Curtains (6 page)

Fine, I say. But you’re still putting the body, the embalmed body, into a steel casket with a rubber gasket and a cathodic bar to keep away rust, and then the works go into a vault. What exactly are we protecting?

“Well,” he says, “the idea is if the casket ever had to be disinterred for some reason, and it comes up from time to time if there’s been a tragic death, where there’s a real need to keep the body
preserved should things change technologically down the road, well then, it’s important. One example, down in the States, someone was murdered and the funeral home and the state had the foresight to protect the body as best they could, so when it was exhumed they were able to do a more thorough post-mortem examination and found proof of the murder, and they were able to tie it to someone.”

“But most of us aren’t murdered,” I say, not a hundred percent confident in my facts but close enough for the purpose of the debate.

“It’s a cultural choice,” Richard says. “It’s up to the family’s belief structures, not mine. I have trouble with it too. But I have to provide, as a funeral director, the things that people want. It’s how people feel about the body and what it needs to do, the idea of being resurrected, to be whole again.”

Back in the showroom alone, I imagine myself in the shoppers’ shoes. Which one best suits the lifestyle to which I’m accustomed, or the deathstyle to which I aspire? The top-of-the-line Champagne “sealer” is sweet, but showy: there’s a small drawer in the lower half of the lid, a “Memory Safe” drawer, for keepsakes, maybe an iPhone, car keys. The hardwoods, including a Harvest Oak with a sheaf of real wheat sewn into the lid fabric (popular with farm families), have homespun charm, but the steels come with a limited, pre-interment fifty-year manufacturer’s warranty against the elements.

I hear a sound that seems to come from behind the Champagne casket. A muffled sound, like a baby crying.

Then someone behind me.

I jump. It’s Eirik, the boss’s eldest son.

“It’s needle day, at the pediatrician next door,” he says.

With the C. family now gone, we set up for the afternoon service. It’s sparsely attended. My job is to point mourners at the coat rack, the guest book, the chairs. I wear the only suit I’ve ever owned where the jacket and pants match: Italian design, made in Turkey, probably one-size-fits-all, possibly flammable. The guests are apprehensive but well behaved. They smile thin-lipped half-smiles when I hand them memorial brochures with the order of service, but don’t look me in the eye. Ladies sign the guest book for their husbands. A little girl in snow boots walks on her heels so as not to mess up the pink carpet. Richard lights twin candles at either end of the closed casket (another Colonial) and then cedes to the minister, hustling back to the office, where he joins Shannon, the junior funeral director, to work the phones. My perch is at the threshold between the office and the chapel. I can follow the action on both sides.

“She always carried Life Savers or Chiclets,” the pastor is saying. “With her pristine Pepsodent smile, Lord, she has so many times been the rope that binds us together. We celebrate her life with great joy.”

The guests look at their shoes.

In the office, Richard books a grave at Chapel Lawn, while Shannon whispers to a customer on the phone. “However it’s convenient for yourself,” she says. “And do you happen to have her particulars, her social insurance number, and whom her parents may have been so we can have that information at the time of her untimely death?”

The pastor says: “She was a rock. She could tell a spellbinding story or involve herself in conversation on any topic. Life is short, compared to the life of a tree.”

If the funeral is meant as an instrument of spiritual and emotional renewal, and transcendence over death and the chaos of nature, or as Milton said in
Paradise Lost
, to “justify the ways of God to man,” then someone forgot to tell these people. The room is tense, breathless. A man in jeans and a parka in the back row yawns. When the eulogy is done, Richard hits the CD player and “Red River Valley” plays over the sound system, and no one in the chapel moves. To my left, in the reception area, away from the view of the crowd, I can see Neil and Helen, the hostess who prepares the food and serves the coffee. They’re dancing.

This, I take it, is Funeral 101: developing a detached engagement with technical details and zero or minimal engagement with the emotional ones. There’s a logic to it. Carnies don’t get whipped up about riding The Zipper, cabbies don’t get involved in
why
people want to go to the airport. Here, funerals happen, then more funerals happen. Tomorrow there’ll be another one. After the service is done, a man approaches me and asks if he’ll get a ticket if he parks on the road, and I have to admit I don’t know. Another man in a red shirt and cream tie asks for the bathroom and I lead him the wrong way, through the private family room to the reception area, where we have to start again. This adds up to me already flunking Funeral 101: I have zero engagement with technical details.

After coffee and some strained mingling, Neil leads a short procession of cars to Brookside cemetery. I’m tagged to drive the hearse. A Cadillac Superior funeral coach, barely a year old, it’s a $100,000 machine that I tell myself I won’t wrap around a utility pole as long
as I keep my eyes on Neil’s four-way flashers. The front end alone covers a car-length, and it has the turning radius of a commercial fishing trawler. The seats are low to the ground. If I open the door I can touch the road, but I don’t. In my rear-view all I see is the casket and a pile of white roses. There’s not a sound from the outside world. Traffic stays out of our way. It’s a heady moment, sensing this new, unfamiliar authority in my black suit, Ryders wraparound sunglasses and a vehicle worth more than my house in Wolseley.

At the cemetery gates we wait for the sexton, who leads us in a pickup truck to the grave. The grounds are snow-covered, until we get to the hole that is bordered by AstroTurf so nobody slips and falls in. Once parked, I scoot to the back and open the door for the pallbearers. Neil tells them to slide and lift so that they’re not surprised by the weight. They carry the casket head first, facing the stone, and lay it on the straps of the Device, a steel rack that, once engaged, will lower the casket into the grave. The pastor says a few words and then, seemingly inspired, Neil picks up a flower and hands it to one of the women in the family. Then everyone gets one. A man at the back of a small knot of people puts his white rose in his mouth and executes a quick tango move. It’s like the air’s been let out of this overinflated event: shoulders relax and people start chatting and laughing. It’s over. Once the last civilian car is out of sight, the sexton lowers the casket into the hole and chucks the AstroTurf into the pickup truck. The casket is never lowered in front of the mourners. It’s considered too real.

