The Undertaker's Daughter (8 page)

When I became old enough to go, she walked with me to school and always insisted that I hold her hand. I was happy to do
it, not for safety, but because I loved her. “I be seein’ you round ’bout lunchtime” were her parting words. She was my only true friend for many years.

I visited Belle’s house many times. She first shared her home with her husband, Henry, but Henry was gone. Belle told me he found a good job in another town far away and she didn’t want to leave Jubilee. That was only half the truth. Belle was too polite to tell me that she caught Henry cheating on her. He and Belle became friends again after their divorce, and she always announced when Henry was in town. “I seen Henry last week. Showed me round ’bout nine”—clap, clap—“maybe ten pictures of his new house.” I met Henry once when he was visiting Jubilee. He was nice enough, but I thought he’d made an enormous mistake in letting Belle go.

My parents sometimes dropped me off at Belle’s house in the evening when they went to dinner out of town. I made myself comfortable in her modest sitting room and watched Friday-night wrestling with her on her small, black-and-white television. Belle became outrageously excited when her favorite wrestler, Tojo Yamamoto, appeared on the screen. She jumped up and yelled at the television as if it were a person. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Git him, Tojo!” Clap, clap. “He from Japan, or China, or somewheres like that.” Clap, clap, clap. “Oh! Oh! No! Now you knows that’s illegal . . . that’s illegal! Blows your whistle. Blows your whistle!”

“Belle. Belle!” I yelled. “You’re blocking my view! I can’t see through you!”

She backed up to her seat without taking her eyes off the television. I held her chair for her to help guide her safely down.

At our house, when we didn’t have a funeral or a visitation, Belle sometimes watched
The Edge of Night
on low volume while
she snapped beans.
The Edge of Night
was her favorite “story,” and on the afternoon Cookie, a female character on the show, was stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors, I took charge of the beans because Belle was upset and needed a moment to compose herself.

After today’s lunch, Belle said she didn’t have time to “mess with me,” so I made my way back downstairs, where I ran into Luther and Bobby, two black men my father employed to dig graves for him.

Luther was short and quite old. His nephew Bobby was taller, younger, and often liquored up. I guess they must have been the best gravediggers in the county because my father went to great lengths to locate them. Whenever he had a hard time finding Bobby, he learned to look for him in jail and often bailed him out when he needed a grave dug. Luther was superstitious and terrified of dead bodies. Evelyn knew this and took great joy in scaring him half to death. Outside in the garage where barely a ray of sun penetrated, she would lie flat on a gurney and cover herself with a white sheet. When Luther and Bobby walked by, she slowly sat upright, the sheet still completely covering her. Luther screeched like an owl when he saw the corpse rise from the dead. Bobby tried not to show his irritation, but the theatrics put a damper on the fine buzz he had fostered with someone’s bootleg whiskey.

I could see that Luther and Bobby were uncomfortable in the funeral home. They always entered through the rear door and lingered in the back, awaiting my father’s instructions. Today, they looked down at the floor when I spoke to them.

“Hey, Luther. Where did you get that hat? I’ve never seen a hat like that.”

Luther removed his flat cloth newsboy cap.

“Why, Luther, you have gray hair!”

He smiled and looked to my father for deliverance.

“Hi there, Bobby. Hey, your eyes are red today. You haven’t been crying, have you?”

“No, ma’am, I haven’t.”

“Don’t have to call me ma’am, Bobby, I’m just a girl.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Last winter when a sheet of ice lay on top of the cemetery’s frosty ground, my father waited for the word from Luther and Bobby. “Is she frozen, Luther?”

“Yassuh, sho is, Mr. Mayfield. ’Fraid so.” Luther spoke softly and slowly.

“How long are we going to have to wait for this one, can you tell?”

“Ah”—he scratched his head—“depends on the weather. Can’t rightly say.”

“Well, you do your best to get that shovel in the ground as soon as you can.”

Storage problems, that’s what we would have if Luther and Bobby couldn’t dig graves. We didn’t have enough space to store more than two, maybe three bodies at the most, and they would have to lie in different rooms.

