Picking Up Grandma at the Train
Grandma died in Chicago. Dad had her body shipped via train back to Edwardsville, three hundred south of the City of Big Shoulders. We waited for the coffin to arrive at the train station on Franklin Street, on the very edge of town. Of course it was raining, which matched our collective mood completely.
I’m not sure what we expected to find at the depot. The coffin–ordered over the phone by the local funeral director–was a ghastly, lurid specimen of funereal craftsmanship, a bronze monstrosity. Mom remarked on the beauty of the death box. I blinked in disbelief but of course I said nothing.
A worker from the funeral home was slumped against the hearse, nonchalantly taking nips from a suspicious looking amber colored bottle. Soon the door of a boxcar rolled open with a heartrending screech.
As the casket was off-loaded by the porters and the man from the funeral home, it teetered precipitously on the lip of the train car and then suddenly disaster struck. One of the men handling the coffin said “Shit!” and with a loud crash the darn casket tumbled to the ground! I half expected to see Grandma spill out onto the tracks, but it didn’t happen, thank God!
It would have been horrific for my parents, although I, who had met the old lady only twice in my nine years of life, might have been somewhat amused. I was perhaps a rather sadistic little boy.
After at last being laden with its burden, the hearse sagged wearily under the weight of Grandma and her ugly orange casket. The vehicles used back then were really glorified station wagons, similar to the ambulances in use at that time. It was a Studebaker, my Dad remarked.
The driver, pausing only long enough to take a swig from his bottle, made a beeline for the hearse. On his way he tossed the empty bottle through the open door of a boxcar, where it clattered loudly.
Dad looked pained–this was his mother–and he thought we should commemorate the occasion in some way–say a prayer, perhaps. As we gathered near the open door of the hearse, now loaded with Grandma, he began to pray aloud.
But just following “Dear Lord,” the driver slammed the door on Grandma, scampered into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. At the very moment Dad reached “Amen,” the hearse peeled out with a spray of gravel and with an effluvium of oily exhaust fumes. Dad, discomfitted not at all, smiled and said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I remember Mom rolled her eyes.
The train station is gone now; the railroad no longer stops in Edwardsville, though Amtrak, when it first began service in Illinois, did for several years. But Grandma passed long before that, way back in the1950s.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. The hearse driver, by this time, was fully in his cups. On the way to the funeral home he ignored a light and gate posted at another railroad crossing.
Thinking–mistakenly–that he could beat the train, he drove the hearse past the signal, around the lowered gate, and over the tracks, where he was struck by the speeding locomotive.
The only good that ever came of this episode is that the railroad company, in order to avoid bad publicity or a lawsuit, was on the hook for the funeral expenses–though, coincidentally, the service was conducted with a new but now empty casket.