Thaddeus McChesney leaned into you when he spoke. He gave you irrefutable advice and detailed explanations of the trivial. His job at the bottling company had involved adjusting the labels, truing them to lay parallel to the draft’s bottom and spell checking their fine print. I doubt he ever drank a beer. His edge was important to him. Why dull it? He ate organic, fearing to introduce the slightest dust into the well oiled machinery of his life. The fact that he expected such accuracy of others nurtured in many hearts a concern that he might never die.
One day, though, he failed to awake. Mary, his widow, a mouselike thing, sat me at the kitchen table. I offered her the condolences she deserved for her fifty years of loyalty to the intense little man. She stood beside him, if not one step back into his shadow in the gold framed photo of them on the table. Then as now, she was dry eyed and unsmiling. The day was quiet and I waited with expectation for some kind words which I could repeat when I eulogized Thaddeus McChesney.
“I wanted simply to cremate him,” she began. Waving her hand limply over her head as if chasing flies. “They want to do an autopsy. Besides…” She took three neatly typed pages and placed them before me, covering their wedding photograph. I skimmed down the twenty-five bulleted lines.
“His final wishes?” I asked. She shrugged in faint affirmation. Even in that quick glance, I could count three typos. Bullet number thirteen was repeated. It ended the man’s first page and then was repeated on the second, as if wanting to be viewed in a full length open casket was of importance to Mr. McChesney.
This repetition forced the man’s twenty-fifth request to be orphaned on the third page. I read it and paused considering how intrusive I should be as their pastor. Finally I said, “Since he is… in a better place. We don’t have to obey…”
“I want what he…” She waved vaguely to the white sheets in my hands, then rose to make coffee. She knew that I needed something to say for the man. Lighting the gas burner gave her time to compose her thoughts.
“He was a dedicated employee of Rolling Rock.” I knew this story. When Thaddeus passed the mandatory retirement age, he refused to surrender his employee badge. They gave him his watch and handshake anyway and made him gatekeeper of the company parking lot. I often saw him walking the rows of cars checking each plate number against his clipboard. Even in winter, he wore a dark suit and grey tie. His silver hair neatly stayed in place.
“Cremation would have been good,” She concluded. “Mr. McChesney enjoyed being warm.” I was incredulous. Her husband had been secretary of the church trustees since long before JR was shot. Many Sundays I begged him not to keep turning the thermostats down. McChesney would rise on toes and put his nose and inch from mine before citing the precise statistics on fuel saving for each degree of setback.
Now in the dead of August, I almost expected him to jump from his coffin and implore the funeral director to quit running the air-conditioning so high. Instead, Thaddeus lay pallid white, all of his zeal drained and replaced by formaldehyde. His grey tie was noose-like around his neck. I thought of the coffee cup I had left untouched on Mary’s kitchen table. Had something in those three typed pages poisoned my normal regard for a widow in her grief? Should I squeal my doubts to someone in authority? They did do an autopsy, didn’t they? I steeled myself to look down to bottom of the casket. Yes, she made them do bullet twenty-five. He was wearing plaid pants.
When I came to Mary McChesney in that final minute before the closing of the casket and the beginning of the service, I wanted to ask her about the results of the autopsy. Was it his heart? Had a stroke caused him to sleep passively away? Or was it… Instead I said, “Did he deserve this?” Mary smiled the faintest line and said, “He forgot our anniversary.”
