The Undertaking of Tess Read online

  Even though I owe Mr. Dalinsky for telling her what I’ve been telling her all along is true, I wouldn’t mind setting his stupid store on fire for laughing at my sister. I would get gasoline in a paper cup from the Clark station. But when you are doing a crime, you can’t have any witnesses who could rat you out to the cops, so I’d have to do that on one of the days “The Peeker” isn’t working at the station because he never takes his eyes offa me when I go up there. He’s told me three times that he loves redheads. “Ya know, like Lucille Ball,” and then he laughed. I think it was a laugh, whatever it was, I never wanna hear it again.

  I pat Birdie to calm her down, stroke her hair, and after she curls up against me, I take the folded up paper and pencil out from under my pillow and add Mr. Dalinsky to:

  MY SHIT LIST

  Dennis Patrick

  The greasy man who tries to peek in the gas station bathroom window when you can’t make it home from the Tosa Theatre after you drink a large root beer.

  Mrs. Gertrude Klement.

  Mom. Louise.

  Jenny Radtke.

  Mr. Dalinsky

  I’m worried that when the owner of the drug store told Birdie that Daddy was really dead that she started wailing. I can only hope she didn’t do that really loud and in front of one of the gossipy ladies from the Pagan Baby Society because they would talk about her at their next Monday night meeting, and then Louise will know for sure that Birdie has gone around the bend.

  That was so stupid of me to send her up there in the first place. Selfish. I needed her out of the way, and knowing that she can’t resist a brown cow, or me, I lied and told her that I wasn’t feeling good and gave her a dollar from my piggy bank so she could get herself a float and me some Tums, even though I knew that wasn’t the ginchiest idea because she’d probably just stand in that air-conditioned store and stare at that stupid picture postcard taped up to the cash register for an hour. It was a gamble, and I lost. But who knows? Maybe it’ll turn out okay in the long run because at least she knows now that Daddy really is at the bottom of Lake Michigan and not catching pointy-nosed fishes in Boca Raton.

  Once Birdie skipped far enough down the block yesterday that I was sure she wasn’t going to double back, I checked to make sure that Mrs. Klement was at confession and couldn’t spy on me some more from her stool in the back window, and I hopped over the cemetery fence to do another one of what the cavalry calls scouting missions. Birdie hasn’t been coming with me to look for Daddy’s pretend grave because she didn’t want to face the truth, but I’ve been sneaking away when she was busy cleaning or doing something else for Mother, like giving her a foot rub, so when the day came that she finally did believe that he really is dead—like she does now—I could take her straight to him.

  I looked and looked until I bumped into Mr. McGinty not far from the pond where Daddy and me used to fish. That was odd, because Mr. McGinty usually only digs graves, mows, and pulls weeds right after the sun comes up or close to when it’s about to set, so there is less chance that he’ll run into visitors because he is very shy except around Birdie and me. He doesn’t get out of the cemetery much, only to early Mass, and he buys food, but I have never seen him at the grocery store. Secretly, I think that he takes care of more than just the cemetery. I think he keeps his eye out for, and on, the Finley sisters. Did Daddy ask him to do that in case anything happened to him because our mother is 100% Irish and it’s a well-known fact that they are not good with kids? That seems possible because Daddy really liked Mr. McGinty. “Pipe down, Louise. Joe’s a little cracked, but he’s still a good egg,” he used to tell her when she would complain about Birdie and me going over to Holy Cross to visit with him.

  Even though I gave him the signal to let him know that I was nearby the way Mr. McGinty told me I had to because he’s not good with Gotchas!, when I said, “Hi,” he jumped about a foot in the air, dropped his shovel on his foot, and yelped something that I couldn’t make out. That’s another reason why he’d be a great daddy because he’d understand Birdie’s jitteriness. “Sorry,” I said. “I whistled really loud.”

  He took a clean, white hankie out of his pocket, mopped the sweat off his forehead, and said, “Good afternoon, Tess.” He has the nicest voice. It reminds me of Mr. Ed Herlihy’s. He does the Kraft commercials on the television. Those are Birdie’s favorite ads because she really loves cheese.

