Magpies

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

One afternoon, years ago when I was maybe nine or ten, my uncle Bill held a funeral downstairs while my brother and I watched Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, with the sound turned off, upstairs. Uncle Bill’s funeral home stood just three blocks from Asbury Park’s alluring boardwalk. Trips down to the shore from our house near Trenton marked the high points of our New Jersey summers. The funeral home itself took up the whole first floor of a massive stucco building on Third Avenue. Uncle Bill, Auntie Mil (my dad’s sister), and my cousin Bill (who played football for Asbury Park’s Blue Bishops and would take over his dad’s business) lived on the second. Their third floor accommodated family and other visitors down its long hallway of otherwise empty rooms and closets.

The payoff of a walk on the boardwalk with pockets full of change beckoned so strongly that we could certainly put up with an occasional hour of silence. We sat absolutely still on a couch in the room just above the services. We laughed into dusty pillows as the cartoon magpies made life miserable for brutish dogs and ditzy cats, all in silence, until muffled voices below let us know the funeral was over. At that point, we improvised our own slow-motion cartoon and skated on stocking feet across the floor to a window where we looked down on Uncle Bill’s helpers, who rolled the casket gingerly along a gray ramp to the hearse. A second black funeral car, filled with flowers pressed like children’s faces to its windows, pulled in right behind the first. When car doors slammed shut, the black hearse, the black flower car, and assorted other vehicles following with family and friends arced gracefully through the narrow parking lot and drove out of sight to one of the Jersey shore cemeteries. That big house burned down in 1997, leaving a vacant lot on the broad avenue of once grand summer homes. But the day of that funeral stuck in my mind, and the magpie, even in its black-and-white cartoon version, has stood for me ever since as an audacious witness, a trickster of sorts, poised on the divide between living and dying.

The Heckle and Jeckle Cartoon Show from the late ’50s and early ’60s begins with those oval-headed magpies running full-tilt from a loose-jowled dog. At the last possible moment, the birds leap safely away through holes in a hollow tree. As the dog lunges after them, one of the two (I never knew which was Heckle and which Jeckle) quickly pulls up the lower hole, in a cartoon twist on material reality, just in time for the dog to slam accordion-like into the trunk. There’s a quick cut to magpies and dog, who now stand together laughing behind the show’s opening titles, and then, even more surrealistically, a lion chases the cartoon birds through mouths of alligators snapping shut and into a hallway where they all scurry in and out of doors remarkably like the third floor of my uncle’s funeral home. My brother and I slept many humid nights up there as creaks and groans, ghostly, we thought, rose through the immense house, while just up the street the gray waves of the Atlantic broke ceaselessly over the shore.

We knew that my uncle and aunt’s house housed the dead. That was their job. But even with all our visits to Asbury Park, I never saw a dead body at Uncle Bill’s. Death, for me, was abstract and held loosely together by working terms— the body, embalming, casket, viewing, funeral, hearse, vault, and the family—all floating freely around Auntie Mil’s big kitchen table. And even though I spent days and nights knowing that there was at least one dead body somewhere in the rooms below, it would be years before I saw my first dead man, in a funeral home not unlike Uncle Bill’s but on the opposite coast.

Stephen Crane, our...