The embalming room was too small for a casket. The body, once embalmed and dressed, had to be carried into the casket room.

So, two was a crowd, and three bodies, well, we’d be on our way to bursting at the seams.

And it happened.

One quiet month, not that my father wanted one, the phone rang to bring news that Mr. Harris had died, then it rang again. Mrs. Summers was gone; and again, Mrs. Lancer, too—until we were up to our necks in bodies.

The circus began.

Mr. Harris lay on the embalming table while my father made space in the casket room on the last available cot for Mrs. Summers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lancer lay temporarily in the hall on a gurney borrowed from the hospital. It seemed dead people were in every corner. Pulling it off involved a lot of corpse shuffling.

My father juggled each family’s arrival time so they wouldn’t run into each other when they came by to make arrangements.

“Move Mr. Harris and Mrs. Summers into the embalming room while Mr. Lancer is here this afternoon choosing a casket for Mrs. Lancer.” My father’s organizational skills burst to the fore. “We need to embalm Mrs. Lancer first, she was awfully ill.”

“Now Lily Tate,” my father said at dinner the first night, “I’ll need you to call all the part-time boys and get them in here to help. Call the flower shops and give them the order of delivery; we’ll be swimming in carnations if they deliver for three funerals all at once. Get Mildred in here for Mrs. Harris and Betty Summers. See if she can do them both at once. I’ll have them ready. And get Totty on the phone. And call the radio station—no, I’ll do that. I want to talk to Whit directly.”

All three families knew that their deceased shared the space with the others. But when they walked into the funeral home to make arrangements, they were each made to feel as if theirs was the only bereavement that mattered, and there was no sign of any other family or, God forbid, a body. Except for one almost disastrous mishap. It became so confusing that when Mr. Summers came by to drop off Mrs. Summers’s necklace, Sonny almost led him into Mrs. Lancer’s private viewing. My father caught it just in time.

The next day there was an argument between the families. Two of them wanted to book the following day for the funerals.
This being impossible, my father began to reason with them separately and made gentle suggestions. They couldn’t agree even with my father brokering dates as if he were representing prizefighters. No one won. Both funerals were delayed a day. The third family was pushed back two days.

Luther and Bobby came by to get their instructions.

I overheard my father. “Bobby, you have got to stay sober until you get these graves ready. I don’t have time to go down to the jail and get you out. Can you do that for me? Luther, will you make sure he gets to the cemetery?”

They both nodded. “Yep.” “Yesser.”

During this busy period, my father ate standing up. I didn’t catch sight of him again until all three funerals were over.

On this summer afternoon while my father spoke with Luther and Bobby about the intricacies of a particular burial plot, I wandered out back and ran into the boy who lived next door to us for a brief period. Earlier Patrick had seen Luther and Bobby outside leaning on their shovels, and now he made a nasty remark about useless, ugly creatures. He began a chant that started with
digger
and ended with
nigger
. He sped through the back of our property on his bike and rode circles around me chanting, “The digger niggers, the digger niggers.”

I lost my temper. “Stop it! Stop saying that word!” I yelled at him.

He tried to run over me with his big, red bike.

I grabbed the handlebars and twisted them. Then I gave him a lecture. “Don’t you know how important gravediggers are? This is not a morgue, you know. We don’t have refrigerators for dead people. We need for them to be buried. How would you like it if your father died in the middle of winter and he was stacked up in an embalming room waiting for his turn to be buried? He would
turn gray and start to rot and stink. And then he’d blow up.
That’s
how important gravediggers are,” I said hotly.

But the boy was hateful and ignorant and nothing fazed him. He thought his father would live forever. I knew he wouldn’t.

I ran into the funeral home looking for my own father. My color was high and I was eager to spill all about the wretched boy next door. But there was no time for that now. The caskets had arrived!

Casket deliveries were a big event. Not even Sonny could dampen my spirits on casket day. All hands were needed to unwrap and position the large pieces of funeral furniture. Tremendous, long boxes were rolled into the building as usual, but this delivery contained something I’d never before seen—two smaller boxes. I stood by my father’s side when he opened the first one. In it was the smallest coffin I had ever seen. The pink satin box looked like a toy. I glanced at him but said nothing and watched as he opened the second one—a blue satin baby coffin. I ran my fingers along the rim of the pink one, still covered in plastic. The fabric had tufts and pleats, and inside this miniature box of sorrow a tiny pillow rested poignantly. I asked if it was for a baby girl, and he said yes, it was.

