Excerpt
I was facing the area underneath the tent where the minister, Tammy, Jason Leder, and the five other pallbearers “privileged” to be part of Clay Harrison’s funeral party stood, which was a few feet away from the white-cloth draped coffin that held the deceased. The preacher and most of the crowd were intoning the 23rd Psalm with mouths moving and heads bowed.
Except for one. The mouth was moving, but not in prayer.
A pudgy, very cute, red squirrel had made its way to the top of Clay Harrison’s coffin. He held a small acorn between even smaller paws and was in the process of gnawing while eyeing the humans around him with an air of someone whose lunch was being disturbed with all this durned speechifying.
What could be described as mildly comic quickly turned into sheer farce.
Tammy Tarantella started it. She raised her head and aimed at piercing look at the squirrel clearly meant to say, “move it or lose it."
The squirrel returned the look with one of sheer antipathy.
Tammy’s lips pursed. Using her black prayer book she attempted to unobtrusively motion the squirrel to remove its offensive presence from the top of the coffin before it either spread nut crumbs or made little squirrel poopies on the expensive white fabric covering the mahogany finish.
The squirrel calmly bit into the acorn. It paused. A light came into the dark eyes. With what appeared to be total malice aforethought, it raised its paws and threw the acorn directly at Tammy. Tammy shrieked right in the middle of “thou annointest my head with oil.” The squirrel snickered, then began to scamper from one end of the coffin to the other.
By this time everyone who was in attendance at Clayton Harrison’s funeral was following the action with great interest and varying degrees of amusement.
Tammy angrily removed her black lace hat and the silver hatpin anchoring it to her head. Holding the pin in her right hand like a Bowie knife, and her hat in her left like a shield, she stalked toward the coffin. The squirrel stopped at the south end of the mahogany casket then casually turned its back on the big mean human. Its bushy red tail rose high into the air and it leaned down and mooned her. Tammy threw her hat to the ground and began shouting obscenities at the furry rodent who’d brought a stash of acorns with him when he first decided to use Clay’s coffin as a lunch counter. Acorns flew with deadly accuracy at Tammy who rapidly lost control of herself and the situation and pounced on top of coffin jabbing wildly in an attempt to commit scirusicide with a hatpin. Which was when the squirrel jumped up, landed on Tammy’s head, and tugged at her hair.
Before Tammy lost all her lovely blonde curls, Jason Leder, the preacher, and three stalwart pallbearers joined the fray by lunging across the coffin. They succeeded in stripping the white cloth off the coffin and banging their knuckles on the hard wood. One of them disentangled the squirrel from Tammy’s head.
The squirrel leapt to the ground. Tammy saw her chance. She removed one of her five-inched stiletto pumps and threw it at the squirrel. Missed by a good two feet. The squirrel grinned and swished its tail. A now truly enraged— and possibly deranged—Tammy removed the other shoe and attempted to drive a spike through the squirrel’s head. She tripped on the white cloth the pallbearers had dislodged from the top of Clay’s coffin and ended up sliding like a runner stealing home perilously close to the open hole awaiting that coffin. The squirrel pranced over to her and stared down into her face. He seemed to focus on Tammy’s black lace hat. Ignoring his chance to bite, spit or do other physical damage to his new enemy, he grabbed the hat in his two tiny paws.
He ducked under the hat. He sped off. Fifty people watched a black lace garden hat dart from headstone to headstone. All that could be seen under the hat was a swishing red tale.
My ribs were in pain from the laughter I’d been unable to contain. Sebastian’s lip was bleeding where he’d bit it to contain his own merriment.
Babs smiled, then solemnly proclaimed, “I now have the epitaph for Clayton’s headstone. ‘Behaved like a white shark in life. Eaten by a mechanical grey shark in death. And upstaged at his own funeral by a chubby red squirrel in a large black lace hat.’”