Night Freight

It doesn't make sense that Little River was chosen. Ours is no worse nor different than any other small northern California town. Dairy and beef cattle is what supports us; agricultural crops such as alfalfa, too. We have six saloons, a gambling house, and a whorehouse, compared to only three churches, but that doesn't mean there is much sin or even much impiety. There isn't. We haven't had a killing or any other major crime in nearly twenty years. Rowdyism is confined to Independence Day and once in a while when a cowhand off one of the ranches gets liquored up of a Saturday night. We're a God-fearing town of thirteen hundred and sixty-eight souls, according to the 1892 census. Good souls, with no more than a bucketful destined for a handshake with Satan on their judgment day.

Doesn't make sense, either, that it would start when Abe Bedford put up his new undertaking building. But it did, and no mistake. I used to believe everything that happened in this life had its clear-cut purpose and meaning, and if you studied on it long enough, looked at it in just the right way, you'd come to know or at least suspect what it was. Not this, though. No one can figure out the cause or reason for this—no one mortal, anyhow. And perhaps that's a blessing. I know too much already; I'm too scared as it is. I reckon I couldn't stand to know the rest of it too.

Abe Bedford buys all his rough pine boxes and fancier coffins from a casketmaker in the county seat. He used to store them in the barn back of his house on Oak Street. Had the coffins trimmed there, as well, by his wife Maude before she passed away and then by the Widow Brantley; he buys them without lining because it's thriftier that way. His embalming room and viewing parlor were in a rented building down on lower Main, near the train depot. He'd been the only undertaker in town for some while, but Little River was growing and Abe took to fretting that before long some other mortician would move in and open a fancy establishment and take away a good portion of his business. He came to the idea that what he had to do was build his own fancy establishment first, in a better location than lower Main—a place that was big enough for embalming and viewing, and to show off and store his caskets and rough boxes.

So he had a new building put up on the other side of his Oak Street property, close to the street. It had a large plate glass window in front so folks walking or riding by could look in and see the trimmed display coffins with their satin linings and silk pillows and shiny brass fittings. Abe also laid in shrubbery and a lawn and a brick walk and a wide brick drive to accommodate his black hearse and team of four. When it was all done, everybody agreed the new undertaking parlor was a worthy addition to the community.

Abe had been open for business in the new place less than a week when the woman who called herself Grace Selkirk came to town.

No one knew where she came from, or even how she arrived in Little River. She simply appeared one day, and took a room overnight at the hotel where the drummers and railroad men always stayed; and the next day she was living in Abe Bedford's house, keeping it for him and working in the Widow Brantley's stead as his coffin trimmer.

Tongues started to wag right off. Gossip's a major industry in any small town, and in Little River the women and members of the Hot Stove League in Cranmer's General Merchandise Store work harder at it than most. I hear more gossip, I reckon, than just about anyone in town. Cranmer's General Merchandise Store is mine, inherited from my daddy when he passed on fifteen years ago. George Cranmer is my name.

Abe Bedford is a widower and reasonable handsome for a man in his late forties. Grace Selkirk looked to be about thirty-five and was not too hard on the eye, in a chilly sort of way. Before long, folks had Abe and the Selkirk woman sharing a bed. Some even went so far as to claim he had met her on one of his trips to San Francisco, where his son lived, and brought her back with him on the sly so they could live together in sin.

I didn't believe any of it. I've known Abe for four decades; there is no more moral and God-fearing man in this state. He'd heard the gossip, too, and it hurt him. He wouldn't have anything to do with Grace Selkirk, he said to me one night, not that way, not if she was the only woman in a thousand miles. She made him shiver just to look at her, he said.

I asked him why he hired her and he said he didn't rightly know. She'd showed up on his doorstep the morning after she arrived in town and asked him for the work; he was about to refuse her, for he'd had no trouble doing for himself since Maude died, but he couldn't seem to find the words. Couldn't bring himself to let her go since, either. She was a good cook and housekeeper, he said, and the fact was, she trimmed coffins better than Maude or the Widow Brantley ever had. Why, some of her finished caskets were funerary works of art.

Nobody liked Grace Selkirk much. She never made any effort to be neighborly and little enough to be civil. Stayed close to Abe's home and undertaking parlor, and on the few occasions she came down to Main Street and into my store, she hardly spoke a word. I could surely understand why she made Abe shiver. She was the coldest woman I'd ever laid eyes on. Ice and snow weren't any colder.

One blustery day when she walked into the store, old Mead Downey was occupying his usual stool by the white-bellied stove, and he tried to make conversation with her. She wouldn't have any of it. Went about her business and then walked out as if old Mead wasn't even there. He spit against the hot side of the stove, waited for it to sizzle, and allowed as how he'd never believed those rumors about her and Abe and now he knowed for a fact they weren't true.

"Why's that?" one of the other loafers asked him.

"He's still alive, ain't he?" Mead said. "First time he stuck his pizzle in that woman, him and it would of froze solid."

All the boys laughed fit to choke. I laughed too. I thought it was a pretty fu

It isn't fu

The one thing about Grace Selkirk that you couldn't fault was her coffin-trimming. As Abe had said, she was an artist with silk and satin, taking pains to get the folds in the lining and the fluff of the pillows just so. She did her work right there in the showroom, in plain sight behind the plate glass window. Most any time of day, and late some evenings, you'd see her at it. She spent twice as much time working in the undertaking building as she did keeping Abe's house for him.

It wasn't that she was readying caskets for future use. No, all the ones she trimmed were for fresh business. More folks than usual had commenced dying in Little River. Nobody worried about the increase in fatalities; births and deaths run that way, in high-low cycles. A feeble joke even got started that Abe had done such a bang-up job on his new establishment, people were dying to get into it.

Grace Selkirk had been in town about six weeks when Charley Bluegrass came rushing into my store one night. It was a chilly fall night with a touch of rain in the air. I'd stayed open late, as I often do, because I am a confirmed bachelor and I'd rather be in the store playing checkers and dominoes and shooting the breeze with members of the Hot Stove League than sitting alone in my dusty parlor.

Bluegrass wasn't Charley's true last name. Everyone called him that on account of he'd planted a Kentucky Bluegrass lawn for Miss Edna Tolliver a few years back and it had come up so rich and green, half the women in the county took after him to do the same job for them. Which he did. He'd given up his handyman chores and taken to working as a gardener full-time. Charley was a half-breed Miwok and liked his liquor more than most men. He'd been liking it pretty well on this night; you could smell it on him when he blew in.