The Undertaker's Daughter (4 page)

M
y mother, intolerant of noise at any time, was perfectly suited to this line of work. Childish expressions of emotion irritated her. She must have invented the phrase “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” which she threatened whenever she spanked me.

She was the disciplinarian of the family. My parents must have agreed that her job was to relieve him of the burden of attending every scrape, fight, tug-of-war, disobedience, whine, and moan that three children were sure to muster. Although she often threatened us with “I’m going to tell your father,” he rarely stepped in.

I blamed sour-faced Bretta West for my mother’s ability to slip so easily into funeral-home mode. Bretta, my mother’s mother,
was a strict Southern Baptist. She and her husband had settled on a small farm in western Kentucky, where she was a Bible-reading, churchgoing, no-nonsense woman who didn’t believe in dancing or music other than hymns and who insisted on modest dress. Two things Bretta would especially not tolerate were noise in the house and sassing.

I never saw Bretta laugh, and on the few occasions when she smiled, her eyes crinkled up and narrowed as if she were in pain. I thought her face would crack from the effort.

My mother was accustomed to being on her own. By the time she was ten her older brother and sisters had already married and were living in Lanesboro, the largest city near them. No other children her age were within walking distance, so she entertained herself with a few wooden toys, a doll, and her pet squirrel, Fuzzy, who lived outside in a nest at the corner of the house.

My mother doesn’t remember ever being punished.

“You never got in trouble for anything? Nothing?” I once asked.

“No, not really. Nothing serious. You don’t get in trouble when you mind your parents.”

We always had our evening meal together as a family, but like her mother, my mother had expectations for our behavior that were positively Victorian. She demanded our elbows off the table, polite passing of the food, napkins in our laps, and a minimum of table talk. This was exactly how her meals with her parents must have been, except for one thing: I enjoyed a good supper conversation.

“Daddy, if you were arrested right now, the sheriff couldn’t take your fingerprints.”

“Hush,” my mother said.

“ ’Cause if they did, all they would get is a picture of your wrinkled fingers.”

“That’s enough.” A clear warning was in her voice.

“But it’s true. Look how wrinkled his fingers are.”

He’d just sat down to dinner having embalmed a body, and his fingers were prunelike from the tremendous amount of water he used. He never wore the ghastly rubber gloves that hung from the handle of a storage cabinet in the embalming room. They were actually old-fashioned autopsy gloves he’d bought from the hospital. They dangled in the air, an awful brown color, swollen, larger than a big man’s hand. When he made the effort to work in them, they were so thick and heavy he became annoyed, pulled them off, and flung them on the floor. This was long before the fear of disease and the invention of latex gloves.

My father never interfered with my mother’s constant quest for silence, but the slight lift at the corners of his mouth told me that he was sometimes on my side.

“You do not talk about this subject at the table. Now be quiet.” She passed the mashed potatoes. But of course she and my father
spoke of nothing else.

“It looks like Mr. Simmons will be dead by morning,” my father would say.

“I don’t know, Frank. Elsie told me that he should have died last month. His heart is barely thumping, she told me, but he’s still hanging on.”

I worked on a fried chicken leg for a while, then thought aloud, “You know, Totty has a chair what sings and—”

“That,”
Thomas offered. “A chair
that
sings.”

“Uh-huh, Totty has a chair that sings. It’s a little wooden rocking chair and—”

“You’re so stupid,” Evelyn said.

“That’s enough,” my mother intervened.

“She’s so stupid.” Evelyn had to have the last word.

My mother knew absolutely that children could be trained to be still and silent. Her mother wasn’t the kind of woman who had the time or patience to teach her youngest how to cook or clean, nor did she invite her to sit with her at the sewing machine while she made her clothes, nor into the garden to plant beans and tomatoes. Like me, my mother turned to her father for attention, and there, too, she met lessons in silence.

Charles West, my mother’s father, worked the land-based oil fields in western Kentucky during the 1930s. After the roughnecks had drilled the wells, hauled the supplies, and laid the pipelines, they relocated to the next potential oil field. Charles was a pumper, the man who stayed behind after the others moved on. He monitored and maintained all the equipment, working as a caretaker of a producing oil field.

During the summer, my mother would clamber up into his pickup truck and accompany him to work. She stood a safe distance from the heavy equipment in the humid summer heat, a solitary figure in her brown leather lace-ups. Black ringlets of hair fell to her shoulders; her homemade dress caught an occasional breeze. The air smelled nothing at all like gasoline or tar; the odor of crude oil registered as something sweeter, softer, as it filled her lungs. She followed his movements as he walked down the pipeline to the tune of a whole field full of equipment; the pump-jack sang a steady song, the cling-clang of tubing, rods, and valves its chorus. They lunched together in the shade of the truck with crinkled paper bags in their laps, biting into thick-bread, roast-beef sandwiches and sharing a thermos of iced tea.

On Saturdays her father often took her fishing, but she couldn’t sit still in the small boat. She squirmed, rocked the boat, stood, and leaned over one too many times, until Charles scolded
her and threatened to leave her at home in the future. She learned to sit still. She learned to be quiet.

Then she lost him to the final silence. On one of those unpeopled oil fields, surrounded by the pumping, grinding equipment, something went wrong. A piece of equipment fell. He didn’t die immediately, but later, in his home, of internal injuries. It was hard to prove in those days that his death was caused by an accident on the job. There was no compensation. She was fifteen when her father died.

