The Funeral Plain

By Michael Dean Kiggans

Elijah is just nine when he loses his iron working father in a skydiving plane crash. When his father is forever buried in the family cemetery, Elijah accepts the realization that one day—already marked—he too will die.

Through vivid memories of not just that fateful day but also his childhood, Elijah reflects about the time not only of his father’s untimely demise, but the rippling effect it had upon his paternal relatives, how their lives transformed everything in his own.

The Funeral Plain reveals the moving crescendo of a young man’s deeper journey into the truth of life; an homage to the ghosts of memory in the long book of life.

The Funeral Plain is an award-winning Finalist for the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the two categories of First Novel (60,000-80,000 words) and General Fiction/Novel (under 80,000 words), and an iUniverse Editor’s Choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532020575

Michael Dean Kiggans

Michael Dean Kiggans lives in southeast Ohio Appalachia. The Funeral Plain is his first book.

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Copyright © 2017 Michael Kiggans.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-2058-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2057-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909489

iUniverse rev. date: 08/21/2017

Contents

Semper Fidelis

The Psalm of Jammy Strong

Jesus WeptHannah Blue

Let me tell you a story from the Long Book of Life

For my wife, Deborah,

who had faith in me and endured;

this book is yours.

Have pity upon me, have pity upon me,

O ye my friends;

for the hand of God hath touched me.

—Job 19:21

Other men are lenses

through which we read our own minds.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Representative Men

Semper Fidelis

And the day of one’s death is better

than the day of one’s birth.

—Ecclesiastes 7:1 NASB

1

T HERE ARE SONS who have never known their fathers. There are fathers who have known and lost sons. There are sons who have lived and have not had sons. Fatherless sons have always lived and died, fathering their own, never knowing what it would have been like to be sons of their living fathers. There are fathers who have been sons of their own living fathers and have raised sons and then lost them.

Elijah Rake lost his father, Gene, when he was nine years old, and from then on, he wasn’t a son anymore. He became a man. He realized he was a man the day Gene was finally and forever buried, for it was then that he knew what death was. How powerful, mysterious, and terrifying it seemed, for he knew, when he was a nine-year-old boy, that one day, already marked, he too would die—and that knowledge left him cold and alone.

He looked at the graves of his paternal great-grandparents, Semilda Arminda and William Tecumseh, which were side by side. They had been gentle folk who had led hard, happy lives during the time of the oil deposits underground, two world wars, and a depression. They’d raised ten children: eight boys; their daughter, Minerva, who was the youngest; and Ethel, Semilda Arminda’s oldest child from her first marriage.

Semilda Arminda had been left a young widow when her husband, Jacob Schlarp, was buried alive in a cave-in from a deep trench under construction. She had stood over the trench after being reached at home and watched frantic young workers dig up the heavy clay, only to see her dead husband lying crushed, facedown. Then she had fallen to her knees over him and slowly wiped his face with the large white lace handkerchief she always had with her. There had been no tears from her yet, but the young men surrounding her had wept openly as they watched her clean her husband’s face.

Jacob Schlarp too was buried on top of the hill, only a few feet away from Semilda Arminda.

Semilda Arminda and William Tecumseh’s other sons, their wives, and a few of their children were buried on top of the cemetery hill. Twelve years after the death of Gene, Floyd and Edna were buried there too, as well as other Rake relatives.

Elijah walked from gravestone to gravestone, saying aloud the deceased’s names and how old they were when they died. He knew that each person had a story to tell but was no longer there to tell it. They had already been part of the book of life.

He stood atop the steep, round grass-covered sandstone hill where all his paternal relatives lay buried and stared at Gene’s grave. He listened in silence. Hello, Father, he said. How are you?

A killdeer cried somewhere, invisible but close.

The music of the wind, the mournful cry of the killdeer, and the sound of waving leaves in old trees broke the quiet. Underneath was the deeply intense suspended stillness and timeless silence of the graves. The wind blew the mist southwest through the small river valley.

Elijah stood still for a long time and watched the mist slowly dissipate with the breeze. Sunlight danced through the mist, only to be hidden by one of the large white clouds scudding through a brightening blue sky. For an early September morning, it was cool, perhaps showing what was to come that winter. He had put on a light jacket before coming to the cemetery, and he was glad he had. The trees around the cemetery hill swayed with the wind, making a low sound. It was quiet on top of the cemetery. The thick white marble grave markers lay flat on the ground, with the names of the dead etched deeply into the marble. Some graves had headstones, large or small. The markers stared silently into the sky.

