The Undertaker's Daughter (9 page)

My father stood at the head of the table with his shirtsleeves neatly rolled up, his tie still perfectly knotted, but tucked inside his shirt, and a clean towel draped around his belt loops. He held a rather nasty-looking rubber hose in his hand. Their subject lay on the long, white porcelain table. Thankfully, a sheet covered all but her head, which was suspended in the air as it rested on the black head block. Sheer luck, I guess, that I had entered at this stage.

“Come on in,” my father coaxed. He sounded so inviting, so happy to see me. All three of these characters, for they no longer resembled my father, or the real Mildred and Sonny, smiled at me with their various utensils in hand. I trembled before them. Sonny smirked at my obvious display of terror, pleased that I was rendered speechless.

Laid out precisely on a rolling cart were a big needle with a curved end like Captain Hook’s arm, with a long piece of nylon
thread hanging from it, and something called a needle gun, and other hook-tipped devices and metal tubes of several varieties.

The room was the size of a single bedroom, which was exactly what it had once been, long ago. Faded wallpaper covered the walls. Bright, clean linoleum in a speckled pattern buckled a bit on the floor. A shade was on the window in the back of the room, but in addition a sheet had been nailed to the wood over it, giving the window an abandoned, ghostly look. I surmised that such apparently careless treatment was a haphazard precaution against spying neighbors.

A naked bulb hung from a long cord suspended from the tall ceiling. The only other light was an accordion lamp that stretched to capacity over the embalming table. Below the table, directly underneath, was the drain for the unmentionable fluids that ran down and out of our house.

And the smell. I glanced at the metal cabinet, the control tower of my father’s craft, its doors spread open to display a variety of colorful bottles. Deep orange, pink, purple, and green embalming fluid cast a neon glow in the dark patches of the room. Arterial fluid with names like Frigid Jr. and Champion neatly arranged on the shelves in every shade of pink hinted at the color the deceased’s skin would mimic. The pungent odor of formaldehyde mixed with that of cosmetics, hairspray, and the strong iron smell of water hung in the room like a veil, from which there was no escape, ever. I would never be capable of forgetting that smell.

I felt I had caught these people in the first act of a macabre fantasy.

I finally managed to squeak out my given task. “I’m supposed to ask you when you’ll be ready for dinner.” I thought I sounded quite brave, untouched, even remote, although now I’m sure I didn’t.

“Oh, I think in about half an hour.”

I managed to nod furiously and then retreated, horrified.

It’s true to say that I was lily-livered. I wanted to be blasé about the whole thing, but I never developed a taste for hanging out in the embalming room. From that day forward my stomach somersaulted before I even knocked on the door. It amused my father to rub it in a little bit. Whenever he asked me to deliver an item to the room, he knew I would be skittish. “Go on, there’s no one in there,” he would say. Right. I could never be absolutely certain that the room was free of some corpulent corpse. Sure enough, when I cracked open the door and peeped inside, a bumpy mound lay under the white sheet, minding its own business. He really got a kick out of that.

After the delayed supper when the dishes had been washed and dried, I skidded back into the kitchen, where I found my mother and father locked in an embrace. It was embarrassing. My mother was not the affectionate type and it looked unnatural to see her body so close to his. Then he kissed her. Good grief. I could count on one hand how many times I’d seen them doing
that
.

In their rooms, Thomas pored over a book and Evelyn talked on the phone for ages. I joined my parents in the living room while they watched television.

My father teased my mother while they sat on opposite ends of the sofa. He reached over and poked her with his foot, playing with her during
Gunsmoke
. The thing was, I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed the attention. She pretended to be annoyed, but I’m not sure she was.

“Where are your wedding pictures?” I once asked her.

“We don’t have any.”

“Why not?”

“Because we got married on the army base. I took the Greyhound bus down to Alabama where you father was in an infantry training camp.”

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen. He’d just turned eighteen. They didn’t even let him graduate. They whipped him out of school so fast.”

“What did you wear?”

“A navy-blue suit.”

“What did he wear?”

“His army uniform.”

“Did anyone else go with you? Your mother, or sisters?”

“No. We got a couple of soldiers to stand up for us.”

“No white dress then?”

“No white dress.”

They’d been dating for only a year. Simple, innocent stuff, dates were little more than a bite to eat after Frank’s basketball games, or else he invited her to the farm for his mother’s famous Sunday dinners. Photos of Frank before he was whisked away show a slightly chubby young man in a suit standing next to his brother, who was in uniform. In her high school photo my mother’s hair was brushed back and swept high off her forehead, her red lips were closed solidly, with only a hint of a smile, and her brown eyes glistened just a bit, but gave nothing away.

I asked her where they went on their honeymoon and she cocked her head and stared at me. “There was a war on, you know. We stayed at an apartment on the base for two weeks, then I came back to Kentucky and they sent him overseas . . . to England first, then to the front line. That was 1944. I didn’t see him again for two years.”

When he stepped out of the taxi in 1946, she didn’t recognize him. “Is that him?” she asked his sister. The two women had sat by the window all afternoon waiting for his arrival.

