Winter Transit

The first motor hearse in the county came to Corley, Illinois, in the fall of 1926. The horses it replaced are buried in the churchyard of St. Barnabas, and on cold nights they do not breathe.

My grandfather said a horse tells you who you are with its nose, and the first thing he ever taught me was how to answer.

I was six. He lifted me under the arms in the cold of the livery barn on Locust Street and held me up to the face of the lead mare, a black so deep it went blue where the lantern touched it, and he said, "Blow. Not hard. Like you're cooling soup." So I blew into the big soft cave of her nostril. She considered it. Then she blew back, one long warm gust that smelled of hay and molasses and lifted the hair off my forehead.

"There," said Asa Quarrier. "Now she knows you. She'll know you in the dark."

Her name was Jane. The other three were Matthew, Mark and Luke, and when people asked my grandfather why the fourth wasn't John he told them John had been taken, by a gelding over in Galesburg that had no right to it, and he wasn't going to argue scripture with a Methodist horse. So the mare was Jane. She led. The geldings went where Jane went, and Jane went where my grandfather's hands told her, and that was how the dead of Corley, Illinois, got from wherever they had stopped to the churchyard of St. Barnabas on the hill.

There had been other teams before that one. Asa had been driving the dead since before the war with Spain. But Jane's was the team I knew, and the hearse was the one he'd bought secondhand from a firm in Springfield when my mother was a girl: black lacquer, glass on both sides so the town could see who it was, carved urns at the four corners, two brass lanterns, a driver's box high enough that I had to be handed up to it. On a funeral day the horses wore black ostrich plumes on their headstalls and long velvet drapes over their backs, fringed at the bottom, heavy as wet wool. In any kind of wind the drapes would lift and stand out from their sides, and the little kids in town who didn't know better would point and shriek that the Quarrier horses had wings.

I was one of the kids who knew better. I had brushed that velvet. I knew where the moth had got into Luke's.

Jane stopped at the lych-gate of St. Barnabas on her own. Nobody taught her. She'd come up the hill road at a walk, steady as a clock, and at the roofed gate she'd halt without a word from the box and stand while the bearers slid the coffin out the back, and she'd drop her head. The other three dropped theirs because she did. People who had seen it a hundred times still stopped talking when she did it.

"She's not praying," Asa told me once, when I asked. "She's waiting to be told she did it right."

"Did she?"

"Every time."

Lyle Varnum went to Chicago in August of 1926 and came back in a Cunningham.

Varnum owned the funeral parlor on Front Street. He did the embalming and sold the caskets and ran the viewings, and for twenty years he'd paid my grandfather by the drive. He was a soft, clean, decent man who smelled of carnations and something under the carnations, and he wanted Corley to be modern. Galesburg had a motor hearse. Peoria had two. So Varnum went up on the train with a bank draft and drove home the next week in a long black Cunningham with beveled glass and a nickel radiator and a horn that played two notes.

Half the town walked down to Front Street to look at it. Kids climbed the running boards until Varnum's nephew Dwight shooed them off. The men lifted the hood and talked about the engine in the low voices men use for engines. The women looked through the glass at the empty bier inside and didn't say much.

My grandfather didn't walk down. He stood in the door of the livery barn with his thumbs hooked in his braces and watched it go by on Locust, and Varnum stopped and leaned out the window to talk to him.

"It doesn't eat, Asa," he said. "It doesn't throw a shoe in February. It'll get them up that hill in four minutes in any weather God sends."

"I don't doubt it."

"I'll find work for you. There's always work."

"I don't doubt that either." My grandfather looked the Cunningham over from nose to tail, the way he'd look over a horse somebody wanted to sell him. Then he said the only thing I ever heard him say about it. "It doesn't know anybody."

Varnum didn't know what to make of that. He tipped his hat and drove on.

The trouble was the team itself. Jane was nineteen that summer. Matthew was older, and Mark had a hock that swelled in damp weather. Nobody in three counties wanted a black funeral team that had been retired by a motorcar; a funeral horse is good for exactly one thing, and the one thing was gone. There was a renderer from Peoria who came through every fall with a slat-sided wagon and paid by the pound. He came by the barn in September and named a figure, and my grandfather said, "No, sir," in a voice I had never heard him use, and the renderer put his hat back on and went.

That was a Tuesday. On the Thursday my grandfather took the team out one last time.