The stillness of the cemetery had not left his senses. He smelled the blooming dogwood trees and heard the distant killdeer cry its mournful chant. Elijah stood over Gene’s grave, noting the dates and looking at the bronze marker. His father’s full name, Gene Woodsfield Rake, in large capital letters, stared upward at the sky. The month and day of his birth and death were the same—with only a thirty-one-year span separating them. The grave marker—a large rectangular piece of bronze encased in cement, lying flush with the ground—was located at Gene’s feet, and the grave itself was just slightly raised above the true gentle slope of the top of the hill.

Elijah said, Thirty-one, and he thought of that number. Thirty-one years exactly. A prime number. Going out like he said he would—with his eyes wide open.

The other grave markers rose out of the ground in solid grandeur. The names and dates of his relatives carved into marble and old sandstone gave finality to what were once their lives and to the living of what was to come. Many people were buried on top of the hill; those buried at the foot had been dead at least two hundred years or more. The old tombstones at the bottom of the hill, with their chiseled names fading into the dust of long-ago and forgotten memories, stood solemnly, bent and cracked in the silent tone of time. The ground around the bases of the old markers pushed brown weeds and wild rosebushes up through the stones. The higher the graves crested toward the top of the hill, the more recent were the years.

Many descendants still remembered their buried and lost—the grieving mothers, the weeping widows, the shivering orphans drawn to the grave—with flowers decorating the ground. Whoever left them—roses, chrysanthemums, daisies, tulips, ferns, and lilacs in yellows, reds, whites, and blues—upon the graves remembered the lives of those who were not there anymore. On each anniversary of Gene’s death, Elijah always put flowers on his grave. He knew he would do this until the day of his own death.

In a different time, almost one hundred years ago, his great-grandfather had donated the large hill to the Independence Township Baptist Church, which stood at the high, sharp curve of the highway. Elijah looked out over the lush green valley to the south, through the old forests of Eddy Ridge, at the meandering Little Muskingum River and old paved Highway 26—the Marietta-Woodsfield Road—which followed the river’s course. The road once had been an Indian trail; Daniel Boone and Indian killer Lewis Wetzel had been known to travel through there. Elijah felt the immensity of the old, forested surrounding Appalachian Mountains.

One day many years ago, he and his grandmother, Edna, had stood upon that spot, and Edna had said, Can you imagine what it must have been like two hundred years ago—a bunch of Indians standing here and looking out yonder over that valley and at the ridges around us? You think they stood on top of this here hill? The spot was serene, quiet, and majestic, and Elijah felt an inner peace there.

The old Independence Township Baptist Church stood as a white guardian of those who lay buried beneath the hallowed ground of the steep cemetery hill. The old church stood guard at the base of the cemetery, at the crest of a small ridge. It still carried an air of quiet dignity about it, its square white clapboard presence a stark contrast to the looming, steep green hill behind it. The silent sanctuary retained a divine brightness, as the white walls reflected the sunlight streaming through the tall, narrow windows. The dark oak-hardened pews stood out amid the natural brightness inside. The church stood in silent meditation, carrying on in time, taken care of, and every Sunday, a circuit-riding preacher always showed up, sometimes staying for a month or two before another would come to take his place. On Sundays, the sanctuary was faithfully filled with Jacob’s remnant—these Israelites in the national wilderness—for those who lived in the township were believers in the Word, and there they imbibed the meat and sometimes the milk, in season and out of season.

Knowing that Gene had lain beneath the ground for more than forty years now filled Elijah with sadness and wonder, for he had been denied this father since the age of nine, left without a guiding direction. There was a lot about Gene’s life that he did not know. He remembered hearing stories as a youngster from his older relatives. They told him who and what Gene was like. Each of them told the stories in the same way, which made them believable, and Gene seemed real. With the distance of time, it had become more difficult to remember Gene as he was when he was alive. Elijah still remembered what his voice had sounded like and what he’d looked like; he still had the last photographs ever made of him. He often wondered what his life would have been like if Gene were still alive—but an accident had cut his life short and cheated him out of life and time. Elijah stared at the dates at the silent grave and wondered if death was somehow predetermined. His younger brothers, Mark and John, had told him they could not remember Gene anymore.

He was the only brother who remembered.

Elijah had been christened with the name of his great-great-grandfather, whose dry bones lay beneath a cracked, flat sandstone marker nearest the church, under an old, towering weeping willow that shaded his grave and the front of the church. Old Elijah’s two wives were buried by his side.

It is strange how you come to be named the way you are, he thought. We grow into the name and live it. Other times, our name determines what we do in life. He felt his life was guided, but by whom or what, he did not know.

2

Elijah was Gene’s oldest son. He had been four months shy of his tenth birthday when Gene died.

