The Undertaker's Daughter (26 page)

“Oh, I won’t, Mr. Miller. A Bud, right?”

“That’s right, over the state line, my friend, over the state line.” Then off he went, whistling down the street.

My father promised Mr. Miller that he would drive over to Tennessee, purchase a beer, bring it back to Kentucky, and place it in Mr. Miller’s pocket at the time of his funeral. Not just in the casket, but in his trouser pocket, right next to his body.

Then, as if the whole town were listening in on a party line, other requests poured in. Horace wanted to be buried with his whittling knife. Mrs. Palmer insisted upon lying in her casket with her iron skillet in full view. A farmer would not part with his John
Deere blanket. John Deere was a favorite—the hat, the toy tractor, almost anything with the logo on it.

My father viewed the changes in burial customs and the fulfillment of ever-growing special requests as a natural evolution of the business. But he would never admit that he was taken completely unaware when Sonny pulled a fast one on him. Sonny wasn’t as thickheaded as he looked.

“Where’s Sonny? Is he on vacation?” I asked.

“No, Sonny’s gone.”

“Did you fire him?”

“No, I didn’t fire him. The son of a bitch has opened his own funeral home.”

“Where?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Right around the goddamn corner, that’s where.”

Later that afternoon, the men gathered at the poker table and discussed this sensational news.

“Well now, Frank, you knew it was bound to happen. He’s a homegrown county boy. Why, he’s got all kinds of connections.” Johnnie Ray dealt the cards.

“Yeah, he’s got that relative in the sheriff’s department, and the coroner’s a good friend of his, too,” my father said. And these were most likely the only reasons he’d never fired Sonny years ago.

“The hometown boy who had nothin’, poor as dirt, now he’s gonna start up his own business, gonna make good. There’ll be some in Jubilee pullin’ for him, Frank.” Brother Sam stated the obvious.

“They’ll forget who taught him everything. He sure has. He wouldn’t have his license if it weren’t for you.” Johnnie Ray threw in his hand.

They played cards silently while the question in everyone’s mind was
Why didn’t Frank make him a partner?
My father had
discussed the possibility with Sonny, but when my father mentioned this to my mother, she went berserk. She’d endured Sonny’s bravado on several occasions and early in his employment overheard him bragging to salesmen about how he would one day own the whole business and that he was solely responsible for making the funeral home successful.

She couldn’t have been more clear, or more serious, when she threatened my father, “If you make Sonny a partner, I will leave you.”

My father always tempered Sonny’s eagerness with “We’ll see. We’ll see.” What happened later was something my father would never tell the poker players. An elderly man who hadn’t much money was in need of a ride to his doctor, an hour’s drive from Jubilee, and was required to keep to a schedule of regular appointments. He was dependent on the funeral home’s service to drive him back and forth. Sonny was given this task and my father told him not to charge the man, even if he offered to pay. One day my father ran into the elderly man and discovered Sonny had indeed charged him each time and had pocketed the money. Good riddance.

After Sonny left, a few new employees drifted through the funeral home, until a man named Fount walked through the door. He was the one who stayed. I guess if you were going to work with my father, you had to become accustomed to his children hanging around and running down the stairs when the funerals were over. Sonny always bristled when Jemma and I ransacked the snack machine or lurked around the office and listened to his phone calls. But Fount was different. He was quiet, with feathery, white hair and a barrel of a stomach. Thin, black-framed glasses sat snugly on his temples. He reminded me of Colonel Sanders. Fount looked as if he’d already had a life and anything else was a bonus. I
never knew what he was thinking, but whatever it was, it didn’t feel bad. He never tired of Jemma and me running in and out the front door when the funeral home was quiet. He stood at the door and opened it for us with his chunky arm about a thousand times a day. Fount didn’t mind when I practiced the organ, even if I got carried away and dramatically blasted the “Theme of
Exodus
” over and over. I was eager to prove that my music lessons with Totty were not in vain.

Fount wore the face of contentment when he was working. My father said Fount was happy to fill his hours with our family and the folks of Jubilee rather than stay at home with his difficult wife. She might have been fun to court, but turned sour and demanding when the marriage had aged. His avoidance of her bred loyalty to my father.