He didn't tell anybody. He came and got me after supper and we harnessed them together in the barn, all four, the full funeral rig: plumes, drapes, the brass polished. He lit both lanterns. He handed me up into the box and climbed up after me, and we drove the empty hearse down Locust and out along Front Street and up the hill road to St. Barnabas in the long September light, at a walk. People came out on their porches to see who had died. When they saw the glass was empty they didn't know what to do, so some of them took off their hats anyway.

At the lych-gate Jane stopped. She dropped her head. The others dropped theirs.

My grandfather sat on the box with the reins slack in his hands for the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer twice through, which I know because I said it, under my breath, the second time. Then he said, "That's right, girl. That's right," and turned them for home.

The vet came the next morning. Doc Ostrander. My grandfather had slept in the barn, and when I brought his coffee out at six he was standing in Jane's stall with his forehead against her forehead and his hand flat on her neck, not moving. I set the cup on the grain bin and went back in the house. My mother was at the kitchen window and we didn't speak to each other. Around seven we heard the first shot and she put her hand over her mouth and kept it there through the other three.

You cannot bury a horse in a churchyard. Everybody in Corley knew that, the way they knew you can't keep a pig in town. It isn't written down anywhere. It doesn't need to be.

My grandfather went to Reverend Hesketh with eighty dollars in a coffee tin and bought five plots in the north corner of St. Barnabas, where the old burying ground ran out against the stone wall and the Fahnestock pasture began on the other side.

The vestry argued about it for two Sundays. Mrs. Ida Pruett said a churchyard was for Christians, and that if Asa Quarrier wanted to put livestock in consecrated ground he could also put a hog in the baptismal font and see how he liked it. Mr. Fenwick from the drugstore asked whether horses had souls and was told by several people at once that this was not the question. Reverend Hesketh let them run down. Then he stood up and said he had read the deed, and the deed said for interment and did not say of whom, and that he personally had watched Asa Quarrier carry more of this parish to its rest than any minister who had ever stood in that pulpit, himself included, and he would be glad to hear a motion from anyone who wished to tell Asa he couldn't. Nobody made one.

Nobody asked about the fifth plot either. Not then.

Two hired men dug four graves with spades and a pick, through to the end of that week, and they were big graves, wide as a wagon bed, and the men complained the whole time and took my grandfather's money and went home. The horses went in one at a time on a stone-boat dragged by Fahnestock's old Percheron, who did not like the work and said so. Jane went last. My grandfather wrapped each of them in their own funeral velvet before the dirt went in. I asked if that was a waste of good velvet and he looked at me and I didn't ask again.

The fifth grave he dug himself.

He did it the week after, alone, in the afternoons, after the hired men were gone. He was sixty-seven years old. It took him most of a week, a little every day, and I'd go up after school and sit on the wall and watch him throw dirt out of a hole that kept getting deeper until only his hat showed. It was a man-sized grave, narrow and square-cornered, and when it was done he laid two-by-ten planks across it, and straw on the planks a foot thick, and a canvas tarpaulin over the straw with a fieldstone on each corner.

"Ground's going to freeze," he said.

"Who's it for?"

He climbed out and knocked the dirt off his spade against the wall and looked out over the Fahnestock pasture, where the light was going copper. "Fellow who's going to need it," he said.

All that fall the Cunningham took the dead up the hill, and it did it well. I want to be fair. It was smooth and it was fast and it never once balked. Old Mr. Treadwell went up in it in October and Mrs. Gertrude Amsel the week before Thanksgiving, and people said what a mercy, no swaying, no smell, just that long black car purring up the hill road with Dwight Varnum at the wheel in a black cap. And nobody stood on their porch to watch, because by the time you heard it coming it was gone.

It didn't stop at the lych-gate. That was the first thing everybody noticed and nobody said. The gate was wide enough for a motorcar, and Dwight drove straight through it and up the path to the graveside, because he could. The bearers had to walk the coffin back down to the gate so the procession could start properly. Reverend Hesketh insisted on that. So the Cunningham saved the dead four minutes on the hill road and cost them four minutes at the top, and everybody stood around in the cold watching the bearers walk backward.

My grandfather went out to the barn every morning anyway. He mucked out stalls that were already clean. He forked hay down from the loft into the empty mangers and then forked it back up. All through December he oiled harness, and there was nothing to put it on. He'd sit on an upturned bucket by the stove with the lead set across his knees, Jane's bridle, the one with the brass rosettes, and work the oil into the leather with his thumb until it shone like a church pew, and then he'd hang it on its peg and take down the next.

