After visiting the Pelham Family Funeral Home, all four men bought coffins.
The men claimed they weren’t drinking, but nobody believed that. Arlene Lansbury saw the four of them walking down Court Street, clinging to one another’s shoulders for support, their legs stumbling worse with each step, all the while singing at the top of their lungs like a bunch of children.
All four men were in their mid-forties, a time to think about wills and estate planning and increased medical checkups. But buying coffins? That seemed way over the line.
“Is this supposed to be some kind of sick joke?”
Amanda’s husband’s coffin arrived first. The delivery truck backed onto their street late Saturday afternoon, beeping a steady chirp that spooked all the birds. Two men opened the back of the truck and loaded a wooden crate onto a dolly.
Amanda’s husband prepared for their arrival. He pushed all the furniture from the hallway to create a clear path for the men to carry the coffin through the house and down into the basement rec-room.
“It was like that movie Christmas Story when the father gets the lamp,” Amanda said. “Jim acted so excited to break open the crate and make a big mess. He was like a little kid, happy to receive his . . . coffin?”
Amanda took a drag from her slim cigarette, turning her head to blow smoke away from the playground.
“The whole family could have taken a nice vacation with what he paid for that coffin.”
Manja’s husband got his coffin next. The other men came over to admire it. Sure, they had seen the models in the funeral home showroom, but that didn’t convey the beauty of the container like seeing it presented in its owner’s living room. The wood was the colour of a ripe coconut shell.
The other three men all wanted to touch the coffin, to run the back of their hand across the cool outside, imagining it as smooth as their freshly shaven cheek.
“It isn’t so bad,” Manja told the other wives when they questioned how she could stand having her living room clogged up with her husband’s coffin. “It fits right against the wall, where my mother’s credenza used to be. It’s just like having a sideboard. I threw a table cloth over it and put up some pictures and candles.”
She puffed her vape, blowing strawberry scented mist through the group. She laughed.
“Maybe at Christmas that’ll be the kid’s table.”
All four men kept their coffins out in the open, either in the basement, or living room, or the guest bedroom (no longer a guest bedroom since the bed had to be removed to make room for the coffin).
Aoife’s husband was the only one not to have his coffin in the house. His was the last to arrive, and outraged at how the other wives capitulated, Aoife put her foot down, insisting the coffin would not be coming into the house.
“Are you stupid?” she asked her husband.
His coffin went into the garage. Almost immediately, Aoife’s relationship with the other three wives deteriorated. She no longer joined them at the edge of the park to gossip and indulge in a cigarette. The women demonstrated abundantly that Aoife could expect the cold shoulder whenever she came around. Aoife told herself the other women resented her for being bold enough to demand what she wanted, none of them had that. They put their own needs aside for their husbands. Always. Aoife wasn’t going to apologize for standing tall.
Still, she cried to have been rejected so cruelly from her former group of neighbourhood friends. The women she used to call “my people.”
Joke was on her if she believed she had gained any ground in her marriage. Her husband loved having his coffin in the garage, which was less a place to park the car and keep old lawnmowers than it was a quiet place for the four men to hang out, shooting the breeze and drinking beer from the well-stocked fridge.
The coffin rested across two work benches. Honestly, Aoife’s husband wouldn’t have wanted to keep his coffin anywhere else.
A little after midnight, Amanda’s husband rose from bed and went down into the basement to see his coffin. He inspected the lid and the sides, making sure there were no greasy fingerprints. He nodded in approval. The kids could play down here anytime they wanted, so long as they kept their hands off his coffin.
His CD collection and stereo system were housed in the basement. Amanda’s husband hadn’t touched them in years, not since Amanda made all their devices capable of streaming music. The stereo was the same one from his first apartment over twenty years ago. At the time, that stereo and the snakes of wires leading to the multi-speakers was the most costly thing in his possession. He didn’t even have a proper shelf for them, everything sat on the floor. He and Amanda had danced for the first time to music coming out of that stereo.
He picked a CD from the row of jewel cases he once spent hours keeping in immaculate alphabetical order. He was pleased when he flipped to the track list on the back and one of the titles screamed out, Yes! This is the song to listen to in this moment!
All the auxiliary cords were still connected. He pressed the PLAY button and the face of the stereo lit up. The CD tray slid open, like a tongue waiting to accept a communion wafer.
Amanda’s husband stepped out of his slippers. With an athletic leap, he climbed on top of his coffin.
