Ground Rules

From his first recollection, Douglas Pitt knew exactly where his life would ultimately lead him. It's not that he hoped or dreamed it. He knew. After everything was said and done, Doug would be here in the Central Valley of California, lying beneath a stone and four feet of earth in a quiet cemetery on the southeastern spur of the Sutter Buttes. The sun might bake and the wind might blow, but there he would lie, peaceful and among family.

The Pitts were an extensive family with branches going back three and four generations in the area, so Doug saw his share of funerals as he grew up. Some of the family were buried in this public cemetery, some in that. A few found rest in a plot on a family ranch, and one was scattered as ashes to the wind, off a bluff over the Pacific Ocean. But the vast majority—with Pitts numbering in the twenties or thirties and otherwise-named relations stretching far beyond that—lay in the ground at the town of Sutter.

No one in the family nowadays actually lived at Sutter, or at least no one nearer than a third or fourth cousin—and once you trace things that far back, everyone's related. Suffice to say, no one lived in town who was close enough to, say, host the reception in their home after a funeral. The town had a modest community hall down the block from the cemetery that the family could (and often did) rent for a gathering after a burial. There a person could touch bases with cousins, uncles, and aunts of all varieties (firsts, seconds, removeds, and greats, most of them seen so seldom as to be indistinguishable one from the other to a child of less than 10 or 12 years) at the same time as you avoided the scattering of pariahs who were always in attendance despite being more or less shunned from the family for long-forgotten offenses of their own or their ancestors', or (shamefully) for their mental or physical shortcomings, or even for their chosen form of conveyance (anything with fewer than four wheels was severely frowned upon).

A young boy, being invisible, could see and hear a lot on such occasions. Because it was a rented hall, there was no consistent host from one reception to the next, and a major topic of conversation was always either how well everything had been arranged (when speaking to one of the hosts) or how you thought thus-and-such really ought to have been done differently (when speaking to anyone else). Booze was entirely prohibited both by family convention and the rental contract, which meant that it was plentiful and varied just outside the back door of the hall. A man who stepped out that door and under the awning stripped off one mask (of wisdom, concern, and sobriety) and swapped it for another (of a nervous, guilty sort of relief—at having escaped the indoor formalities, having made it to another funeral in a vertical posture, at seeing, outdoors, this or that relation again after so many months or years). The women found a similar release in the hall's kitchen, where the wrappings came off the cold chicken and plates of cookies just as they came off their own deeper emotions and feelings toward one another. It became clear early on to Doug, as he drifted between the kitchen, the hall, and the back porch, that one of the most important functions of a funeral was to give people an opportunity to tell stories and to pass them along. This was the Grand Central Station of family lore. This was the second thing he knew.

The third was an outgrowth of the first two: that the life you lead, the choices you make, and the adventures you have along the way all HAVE THE POTENTIAL to influence what some of those posthumously related stories might be. Some things you couldn't control, of course—such as how people will interpret what they see or hear, or how well they will remember the details of actual events, or whether in the confusion the things you have done or said might not be ascribed to someone else, or vice versa—but still, you have the opportunity in life to do your best to give them something interesting to talk about when it's all over.

All of these things Doug knew, somewhere deep inside his being, from an early age, but he only became consciously aware of them when he went to his twelfth funeral (Great Aunt Pearl) at age fourteen, and discovered that he was no longer invisible. Adults noticed when he entered a room, and they changed, hushed, or interrupted their stories. Aunt Pearl had been particularly close to his parents and sisters, so maybe the rest of the family saw him more as one of the hosts than one of the guests. Or it may have been that at fourteen he was nearly as tall as a man, and near enough to eye-level to be detected by his elders. Still, he was far too young to drink, and that put the back porch out-of-bounds; likewise the kitchen, since he was neither woman nor child. On this particular rainy day in April, that left him only the main hall with its small clutches of outcasts and quiet murmur of conversation that faded to silence whenever he approached a group.

Alone at the gathering, Douglas sat at a table by himself and thought. He ate cookies and he thought about the stories he had heard about Aunt Pearl and other relatives down the years. He thought about which stories were his favorites, and why. After twenty minutes or so, he settled on one that he wanted to share, the story of how the power went out when his family was having Christmas dinner at Aunt Pearl's one year, but having never told a story at a funeral before he didn't really know how to begin. Eventually, he sidled unnoticed up to a group of two aunts and an uncle, waited for a pause, and started in, but he stumbled early in the telling and was rewarded with unlooked-for sympathy and dismissal – "the poor boy!" the seemed to say – and they turned away from him and back to their own talk. Well, that didn't get him anywhere.

Left again to himself, Doug got to thinking about what it is that makes a good story, and what it takes to tell one. The family certainly had its share of storytellers. Some held their listeners in thrall by virtue of their place in the family, whether because of their age or their status as the only one living who could remember thus and such; others held the minds of their listeners, even with an old story many times told, by their obvious love of the stories, and the telling, and the listening of their audience. These would make a point of catching in new listeners by tossing out an intriguing phrase as someone happened to walk by or pass within earshot, and took delight in tempting otherwise-occupied people into interrupting errands and other busyness for the sake of listening, delaying meals, chores, and departures for the sake of a tale. Doug had watched them many times, watched and listened, and had seen them coax and play their listeners like fish into a net or sheep into a pen. Like otherwise respectable people into a carnival show.