The Undertaker's Daughter (6 page)

 CHAPTER 2 

T
he South is like a lusty woman who stands at the mirror and admires her own astounding beauty, a beauty that after all these years only seems to intensify with age. Even though her face has changed, she has never lost her melancholy charm.

Jubilee, the county seat of Beacon County, is a child of the South. There were no Appalachian Mountains in this town, nor coal miners, hillbillies, or holler dwellers. Neither were there white fences bordering exclusive horse farms, nor tony Derby breakfasts. It was just a sleepy, little tobacco town that fostered the illusion of self-sufficiency, even though its citizens had always abandoned it for other places where they spent money, dined in finer establishments, and generally let their hair down, free from the prying eyes of their neighbors. Sunday drivers slowly coasted through town and called it a pretty little place, but they rarely stopped. How were out of towners to know they could buy a cup of coffee in the back of Perry’s drugstore?
No neon signs or billboards directed a stranger to Felt’s Diner, or the Hilltop Restaurant, both on the outskirts of town. Despite a few stately homes positioned on the corners of tree-lined streets, when they took a closer look, they noticed that the place was a little worn around the edges, as if a fine layer of dust had settled over everything.

Life and death rolled along in Jubilee, faintly touched by those outside its boundaries. Each day started about the same. Bottles of milk sweated outside doorways so early in the morning that we thought the milkman was a phantom. We gathered around the Formica table that faced double windows. My legs dangled and my ponytail swung as a meaty aroma began to fill the air.

My mother cooked a sit-down breakfast every morning. She fried eggs, bacon, or sausage, popped biscuits in the oven, sliced juicy, red tomatoes, and sometimes made grits, my father’s favorite. We drowned the thick white splotch of cornmeal in a pool of melted butter.

I begged for the percolated coffee and was usually rewarded half a cup, to which I added heaps of sugar and milk to the brim. I held the cup with two hands, careful of my red-and-white candy-stripe shorts, pressed to perfection by Belle’s iron.

To say that my elder sister, Evelyn, was not a morning person doesn’t describe the intensity of her personality. Somewhere along the line of her development Evelyn made a sharp turn and never looked back. When she was younger, she was so active that my mother couldn’t control her.

“Mama put a harness on me,” Evelyn said accusingly.

“I sure did,” my mother said. “You couldn’t be trusted. I couldn’t turn my back for a second. You’d just go wandering off no matter where we were.”

But as Evelyn grew older, it was if a great magnet pulled her
toward her bed, as if she needed to rest up after all the activity of her younger, wilder self.

When she arrived at the breakfast table, she sat down with a thud and a notable absence of any greeting. I was struck by her rudeness. How was it possible to sit at a table with other people and not acknowledge their presence? My mother, who never seemed to take Evelyn to task, passed food to her, so that she scarcely had the need to speak at all. We heard “Pass the salt,” often enough, but other than that, not much left her lips. Of course her morning conduct fitted nicely with the morguelike silence that my mother required. Perhaps a quiet Evelyn was preferable, even if it meant sacrificing her manners.

She was strong like a boy and bossy like my mother. In her short silences between hungrily chomping her breakfast, she looked down at her food as if she dared it to leave her plate on its own accord. I usually woke up chatty, but was tamed by her sullen presence. I had the distinct feeling that cheer was unwelcome when she brought such a heaviness to our already stifled meals, a steaming volcano that constantly threatened to erupt. It was best not to disturb it. The only person who never tiptoed around Evelyn was my father.

My brother, Thomas, was kind of perfect, and despite the atmosphere, he wore a reliable smile every morning. He was going to be tall like my father, but looked more like my mother.

Thomas never got into any trouble, though occasionally my mother brought him to task whenever she thought Evelyn needed defending. Such as the time Evelyn stuck her fist through a glass pane in the back door and blamed Thomas; my mother insisted he was responsible simply because he was two years older.

Our father wasn’t talkative at breakfast, either. I wondered if he couldn’t wait to go downstairs and take care of a body that
would never ask for salt, more sugar, or some kind of favor, all of which might be coaxed from him before his first cup of coffee.

“Daddy, can I have fifty cents?” I asked.

“May,”
Thomas said. “It’s
may
I have fifty cents.”

“What do you want it for?” my father asked me.

“The new Casper the Friendly Ghost comic book, that’s twelve cents, and a pack of bubble gum, and some View-Master slides, maybe the Niagara Falls reel.”

“What are you going to do to earn fifty cents?”

“Dust the caskets?”

“Leave him alone. Eat your breakfast.” Too much conversation for my mother.

“Dust one and you can have it.”

Every morning without fail my mother turned on the radio. This was the only sort of noise that pressed a chink in her armor of silence—to hear Whit Piper report the funeral announcements.

“Hush! Here it is,” she said, and we were held captive.

Forks down. Everyone except Evelyn tried not to chew loudly as we listened to Whit and breathed a sigh of relief when he announced the arrangements at our funeral home correctly. Grieving people deserved to have their names pronounced perfectly. My mother said it would be a bad reflection on us if Whit made a howler. Sometimes, he did just that.

We were anxious and hoped no one else noticed when he once said, “Mr. Kettering is survived by his husband, Mrs. Sally Kettering.”

Or the time he proclaimed, “Those who wish to attend the marriage of Mrs. Laney Price may do so at the Mayfield and Son Funeral Home.”

