The Undertaker's Daughter (30 page)

“What happens to them, Daddy? What happens to all the bodies buried under this cemetery?”

He looked out over the graveyard and then down at the ground as if he could see through the green carpet of grass, the
dirt, the vaults, and into the caskets. He slipped his hands into his pockets in a settling-down way.

“Embalming doesn’t last forever. The chemicals, well, they eventually break down. And even steel vaults, they can’t keep the water out forever, and water reverses the effects of embalming. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes, just try not to make it too gory. Is it like a horror movie? You know, those zombies?”

“I better never hear you, or hear
of
you, talking about the dead like that. You will not be disrespectful. I won’t have it.”

“Okay, okay. Gosh, I was just asking.”

“It’s a natural thing. The body will eventually decompose. The flesh breaks down. Do you want to know how?”

“No, I do not.”

Here we stood in a whole community of stinking, rotting flesh, which is the only way I perceived it in that moment. “What’s left after all that, then? Just the bones?”

“Yes, eventually.”

“And how long do those last?”

“Oh, it depends. A long time.”

“A hundred years?”

“Well, they could last for hundreds of years, or thousands, depending on the climate and conditions, but not here. Some may not last as long as forty or fifty years.”

I looked up at him now, for the first time during this quick education, and asked him something that had bothered me for quite a while: “Then what part of us goes to heaven?”

He laughed. “I guess the soul, isn’t that what all the preachers say?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Well, sure, that’s what we all think.”

“There’s no proof, you know.”

“Proof of what?”

“That there is a heaven.”

He was silent.

I pressed. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all. Some kind of invisible thing called a soul floats sky-high into another invisible thing called heaven? All I understand is that we die and we end up here.”

“Well, I guess that’s a good start. Come on, it’s getting chilly.”

He was clearly not interested in talking about souls. An enormous number of prayers had fallen from the lips of Jubilee’s preachers in his funeral home. Jesus could have set up residence in the chapel, so many times had his name been invoked in a last effort to usher the deceased to heaven. Yet my father remained tight-lipped about his thoughts on religion and would not philosophize over the existence of a soul. Perhaps his demons demanded constant attention.

I’d seen quite a lot of corpses by then. Now a new image crept into my growing collection and summoned yet another intimacy with the dead. The cemetery’s pleasant lawn of greenery and trees was but a carpet that hid bones and varying states of decomposition.

I wondered if the idea of heaven was a sugarcoated fallacy to keep us calm when wrongs were not set right, when inexplicable suffering had no meaning; that the only way we would be good people was by the threat of eternal damnation. And I entertained the most bitter doubt: that the greatest promise of all, that of being reunited with those we’d loved and lost, the largest Band-Aid to grief, was also a beguiling misbelief.

Titus and Annie lived in a shack. The unpaved road that twisted through an overgrown, neglected bit of land near a wood made it difficult to find them. They lived in poverty. The few people who knew of their existence criticized them for going out of their way to take in any stray dog in the county when they struggled to feed themselves. They had no electricity and no indoor plumbing.

My father never solved the mystery of how they squirreled away a few dollars to make a small down payment on their funeral arrangements. Prearranged funerals were rare at that time, and my father thought it ironic that two people who couldn’t afford a pair of Salvation Army shoes could spare the change they brought to the funeral home.

They drove a beat-up, old-model farm truck that they’d borrowed from their cousins. It clanked and rattled down the street at a pace that created a traffic jam in Jubilee—and that was no mean feat. When a glance out the window of the funeral home revealed that Titus and Annie would soon be upon us, the room cleared quicker than in a fire drill. They were the dirtiest, filthiest, smelliest people that ever existed in Jubilee. They were so dirty that my father, who’d handled hundreds of dead people with his bare hands, had to gird his loins to offer his handshake.

Thank the Lord they never sat down and didn’t stay for more than a couple of minutes; that was quite long enough for their visit to make an impact. Titus reached into his dirt-rimmed trouser pocket and offered a threadbare bandanna filled with change.

As the odor of unwashed flesh grew stronger, my father opened the handkerchief, and the quarters, nickels, and dimes came tumbling out onto his desk.

Titus reached out. “I’ll have my hankie back, please.”

My father was happy to comply.

Annie stood by silently, uncomfortably, as if unaccustomed to a clean, orderly environment.

After the truck jerked down the street with a backfire or two, my father, or the unlucky employee who’d had the misfortune to attend them, ran to get the Lysol and sprayed half a can around the office. Still, the odor lingered, eyes watered, and the environment wasn’t normal for hours.

“God in heaven, what is that smell? Did someone die?” I asked the first time I passed through the office after their visit, nearly gagging from the strength of the odor.

“Dead people don’t smell like that. At least not here they don’t,” my father said.

When Titus Bromley was dead and laid out on the embalming table, soap and water was not enough. For the first time in his career, my father bought scouring powder. He and Rex, his new employee, scrubbed away the caked-on dirt and the grime that held stubbornly in the creases of Titus’s skin, until they were weary. They shaved his beard because it was so dirty and tangled in knots that it stuck straight up when he was supine. Shaving a dead man’s beard is an altogether tricky thing. Dead skin doesn’t heal, and nicks are to be avoided at all costs. Three new blades later, the face of Titus Bromley emerged.