  He’s tall, so I usually have to crank my head back when I talk to him, but yesterday he was standing in the grave, so we were almost face to face. He gets a lot of weather on his ’cause people die all the time and they gotta get buried during the summer, fall, winter, and spring, so his skin looks pretty used. His nose runs on the large side, not like Jimmy Durante’s or anything, but biggish, his cheekbones jut out like cliffs, and his hands have a lot of calluses. His blond hair sprouts up on his head like new grass, shorter even than a crew cut, so you can see his scalp. (Apaches would love him.) All in all, he’s a fine-looking gentleman. And his leg isn’t withered the way Louise said it was when I told her that she should come over here to talk to him about getting married. It’s just got alotta red and pink scars and is tender to the touch.

  I didn’t know how bad I missed him until I saw him. I toed some of the dirt that he’d piled up next to the grave and said, “I feel crummy about not coming to see ya since….” We have things in common. We both like being around dead people, and he can’t sleep either. He hasn’t come by for awhile, but out of habit, I still keep a look out for him from our bedroom window. On certain summer nights, he waves a lantern on the other side of the cemetery fence. We go frog hunting and firefly catching. He also taught me some of the constellations, but other than pointing out the Big and Little Dippers and such, we don’t talk a lot because Mr. McGinty is the strong, silent type. “I don’t know if you heard … our daddy died.”

  “I know that, honey. I dug—” In his brown eyes with the lids that are always dropped to half-mast, I could see that he felt bad. Even if Louise doesn’t think of him as husband material, I almost asked him to be our new daddy right then and there. Maybe he could grow on our mother over time. I didn’t like Charlie Garfield the first day I met him and now look at us. We’re practically going steady. Mr. McGinty says, “I been watching you comin’ over the fence.” With his war binoculars, I bet. He uses them to watch out for, “Intruders.” He can see right into Birdie’s and my bedroom, that’s how powerful they are. “How come your sister hasn’t been with you? She okay?”

  I don’t want to lie to him because I like him so much, but I also don’t want to go into a long explanation about how weird she’s going, so I just say, “Birdie’s been resting up. She’ll be coming over any day now.”

  He cracks his knuckles, which is a bad habit of his, and says, “I don’t worry about you so much, you’re strong in the legs, but your sister….” He has warned me about this many, many times. She has always made it over the fence okay, but there is a first time for everything. She has that chubby tummy that she might forget to suck in all the way and it could get caught up on the points. “Wouldn’t want her to get hurt.”

  Mr. McGinty frets all the time about bad things happening. I would too, if I were him. He’s told me some war stories. How any of those GI Joes come back after the war and be normal after they got chased around by the Nazi people, bayoneted left and right, and saw bombs blow up their friends is a mystery to me. How can they go back to being a regular fella that works at the Feelin’ Good Cookie Company or American Motors with all those bad memories running around in the brains? That’s where most of the dads around here have their jobs. They can also be tool and die makers, like Charlie’s father is. I pointed at Mr. McGinty’s grave-digging shovel one afternoon and told him, “You’re a tool and die maker too,” but he didn’t think that was funny. This is something we don’t have in common. He doesn’t joke or watch detective shows or go to the movies or sing, none of that. He doesn’t go in for exciting mystery stories either. He reads rel
igious books and says the rosary on his day off. All his pants have knee patches from praying so much.

  I tell him, “Thank you for worrying about Birdie climbing the fence, but sometimes you don’t have any choice. Sometimes you gotta take your life into your hands no matter how scary something is, right?” I thought saying that would make him feel a little better about being a war hero even if he’s got a dinner plate in his head and a screwed-up leg, but he didn’t take that well. He hopped up out of the grave really fast and took off. He didn’t even stop when I yelled after him, “Hey! You forgot your shovel!”

  When I was watching him hip-hop away, I realized again how stupid, stupid, stupid I’ve been. Instead of searching for Daddy’s pretend grave every chance I get, I shoulda just asked Mr.McGinty where it was before he hightailed it back to his shack, which is a lot bigger in the inside than it looks from the outside.

