The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [172]
When Annie slipped into a seat near the back of the room, the whole group of mourners turned to look at the young slender woman in a white naval uniform. Frowning mulishly, they turned their backs. She was puzzled by their hostility.
After a long restless silence, the blue curtain slowly opened, revealing on an otherwise empty stage a table draped in blue and yellow satin on which sat a small mahogany box with silver handles. A large-boned white-haired woman made her way heavily onto the stage and began to slide in and out of the tune of “God Bless America,” accompanied by a sullen female teenager at an electric organ keyboard.
Annie looked around for Rafael Rook, who wasn’t in the room, despite his claim to be Jack’s best and only friend. She searched the room for Dan, who’d spent so much time trying to put Jack behind bars, but she didn’t see him either. She stared at the little mahogany box with silver handles. Whoever these alleged brothers and sisters of hers were, they had cremated Coach Ronny Buchstabe in a hurry.
She asked herself, if these remains were Jack Peregrine’s, was she upset that she’d missed her chance to view them before the cremation? No; better not to think that this little box contained that fast-moving man. Better not to see how such vital noise, speed, laughter, could be shrunk to such a small container of gray ash and chips of bone.
Two of the dough-faced males carried a cardboard photograph up onto the stage and placed it on an easel beside the crematory box. The photo was a colorized portrait of a big bald male wearing a blue and yellow sweatshirt with the letters SFU on it. He had a whistle around his thick neck. Annie let out a long audible breath. If this was Coach Ronny, he definitely wasn’t her father.
After the woman finished “God Bless America” and left the stage, a younger, even bigger woman, in her sixties, with long straight grayish brown hair and puffy eyes, stomped up and asked everyone to clap for the singer, “Daddy’s sister Clara Louise, widow of Francis W. McGreb of McGreb and Son—that’s Frank, Jr., there on the third row with his family from Cincinnati—Wholesale Plumbing Parts. Aunt Clara’s the oldest here by far and came the longest way by far, all the way from Winner, South Dakota, where she and Daddy were raised to be winners!” Everybody clapped except the widowed Mrs. McGreb, who looked put out at being described as “the oldest by far.”
The long-haired woman’s black shiny dress sported green flowers fluffed out at her waist like sprigs of parsley on a glazed duck. The flowers quivered as, in a voice as flat as her features, she introduced herself. “You all know me, I’m Daddy and Mama’s oldest girl, Jimmy Stump’s wife, and Jimmy and I are here from St. Pete’s, where he’s retired. We’re sorry our daughter Barbra couldn’t make it but it’s the Once a Year Sale today at Barbra on the Beach, downtown Sanibel, fine women’s casual wear, and her manager called in with a 103 temperature. I’m here the same as you, to honor Ronny Buchstabe. My daddy. Frankie’s daddy. Your granddaddy. Your brother. Your friend. The Coach has left the stadium. He’s gone from the fields of this life to the fields of a better. He played his last game and it was a hard one. But death, where is thy victory?”
A sob was stifled in the first row. Jackie acknowledged it by pausing. The crier, a stolid and stiffly dressed gray-haired man, blew into his handkerchief. Beside him, the teenaged boy checked his cell phone again. Signaling with a hostile gesture that he should pocket the phone immediately, Jackie opened a spiral notebook and flung over a page. “We all know Coach Ronny was all-American all the way. He preached what he lived and he lived what he preached—hard work and family values.”
As the speaker went on, Annie looked inquiringly around the room. She saw nothing on anyone’s face to suggest that Jackie’s eulogy was being delivered tongue-in-cheek. People were even in tears. That this woman should attribute hard work and family