And sometimes, though both my parents swore they gave him
the correct information, Whit turned it right on its head: “The funeral will be held on Thursday at three p.m.”

“No!” My father jumped up. “Hatdammit. It’s Friday at two. Lily Tate, call the radio station.”

Twice a day, every day, even our meals included the
business of death. My parents eagerly waited to hear the details of who was going to be buried by the competition. On occasion they would vent their bewilderment and, sometimes, their anger at what they had heard.

“I don’t understand. We were supposed to get Mr. Shoemaker,” my father would say.

“Well, Frank, his sister was buried out in the county, too,” my mother reasoned.

“But Sonny’s known the family for a long time. I thought they’d come to us.”

“Hm. Well. You can’t always believe everything Sonny says.”

I agreed with my mother on this point. Whenever Sonny settled into a conversation, he punctuated it with winks. I didn’t trust him.

“I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me again.” Sparks of my parents’ friction regarding Sonny were evident in my father’s voice. “And we hauled all those chairs out to the Shoemakers’ house just a few months ago. I thought that would have clinched it. Hellfire.”

After breakfast I couldn’t wait to follow my father downstairs. So many different things could happen in a single day in the funeral home.

For a few years I had the run of the rambling house. Thomas and Evelyn had already outgrown anything that resembled a child’s entertainment. My playmates were the people who flowed
in and out of the funeral home. Downstairs someone would always be around who tolerated my questions or, at the least, considered me part of the furniture.

I liked to slide down the banister early enough in the morning so that I wouldn’t miss the Egg Man. The most phenomenal aspect of the Egg Man was that he actually looked like a gigantic egg. He was a huge, tall man with a shiny, bald head that was, well, egg shaped. His body swelled in his bib overalls at his middle, then dwindled down to a pair of unusually small feet for such a giant. His feet were covered by farm-worn, brown leather work boots that just barely peeked out from the faded blue denim.

The Egg Man arrived with a wire basket full of still-warm eggs, and I thought how small they looked in his plump hands. I anticipated the moment when he would sit down in a low, puffy armchair meant for delicate widows. He approached the chair by backing up to it, then slowly made his way down. He struggled to sit and struggled more when it was time for him to go. He shimmied his way out of the chair as I stood beside him and silently cheered his ascent. When this great event was accomplished, my father, the Egg Man, and I stood around smiling, rather pleased with his success.

“How in the world do you get out of bed in the morning?” I could not help but ask.

The Egg Man just laughed. “Why, honey, I just roll out.”

He climbed carefully into his blue farm truck and drove away with a wave of his beefy arm.

He’s going to need a really big casket someday,
I thought.

In those pauses from the dead and the dying, I lolled about in the gray wooden swing on our wraparound veranda, where the smell of strong coffee and burnt toast drifted all the way from our next door neighbor’s kitchen window.

This would be the time of morning I would pester my father to take me to the Spring Farms coffee counter. When he was finally ready to go, he came outside to find me, and I grabbed his hand lest he somehow escape. I was determined not to miss out on the morning coffee klatch.

“Wait here on the front steps a minute,” he said. “I’m going around back to the garage to get the car, and I’ll pull up front here and you can hop in.”

“But I wanna go with you.”

“No, no, hold your horses a minute. Just stay here.”

I wondered which automobile he was going to drive this time. He bought and traded cars like livestock and absolutely flipped over antique cars.

Today he pulled up to the front of the funeral home in a convertible. I ran down the steps, set afire by the glamour. The car looked like a lemon meringue pie. I approached it in awe and ran my fingers along its pale yellow body. The interior was white leather, and I thought it was without a doubt the most beautiful car I’d ever seen.

“Did you buy this?” I asked breathlessly.

“No, it’s on loan while they repair your mother’s car.”

My mother drove a big Buick Electra. I nagged him to trade it in for the convertible.

“This kind of car isn’t practical. And your mother wouldn’t want it anyway. It would mess up her hair. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Lord, no.

My mother’s hair was sacred. Without fail, twice a week she kept standing appointments at the beauty parlor. Most of the women in our town wore beauty-parlor hair, the kind that didn’t move in a stiff breeze because it was teased and sprayed with
enough hairspray to kill a cat. No one touched my mother’s hair except Mildred the beautician. I didn’t dare and I never saw my father go near it.

I climbed to the top of the backseat and sat as tall as I possibly could, and off we went. Everything looked quite wonderful from this vantage point, and I waved to anyone I knew. I made my father honk if anyone walking the streets of Jubilee happened to miss seeing us. It was grand until a dog ran across the road and he slammed on the brakes. I went flying into the air and landed in the front right beside my father. I laughed my head off.

“Don’t tell your mother, okay?”

Of course I wouldn’t. Our secret.

“Pull in real slow, Daddy. So they can see me in this car.”

The Spring Farms Dairy provided milk for the county, and a small lunch counter was set up adjacent to the building where the milk was bottled. We often drove up in an ambulance or a hearse, so the waitresses scarcely looked up anymore if they saw an unusual car. I took my time putting my shoes on so that everyone could get a good look at the yellow convertible.

I ran in to say hello to Paulette the waitress, who teased and tossed her light brown hair to a peak on top of her head. Paulette always had something interesting to say.