Amanda heard the music. At first, she thought a passing car was playing the familiar old tune, but after noticing the vacant place in bed beside her she got up to investigate.
In the basement, she found her husband. He’d turned the music up loud. He stood on top of the coffin, dancing. His bare feet smacked the polished surface, making spatting sounds.
“What are you doing?”
Her husband spun around, waving his hands as he did so. His legs continued to move rapidly, pattering out a series of quick steps. He smiled, looking like he was having the time of his life as he danced with joyful abandon atop his new coffin.
Around the neighbourhood, a similar scene repeated itself in the living room, spare bedroom, and garage of the other three coffin men. In bare feet, under the spell of songs they loved, they danced atop their coffins.
“It wasn’t like wedding dancing, not even drunk wedding dancing,” Amanda said. “He really put his heart into it. It’s like he was dancing to express joy, or gratitude.”
She took a drag of her cigarette.
“It’s getting weird.”
Janet nodded. “If he starts sleeping in it, we’re looking at a divorce.”
The coffins remained, but thankfully no one slept in them.
Once a month (perhaps following some natural sign like the phases of the moon) the men would get up, put on old music, and dance their hearts out on the lids of their coffins.
Janet’s husband signed the two of them up for dancing lessons. Initially, she called this as a positive “coffin-benefit.” For years, she would have loved to take a dancing class. Six months later, at their niece’s wedding, Janet and her husband moved across the dance floor with a grace and confidence that drew all eyes to them. As she was twirled and dipped, Janet could see the envy on the other wives’ faces. They were thinking, Wow, I wish my husband could do that.
The dancing didn’t remain a source of pride for long. Some nights, Janet got up to follow her husband into the spare bedroom. On top of the coffin, he danced with an earnestness and passion that was absent when he danced with her in his arms. She may get fancy technique and public applause, but at home in private, the coffin got his true heart. At the next wedding, once the bride and groom had completed their first dance and welcomed others onto the floor, Janet’s husband rose and formally offered her his hand.
“Not tonight,” she said. “My feet are too tired.”
The four wives (enough time had passed that Aoife had rejoined their group) agreed—other than this one idiosyncrasy, their husbands performed the rest of their functions as well as before. Responsibilities were taken care of, time with the kids spent, and affection bestowed on their wives.
“It’s not as if they’ve lost their minds.”
“There’s a lot worse things they could have done for their mid-life crisis. An affair . . . I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Do any of you go to church?”
The women shook their heads.
“When the kids were younger, and a few times during the holidays. But not really.”
“I think it’s a spiritual thing. They’re trying to connect with something deeper. The dancing is like prayer, a way of celebrating their thankfulness at being on the right side of the coffin lid, you know.”
Janet wished she had one of her cigarettes she’d recently given up.
“That doesn’t seem like thankfulness to me,” she said. “Seems more like boasting.”
The winter was one of the strongest to blast the Niagara Region since the 1970s. Mounds of snow the size of two-story houses lined the roadways, hiding sidewalk pedestrians behind frozen, white walls.
In March, a heavy rainstorm on top of the melting snow caused terrible flooding. Amanda’s basement was ruined. The rising water submerged everything.
The children were terrified. “Is the house going to float away?”
“No, of course not, we’re very safe,” Amanda said, even though she wasn’t sure herself. What if that much water beneath them caused the foundation to slip? What if the whole house sank into a mud pit?
The coffin was destroyed. The wooden surface her husband had been so proud and protective of was now white with water stains. It looked like a chocolate bar that had been forgotten at the back of the pantry. The insides were worse. The soft, white bed had been stained grey. A thick layer of black muck remained behind after the water drained. The smell was terrible, all mold and sourness.
The coffin was no longer a slick, sturdy bandstand for her husband to dance atop of, taunting Death. This most prized possession had been smashed like a bug. Amanda was sure if they went to the cemetery and pulled old coffins from deep in the earth, they’d find ones in better shape.
That night, Amanda’s husband spent a long time tucking the kids in. He took forever in the bathroom. Normally content to look like a caveman for weeks at a time, he shaved, trimmed his hair, even cut his bushy eyebrows back. He and Amanda made love. As she drifted off to sleep in his arms, Amanda remembered him whispering, “Eighteen months. That was good. Better than most people get.”
The car accident happened four days later. Amanda’s husband had been driving along Glenridge when a woman coming off the highway pulled an illegal U-turn into the opposite lane and T-boned his car. She told the police she panicked when she realized she was going in the wrong direction to the pizza place to pick up an order.