"You already did that one," I told him once.

"Did I," he said, and kept going.

The cold came down out of Canada on the fourteenth of January and sat on Corley like a hen on an egg.

The thermometer outside Fenwick's read thirty below on the first morning and the mercury went down into the bulb and didn't come back out. Pipes burst all over town. The Pruetts' cow froze standing up. Trees in the Fahnestock woodlot went off in the night like pistols as the sap in them froze and split the wood, and you'd lie in bed and hear them, one and then another, far off. You could not take a breath outdoors without it hurting. The air went hard and glassy, and anything that moved through it left a white plume hanging behind it after it was gone.

My grandfather took sick on the second day. He'd been out to the barn in it. He came in coughing, and by evening his chest was full of something wet, and by the morning of the third day Doc Ostrander, who'd been out to see him twice, stood with my mother in the hall and said a word I knew from church. My mother sat with him all that day. I sat with him through the night so she could sleep.

He didn't say much. He didn't make a speech. Toward three in the morning he opened his eyes and looked at the window, which was white over with frost ferns, and he said, "Open that, Tobe. I want to hear the road."

"It's thirty below."

"I know what it is."

So I cracked the sash an inch and the cold came in like a hand. There was nothing on the road to hear. A tree went off out in the Fahnestock woods. My grandfather lay with his head turned toward the window, listening, and his breath came out over the quilt in a little cloud, and then a smaller one, and toward six there wasn't any, and I sat with him a while before I went to wake my mother because I didn't want to be the one who made it true.

Varnum came that afternoon and did what he did, and they laid my grandfather out in the front parlor in his good suit with the fire banked low so he would keep. The funeral was set for the eighteenth.

My mother cried for the first time that evening. Not at the parlor. At the kitchen table, when Varnum asked, delicately, where we wished him buried, given that the ground in the whole county was frozen deeper than any spade could go and the town receiving vault was full until spring. My mother started to say she didn't know. And then she understood, all at once, what was waiting up on the hill in the north corner of St. Barnabas under a foot of straw and a tarpaulin and four fieldstones. She put her face in her hands.

Varnum, who was a decent man, waited.

On the morning of the eighteenth the Cunningham wouldn't start.

The oil in it had gone thick as cold molasses. Dwight cranked it until he was sweating in thirty below, and it coughed once and died. They lit a smudge pot under the crankcase and waited, and cranked, and it coughed again and died again. They lit a second smudge pot. Somewhere around ten o'clock there was a sound from under the hood like a dropped plate, and Dwight said a word you don't say in front of a funeral director, and that was the end of it. He'd filled the radiator with plain water the week before instead of the alcohol mix, because the alcohol cost money, and the water had frozen in the engine block overnight and split the iron from one end to the other.

Varnum came to the house with his hat in his hands and apologized to my mother. They could postpone a day. Fahnestock would bring his Percherons and a stone-boat in the morning. It would not be fitting, he said, and he was sorry. It would get Asa up the hill.

My mother said that would be fine.

I went to bed early that night. I didn't sleep. I lay listening to the trees go off in the woodlot and to my mother moving around downstairs, and then not moving, and then the house was all the way quiet except for the stove ticking and the windows creaking in their frames. It must have been after two when I heard it.

I knew it before I was awake enough to know I knew it. A sound I had heard every day of my life until October and had not heard since. The creak of harness leather under weight. A trace chain settling link against link. And under that, the long slow shift and stamp of a team standing still in the cold.

I went to the window and scratched a hole in the frost with my thumbnail.

The hearse was in the street in front of our house. The glass hearse, the Springfield one, with both brass lanterns lit and throwing yellow light out over the snow. Four black horses stood in the traces, plumed and draped, standing quiet the way a good team stands, heads up, weight square. The driver's box was empty.

I put on my boots and my father's old coat over my nightshirt. I went down the stairs. The parlor door was shut and I didn't open it. I went out the front, and the cold took me by the face, and I walked down the steps into the lantern light.

Every living thing on a night like that wears its breath. I want you to understand that. I walked down the path inside my own white cloud, so thick I had to push through it. The Pruetts' dog barked from under their porch and his barks came out as little white puffs. Every chimney on Locust trailed smoke. The lanterns hissed and a thin vapor curled off the top of them.

The horses stood in the light with frost on their manes and frost furred along the fringes of their drapes. And the air in front of their faces was as clear as glass.