And so my life goes for the first weeks, flipping from the chapel on Aubrey Street to the Factory. The suit stays at Aubrey, my
work clothes at the crematorium, me in one or the other depending on personnel needs. Glenn whips me into military order at the Factory, sending me on removals where I can work on my stretcher skills and to the car wash to keep the coach and cars muck- and road-salt-free. All vehicles are to be kept topped up with fuel, like the Cold War bomber fleet (to avoid running out in the middle of a procession), and with earth. We keep a Gerber baby-food jar of dirt in the glove box of each vehicle for ceremonial sprinkling at graveside. The jars are supplied by a bag of C-I-L potting soil in the shed, actual grave dirt apparently being too dirty. At the Factory, when I pass by, I keep an eye on the locked door of the prep room (sign says
ALWAYS KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING! NO EXCEPTIONS!
) where all I see, through the ventilation grate at the bottom, are Nat’s blue paper booties sliding back and forth. I’m in no rush to get in there. There are floors to swab and bodies to burn.

We take delivery from one of our “trade clients” (local undertakers who hire us to cremate their dead) of an elderly, birdlike lady wrapped in a crocheted quilt. Straight from a seniors home, she arrives without the standard hospital plastic shroud. Her head is cocked up and to the right, as if she were listening for a faint sound, and her hands clutch the quilt. Glenn asks the undertaker who brought the body if we’re to cremate the quilt as well. He shrugs.

“Maybe you should check,” Glenn says, and the undertaker takes his cell phone outside.

Glenn shows me how to search for a pacemaker or defibrillator, either of which, if left in the body, might explode in the retort and damage the brick interior, or the cremationist if he happens
to be peeking into the porthole when it goes off. I feel around the top of her bony chest for anything the shape and size of a box of wooden matches. She’s clean.

The trade undertaker returns and gives us a double thumbs-up: the family wants the quilt to go with the body into the fire. It was hers. She made it.

The body goes into a cardboard box on an electric scissor-lift, which whines when Glenn raises it to the height of the open retort. Then, aided by a set of steel rollers, he slides the box in and shuts the door. First step: light the box. This is done by turning on the gas jets for a few seconds until the container ignites, and then leaving it and the quilt and other bedclothes to burn away on their own. A secondary chamber under the retort will deal with smoke and combustible gases, so that the chimney on the roof won’t belch black, which is considered bad form (like lowering the casket into the ground: too much reality for passersby).

“That’s getting a pretty good roll on it now,” Glenn says, studying his work through the peephole, and then giving me a turn.

She’s covered in slow, swimming, watery orange and blue flames. It’s hypnotic but horrible. There’s no smell. Fans suck all the smoke and gas into the bottom chamber. When Glenn turns the main jets back on, we watch the temperature rise, past 1,000 degrees, then 1,200. Air intake and gas levels are carefully controlled so she doesn’t blaze out of control. Each body is different. You have to watch, and adjust. I can see her rib cage now. This is a good sign, I’m told. We can walk away from the machine for a spell now that the fat’s burned off, since there’s little remaining threat of heavy smoke and flare-outs. With her size she’ll be done and sweepable in ninety minutes.

It’s an odd relief that each corpse has its idiosyncrasies in the retort. The big and fat call for vigilance, some measure of babying and fiddling with the airflow and gas, while the small and reedy, like our little quilt lady, are more independent and can be left alone without fear they’ll burn out of control. What they ate and stored around the waistline, how fit they were, whether they had strong long-bones, the femurs and humeri, from a lifetime of manual labour – it’s all relevant to the cremationist. Some bodies will raise their arms in the retort like they’re hailing a cab, a result of tendons contracting in the intense heat: what an odd relief that, even in death, we find ways to express ourselves.

Just under two hours and a lunch later, we open the heavy door to reveal her scattered skeleton, pieces of white bone blown around by the powerful gas jets. I sweep out the remains with the heavy steel broom. To get at the corners, I have to reach into the hot retort and sweep by hand, wearing suede gloves, until everything that looks bony and human and white is in the pan.

She has no artificial joints, but at the sort table, the magnet picks up a couple of black screws and staples, leftovers of a burned casket from a previous cremation. Her bridgework, three false brown teeth in a sooty plate, survived the fire. Fillings do not. Gold and mercury sublimate to gas and go up the chimney. Glenn demonstrates technique, flicking bits of black and yellow stone fragments from the floor of the retort into the slag box, and the bone shards into a pile. He picks up a ball joint, maybe the hip. I find another and do the same. It’s light like a macaroon, and crumbles in my grip. A fat black vacuum hose hangs over the table on a garret, to suck up the dust.

“You can go mental,” Glenn says. “You could work on a sort for days. Don’t. Just use your common sense, get as much of the
crap out as you can.” The goal in the end is to have a white powder. It’s part of Neil’s brand, having the whitest cremated remains in Winnipeg.

“What’s this?” I say, poking at a hard green glob the size of a pencil eraser.

“I don’t know. But every cremation, we get one or two.”

Without evidence to the contrary, I decide it must be the soul.

L
OVE
Y
OUR
H
AIR
, W
HO’S
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OUR
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MBALMER?

T
o get to the Silver Doors at St. Boniface General Hospital I rattle the stretcher down a long corridor, always empty of people but full of discarded hospital gear: iron bed frames, armless armchairs, IV racks. At St. B the Silver Doors can handle a dozen or more plastic-wrapped corpses comfortably. The security guard has waxy yellow smoker’s hair and a lot of questions about working in a crematorium.