The Undertaker's Daughter (22 page)

T
he rivalry between Alfred Deboe and my father kept him on his toes. One day he came home with a suit bag from his favorite men’s clothing store. Unzipping it, he revealed a white, double-breasted suit.

“What are you doing with that?” I asked him.

“Come and see.”

Outside, parked in front of the garage, was a gleaming white Cadillac hearse. He’d traded in the black Packard for this big, white monster. Next to the hearse was a smaller monster, a white ambulance built in the same elongated shape as the hearse, both like white, winged omnibuses.

“Isn’t that a pretty sight? We’re going to have white funerals.”

“Is that why you bought that suit? You’re going to wear a white suit at the funerals?” I asked, stunned.

“Not many of them, just the high-profile, bigger funerals.”

His white funerals were a first in Jubilee. Everyone in Jubilee was seeped in the culture of dark, somber mourning, and that image remained, except for my father’s figure. Slowly the funeral procession made its way through town, the white hearse leading the way. Folks pulled over to let the cortege pass, and when it reached the cemetery, my father stepped out and moved through the green shade trees, his white suit glaring.

It didn’t stop there. The flashing lights on Deboe’s ambulance were red, so my father switched his red lights for blue ones. But the police force, all of two cars, used blue lights, so, much to his chagrin, they insisted that he return to his red lights.

Every autumn Deboe drove his ambulance onto the sidelines of the high school football field during the games in case of an emergency. He’d held that prominent advertising position for years. Undaunted, my father muscled his way onto the field for the games played away from Jubilee. He drove for hours to other towns so the fans could see him at the games. I rode along, stretched out on the gurney, and emerged from the ambulance onto the football field, refreshed and ready for the game. Eventually he won the right to service half the home games as well.

I wondered if Miss Agnes had given him a little shove to promote himself in these ways. I’m certain they at the very least discussed his ideas.

Percy Foley, the hospital administrator, continued to do everything in his power to give Deboe an edge. Foley secured free hospital beds and wheelchairs and gave them to Deboe, who loaned them out to people free of charge, securing future business when the time came. It made my father furious. Not to be outdone, he bought hospital beds, wheelchairs, crutches, and extra folding chairs and loaned them to anyone who wanted them, also free of
charge. And no need to worry about coming by to pick them up; he delivered them, too. I overheard Sonny tell someone that Percy Foley hated Frank Mayfield and his whole damn family. Whenever my father’s name came up in conversation, Percy could only bring himself to refer to him as “that son of a bitch.”

He may have been a son of a bitch to some people, but others thought he was close to being a hero. A family, the Nelsons, lived on a small, ratty old piece of land outside of Jubilee. My father would describe the family as hard up, and when the couple walked into his office, he knew he would never see a penny for the service he was about to perform. The Nelsons had several children, maybe nine, maybe ten. Now they had one less. Their two-year-old had died and they asked my father to bury the child. They struggled to say they would pay “when things got better.” He put them at ease, buried their child, and never sent a bill.

At times a hero was the last thing he wanted to be, when duty called and he would have given anything not to answer. On a morning when the sky was dark as granite and the roads, dusty from a dry spell, had become slick and dangerous from a light rain that fell the previous evening, Miles Parker’s car slid off the road and hit a tree. He died instantly. Miles had often come by the funeral home and had long conversations with my father. The tone of their voices was always smooth and calm, and I discovered it was all about insurance, families, and the state of the world. I remembered the day Miles walked by me on his way up the steps to the funeral home. A patch of earth stuck out of the concrete where the tree trunks plowed into the ground.

“What are you doin’ there?” he asked.

I dug slowly and patiently with a white plastic spoon. “I’m digging a tunnel.”

“That so? Where to?”

“China.”

“How long do you think that will take you?”

“Not sure.”

“What will you do when it’s finished?”

“Why, go there, of course.”

“I’ll tell you what. Here’s a quarter. When you get there, let me know and I’ll make a full investment in your tunnel.”

“Miles was too young to die,” I said to my mother. She told me to stay out of the way so my father could work on him.

“Your daddy’s all torn apart. When he brings Miles out, don’t go into the chapel until he’s finished.” I noticed her voice was softer, more patient than normal.

