Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(31)

Jorrie elbows him, emits a sizzling whisper: “That must be the widow, in the blue. Crap, she looks about twelve. Gav was such a perv.” Tin tries to see but fails to spot the likely candidate. How can she tell, from the back?



Now there’s a hush: a master of ceremonies has taken the podium – a younger man in a turtleneck and a tweed jacket, a professorial getup – and is welcoming them all to this commemoration of the life and work of one of our most celebrated and best-loved and, if he can put it this way, most essential poets.

Speak for yourself, thinks Tin: not essential to me. He tunes out the audio and turns his mind to the honing of a phrase or two from Martial. He doesn’t publish his efforts any more because why bother to try, but the impromptu translation process is a private mental exercise that passes the time agreeably on occasions when the time has to be passed.

Unlike you, who court our view,

They shun an audience, those whores;

They f*ck in secret behind closed doors.

In curtained, sealed chambers;

Even the dirtiest, cheapest ones

Sneak off to ply their trade behind the tombs.

Act more modestly, like them!

Lesbia, you think I’m being mean?

Shag your head off! Only – don’t be seen!



Too much like Mother Goose, the rhyme, the rhythm? Then, perhaps, even more succinctly:

Why not emulate the strumpet?

Bump it, pump it, multi-hump it,

Lesbia! Just don’t blow your trumpet!



No, that won’t do: it’s sillier than Martial at his silliest, and with too much detail sacrificed. The tombs in the original deserve to be preserved: there’s much to be said for a graveyard assignation. He’ll have another run at it later. Maybe he should take a crack at the one about the cherry versus the prune …

Jorrie elbows him sharply. “You’re falling asleep!” she hisses. Tin comes to with a start. Hastily he consults the pamphlet that outlines the order of events, with Gavin’s photo glowering magisterially from its black border. Where are they in the timeline? Have the grandchildren sung? Apparently so: not even some lugubrious hymn, but, oh horrors – “My Way.” Whoever proposed that should be flogged, but luckily Tin himself was zoned out during it.

The grown-up son is now reading, not from the Bible, but from the oeuvre of the deceased troubadour himself: a late poem about leaves in a pool.

Maria skims the dying leaves.

Are they souls? Is one of them my soul?

Is she the Angel of Death, with her dark hair,

with her darkness, come to gather me in?





Faded wandering soul, eddying in this cold pool,

So long the accomplice of that fool, my body,

Where will you land? On what bare shore?

Will you be nothing but a dead leaf? Or …



Ah. The poem’s unfinished: Gavin had died while writing it. The pathos of it all, thinks Tin. No wonder there are repressed weeping noises rising around him like spring frog-song. Still, when further refined, the poem could have yielded a passable result, apart from its ill-concealed rip-off of the dying Emperor Hadrian’s address to his own wandering soul. Though possibly not rip-off: allusion is how a well-disposed critic would frame it. That Gavin Putnam knew Hadrian well enough to steal from him has improved Tin’s view of the expired versifier considerably. As a poet, that is; not as a person.

“Animula, vagula, blandula,” he recites under his breath. “Hospes comesque corporis/Quae nunc abibis in loca/Pallidula, rigida, nudula/Nec, ut soles. Dabis iocos …” Hard to put it better. Though many have tried.

There’s an interlude of silent meditation, during which they’re all invited to close their eyes and reflect on their rich and rewarding friendship with their no longer present colleague and companion, and on what that friendship meant to them personally. Jorrie digs Tin with her elbow again. What fun this will be to recall afterwards! that dig is saying.

The next funeral baked meat treat is not long in coming. One of the less successful Riverboat-era folksingers, much bewrinkled and with a straggling goatee that looks like the underside of a centipede, arises to favour them with a song from the period: “Mister Tambourine Man.” A curious choice, as the folkie himself admits before singing it. But this isn’t about being, like, mournful, right? It’s about celebration! And I know Gav’s probably listening in right now, and he’s tapping his foot in joy! Hey up there, buddy! We’re waving at you!

Choking sounds from here and there in the room. Spare us, Tin sighs. Beside him, Jorrie is shaking. Is it grief or mirth? He can’t look at her: if it’s mirth they will both giggle, and that could prove embarrassing because Jorrie might not be able to stop.

Next there’s a eulogy, spoken by a criminally pretty coffee-skinned young woman in high boots and a bright shawl. She introduces herself – Naveena something – as a scholar of the poet’s work. Then she says she wants to share the fact that, although she met Mr. Putnam only on the last day of his life, the experience of his compassionate personality and his contagious love of life had been deeply moving for her, and she is so grateful to Mrs. Putnam – Reynolds – for making this possible, and though she has lost Mr. Putnam, she has made a new friend in Reynolds through this terrible ordeal they have gone through together, and she is just glad she hadn’t left Florida on the day it happened, and was able to be there for Reynolds, and she is sure everyone in the room will join her in sending warm wishes to Reynolds at this tragic and difficult time, and … tremulous breakdown of the voice. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I wanted to say more, about, you know, the poetry, but I …” She hurries from the stage in tears.