I always wanted to handle the horn like Louis Armstrong, with lips so swollen and flush against the mouthpiece, girls wouldn’t know if I was making music or making love. But most of us don’t turn out to be Louis Armstrong. I ended up uninteresting, a trumpeter called on to perform at funerals, kind of a musical pallbearer. If anyone is seeking to get into this line of work, I’d suggest starting the trumpet at fifteen, having a military uncle that dies, and a father who encourages you to play “Taps” at the funeral.
I couldn’t play it well, but people cried anyway. That’s the nice thing about playing “Taps”, it’s beautiful to some, no matter how badly it’s played.
Outside of funerals, I’m no one. I could never stick in a band, play anything worthwhile, or find work that was the least bit related to my trade other than appearing as a local bartender-slash-holiday-trumpeter double threat. So, if you’re me, every time you play a funeral, there isn’t much else to do but stare down at the decorated coffin about to be lowered into the ground and wonder what it was all for.
That’s thinking inside the box; a little funeral humor. You learn these things if you go to enough funerals.
Like this last one I played.
It was a cold day, cloudy, gray as the reaper might like it, and the funeral proceedings came to a close. I was left with the priest, packing my trumpet back into its case as we exchanged the usual dry and morbid joke that a veteran pair of funeral goers knows: “See you next time,” I said. “Hopefully not in the ground, aye?” said the priest, and we went our separate ways, a blast of frigid wind the only applause for our vaudevillian show.
“Excuse me,” came a woman’s voice behind me. “Could I ask you a question?”
I knew who she was. At military funerals, there’s always a growing collective of widows to support whomever the newest addition to the sad sorority was. Cassidy, was her name. No one had told me who she was, but I was interested from afar, so I knew it anyway. She was younger than I was, thin in a way that complimented how tightly a funeral shawl wrapped around her to scantly protect from the cold, and she had a pair of dark eyes that seemed permanently stained from mascara that no longer streaked across her face from tears.
She had cried her share of those, having lost two military husbands before the age of twenty-five.
“Is it hard playing at funerals?” she said when I stared blanky in reply.
“Can be, if it’s cold” I said, wondering why she asked. We watched the gravedigger pat the final plot of dirt on the gravesite. “Why, do you want lessons or something?”
She smiled meekly, as though it took great effort. “Do you want to get a drink?”
Something about meeting a hardened woman suits a trumpeter, I think. We found a nearby bar and sat down. Cassidy had such silky hair. I always thought widows didn’t care much for dressing up anymore, especially someone who had lost a pair of husbands so young in life. But there was something in her eyes. They were crystalized things of marble, able to withstand the rays of the sun without dilation or intention to blink. I’ve seen soldiers with the same look. It comes from experience, not character. I felt I was talking to someone twice my age, not ten years younger.
“I’m going to need more than two of these,” she said, indicating her nearly finished glass of whisky. I flagged the bartender, signaling another round. She sighed and said, “I think there are times when you’ve felt you’ve died more than other people.”
“Your husbands?”
She nodded, unsurprised that I knew about them without knowing her. “The worst part is never getting to see them die.”
“I don’t think it helps.”
She shook her head. “Not when you need closure. No matter how something ends, it’s better to see the blood and guts of how it ended.”
I disagreed but kept silent. She was talking another language, the soldier one, and I was playing the part of trumpeter waiting for his cue to play “Taps”.
She touched my hand. “Have you ever seen someone die?” she asked. I shook my head. “Me neither. I hate it. I feel disconnected from those that do, like they’ve seen something in life you are supposed to see. You know what it’s like to have lost two husbands overseas? It’s like having something taken from you and never getting to see it; kind of like a soul. You can feel it there, by your side, it’s warm, but one day it’s gone and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“I don’t know,” I replied stupidly, automatically. “Losing something feels bad no matter how you look at it.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, drinking the whisky. “There are people out there who think they know what it’s like to be without, but they just think they know. Like yourself.”
I cleared my throat. “Me?”
“You never served.”
“No,” I said, feeling exposed. Was this the point? To be shamed? I felt I should leave.
She touched my hand again, keeping me in place. “No, it’s not that. You’re still part of it.”
I smirked. “I just play the trumpet.”
“You don’t believe that. You’re needed.”
“A recording would do the same thing. And sound better, honestly. I’m not very good.”
“It’s not about how good you were.”
“Were? Are we talking about you or me now?” I couldn’t tell anymore.
