The wake began before anyone thought to call it that, which is usually how these things start at the Bluestocking.
Grog was first through the door of the function room, carrying the good candlesticks, the ones normally kept in the Tunnocks vault for occasions nobody could quite define as an emergency but that felt like one anyway. She set them either side of the record player without a word and stood back, paws folded, the way she stands when she is about to conduct something she considers sacred.
Ginger arrived already crying, one hand full of rhinestones she’d apparently been keeping for exactly this kind of moment, and pressed them into the tablecloth in rough constellations. Nobody asked where the rhinestones had been living until now. It seemed, suddenly, like the wrong question.
Gimlet was behind the bar within minutes, working through a cocktail she refused to name until it was finished, gold and clouded and smelling faintly of peaches, and when she finally poured the first glass she didn’t toast so much as set it down hard enough that the whole room understood the gesture. Nobody’s stomach has ever once complained at the Bluestocking, so the second and third glasses went the same way, and the fourth, and by the fifth round the grief had started doing what grief always does here, turning sideways into something closer to a celebration nobody planned and everybody needed.
Gauge stood at the edges doing what Gauge does when she can’t fix a thing, which was rearranging the chocolate fountain into something more architecturally serious, checking its temper twice, three times, as though precision might hold the room together where sentiment alone could not.
Genial kept trying to say something comforting and kept dissolving into tears halfway through, which somehow made it more comforting, not less. Gossip had already produced a story, fully formed, about the time Dolly supposedly slipped into the pub disguised as a tourist and beat every gerbil at darts without once breaking character, and nobody corrected her, because it felt more true than most things that actually happened.
Gratuity moved along the tables with a jar, not for money this time but for anyone who wanted to leave a coin “for the road, for Dollywood, for wherever the road goes now,” and by the second lap the jar was heavier than it had any right to be.
Clara the capybara had been building since the news broke. By the time the wake was properly underway she’d finished a structure in the corner: part stage, part chapel, part rollercoaster, with a hand-lettered sign that just said SHE BUILT IT HERSELF AND KEPT THE DEED, which is the kind of thing that gets you cheered and then gets everyone crying again inside the same breath.
Rosie sat in the middle of it all letting gerbils lean against her fur one after another, which is its own kind of eulogy.
Colin, in what the pub’s constitutional scholars are already calling a significant development, sat upright through the entire wake without once attempting to leave the room, which several older gerbils described as the most respect Colin has shown to anything since the Spitfire Incident.
Someone put the record on. Nobody danced properly. Everyone danced anyway, badly, on purpose, the way you dance when the point isn’t the dancing.
Glacier arrived last, an hour after everyone else, moving at her usual untouchable pace, and placed a single seed on the makeshift stage without comment. Given what that seed was worth on the current underground exchange, several gerbils had to sit down.
By midnight the toasts had stopped being toasts and become something closer to testimony. Someone always found their way back to the same point: not just the songs, though the songs were reason enough, but the woman who wrote them herself and then made absolutely sure she was the one who owned them. A woman who builds an empire and keeps every brick of it in her own name is not a small thing to grieve, not in a pub built by women and animals who understand exactly how rarely that gets to happen.
The wake didn’t end so much as thin out, gerbil by gerbil, until it was just Grog and the candlesticks and the last of the gold cocktail, and the quiet that comes after a room has said everything it needed to say.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/the-wake-for-dolly-parton