第12章 The Trade Changes

A trade does not change all at once. It changes the way a body changes, a little a year, and the person inside it does not notice, and the neighbors notice, and nobody says anything to the person. Rocco took the front door in the middle of the seventies, when his father began to slow down, and he was the face of the house by the time he was thirty, and by the middle of the eighties he had buried enough of Brackwater to have a reputation of his own, separate from his grandfather's and his father's, and the reputation was this: that Rocco Marzullo would come in the middle of the night and would not rush a family, and that he could stand in a room with three generations of a family that was already breaking apart and hold it steady for the hour it took to decide the things that had to be decided. What changed around him was simpler and more brutal than any of the eulogies. The first change was the fire. Cremation came up the river the way everything came, a little later than it had come to the coasts, and for the first fifteen years after it was legal in the state it was still, in Little Rocca and its children and grandchildren, a thing you did not mention, because the church had opinions and the old women had worse ones, and a family that chose it was quietly saying that they were a family that had stopped living where their grandparents had lived. Rocco did not fight it and did not welcome it. He built a second room for it with a plain wall and a plain chair and a shelf, and when the time came he used it as well as he used the chapel, and he learned that a woman who has been sitting with a body in a front room for three days and a woman who is going to receive an urn on a Saturday morning are not the same woman, and need different things from a man at a door, and that neither of them needs to be told that the other one is wrong. The second change was the money. The family that owns one funeral home in a city owns a living. The company that owns forty funeral homes in a state owns a market, and by the nineties the market had come to Brackwater in the shape of a young man in a good coat who parked a clean car on Ferrona Avenue and sat in the chapel with Rocco's father for an hour, and left a folder on the table. The folder said Vescor, in letters that had been chosen by a firm in the capital. Under Vescor, in smaller letters, it said that they were assembling a group of family homes in the northeast corner of the state out of respect for the families those homes served and for the craftspeople who had built them, which Salvatore read out loud in the front room that evening in a voice that got flatter with every line, and then he closed the folder and put it on the table and said the only thing he ever said about it, which Rocco wrote down later because he had never heard his father say anything quite like it. "A man who sells his name sells the name of every family that ever trusted it," he said. "They will keep the sign for five years and then they will take it down, and nobody will be able to say when it went, and the families who came to us will be sent to a room on the highway with a plaque in the lobby and a girl on the phone, and they will not know they have lost anything except the person they came to bury. It is the same as any other theft. The only difference is that the people being robbed are mostly dead." He would not sell. He would not even discuss it twice. And because he would not, the house stayed the size it was, and the trades that Vescor took were the trades that grew, and the Marzullo home went, over the next twenty years, from being the largest funeral home on the east side of Brackwater to being the oldest, which is a different and much smaller thing, and it pays a man in respect and not in money, and Rocco learned that winter that the family would be able to afford the respect and not the money, and that his father would choose the respect every time, and that this choice, which he had been raised to honor, was also, if he was honest, a hammer that his father had just handed to him, and he did not yet know who would be at the other end of it. Filomena died in the spring of that same year, in the prep room, at the table, at the age of seventy-one, with her sleeves rolled up and the high window letting in its gray light, and when they found her the work on the table was finished and squared away and the tools were laid out in their places in the drawer the way she had always kept them, and the last thing she had done in the world, the family liked to say, was to leave a room in order. She left her daughter an envelope. It had Sera's name on it in her mother's handwriting, and inside it there were three sheets of paper, in the hand of a woman who kept the sheds' lists, and on the sheets there were two names and a set of numbers that did not agree with themselves, and nothing else, and no letter, and no explanation. Sera was living inland by then, in a university town, and had been gone from Brackwater for a decade, and she read the three sheets at her kitchen table twice, and then she put them in a drawer, and she did not come home. Not that year. ---