My mother may have been a seeker of silence, but I wasn’t. Living in a funeral home was unnatural to me. During the funerals and in the evenings when the townspeople filed through the front door for visitation, I often felt I couldn’t sit still for another second. Out of sheer boredom, I crept to the landing at the top of the stairs, from where I heard the sounds of the people below. This was risky. One only need look up to see my loose hair hanging down and my nightgown floating in the air, my mischief a distraction from their mourning.

It being so vital that the scene downstairs not be disturbed by our presence upstairs, my mother grew overly sensitive to our movements.

One night I leaned over the railing and peered down at the row of ladies with violet-rinsed hair who sat just below me. Among the elderly women sat a young girl who suddenly burst into song. The song had no words; a light
la la la
rang above the ladies’ low hum. The sound of her voice rose up into the air to the exact spot where I stood. My mother, convinced I was the culprit, came toward me with her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes narrowed into angry slits. She grabbed me by the arm and spanked me before I had a chance to proclaim my innocence.

In a tense whisper she asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Before I could say anything, she clamped her hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t respond. I tried to wriggle away, but she held on with a strong hand that smelled of Jergens lotion. The child sang again and my mother knew she’d made a mistake.

“You should never have been standing there in the first place!” she hissed. The apology I awaited did not materialize. My mother didn’t like to be wrong. My legs stung for a second or two from her spanking, but my feelings . . . they were bruised for days. Small, weepy hurts like this later snowballed into disagreements that ended at an impasse with my mother and drove me downstairs to my father, where I felt more accepted.

On the days when she wasn’t around, I crept back to the spot, where I would close my eyes and listen to the rhythm of it all. Everyone grieved differently. Some mourned in silence; I thought maybe they cried silently inside or saved up their tears, too embarrassed to weep publicly.

The first time I heard a wailer, I jumped from my seat on the stairs. It’s hard to forget the sound of someone wracked with sobs. It scared me to death—I thought she was dying. I was relieved to hear the notes from the Hammond organ. My soon-to-be piano teacher, usually chatty and mischievous, was on her best behavior as she played the mournful hymns. Totty Edwards was a musical woman who had slipped right out of her nun’s habit when she found love in the form of Victor. She told me Victor was “from the plant,” as if he had sprouted from the earth. An explanation from my parents revealed that he was a business executive the local toolmaking company had recruited
from The North.

My mother thought she was crazy. What she really meant was that Totty was different. She was different because she, too, was from The North. “Somewhere in Michigan,” my mother said, as if it were near the Arctic.

“Totty’s scatterbrained and silly. How many times has she told the same old story about the time Perry Como kissed her on the cheek? And she’s always late. Your daddy asks her to be here fifteen minutes before the funeral starts, but she never is, we have to call her, and then she waltzes in wearing those tall boots, all apologetic, smiling at everybody like nothing’s wrong, while we’re on pins and needles. He doesn’t need to worry about things like that, she should just be on time.”

I tried to understand what this had to do with being from The North. As far as I could make out, people from The North were bad timekeepers, wore tall boots, and played bridge quite atrociously. These things made them crazy and not to be trusted. But I liked Totty’s Northern accent, which sparked my imagination. She spoke so quickly, like short flashes of lightning. I imagined everyone in The North raced about their day, speaking in clipped spurts while we walked through molasses elongating our vowels.

One day after a funeral, I noticed Totty had placed a strand of beads on the organ. I asked to hold them. My mother overheard me and was furious. It was as if I had intentionally betrayed the Baptists.

“The next time you ask to see her rosary beads, I will smack you into tomorrow.”

I had no idea what rosary beads were. I thought Totty’s string of black and silver beads was a necklace. I didn’t take the huge silver crucifix hanging from it as anything other than decorative. Good Lord, the sign of the cross jumped out from all sorts of places all over town, most prominently in the jewelry section of the drugstores, on sympathy cards, and church signs of every
denomination. None had anything to do with Catholicism; how should I know that Totty’s was a Catholic cross?

Despite being a Catholic from The North, Totty’s music must have soothed the wailing woman downstairs because she soon caught her breath and quietly wept. As I listened to Totty’s hymn playing, I waited for the clinkers. I often heard her shoes struggling with the pedals, as if she’d caught the heel of one of her tall boots in the cracks. Sometimes the music swelled when it should not. My father made concessions. Totty was available when most other musicians were not, and there weren’t many in Jubilee, anyway. He forgave her shortcomings as an organist when she played his favorite hymn. He always said that Totty played a mean “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

As I sat on my secret perch waiting for the service to begin, the heady, concentrated odor of the flowers in the chapel found its way up the stairs. It took some time for the flowers to warm up; they stood in buckets in the refrigerator of the local florist and arrived with a chilled, subdued aroma. Soon the lights and the warmth of the people who filled the rooms summoned the fragrance of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, and gladioli, and the marriage of their scents gathered strength as the day progressed. Occasionally a lady’s eau de toilette drifted through the air to merge with the perfume of the flowers. These were the days and nights of mourning; the funerals I heard and smelled.

I recognized my father’s footsteps during the funerals, which wasn’t difficult because he was usually the only person allowed to walk around during a service. Even so, his slow, deliberate stride was distinctive. He was in his element—master of the grand finale, directing families through the hardest, most uncomfortable forty-five minutes of their lives. My admiration teetered when I faced the world without him. One of the teachers in our school always
sniffed when she passed me in the halls, as if I carried the odor of the dead. Suddenly the warmth of a blush rose from an understanding that his profession was offensive to some. Then her mother died and my father was called upon to bury her. The teacher’s sniff was replaced with a little nod. Oh the glee of that comprehension, the little skip in my step, the satisfaction I felt. I was filled with an awareness of his unique duty in this little scrap of a town.