That clear, bright Saturday morning at Mr. Baumgartner’s funeral home, he wore a new black suit with a white shirt and black tie purchased suddenly the day before. He sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs in the front row, inside the crowded, stifling, overflowing room. Gene’s sister, Naomi, dressed in black, sat to his right and clutched a small white handkerchief in her thin fingers. It was eerily dark and oppressively silent inside the funeral home. Tall, thin Preacher Henniger intoned his own personal eulogy. At age twenty-one, fresh out of Bible college, Preacher Henniger had baptized Gene on his eighteenth birthday, before Gene joined the Marine Corps. Preacher Henniger and Gene had hunted and fished together for many years afterward.

Elijah was stoically composed throughout the ceremony, but he broke down completely when, after the preacher’s final Amen, he watched his mother, Delia, and Gene’s mother, Edna, sob loudly and hold on to each other tightly as they walked, as if drawn, to Gene’s closed, flag-covered casket. Delia, grieving with sudden fear, anguish, and desolation, clutched the casket tightly and held a framed photograph taken when Gene was a nineteen-year-old Marine Corps corporal. Edna lay lightly draped over Delia, holding her hands, as Delia wept piteously. Elijah could not hold back the tears when he witnessed the raw scene of grief and despair unfold before him. He knew that his life had changed; he felt dark angels hovering around him. He lay facedown in Naomi’s lap, sobbing uncontrollably. He felt Naomi’s own tears upon the back of his neck as she held him gently in her arms, telling him quietly to hush and saying that it was all right. There was sobbing throughout the funeral home.

Marvin Vollmann, the twenty-three-year-old Jewish man who had died in the airplane with Gene, left an eight-months-pregnant widow and a six-year-old son. Deborah Vollmann and her son, Joseph, appeared at the funeral home just as Elijah walked out the open double front doors with Naomi. Deborah cupped Elijah’s tear-streaked face with both hands. He felt lost in her perfume. Her dark eyes unblinkingly shimmered as she stared intensely at him for nearly a minute without saying anything. He was as lost as she was; he saw it written in her wide brown eyes. Tears streaked her cheeks too. She was a young schoolteacher; she’d buried her husband yesterday.

I’m sorry for you, Elijah, Deborah told him in a soft, sad voice. To lose your father, when now you will need him the most. She shook her head. You’re going to be a lonely boy, Elijah. I know my Joseph will be. I pray to God you’ll be okay from here on.

Deborah appeared lost and alone too—the look was etched clearly into her large, wet eyes—and she hugged Elijah tightly to her. They held each other for a long time. She left him dizzy with her perfume. Without another word, she disappeared inside the funeral home to be with Delia. It was the last time he ever saw her and her son.

He and Naomi stood quietly near the entrance and watched everyone come out of the funeral home. Naomi smoked a cigarette. Elijah had wiped the tears from his face; he felt dazed, battered, and numb. Emptiness filled his soul. He knew most of the people—friends and relatives—and watched them silently as they talked among themselves in low tones, milling around the entrance, along the sidewalk, and into the full parking lot. Hands touched his shoulders and the top of his head; he was now the anointed. He felt alone and lost. It was eerily quiet except for the solemn organ music wafting outside. He didn’t know what the future was going to hold. He could not believe this had happened. Gene had been alive just two days before, celebrating his thirty-first birthday. There was nothing anyone in the family could do except remember him. Beyond the funeral home, on the streets and in the world, life went on, ignoring the pain and desperation he felt.

After all the mourners filed outside, the pallbearers—Gene’s paternal relatives and Jammy Strong, who had been with Gene when he died—with the casket resting upon their shoulders, walked slowly outside into the bright sunshine and the crowd of people, moving toward the waiting hearse. When the tall, brawny, large men passed by Elijah, he reached out and touched the end of the mahogany casket.

Wait here, Naomi told Elijah, holding his hand.

No, Elijah answered. No, I want to walk with them. He freed his hand from Naomi and walked behind the casket to the waiting black hearse. Gene’s younger brother, Lincoln, and Jammy Strong had tears running freely down their cheeks. It was the first time Elijah had seen men shedding tears for another man. He felt more than saw the crowd that surrounded him. The men and the casket were all that occupied him. He had no more tears. His father was dead, and he knew he would never hear his voice or feel his paternal presence again. He was no longer a son.

It was then, standing by one side as they slid the casket slowly, almost reverently, into the hearse, that he realized he was now a man.

Lincoln pressed his hand upon Elijah’s shoulder and said gruffly, Follow me. Quiet and numb, Elijah walked behind the rawboned six-foot-six giant across the street and into the local high school parking lot. They said not a word. Lincoln had lit a cigarette after loading the casket into the hearse, and he smoked it furiously as he walked. They stood next to Naomi’s ’56 Ford Fairlane and waited for Naomi and Uncle Don and for the procession to leave the funeral home. Cars filled the parking lots of the funeral home and the high school across the street. Across from the high school was another large parking lot for the popular bowling lanes, and it too was full of cars. Each vehicle had an orange sticker with the word Funeral in black across the windshield. Naomi and Uncle Don approached the car.