One morning Fount and my father were in the showroom, putting the finishing touches on a body while I looked on.

“Totty can’t make it to the funeral tomorrow,” my father said.

“What are we going to do?” Fount asked.

“Aren’t you going to call Mabel? She always fills in for Totty,” I said.

“Mabel’s out of town. You’re going to have to play.”

“I can’t! I’m not ready.”

“Aw, hell, of course you are. It’s a small funeral. You only have to play three hymns.”

“I’ll mess up. Or I’ll play at the wrong time.”

“Not possible,” said Fount. “You can’t play at the wrong time. Your daddy controls these things. He’ll tell you when to play.” Fount spoke the absolute truth.

“I’ll pay you,” my father offered.

“How much?”

“Exactly what I pay Totty.”

“How much is that?”

“Twelve dollars.”

I thought about it. School had ruined my home life. The days of traipsing through the cemeteries with my father had dwindled. Spring Farm’s coffee counter had closed, and I no longer ate pie with him at ten o’clock in the morning. My mother bought eggs at the grocery now, so the Egg Man was history. I was too old to play in the casket boxes. This might be a way of staying connected, a way of garnering a little more attention from my father.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

I practiced all night on three hymns and woke early the next morning and practiced again, still in my pajamas. My rendition of “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” at eight o’clock that morning brought cries of “Will you stop that racket!” from my mother.

Before the funeral service began, my father took the pallbearers aside and gave them directions on where to stand, how to stand, which way to face, how to hold the casket, when to move forward, when to move backward. He pinned carnations on their lapels with each flower leaning in the same direction.

Jesus,
I thought,
this guy is particular.
It dawned on me that I’d never seen my father in action in quite this way, never seen him actually conduct an entire funeral.

Earlier that morning he’d given me instructions. When he looked over at me at the beginning of the service, it was my signal to play two verses of the first hymn. And the next time he looked at me I was to play the next hymn.

“But what if you look at me and you don’t mean for me to play, you just happen to look at me?” I was slightly panicked.

“I won’t.”

And he didn’t. At the beginning of the service he stood at the wide, open entrance to the chapel and looked over at me. I played
the first few notes of “Amazing Grace” with sweaty fingers. He turned away. Whew! When I began the second hymn, he turned around sharply, frowned, and with his hand tactfully motioned for me to lower the volume. Immediately I let up on the pedal and silently cursed myself.

I sat quietly on the bench during the eulogy, palms still sweating, waiting for the amen. At the end of the service he looked over at me again and I played the last hymn. Then he walked down to the front of the chapel where the preacher stood waiting for him. With a small gesture, just large enough for the congregants to see, he directed everyone to rise. The pallbearers didn’t move a muscle until they received his signal, a slight nod, to move the casket.

When my father returned from the cemetery, he presented me with a check for $20.

“But you said twelve!” I was thrilled.

“I didn’t want you to do it for the money. I wanted you to do it because you wanted to.”

Evelyn cornered me that night. She turned off the television right in the middle of one of Perry Mason’s big cases. She’d grown more moody and, when in a bad phase, intolerably hateful.

“So, I guess you think you’re pretty important now.”

“No, not really.” I had no idea what she meant.

“Sitting up there on that organ bench, like you’re Miss Liberace.”

I said nothing, sensing a scene that might wind up with her fist on my body.

“Can’t you speak up for yourself, or are you just going to sit there like a knot on a log?”

“You could have played for the funeral if you’d just stuck with the lessons. But you quit. That’s not my fault.”

And there came the fist. I showed the bruise on my arm to my mother the next day.

“You should have kept your mouth shut. You know how she is.”

Evelyn’s bullying had no effect on my effort to insinuate myself into my father’s busy life. I felt compelled to be near him, to watch for signs of this secret, private part of him.

One afternoon after school I pulled on a pair of dungarees, an old sweater, and tennis shoes, then announced that I was ready to go hunting.

