Ok, let me revise this to "One of the Funniest Funeral". Funerals are not exactly a barrel of laughs but this one is still talked about some 50 years later. I remember it well for two reasons: one, I was there, not because I was a relative but because one of the altar boys was my best friend and I wanted to chide him for wearing a crimson robe topped with a large lace collar (and pelt him with sticky stuff), and the other reason is simply because behind the cemetery in question a peach orchard nestled between the walls and a natural rock pool. My plan was to fool around with the altar boys and after the service eat as many peaches I could stomach and have a dip later.
If my memory serves me well, I got violently sick, having eaten dozens of them. Then my friend, the altar boy, and his acolyte took me by the arms and legs (as I was recuperating) and threw me into the rock pool as a just reward for pestering them throughout the funeral and making fun of their outfits. There's a moral in there somewhere....
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Now for the story, which is buried in my first book, a trilogy of sorts about "Life between the Tides": if you're good, I might post another excerpt, of me torturing the priest at confession, as only I could.
The funeral of the tallest man from Provence, Monsieur Malpasset, (which roughly translate as "not gone well"!) who had made tree-lopping a facile art, did not appear in print in our local newspaper solely on the merit of his fabled height, but rather on the strength of successive circumstances that had tainted his immediate post-death with an inexhaustibility of ill-luck and incidents of such absurdity that they had quickly entered the local lore and were fixed, indelibly, in the minds of his family and confused bier followers. Resplendent in my new pair of shorts, and as a strapping lad of eight I was among the befuddled mourners.
The heart of the problem was the coffin.
There simply wasn’t one long enough in the whole of the South of France to accommodate Monsieur Malpasset's frame, as Monsieur Seigner, the cabinet maker, did not have any suitable lengths of pine wood in stock to make the deadline, so to speak, on the rapidly approaching date of interment (on account of a parching heatwave, recorded as the hottest one in the century). Searches were made, calls to fellow cabinet makers were logged, relatives were sent to building companies, to no avail. Frantic efforts gave way to hysteria as the family, friends and volunteers held a war council well into the last night before the funeral, severely denting the collection of fine red Bordeaux Monsieur Malpasset had amassed as an official of the wine & liqueur licensing board. At 4 am, after much brain-probing and cork-popping, it had been decided that the deceased’s tall wardrobe be halved and remodeled into a proper mortuary habitat, padded with lengths of white velvet. By ten o’clock in the morning, with complete success, the wardrobe had metamorphosed into a rigidly oblong coffin, dark of wood and corniced at the top. The two-horse bier came dutifully at eleven to collect the body just as the last nail was embedded on the makeshift lid which had served as a tabletop in its previous configuration. Relatives and friends, tired and intoxicated, massed - in full sun - behind the carriage on which the exceedingly tall and neatly halved wardrobe stuck out by almost a meter.
The road to the cemetery was steep and two men were made to sit by either side of the bier to hold Monsieur Malpasset’s coffin until its resting place (rope had been considered and judged too undignified).
The heat took its toll as some of the followers wilted by the roadside, taking a nap under life-saving pine trees. The two horses, unaccustomed at pulling such heavy weight, took the best part of two hours to arrive in sight of the cemetery in which a flushed Father Marchand, our local priest, had been waiting with his two altar boys for some time. Just as someone murmured that the end of the Calvary was in sight, one of the horses fell to his knees, a good hundred meters from the gates. His partner unnerved at the sight of his fallen comrade, bolted upright, trying to shake himself free, causing the two somnolent men on the bier to make a desperate grab for the sliding wardrobe. Two bodies and a corpse crashed unceremoniously upon the stone road: one, was thankfully dead and lying peacefully inside his wardrobe, the others suffered a broken arm and a bloody nose, respectively. It took a superhuman exertion an hour and a half (as the near-exhausted mourners fell like flies) to carry Monsieur Malpasset to his final destination. Led by an unsettled Father Marchand, the wardrobe and the dwindling procession had finally found its way to the grave, where, sadly, it appeared far too inadequate in size. No one had bothered to alert the grave-diggers as to the required length of the hole, and being a Saturday no one was available to make the necessary enlargement. Shovels were produced and, stoically, the remaining relatives endeavored to dig under the relentless sun, listening to Father Marchand delivering his Latin in a hoarse voice. With the appropriate grave length in sight, the closest relative, his clothes soiled by a mixture of dirt and sweat, had remarked cheerfully that nothing else could possibly happen. He had not counted on Father Marchand to faint from a severe heat stroke onto the wardrobe as it was being lowered, at which point most people gave up and walked away, cursing the powers above and leaving Father Marchand behind to the care of his altar boys. As for me, I knew better. I made a beeline for the nearest fruit tree.