“Did a baby girl die, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she die of?”

“She was born dead.”

“Oh.”

He continued to take the clear plastic wrapping off the blue one.

“What’s that? What’s
born dead
?”

“Well, it really just means that the baby died before it had a chance to be born, it’s called stillborn.”

“Will her parents leave the casket open?”

“No, they won’t.”

“They don’t want to see her?”

“No.”

“Why? Why don’t they want to see her?”

“She’s too small. It’s just too hard on them.”

“Did a baby boy die?”

“No.”

“Why do we have a blue one, then?”

“Well, sometimes baby boys die, too.”

“Did the baby girl’s parents know when the baby was going to die? You know, a lot of times you know when people are going to die. I hear you say so, you say Mr. so-and-so is going to go sometime this weekend, and then they do.”

“That’s not the same. I don’t know if her parents knew. It’s not something I would ask them.”

“Do you know when I’m going to die?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Where’s the baby girl, Daddy?”

He glanced over at the embalming-room door.

“Is she in there right now?”

He knew where my question was headed. “We don’t embalm babies.”

I didn’t know that babies died. I moved away from him and the baby coffins so that he couldn’t see me. I felt a cocktail of sickness, fear, and sadness, but I wanted him to think that I could handle it. Otherwise, he might grow tired and impatient with me, ready to cast me off to dolls and toys in which I had no interest. And worst of all, it would prove my mother was right in her belief that I had no business being downstairs.

I felt his hand on my shoulder directing me out of the room, away from the boxes for dead people. “Come on, let’s go get a
Coke and some peanuts,” he said as he turned out the light, closing the door on the blue baby casket.

I helped him remove the peanuts from the cellophane package, and one by one we dropped them into the bottle of Coke. Occupied with this task and the taste of salt meeting sugar, the caskets eased their way out of my mind.

I had no reason to think about dead babies again until a year later, when my mother’s swollen belly reminded me. Day by day I grew secretly terrified that my baby sister, Jemma, would be born dead. Even after my parents brought her home from the hospital, I constantly checked her status.

Belle was the only person in the household who caught on. “Why is you so persnickety round the baby?”

“Well . . . Belle, I’m just checking.”

“Checkin’ what? She’s round ’bout near perfect as she can be.”

I crawled up in Belle’s lap and whispered, “I’m checking to see if she’s going to be born dead.”

“Lawd! What you talkin’ about? She done
been
born. This here baby is a’livin’ and a’breathin’ jest fine. What’s give you cause to say such a thing?”

I burst into tears. Out poured the worries and images of pink and blue baby caskets, and talk of stillborns and born dead and dead babies in general, and when, exactly, would Jemma be out of danger, and please don’t tell my parents, it might worry them.

“Lawd have mercy ’pon my soul. Child, you is all upset for nothin’. Yer sister ain’t in danger of nothin’ but bein’ spoilt rotten.”

Much to my relief, Belle was right, but I remained haunted whenever I saw a pregnant woman’s protruding belly.

Just when we thought the end of this rather busy day was near, the news rang from the almighty telephone that another of Jubilee’s citizens would soon be joining us.

My mother was in the kitchen almost ready to serve supper, and without a word she turned off the oven and all the simmering pots on the stove. Whit Piper’s evening radio announcements kept her company while she waited for my father to complete his work.

A couple of hours later she told me to go downstairs and find out how much longer he would be. I’d done this many times, and a knock on the door would suffice. Usually, he would answer from behind the closed door, but this time the door came flying open. I’d never been in the embalming room while the deed was being done—it looked like a scene from a science-fiction movie.

Mildred, the beautician who gave my hair a permanent twice a year, stood brandishing the first blow-dryer I had ever seen. Sonny was on the other side of the table standing next to a big white pumping, sucking machine, doing God knows what.