The Cold Lamp

The last mourners left Front Street Funeral Home at a quarter past eight, stamping sleet off their boots on the porch mat and saying the things people said on porches in November: that Harold had looked like himself, that the flowers were nice, that it was a shame about the weather for Saturday. Mara held the door for each of them and agreed with all of it. Harold had looked like himself. That was the job. The weather was nobody's job, though people in Sable Harbor liked to hand it to the funeral home anyway, as if the business that put on the coffee could also do something about the lake.

When the lot was empty Mara turned off the porch light, collected the guest book from its stand, and counted the signatures out of habit. Sixty-one. Harold Vane had run the hardware store for forty years and loaned half the county a ladder at one time or another. Sixty-one was a good number for a Tuesday in sleet.

The chapel smelled of carnations and radiator dust. Mara straightened the rows of folding chairs, pinched a wilted lily out of the standing spray, and carried the leftover cookies into the office, where the desk held what it had held all week: the county's contribution to her life.

It was a three-ring binder, blue, swollen with forms. The clerk from the courthouse had driven it over on Monday afternoon and set it down on the blotter with the air of someone putting down a casserole dish that was too hot. "Coroner's manual," she had said. "Death certificate procedure, the inquest statute, the phone tree for the state lab. Your predecessor left notes in the back. Not many." Then, at the door, kindly: "Congratulations. Really. Nobody else filed."

Nobody else had filed. That was the whole story of the election, and Mara had heard it told a dozen ways since the first Tuesday of the month. The old coroner had retired to Arizona with his wife and his emphysema. The ballot line had sat empty through August. Somebody at the co-op had said, out loud, near the register, that the funeral director already did half the work, so why not, and by September the idea had gone around town like a cold. Mara had filed on the last day, mostly so the line wouldn't stay blank. Two thousand, one hundred and six people had voted for the only name printed there. A few hundred had written in Mickey Mouse.

The swearing-in had taken four minutes in the county clerk's office on Friday. Judge Aho had read the oath off an index card, Mara had repeated it with one hand on a Bible that belonged to the courthouse and smelled like the courthouse, and afterward the judge had shaken hands and said, "Most years you'll sign forty certificates for old folks who died in their beds. Now and then you'll get one that doesn't sit right. Those are the ones that make the job." Then he had gone to lunch. The certificate of election was still in its manila envelope on the filing cabinet, waiting for a frame Mara had not gotten around to buying.

Next to the binder sat a square white envelope that had not been there at lunch.

Mara slit it with the letter opener. Inside was a card with a loon on the front, and inside the card, in green felt-tip, in a neat hand that leaned backward as if it were bracing against a wind, a note:

Coroner — Best news this county's had in a while. You already know how to be kind to people on the worst day of their lives. The rest is paperwork, and paperwork can be learned. Call me any hour. — Ev

Ev Maki had been sheriff of Tamarack County for thirty-two years, which was most of Mara's life. He had retired two winters ago to a house on Pike Lake Road and a boat he rarely put in the water, and he still turned up at every visitation Front Street held, shook every hand, and ate two of whatever cookie was offered. People said his name the way they said the name of a good snowplow driver. Mara propped the card against the lamp, where the green ink caught the light.

The binder waited. The clock over the embalming-room door said eight-forty.

Mara decided the binder could wait for daylight and coffee and did the evening rounds instead.

Back door: locked. Garage: the hearse and the removal van nose to nose under the fluorescent tube, keys on their hooks. Prep room: counters wiped, instruments in the sterilizer, the drain grate clean. The cooler hummed its one steady note. Nobody was waiting in it tonight; Harold was upstairs in the chapel in his good suit and would stay there until Saturday. Mara checked the thermostat, because Harold's daughter had said the chapel felt chilly, and nudged it up two degrees.

Upstairs, Mara stood a minute at the chapel doors. Harold's hands were folded the way his daughter had asked, with his wedding band showing. The hardware store's key ring, which she had wanted buried with him, sat in his breast pocket and made a small, square bump under the fabric that only somebody in this line of work would notice.

This was the part of the job Mara had always understood. You made a person look like themselves for one last afternoon so the people who loved them could say goodbye to the right face. The other part, the county's part, sat on the desk downstairs in a blue binder: deciding how a person had come to need that afternoon in the first place.

Mara pulled the chapel doors closed, turned off the hall lights one switch at a time, and caught her own reflection in the dark glass of the front door: auburn hair flattened by a long day, green eyes tired, a person who had just been elected to something by default and hadn't yet figured out what it would ask for.

Upstairs in the apartment over the funeral home, Mara set the county cell phone on the nightstand beside her own. It was a cheap black flip-model the clerk had also delivered, with a strip of masking tape on the back that said CORONER in marker. It had not rung once in the four days Mara had owned it.

Sleet ticked at the window. Out past the breakwall the lake was doing what it did in November, which was throw itself at the harbor in long gray sheets and pull back to try again. Mara lay awake for a while listening to it and thinking about the lighthouse out on Lindqvist Point, which had not been lit in thirty years but which everyone in the county still called the Cold Lamp, as if it might be warmed up again someday. Arne Lindqvist had bought the station from the government after they shut the light off and turned the keeper's quarters into a little inn. His cook made a whitefish chowder people drove forty miles for. Mara had eaten it twice, both times after funerals. Then she slept.

The county phone rang at 7:15.

Mara found it by feel, flipped it open, and said, "Front Street," before remembering that this was the other phone.

For a second there was only wind on the line, a big wind, the kind that came off open water. Then a woman's voice, low and very flat, the voice of someone who had already cried or who had decided not to.

"This is Joanie Bright. Out at the Cold Lamp." A breath. "I called the sheriff. Then I thought, you're the coroner now." Another breath, shorter. "It's Arne. At the bottom of the stairs."

Mara sat up. The window had gone the color of dishwater. Somewhere under the wind, faintly, came the sound of a screen door banging, over and over, on a hinge that nobody had latched.

"I'm coming," Mara said. "Don't move him. I'm coming now."