A COUNTRY FUNERAL
Christopher Bauer
One would have to be very careful if one were to make a film about this village. When would it take place? In the late eighties all the fields would be cultivated, mainly rice and tobacco and adorned with those yellow plastic balloons printed with owl eyes that were all the rage back then: they were supposed to work better than scarecrows. Maybe. Then the turn of the century saw attempts at other crops and there were old CDs dangling from string that were said to work much better than the owl eyes. Now, perhaps half of the little fields are fallow and one field is entirely devoted to solar panels. At night there are those random blinking lights, the ones guaranteed, we are told, to scare away the boars that are increasingly coming down from the hills as the villages higher up, one by one, cease to exist.
Back to the eighties then, when the decline was something not yet a subject of usual conversation and it seemed that what had been and was being might still be forever.
Most of the houses had been around for at least a century in the style of centuries before They had been built for utility back when useful and handsome were considered synonymous: earth packed about bamboo laths; thick beams of wood impossible to find here anymore. Roofs were thatched but covered with silvery metal mantles that were, admittedly, ugly. Who has a couple of million to spend on replacing thatch every five years or so?
This ordinary day of ordinary memory began as a gray winter morning and too early to know if the clouds on the hills were going to rise or fall. One shook one’s hands with the other men. They were gathered for one of their own. The men walked down the road to the house about halfway down the hill, meeting others coming about halfway up. The village was the hill, and nothing more.
The undertakers had already put out the big paper flower wreaths from organizations and companies - farm supplies and such. These tripods lined the driveway, spilled out onto the road.
Greetings from the new widow. In a side room one sat and folded the cards, enclosed packets of salt. The men wrapped presents, the sweet cakes for which the region is famous. There were bamboo frames looking like inverted bells to decorate with paper flowers. These small tasks were left purposely undone by the undertaker: busy work for some reason reserved for men, village men, not family, souvenirs of when death was strictly local and intimate.
Time to eat a little, start drinking. The older men tested the capacity of the younger, tested the one foreigner. It was all rather cheerful. Family members, the village women, the widow, were in the next room and there were greetings from to room. At a certain point the president of the neighborhood association nodded and it was time for the men to go home and change to the double-breasted black suits with black ties that, with white ties were also utilized for weddings.
A couple of hours later the undertakers, the professionals, had covered the yard walls with black and white striped hangings. Two cages flanked the gate; pigeons gray and white, crowded in their feces.
From inside the yard, one could lean into the living room where the sliding doors had been removed so that one would not have to enter to view the open coffin amid flowers, the fruit, furniture, candles, the portrait of the man with his head, taken from a snapshot, placed over a torso in a kimono; one doesn’t press one’s luck with a funeral portrait done before one’s time.
A sound system had taped music. A professional voice spoke of the deceased, his life, his qualities. What to say? He was born here, farmed here, left once for war, came back raised a family protected a family as best he could. He died. All in all, as good as any of us should desire.
One took one’s place behind a long table and bowed to the visitors who signed the book and left money, went to the coffin and prayed with prayers accompanied by incense - three pinches. The visitors took their presents. They bowed again, left, and more came.
A young man took souvenir photos for the album to be made. A - yes, a master of ceremonies read condolence telegrams and maybe at other times he read congratulation telegrams at weddings. There were two priests: one to pray, the other to ring the bells and at the last bell the family tucked flowers among the body. The photographer straddled the coffin to get the right composition: the widow’s hand, his face, the flowers. The lid was put on. His wife, who had waited all through the war and married him as soon as he returned from the POW camp, drove in the first nail with a silver mallet, handed it to his brother, and on to another brother and on until the job is done.
A surprise. Here the pallbearers still wore triangular white head pieces; in the city one only knew of them from the ghost stores so popular in children’s cartoons. The flower bell things that were made were placed high atop long poles and were carried while one followed the coffin. It was a brisk day. There was a dragon on a pole, bending in the wind.
The widow held the portrait that meant most of her life for she was of the same village and it probably had never occurred to either that they would be with anyone else.
Another surprise; those who had come, prayed and collected their presents had not, after all, left; they lined the little road down the hill that led to another little road that led to the highway. One does not see, as one sees in cities, a coffin followed by one or two mourners who are suddenly stricken with the thought that their beloved was not well liked. There are no lonely funerals here.
The hearse was a gold painted structure of intricacy like a temple, or what a temple around the body of a limousine. The widow made a speech by the closed doors, a thank you speech, an apology for the cold weather, for the inconvenience of his death. The family left for the crematorium. There was a little bus provided by the undertaker.
At the prefectural crematorium, the family would have waited while the coffin was incinerated. Then, in an order decreed who knows how many centuries ago, each member would pick out designated bones with tongs. Lastly, the skull cap would be placed on top and pressed down, the ceramic cover would close the urn and they took it home.
That night the family and neighbors, just those from the hill this time, gathered inside the home, in front of the portrait on the family altar, in front of the urn, in front of his bones. The priest chanted and as the hours went by it became difficult to sit on one’s calves, so when the priest stopped for a cigarette; the rest followed suit; this was, after all, still tobacco country.
When the ceremony finished - this time, really finished, pieces of mochi, the new year’s rice cake were served. It was a pretty good funeral. Another speech. Another apology.
Climbing the hill back home, the old men stepped more lightly now. They went to school with him; they went to war with him and once again, this time, as happens more and more as one ages, they could find themselves mildly surprised that they were still alive. The clouds had gone; it was a crisp, clear night with the Milky Way and a map of the constellations above.
That is, of course, one advantage in living in the country; there are more stars.