Miles made a larger-than-life impression when he walked into a room, although he was basically shy and it pained him to be noticed. He was tall, with jet-black hair held in place with plenty of pomade, and dark, exotic looks. My father said his friend was a well-dressed sophisticate. My mother sometimes played bridge with his wife, and Jemma was good friends with one of their children.

My father had to put Miles’s face back together. There wasn’t much to work with. He would have preferred a closed-casket service, but Miles’s wife wanted to see him. So the undertaker pulled himself together and worked on his friend for hours with the few reconstructive tools that existed. I stood beside the casket before Miles’s family came in to see him. My stomach tightened, but I made myself look. Miles had a swarthy complexion, now unrecognizable under thick, orange-tinted makeup. One of his temples was swollen and a little purple, the other was dented. My father carefully dabbed the side of Miles’s face with powder, as if it might still hurt. He was silent while he worked. It was a bitter thing to witness and I wanted to make my father feel better. It was the first time I felt that the undertaker needed consoling.

“He still looks like Miles, Daddy. I bet his family’s really going to appreciate it.”

He remained silent, nodded, and bit his lip.

As distressed and weighed down with grief as they were, Miles’s family was indeed appreciative. They had to see him, no matter what, even if they no longer recognized him. They were grateful that my father gave them that opportunity and were visibly relieved when they did recognize him. They would never know the hours my father spent working on him, or the depth of his own anguish.

Sometimes when illness had ravaged a body, the family couldn’t understand why their undertaker couldn’t perform miracles. He tried to prepare them for their first viewing, to explain that after long hours in the embalming room, he worked for the best result, which might still not suffice. “I’ve done all I could. I know he might not look exactly as you’d like.”

But most of the time, he was surprised to hear how relieved, how satisfied, the family was with the results of a difficult case. At times under challenging circumstances, he couldn’t stop fiddling with the decedent, and I would come upon him while he stood over the casket, the flowers already delivered and in place, moments before the family was due. He would rather not charge for the embalming than have a family unsatisfied.

Bad weather brought another act of heroism. One winter night an unexpected and furious snowstorm fell upon Beacon County. The roads were quickly coated with ice, and several feet of snow fell during the evening. A woman called the funeral home in dire straits. Screaming in pain, she could barely speak. After a few nerve-wracking minutes my father managed to extract the story from her. Her husband was out of town and she was in labor. Her house was tucked away on one of the back roads in the
county and she was stranded. She’d already phoned the police, the fire department, and friends with trucks. No one would venture out to get her. They claimed it was impossible to drive safely on the narrow country lane that led to her house.

The white ambulance, with only snow chains for protection, crept along the country roads. My father made it to the house, but it took him so long to get there that by the time he carried her to the ambulance and began making his way to the hospital, it was too late. She was having that baby there and then and he had to help. He had no choice but to stop along the side of the road. My father knew a lot of things, but his knowledge of midwifery was nonexistent. The ambulance was equipped with a tank of oxygen, a mask, a blanket, and a less than impressive first-aid kit. He picked up the handheld two-way radio and contacted the hospital. The doctor on duty that night guided him through the birth, step by step. In the ambulance, with the snow piling up around the windows, under the small indoor roof light, the undertaker delivered a baby.

One of the drawbacks of the funeral business was the sense of confinement, of always being on call. He offered himself to the people of Jubilee twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even when he tried to leave things to his employees, a shocked and grieving family member only wanted to speak to the owner, to the person who had spent a great deal of time, even years, building a relationship with the person.

Every summer we tried valiantly to get away. We couldn’t make plans until my father was sure that no one looked in obvious danger of dying. Arrangements were made for Miss Agnes to be cared for until our return, and someone had to spend nights at the funeral home while we were away. We tried to behave like normal people. We packed up and headed for Florida. We scrambled,
sleepy eyed, into the station wagon at the crack of an ungodly hour; it felt like we were sneaking out of town. Jubilee had no bakery and we worshipped Krispy Kremes, so our first stop was the nearest town where we could find the sugary doughnuts, warm from the conveyor belt. Thomas told us that Krispy Kremes were first sold in Kentucky and that not a lot of people knew that.