There was no new coffin for the funeral. Amanda had her husband cremated.
“He loved that coffin so much, even if expense wasn’t an issue, it didn’t seem right to get him another. It would be like getting your kid a new cat the day after the old one died.”
The night of the funeral, even though they were off-schedule, the other women’s husbands danced on their coffins. They danced longer than usual, listening to song after song. When the music came to an end, they continued to dance in the silence, the only sound the slap of their bare feet against the smooth coffin lid, slippery with the droplets of their sweat and tears.
Manja’s husband lost his coffin a few years later.
It was supposed to be a fresh start. An opportunity to relocate the family to Winnipeg. An exciting new job. The beauty of out west. An escape from this dying city.
Manja and her husband flew out to look at houses, finding a wonderful home not far from the Forks. The living room was smaller than the old one, but after counting the bedrooms, Manja whispered to her husband, “And an extra room to put your coffin in.”
Her husband nodded.
She went on. “And there’s still space left for a treadmill.”
The contents of their home were packed into two moving trucks, but only one truck arrived in the new province. Unfortunately, not the truck the coffin had been loaded onto.
Her husband went into a panic. He called the moving company over and over, reaching only a recorded message.
“Give them another day,” Manja urged, putting her hands on his shoulders, trying to massage some sense into him. “I’m sure the rest of our things will be here tomorrow.”
No second truck arrived the next day. Or the next. The moving company went silent and ignored them. A sure sign that a terrible mistake had been made for which no one wanted to admit fault.
They didn’t have their bed yet, so Manja and her husband slept on the floor, on a couple cheap foam mattresses they picked up along with a swaddle of blankets.
It reminded Manja of their first apartment. The uncomfortable futon on the floor of their Danforth flat that always filled with the second-hand smoke of their neighbours.
Her husband agreed. “In the dark, with my eyes closed and you by my side, I feel like we’ve traveled there back in time.”
Manja didn’t believe him. With her hand resting on his enormous donut belly and his hand resting across a fat ass she certainly didn’t have in her twenties, it seemed impossible to forget who they were in this moment, even for an instant.
“It’s funny,” her husband said. “I always thought I’d be angry, or afraid, but I feel alright.” He leaned over to kiss her forehead. “About four and a half years. That’s good. Better than most people get.”
A week later, his body went back to Niagara for burial. The new company he’d been hired to work for assisted generously after learning of his passing from heart failure in his sleep. It didn’t seem right to Manja to bury him somewhere he never got a chance to make his home. He went back by airplane, no moving truck to get lost on.
That winter, Manja saw an investigative report on CBC about disreputable moving companies. The program was filled with families who’d lost everything, left to fight with insurance companies that were stonewalling on paying out.
In the program, they showed footage of belongings dumped in the yard of an abandoned factory. There were chairs, and kitchen tables, and boxes full of everything from carefully wrapped carnival glass to stacks of precious family photos. Jutting out from this pile of hijacked households was a tall dark cabinet Manja was convinced was her husband’s coffin.
“I recognized his footprints on the lid.”
Janet split with her husband once the last child entered college. The divorce was bitter, one that dragged on, funnelling money that could have been theirs to the lawyers.
Janet asked for the coffin in their settlement, enjoying how much it fired up her husband’s rage. Against the advice of his lawyer, he agreed to everything she wanted, the house, the car, the alimony, just so long as she gave him the coffin.
“He lives in one of those apartment towers over on Riverview now,” Janet said. “I’ve never been. I picture a sad, empty apartment filled with pizza boxes and take-out containers. He doesn’t even have a couch, just that coffin. I hope he dances on it until his feet fall off.”
Such a prescient remark. All alone, Janet’s husband’s lifelong diabetes caught up with him (probably from a number of factors, including the change in diet, no longer having Janet to remind him to take his injections). He lost his right foot, leaving him on crutches and making dancing an impossibility.
Days had passed since her husband last spoke to anyone. He was found by the superintendent, having lapsed into a coma some days earlier. Just a man on the floor of a sparse apartment containing little more than a coffin with a lid clean of any recent footprints.
Aoife no longer met up with the other three wives. Whether intentional on their part or not, she again felt ostracized from the group. After all, she was the only one not a widow, the only one whose husband still danced on the lid of his coffin.