I need me a drink, Lincoln suddenly said. He and Elijah climbed into the backseat. Naomi and Uncle Don sat in the front and smoked cigarettes. Naomi was in the driver’s seat. Uncle Don silently passed a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle to Lincoln. Lincoln tilted the bottle to his lips and took a large swallow. He blew air out his nostrils and passed the bottle to his nephew. Elijah took the bottle from his uncle, raised it to his lips, and swallowed a small amount of the liquor. It burned down through him; he liked the taste. He passed the bottle to Uncle Don, who chuckled quietly.

You like it? Uncle Don asked Elijah.

Yes, sir, he answered. His sinuses felt hot and clear.

Do you want another one?

No, sir, he answered. Thank you.

Then Elijah watched through the side window in the backseat as his mother, Delia, finally walked out of the funeral home, dressed and veiled in black, with Edna and Floyd on either side of her. Delia leaned on Edna for support. She looked as if she could barely walk. Lincoln, sitting next to Elijah, took another swig from the bottle when he saw that. Christ, he said in a gravelly voice, and he turned away with tears in his eyes.

They watched the large black limousine as Delia, Floyd, Edna, and Elijah’s two younger brothers climbed inside. Behind the limousine, the hearse pulled out of the parking lot at the funeral home with a highway patrol escort. Elijah watched in silent wonder as all the cars slowly poured out onto the two-lane highway, heading south.

I don’t believe this, Naomi said, puffing nervously on another cigarette. I can’t believe how many people are here. I know Gene had a lot of friends, but Christ Almighty. Her voice suddenly cracked as her eyes filled with tears. Uncle Don gave her the whiskey bottle.

Gene had been a blue-collar ironworker. He’d gotten into the trade because his father was an ironworker too. Gene had quit high school when he was fifteen, a year after the end of the Second World War, because he’d felt he had learned all that was necessary for him to live in the world. I can read and write and do arithmetic. If I want to read a book, I’ll read one, he had told Edna.

I tried, by golly, Edna had once told Elijah long ago. I tried talkin’ to that boy to stay in school, but all he said was if he ever wanted to find out about anything else, he’d read a book to get the gist of it, use his own common sense, or just experience it. Weren’t no flies on him. No, sir, by God.

Gene’s younger brother, Lincoln, had quit high school two years later, and after finding himself out of postwar 1953 Korea and prison, he’d joined Gene and Floyd on the skeletal structures they built. It had been a rough-and-tumble existence, and they’d learned quickly to be men in the world. Such an existence had been engrained in the blood and bone, and it had hardened both Gene and Lincoln. Gene had been involved in building most of the interstate highway bridges across Ohio and other nearby states before he died. That had been during the Camelot years of the twentieth century, before the federal interstate highway system finally had been completed, as foreseen by General Eisenhower. Lincoln had worked on every ironworking bridge project with Gene and Floyd.

Along the route that paralleled the ongoing construction of the interstate highway, Elijah watched the ironworkers on the bridges. They had all stopped their work and stood silently as the procession filed past, holding their hardhats against their chests. They knew their friend and comrade was being buried that day. Girders hovered underneath overhead crane cables, and some had already been set in place, with Gene’s name chalk-marked heavily upon their sides.

We were working on them bridges last week, Lincoln said. He took a huge swallow of the whiskey, and great wracking sobs came out of him as he tried futilely to suppress them.

The procession was two miles long, with headlights lighting the way for the dead to see, and it snaked slowly southward out of the midsized industrial city and into the rural forested mountains of the southern Ohio countryside. Naomi’s Ford was the last car in the procession. Two highway patrol cars followed behind them with flashers on. Midmorning traffic snarled as the highway patrol motorcycle escorts at every crossroad and intersection unexpectedly halted the other vehicles.

By the time three hours had ticked slowly by, Lincoln, Naomi, and Uncle Don were all drunk. Elijah felt drained but comforted by being with his relatives. Lincoln gave him a cigarette. Everyone in the car smoked silently. When they passed through Gene’s birthplace, Woodsfield, Elijah knew they were getting closer to his great-grandmother Semilda Arminda’s farmhouse and to the cemetery. They drove through Graysville, Rinard Mills, Bloomfield, Wingett Run, and then Lawrence Township and around the base of the mountain, climbing to Semilda Arminda’s farm, which was three miles from Dart.

Finally, they rounded the curve at Elk Run before