Thomas would leave for college soon, and this might be his last trip with us for a while. We went to the school auditorium to see him perform in the senior play. I’d never seen a play before and was astonished that he was transformed into someone I didn’t recognize. Bewitched, I didn’t move a muscle for two hours. He wore a doctor’s coat and his hair was completely gray. He showed me later how they used special silver spray paint. When I saw him walk across the stage, I sat on the edge of my seat and said to myself,
That’s what I want to do. I have just got to be in a play someday.

When I heard “Pomp and Circumstance” and saw Thomas walk down the aisle at his graduation, a surprising lump developed in my throat and I was useless at holding back the tears. Who would tell me things I needed to know? Thomas told me once why he thought Miss Agnes wore red all the time.

“Miss Agnes is really smart. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She wears red as part of her public relations and marketing plan. It’s her way of advertising. Think how well it worked. Everyone knows who she is.”

That was the kind of thing I needed to know. My father said that Miss Agnes just liked red a lot, but Thomas provided me with details. He was going to be a journalism major. Evelyn, on the other hand, slept almost all the way to Florida and woke up cranky when it was time to eat or go to the bathroom. I doubt if I would cry when she graduated—if she ever graduated.

On this trip, we left Jemma at the funeral home with Belle, for which Jemma never forgave us. She and Belle were the best of friends, but even so, I’ll never forget the image of Jemma sitting in Belle’s lap forlornly waving good-bye, her big eyes filled with tears.

With the open road in front of us, we never knew what was going to happen. My father possessed a radar that honed in on the unusual or hidden gem in a sea of mediocrity. He found an A-framed pancake house off the main road where we stopped for breakfast when the doughnuts wore off. He’d never stop in a generic burger joint, but would find the best damn truck stop with the best damn hot plate in the middle of nowhere or stumble upon an elegant steak house in a city.

He suddenly pulled the car over to the side of a busy highway, straddled a fence, and unashamedly stole juicy, ripe oranges from an unknowing grower’s trees. He performed this mild act of vandalism without mussing up his clothes or bringing any of the grove’s dust back with him. We rode deeper into the South and he pulled over again and bagged the moss that hung from heavy-laden trees.

“Here, smell this. Feel what this is like. This is Spanish moss.”

“They stuff mattresses and furniture with this stuff,” Thomas said. There was that detail again.

As we sped along farther and farther away from Jubilee, I began to sense the
great expanse of America.
How small our little town is,
I thought. Not for the first time, I held the notion that I might not always live in Jubilee. Perhaps, when I grew up, I would move far away.

After hours and hours on the road the salty ocean’s perfume finally drifted in through the open windows. We waited in the car at a hotel praying for a thumbs-up. My father always conducted a room inspection. If he didn’t like it or if the hotel didn’t meet his
standards, onward he drove until the search for the right room, on the right stretch of the beach, was completed.

He became a free man in the ocean. He dove in, swam, rode a raft, and sunbathed all day, every day. It seemed he craved time to be alone. The waves rocked him, he walked silently on the beach looking for seashells, and stretched out on a lounge chair by the pool, his eyes closed. He didn’t ignore us, but he relished his stolen moments of solitude. I sensed this, and though I would have liked nothing more than to build sand castles with him, I made no demands.

We arrived back at the hotel room each day sandy and salty, hoping that the light wouldn’t be flashing on the phone—usually a harbinger of death.

When we changed for dinner, I waited for the fashion show. Out came clothes that my father never wore in Jubilee. Knee-length, white cotton shorts were perfectly pressed and showed off his tan. He wore short-sleeve, knit shirts and dark sunglasses. He strolled around in spiffy canvas shoes, never sandals. My mother wore dressy shorts, too, and brightly colored Hawaiian-print blouses, or cotton sundresses that she wouldn’t be caught dead in at the Jubilee Kroger’s. We went to a different restaurant every night and ordered exotic foods such as lobster and broccoli and fruit drinks with paper umbrellas. We played miniature golf and went to amusement parks and became incredibly sleepy by eight o’clock.