As the years went by, middle age became the golden years. Aoife’s hair began to grey and her husband’s knees became stiff and painful. Between the two of them, Aoife felt like she’d gotten the better deal. Not long after his sixty-first birthday, Aoife’s husband awoke her in the middle of the night, asking her to come with him to the garage.
“What for?”
They’d been married too long for him to feel unwilling to ask her for help when he needed it. “I can’t get onto the coffin by myself.”
In the garage, Aoife’s husband had placed a wooden box on the floor to give himself a step-up onto the coffin. That had been three years ago. Now, Aoife stood at the head of the coffin, holding out her hand. Her husband grabbed hold, and for a moment Aoife wondered if maybe they needed to chalk-up like arm wrestlers to prevent losing their grip. Her husband had one foot on the box, and with aching bended knee, one foot on the lid of his coffin.
“On one, two, three, GO!” he counted off before hoisting himself up, gripping Aoife’s hand to steady himself, trying not to push all his weight down onto her. She gritted her teeth, hoping her husband wouldn’t notice her struggle.
On top of the coffin he looked like a giant, his head inches from touching the roof rafters. Aoife sorted through a pile of CDs on the counter beside her husband’s old paint-splattered CD player. He bought that years ago the spring he took a week off from work to re-paint the house. She was pleased to see he still got use from it.
“Any particular song?”
“You choose.”
Aoife wasn’t sure at first. The CDs weren’t in cases. All sitting on the counter, the surfaces scratched to hell. She picked one at random, wondering if it would still even play. A familiar song filled the garage and she relaxed. It felt like the tune were running a gentle, smooth hand down her back, raising pleasurable tingles.
Her husband swayed to the music. He bent his knees, limbering himself up before he began to dance. Aoife kept a close eye on him, ready to rush in and brace him should he lose his balance.
For the next few years, it became part of Aoife’s routine to get up once a month and follow her husband to the garage when the coffin called out for him to come dancing. She held his hand while he hoisted himself up and then selected the song to which he danced.
“I remember listening to this when we went to Jim’s cottage that one summer,” Aoife said.
Her husband tapped his feet against the coffin. He breathed heavily. “We took a canoe out that one night. No clouds, the water so still the reflection of the stars in the sky made it look like we were sitting in the middle of outer space.”
Aoife ran her hands down her shoulders, hugging herself. “You couldn’t tell where the sky stopped and the water started. It was like we were floating.”
“We were floating. On the water, remember?”
“You know what I mean.”
He smiled, and very slowly spun around, clearly struggling not to lose his balance.
“We could bring the coffin inside. If that would make things easier.”
Her husband laughed. “After all your declarations? That coffin is never coming inside my house! Now you want to go back on your word?”
Aoife nodded. “It’s been twenty years. That’s long enough.”
“Yeah, twenty years is good. That’s more than most people get.”
Aoife thought about her old friends, Janet and Manja and Amanda. Their husbands didn’t get anywhere near twenty years to dance on their coffins.
“So what was it?” she asked at last. “Some kind of fairy tale where the four of you encountered the devil in the forest and he promised you health so long as you danced on your coffin once a month?” She smiled as though she were joking, but her husband saw right through her cavalier tone. He nodded.
“Sure. If that’s what you’d like to believe, go ahead.”
Aoife watched her husband’s terrible foot work, and the tired expression on his sagging face. This was no longer a dance of celebration, or thankfulness, or even boasting. This had become a dance of endurance. This was a dance that could not go on much longer.
Aoife went to the CD player and put on a final song. She remembered it from the time she and her husband slept in their car on the way to the city. They reclined their seats and held hands, looking up at the starry sky. It was a moment where everything seemed like a possibility. And now, over forty years later here they were, the end result of those younger kid’s possibilities. Aoife hoped those young kids in her memory would be as happy as she was when they got to this point.
Aoife stepped onto the wooden box before the coffin. She held up her hand. Her husband took hold and smoothly helped lift her up onto the coffin. It felt to Aoife like she floated up.
They took each other in their arms and began to move as dictated by the music, which was joyful. At first, Aoife danced looking down at her feet, needing to see where she was stepping, afraid of falling off the edge of the coffin. After awhile, she grew confident in the memory of her feet, and she felt free to look up into her husband’s face while they danced.
Aoife held her husband tight, knowing this was the last time he’d dance on the lid of his coffin.
She pressed her face into his shoulder. Knowing how special this dance was before the inevitable was good, more than most people got.
Originally published in The New Quarterly, June 2022.