My father didn’t have any hobbies like most men. Boating didn’t count because he didn’t fish, and no other men in Jubilee went antiquing for a hobby except for a man who was noticeably unmarried. I put hunting down to the farmboy in him that needed an airing. The other men showed up at the funeral home in their scruffy hunting clothes, but when my father emerged from the back wearing his camouflage regalia, I thought,
Here is a man who really likes to dress up.
The crisp, clean, full camouflage went from head to toe, and the fabric was pressed as perfectly as a uniform. Somehow he made it look as if it were the only way to be, and the other men dimmed in comparison. It felt out of character for both of us, but we loaded up the jeep—oh, yes, he also owned a jeep now—with his friends and gear and we took off to the country, intrepid travelers to the fields and woods.

Our motley crew descended upon a field cast in the autumn twilight. The air was full of the strong smell of the earth, and woods that rose behind us. After we settled in a spot, and at the direction of five men who gave me an assortment of instructions, I readied myself to fire a rifle for the first time.

“Kneel down,” my father said.

“No, stand up,” Billy ordered.

“No, it’ll knock her down,” my father said. “Kneel down, put the gun on your shoulder.”

He positioned himself behind me on one side, with Billy on the other.

I aimed at nothing. The rifle kicked back and I thought my shoulder would fall off. Well, hell. It knocked me down anyway. Oh, how they laughed. I scrambled right back up and laughed with them.

I wasn’t going to be a hunter; I haven’t touched a gun since that day. I suggested that instead I should pick up the kill, but they were hunting doves and wanted the bird dogs to do what bird dogs do, so I just crouched down in the field and watched. During a break we drank black coffee from a thermos and ate pimento-cheese sandwiches, melted from the end of the day’s heat. That night my father took the doves down to the Bottom to Miss Rosalie, who cooked the birds in a rich gravy. We brought them back home still warm and ate dozens of them on toast and washed them down with iced tea. The tiny little things had soft bones and a faint gamy taste.

I wasn’t allowed to go deer hunting with the men because they thought it was too dangerous. My father fell out of a tree once and got banged up pretty badly. But he got his deer in the end, and when he placed it in the back of the jeep and took the deer to school to show Jemma, it nearly traumatized her.

When she was called out of the classroom the morning of the hunt and saw the dead, bleeding deer hanging out the back of the jeep, she screamed bloody murder. She sobbed uncontrollably and scolded him in between gulps. He was surprised by her reaction and that she didn’t appreciate that the deer would be on our dinner table later. He never killed anything he wasn’t planning to eat.

Jemma was a deeply devoted animal lover. We were sure she would court a career as a zookeeper. It wasn’t easy to keep a pet at the funeral home, so my father bought a few exotic, but quiet,
animals to keep her happy. Two baby alligators arrived by mail in a square cardboard box perforated with air holes. We took them outside by the garage where my father had filled a small plastic pool with water. He let them loose and we watched wide-eyed as they tumbled from the box and scrambled, their thin tails beating the water, two little exotic creatures swimming behind the funeral home. Jemma visited the pool twice a day to feed them bits of raw ground beef. The ambulance, hearse, and gurneys that carried dead bodies passed by the pool of alligators for a few weeks, until one day a piercing squeal brought us running. Jemma stood by the pool, distressed that it was empty. The alligators had eaten their way out through the plastic. We searched the area, not knowing what we would do if we found them, and we never did. I fantasized that they had made their way through Jubilee’s sewers and would one day pop up in someone’s toilet.

Pastel-dyed chicks at Easter lasted a few weeks. A descented skunk slept in a special cage. These strange animals either died a natural death or suddenly disappeared when they became a nuisance to keep. My father mysteriously disposed of them; no area surrounded the funeral home in which to bury them, so we had no plots of animal graves, or funerals for the creatures.

Though my hunting days were well over, I continued to rely on the company of adults as a young teenager. The men at the funeral home and Belle, Totty, and Theo were my friends because they were near, but also because I found it hard to make friends, especially when I was younger. Girls didn’t appreciate my chirpy tours of the funeral home, even when I tried to emulate Jackie Kennedy’s tour of the White House. I walked slowly and strived to be gracious and informative.