“It’s like being a military wife,” she said. “You’re the plus-one to the party, one you would never get in the front door to if you didn’t know someone. So, you feel you shouldn’t be there, but there you are, doing your best to make friends, appear happy, and be good company. It’s just that no one tells you how perfect you have to be because of what they’ll go through.”
I finished my drink. “Yeah, but it’s their choice to go through it.”
The hardened stare returned. I said something I shouldn’t have, and I slumped in the bar stool, appearing ten inches shorter. I was ready for my corporeal reprimand.
“You’re right,” she said at last, finishing her drink.
“I am?” my voice squeaked, a sharp note.
“My husbands died because they chose to,” she said.
“Well, that’s not what I—”
“No, it’s true! I know what you’re saying. Why should I be stuck in their shadows? I don’t have to wear black, to be a war widow, some sappy girl that cries in the middle of the night because my dreams died with some dumb war hero overseas. We get to choose what our life is about, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling better about all of this. “Yes, we do.”
“What are you doing right now? Are you free?”
She had turned to me, naked knees touching mine, her black dress hiking up from the swivel of the stool, which wasn’t insignificant. “Nothing at all,” I said.
“Pay up. Let’s go to my place. Let’s leave it all behind.”
“Ok,” I said, a feeling in my stomach I hadn’t felt in too long.
I grabbed my trumpet case atop the bar.
She stopped me. “What are you doing?”
“Grabbing my horn, why?”
“Oh, no,” she said and put it down on the bar. She unclasped the locks. “We’re leaving all this behind, aren’t we?”
I was horrified. Her hand was on my horn and I was horrified. “Yes…?”
She banged the bell of my trumpet over the wooden bar top. It clanged, crying out for mercy. “Hey,” I protested, but she was on the move with it, heading towards the back restrooms.
“No turning back now,” she said.
Satirically, I chased her. She locked herself in the women’s stall. I knocked feverishly. “Cassidy! What are you doing?” I heard a stall door open/close, open/close, clamping something into place. Then, a gruff of effort and mangled creak of brass. “Open up!” I shouted, horrified at what I knew was unfolding inside. “Unlock the damned door, Cassidy!”
She did, at last, and something slid to the floor. I entered. She was on the filthy tiling beside my trumpet, which had been wrenched into an awful angle, like a crooked V. She wept there against the wall, head against the sink, mascara running down her cheek. I gave her a look, that I wanted to say something directly, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. I picked up my deformed trumpet and held onto the bent brass, massaging it. “I’m not sure where I can get this fixed.”
She stood up, in a fury, racing past me, “Well, who do I see about fixing me?” She stormed out of the bathroom, slamming the door closed on her way out.
I packed the trumpet as well as I could into its case, which no longer closed, and looked more like a hotdog bun made of hard plastic carry-on. Clamping it together in my arms, I walked past the bartender and all the patrons who had watched the spectacle. They stared, quiet as a funeral procession. And it was one, I think, because something had been taken from me.
That next week, I was called to play another funeral. I hadn’t repaired my trumpet and told the sergeant that requested my playing I was unavailable. “Son, I need you to show up,” he said, and there wasn’t a way around it, even if I didn’t have a trumpet. So, I arrived at the graveyard with nothing in hand, standing around, foolishly, wondering why I had chosen to come at all.
To punish myself, I guess.
The Sargent directed that all military men form two rows around the coffin. I tried to sneak away, then, seeing that I had no purpose, but the Sargent came over, cupped my arm in his large, weathered hands, and placed me sternly at the head of the line. “Son, you lead us off. We need you now.”
“You want me to sing? I can’t sing.”
“It’s not just you,” said the Sergeant, looking around to all the other men of his apparent platoon. And, foolishly, farcically, I cleared my throat and recited the first note of “Taps” in voice-cracking acapella in an embarrassed hush, “Da, da daaa. Da, da daaaa. Da, da daaa, da, da, daaa, da, da daaa!”
And after the first verse, the ten soldiers at my side joined in.
“Da, da daaaa, da, da, da. Da, da daaaa!…”
Afterwards, the gathered audience applauded our efforts. And there, on the end, Cassidy smiled at me before turning away with rest of the funeral party, one arm hooked around the newest widow, helping her along.
I was greeted with stern handshakes from war-weathered men with far firmer grips, and they thanked me for the song. It wasn’t until then that I heard the music the way it was supposed to be played, I think, and I wondered why I never knew it before.
Just how damned beautiful that song was.