  He keeps the place very clean. There’s a small table that has a checker board set up on it because we play sometimes. And instead of paintings in frames, he has holy cards stuck to the wall above his sofa that turns into a bed. He collects religious cards, the same way some of the boys in the neighborhood collect steely marbles. His favorite is the one of the patron saint of the dead—St. Gertrude—which I think is kinda funny because that’s my most mortal enemy, Mrs. Klement’s, first name. (She thinks she’s a saint, but she’s NOT holier than thou.) I had to trade four St. Jude’s for the St. Gert card because it’s very rare, but Mr. McGinty loved it so much that he gave me his purple heart because he knows it’s my favorite color.

  He’s also very keen on St. Joan of Arc because she was a soldier who fought for what she believed in too, which wasn’t Uncle Sam, but God. We had a talk about this under the stars one night. I agreed with him that she was brave, yes, “But she was stupid too, because she didn’t really think her plan all the way through.” Things were going okay for Joan for awhile, but in the end, some French people burned her up like a steak. God the all-powerful coulda saved her, the same way he coulda saved Daddy, so that only goes to show you that: 1. You have to be very, very careful about who you stick up for in life. I wouldn’t fight a battle for anybody but Birdie, and Gammy, if Boppa wasn’t around. 2. What the nuns and priests teach you about the Almighty loving you and taking care of you? That’s nothing but hot air a.k.a. bullshit.

  Even though Birdie has stopped whimpering, I keep stroking her back in our bedroom that’s not as dark as it used to be because of the birthday nightlight. Her skin isn’t satiny smooth like it is in the winter, it’s more like fly paper. “I’m so sorry that Daddy isn’t in Boca Raton like you thought he was. I really, really am.” I tell her more nice things like that so they really sink in. “But now that you’ve faced the music, we gotta do what the state motto says. We gotta move forward. How ’bout we head over to the cemetery tomorrow? We can bring a picnic when Louise goes to try for that job at Turner’s Toppers. After we eat, we’ll look around for Daddy, or we could just ask Mr. McGinty where the pretend grave is.” Birdie doesn’t hop up and down over that idea because finding out that the model in the postcard isn’t Daddy really took the wind outta her sails. She’s kinda limp. “You’ll feel a lot better after we find him.” I’m so sure that this would be the best present I could ever give her. “I promise.”

  She doesn’t say anything back, so I think she mighta fallen asleep. It’s a miracle how she can drop off to Dreamland and doesn’t wake up at all during the night. You could set off a cherry bomb in our bedroom and she wouldn’t move a muscle in one of her arms that she keeps crossed over her chest like she’s in a casket, which scares me so bad some nights that I pinch her to make sure she didn’t die, and even that doesn’t wake her up, she just groans a little.

  I lean over Birdie and push down the alarm button that I set for 5 a.m. in case she wets the bed, which I’m pretty positive that she’s gonna do because she always pees during the nights that things don’t go so hot with mother during the day. After what happened at the fair, I’m expecting a flood. On top of that, raindrops are beating against our window.

  I lie flat and make a coupla sheet angels, not big ones, because our bed isn’t that large. I’m just about to start practicing “My Favorite Things” for when I enter the Miss America contest, when Birdie says, “But … even if we find his grave, Daddy’s not really in there. You told me that he’s at the bottom of—”

  “Part of him is in the coffin. His soul, and that’s much more important than his bones and a bunch of rotting flesh.”

  If she was a little smarter, she could figure out that’s a lie because Daddy’s soul isn’t in the pretend grave, it’s in Heaven with all the other good peoples’ who don’t lie or want to set fire to drugstores or let their fathers drown.

  “But what if Louise comes home from trying for that job at the hat shop and she … she catches us?” Birdie whispers. “She’d be so mad. I don’t want a spanking.”

