing underneath: the need to take hold of it all and run it, and the perfect inability to see what holding it would cost. She’d watched grandma die of exactly that, this afternoon, and learned nothing, and reached for the wheel. Steph watched her go and felt almost sorry, and let her go.
“Fine. Jeffry pays,” Amy said, moving them along, blind and brisk. “So we need — what. A director. Someone to actually do it.”
“We can’t use him, ” somebody said, and didn’t have to explain, because everybody knew. The director had been in on it. The empty coffin proved it — you don’t present a coffin you know is empty unless you’re being paid to — and a man who’d do that for grandma’s fake funeral was not a man this family was going to hand its real one to.
“So we get another one.”
“There isn’t another one.” And there wasn’t. One firm, the whole district, the way it was with everything out here — one church, one priest, one undertaker — and the next nearest was two hours off and might as well have been on the moon, because you didn’t, you simply didn’t, go out of district for a funeral. “He’s the only one. And he’s bent.”
“Then how do we —”
And here the conversation did a strange thing, which Steph watched with a kind of grim admiration, because the family, reasoning aloud, exhausted, walked itself right up to the edge of a true thing and then stepped around it.
“Hang on,” somebody said slowly. “If the director was in on it. He’s not like the rest of us. He’s not some — some patsy that got used. He’s a serious man. A businessman. If he was in, he was in knowing. For a reason.”
“For money.”
“For money. So if there was ever any real money in this —”
A pause, while two hundred years of collective family cunning brushed against the actual answer.
“— then he’s the one who got it.”
And they were right. They had reasoned their way, accidentally, perfectly, to the truth: the director was the serious one, and the real money, if there was any, had gone to him. They were correct. And then, because they were tired, and because it led nowhere they had the energy to go, they dropped it.
But the mafiosi didn’t drop it.
The mafiosi were still there — of course they were, where would they go, they’d come for money and found a magpie and a manure pile and a day of being laughed at — and they’d been standing at the edge of the ring this whole time, listening. And Steph watched the exact moment it landed: watched the three of them, singed and soap-stained and beaten, hear the director is the serious one, the director got the money, and look at each other, and understand, all at once, that they’d spent the entire day in the wrong place, chasing the wrong people, tearing open the wrong boxes — that the family was a herd of patsies and the money had gone, the way real money always goes, to the one professional in the room. They recognised him, in the abstract: a serious man dealing with a serious man. Their kind.
They didn’t take it quietly. One of them said something short and vicious in a language Steph didn’t have, and another said, in English, with deep and genuine feeling, “Bastard, ” — not at the family, not at grandma, but at the director, the absent serious man who’d been quietly holding their money the whole time they were tearing open boxes of doilies and getting dragged out by their legs. The full weight of the wasted day landed on them at once, and it had a name now, and the name wasn’t anyone here.