I went to Jane. I knew her by the white hair in her forelock, the four white hairs my grandfather used to say were where God had held her to set her on her feet. I stood in front of her the way he had stood me in front of her at six, and I put my face up close to hers, and I blew. Not hard. Like cooling soup.

I waited for her to answer.

She didn't. Nothing came back. I stood there with my face a hand's width from hers in thirty below, and my own breath went out over her nose and hung there, and none came back through it, and none came back, and none came back.

Then she lowered her head and laid her muzzle against my chest and pressed, once, hard enough that I stepped back.

She knew me. She'd know me in the dark.

When I looked up, there was a coffin behind the glass.

I don't know whether it had been there when I came out. I've thought about it for most of my life and I don't know. It sat on the bier with the parlor's own two candles set at its head, unlit, and the side glass had a skin of frost on the inside that hadn't been there a minute before, as if something in there had been breathing after all.

A wind came down Locust. The velvet drapes lifted off the horses' backs and stood out from their sides, stiff with frost, black against the lantern glow. Then Jane leaned into her collar and the team moved off at a walk, with no one on the box and no one at their heads. I followed them as far as the corner of Front Street, in my boots and my nightshirt and my father's coat. I watched them go up the hill road, the lanterns swinging small and yellow, and at the top, at the roofed gate of St. Barnabas, the lanterns stopped.

They stayed stopped for the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer twice through. I know because I said it.

Then they went in.

In the morning the parlor was empty and my mother screamed loud enough to bring the Pruetts across the street in their nightclothes.

Varnum came, and the sheriff came, and Reverend Hesketh came, and they all followed the tracks. Everyone could see them. Two narrow iron-tired wheels and the shod hooves of four horses, sharp as a woodcut in the new snow, from the front of our house up Locust, along Front Street, and up the hill road to the lych-gate. There were stopping marks at the gate, all four sets of hooves bunched together. Then the tracks went in, up the path, and across the burying ground to the north corner by the wall.

The fifth grave was filled. The ground on top of it had been tamped down flat and smooth, and the planks and straw and tarpaulin were stacked against the wall, the planks squared up end to end, the tarp folded in quarters with the four fieldstones set on top of it. That was how my grandfather stacked things. He couldn't stand a job left untidy.

There were no tracks going back down the hill. The sheriff walked the whole fence line looking for them. There weren't any.

The glass hearse was in its bay in the livery barn on Locust Street when Varnum and the sheriff went and looked. The lanterns were cold. The harness hung on its pegs, oiled and clean. Jane's bridle, the one with the brass rosettes, hung on its peg with a white rime of frost on it, and the barn was cold, but not that cold. Not cold enough for frost.

Varnum said it was boys. He said it was me and some of the Pruett boys and I don't know who else. The sheriff looked at me, twelve years old and skinny as a rake handle, and looked at the hill, and looked at Varnum, and asked him which boys he thought had dug the frozen dirt back into a grave in thirty below and then flown home. Varnum didn't have an answer and said so. He was a decent man.

Reverend Hesketh read the burial service over the north corner that afternoon. He didn't ask anybody to explain anything, and I have loved him for that all my life.

Varnum sold the Cunningham to an outfit in Peoria that spring, with its cracked block, for a good deal less than he had paid. For a few years he hired Fahnestock's Percherons for funerals, and then in 1931 he bought another motor hearse, a newer one with a heater, and that one ran fine until after the second war. Nobody said much about it. The town kept on being modern. Front Street got paved, then the hill road. The livery barn on Locust became a garage, and then a tire store, and then a parking lot, and the glass hearse went to a museum in Springfield, where I went once and stood in front of it until a guard asked me if I was all right.

I am older now than my grandfather was. My knees are bad and my hands are worse. But on the coldest nights of the year, the nights when the trees go off in the woods and the air goes hard and glassy and every living thing wears its breath like a flag, I put on my coat and walk up the hill road to St. Barnabas. I don't go in. I stand outside the north wall where the Fahnestock pasture used to be, and I wait.

Some years there's nothing. Some years, out in the dark on the other side of the wall, there are four shapes standing quiet in the snow, heads up, weight square. I can't see them well. My eyes aren't what they were. But I can see the air in front of them, and it is clear as glass.

So I lean on the wall and blow. Not hard. Like cooling soup. So she'll know me.

I bought the sixth plot in the fall of 1961. The vestry by then was all young people I'd watched get baptized, and they didn't argue much. One of them, a polite young man who sold insurance, asked who it was for.

I told him: a fellow who's going to need it.