  Our mother never liked it when we visited the cemetery to practice our hobby when Daddy was still alive, but after he drowned, and Mrs. Klement told her that she saw me comin’ over here out of her kitchen window, Louise blew her top. She tells us at least once a day now, “If I ever catch you climbing into that graveyard again, or hear from anybody else that you did”—she means Gert, who has nothing better to do with her measly life than spend it keeping track of my every move— “mark my words, the Finley ghouls won’t be able to sit down for a week.”

  Louise could make my life easier by taking us to Daddy’s pretend grave if she wanted to, but she doesn’t visit it, and she doesn’t want Birdie and me to either because she’s trying to act like he never even existed. She told us, “Life goes on.” She never talks about him, and she hid all his pictures in the attic trunk and gave his things away, even his fishing pole that I wanted to keep so bad that I got down on my knees in front of her and said, “Please?” I stupidly thought she was going to be nice for a minute, but then she set her chin and said, “If he hadn’t gone fishing that day, he’d still …,” and rushed out of the living room with the pole in her hand.

  I get up on my elbow to tell Birdie a little white lie. “I looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the library. Applying for a job at a hat shop takes four hours and we won’t stay over at the cemetery nearly that long.” I use my Señor Wences voice because she loves it. “S’awright?”

  I think she mighta drifted off because she doesn’t laugh like she usually would, but then she says in her sleepy voice, “Thank you again for my nightlight. It’s really nice. You love your present as much as I love mine?”

  “Even more, I bet. That was so brave of you to go up to the attic.” I got the picture of Daddy wedged down deep against the wall on my side of the bed so Louise won’t find it. I pick Birdie’s hand up in mine. “Let us pray.” We don’t bow our heads and recite the now I lay me down to sleep prayer that they taught us a school. Birdie and me always say, “I love you two as much as the stars and the moon,” because that’s what Daddy used to tell us after he tucked us in for the night.

  After Birdie falls asleep for real, I don’t feel like singing anymore, so I’m making hand shadows on the wall and thinking how a lot of people around here want to be more “modern” and “with it.” They want cars with big fins and automatic dishwashers and diamond jewelry, but listening to the rain pitter-pattering against our bedroom window, and feeling my sister’s sticky body next to mine, and every so often reaching down and stroking the picture of our Daddy and pressing his Swiss Army knife against my cheek makes me feel sure that the old days are good enough for me and the Bird.

  Most Things in Life Sound Better than They Are Except for Blackmail

  We didn’t find Mr. McGinty, or Daddy’s grave, the first time we tried, or the second day either, but today is gonna be different. Those other visits to the cemetery had to be quick ones because Birdie was still getting used to the idea of going behind Louise’s back—she was jumpier than a Mexican bean—but like I tell
her when I’m cooking up our breakfast on the green stove this morning, “You know that famous saying … third time’s the charm?”

  It’s gotta be.

  I need to check the last thing off my list or throw in the towel. Daddy would be so disappointed in me, I don’t want to, but tomorrow is the first day of sixth grade. I’ll be so busy diagramming sentences and learning dumb historical facts and getting my ears pinched by those mean nuns who keep us prisoners until 3:30. And then after school, I’ll have to do my homework and Birdie’s too, and tell Louise thank you and how gorgeous she is every two minutes that I won’t have time to sneak over to the cemetery. Even worse, I had to add something extra onto #3 last night, so that’s gonna make it even harder.

  TO-DO LIST

  Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.

  Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.

  If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing. P.S. The resurrecting idea you had is a good one. Don’t forget to tell her that.

  Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.

  Louise is almost done getting ready for work because she got the job at the hat shop. She still does the grocery shopping because she could bump into a man in the Red Owl’s meet department (joke!), but since she needs her, “Beauty rest,” I’m in charge now of getting food on the table in the morning and at supper. I only know how to make a coupla things. Scrambled eggs, fried Spam, and one of my daddy’s favorites, sloppy joes. That’s what I made last night because we had hamburger in the fridge and tomato paste in the pantry. We didn’t have any buns, so I scooped the slop onto pieces of stale Wonder bread, which gave it a nice crunch. (Sloppy joes still make me wanna throw up, so I slipped mine to Birdie under the table.)