They trimmed his eyebrows and nasal hair, cut his nails and dug out the dirt from beneath them, and combed his hair. Fount donated one of his own suits because Titus’s clothes were too dirty to wash and he had no others that were befitting. Finally, he was
ready for Annie’s private viewing before the doors opened to the public visitation.

Annie arrived only a bit more presentable than normal. She still had an odor about her, and though she’d made an effort, she looked like a stunned animal, searching for something familiar. My father led her into the chapel. She looked at her husband, turned to my father, and said, “That ain’t my husband. What have you done with Titus?”

Stunned, the undertaker had never before encountered such a reaction. “Well, Annie, it sure is. It’s Titus all right.”

“No, it ain’t. I don’t know who this character is, but it ain’t Titus.”

Then she became upset and looked all around as if she might find her husband sitting in one of the chairs, or as if he might be standing at the doorway. My father thought she would snap out of it, but she didn’t.

He tried to calm her, and when he was sure she was settled in a chair, he ran out to the office where two of her cousins waited. He directed them into the chapel to the plain wooden coffin. They were just as shocked as Annie, but after several moments they recognized him as Titus. One of the ladies sat down with Annie and after a fair amount of cajoling convinced her that the man inside the coffin was indeed her husband.

As I eventually learned of death rituals in other cultures that greatly differed from ours, I realized that our customs were so ingrained in our community that even the poorest among us sacrificed everyday comforts so that they could one day be embalmed and placed in a casket or coffin. A more frugal Annie Bromley might have wrapped her husband in a sheet and buried him on their property. I’m sure it was never a consideration.

Each time Titus had removed his tattered bandanna and deposited his coins on my father’s desk, his act mirrored those of
thousands who had gone before him. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years people had chosen to
incur debt rather than forgo their idea of a good death.

I figured that Titus and Annie were just as stretched to enter our world as we were to be a part of theirs. They had created a life ritual that blurred class distinctions in the face of death, and this, supported by the rituals my father performed, taught me about empathy. Sometimes people who had less, who sacrificed everything to have what many of us took for granted, were the strongest among us, even though they might be in tattered clothes and smell unpleasant.

I believe my father set the groundwork for a specific approach to one of life’s mysteries—people. His unspoken message, set by his example, was to examine the person, not his or her social standing. I would flounder, occasionally get it right, sometimes get it horribly wrong, but I tried to follow his example.

 CHAPTER 12 

O
n a sunny Saturday afternoon in June, Evelyn would walk down the aisle of a church. To no one’s surprise, at eighteen years of age she chose marriage over college. At high noon on the day of this jubilant event, the door to her room was firmly closed. We anticipated that she was busying herself with a plethora of beauty rituals, plucking her brows, teasing her hair. But as I walked by her door I didn’t hear the radio, or the rustling and bustling of a nervous bride. Jemma and I panicked; we had to be at the church any minute now. This was a job for my mother. She tapped on the door while the three of us anxiously huddled around it. No response. Finally, my mother opened the door. The sun streamed through the window, the air smelled stale from the previous night, and there was Evelyn, still lost to the world.

“Evelyn Dianne! Evelyn. You get up right now. Wake up, wake up!”

My mother’s voice, filled with frustration, didn’t cause much of a stir. Evelyn yawned and looked at us with an I-don’t-understand-what-all-the-fuss-is glare, annoyed that we were annoyed. And, oh, by the way, what’s a girl got to do to get some breakfast on her wedding day? Jemma and I walked away, staring at each other in disbelief. Evelyn’s idea of wedding planning was that she should show up at the church. She’d said something to me about being a bridesmaid. When I’d asked my mother if I had to, she said yes, of course. Jemma was too old to be a flower girl and too young to be a bridesmaid, but our mother insisted that she be included in the wedding party, so she created a role for Jemma, which was to carry the unity candle down the aisle, place it in the candleholder, and then sit down with our parents. Jemma would rather have fallen into an open grave.

Evelyn’s choice of husband was curious. Lenny was short and wiry. His voice sounded like Donald Duck’s with a Southern drawl. He wore rather large glasses, or maybe they looked large because his head was small. Older than Evelyn by a few years, he was too young to have thinning hair, but nevertheless . . . He didn’t look or act like a redneck, but, oh my God, the back of his car was jacked up too high for my comfort. He was an amiable kind of guy, and I wondered what punishment he sought by marrying Evelyn. They had a huge argument a few days before the date and we held our breath, waiting to hear if the wedding was still on. All was forgiven, and this was made apparent when they punched each other in the arms, just for the fun of it. Maybe he was perfect for her after all.

When the pastel mints and the wedding cake were eaten, the fruity, red punch sipped with as much delicacy as the guests could muster, my father laughed when he said to Lenny, “She’s all yours now,” with a hint of “the joke’s on you, kid” in his delivery.