“No, I don’t think so, it doesn’t look like Frank. That looks like an old man.”

But the “old man” who stepped out of the taxi was Lily Tate’s husband. No trace remained of the chubby-faced boy she’d married. This man was gaunt and frail from a near-fatal stomach wound. His grayish skin and the black circles under his eyes frightened her. In a small, fuzzy photograph taken soon after his return from Germany, the black slits that were his eyes were lowered, as if he were cowering away from the camera lens.

When they were finally alone, Frank told his young wife that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be married anymore. Stunned, she knew he’d been through something that she couldn’t understand and perhaps never would, but surely he didn’t mean it? She’d waited so long to see him again. So many men never returned.

She didn’t respond. She didn’t react, didn’t talk about it at all. Her tactic was to focus on his health. His statement simmered quietly between them until it was clear to Lily Tate that he wouldn’t repeat it. Then the moment came when he asked her if she would mind being an undertaker’s wife.

“I didn’t bat an eye,” she told me many years later. “It’s the live ones you have to look out for, not the dead.”

One day while the hearse received a well-deserved bath and oil change and the station wagon was full to the brim with graveyard tents, my father drove Sonny and me to the Spring Farms coffee
counter in the ambulance. Our ambulance looked exactly like our hearse and not at all like the square, box-type ambulance that later came into vogue. The only difference was the round light that sat on the roof and the mechanics that created the siren’s call.

On this summer’s morning the skies threatened a storm and the air was thick with heat that drenched us in sweat. I was anxious to get to a seat at the counter and feel cold lemonade burn down my throat.

We arrived to discover that it was chocolate-meringue-pie day. There was no need to ask Paulette for an order; she placed a big piece in front of me with a wink that was heavy on the mascara. My father and Sonny nursed their first cup of coffee, an act I questioned immediately.

“How do you drink that stuff when it’s so hot outside?”

“It’s nice and cool in here, ain’t it?” asked Sonny.

“Daddy, how do you drink that stuff in this heat?”

“Don’t ignore Sonny. What’s the matter with you?”

The first bite of the creamy, rich chocolate sent me twirling on the seat. Whoosh! I spun around and around until I was dizzy. Then, Paulette ran over to my father and whispered that he had a phone call. He disappeared behind the counter to take it. I sat still, all my senses alerted. Hell’s bells, it could only mean one thing.

My father raced back to the counter and threw a few dollar bills down in front of his coffee cup. A couple of men a few stools down looked up, saw that it was my father who was in a rush, and returned to their newspapers. I, on the other hand, was paralyzed.

He spoke to Sonny, then literally lifted me from the stool while Sonny held the door open.

My father put me down on the pavement and held my shoulders square. “Now listen to me. We have to go get Mrs. Oakley. I don’t have time to take you back to the funeral home because she
lives out in the country and we have to get on the road. You’re to do exactly as I say, do you hear me?”

I nodded. I’d never been on an ambulance call.

We ran to the ambulance and I scrambled into the front seat, squashed between the two of them.

My father explained to Sonny that Mrs. Oakley had called the funeral home and wouldn’t speak to anyone but him. She was told she could reach him at Spring Farms.

“Frank, this is Mrs. Oakley calling. I’m flat out on the kitchen floor.”

“I’ll be right there, Mrs. Oakley. Don’t you worry. What’s the matter with you, can you tell me?”

“I’ve just tripped over the damn cat, pardon my language, Frank, and I think I’ve broken my leg . . . or maybe my arm. Then I jerked the phone off the table. Saved my life, I reckon.”

“Mrs. Oakley—”

“So, I’m just gonna lie here and wait for you, Frank. I’m sure you remember where I live. Do you remember that time—”

“Mrs. Oakley—”

“Hurry though, Frank. I reckon I’m in enough pain to faint clean away.”

“I have to hang up the phone now, Mrs. Oakley, I can’t get to you until I do.”

“Well, all right then, I’ll be here, not going anywhere.”

As we drove down the country road that was barely wide enough for a car, much less an ambulance, my father set out the rules of engagement. “You know you really shouldn’t be coming with us, but I don’t have a choice. It just worked out that way. Now, you listen up and you listen good. When we get there, I want you to stay right here in this seat. Don’t you move a muscle. Don’t say a word.” He shook his head. “I really shouldn’t be doing this.”

I didn’t know if it was against the law, or if he just thought it was wrong and unprofessional, but for whatever reason, he was clearly uncomfortable.

“Are you going to put the siren on? Let’s crank it up.”

“No, not unless I need to later. That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t ask things like that. I have a job to do and I need you to mind me.”

“Will there be blood? ’Cause if there is, I’m going to have to hide my eyes.”

“No. You can’t do that. I don’t know if there will be, but if there is, just look straight ahead like nothing’s happened.”

“Well, what if her bones are sticking out of her skin? Daddy, I would just die.”

“Just look away.”

Sonny could hardly conceal his annoyance.

The thing was, Mrs. Oakley had been one of my teachers a couple of years back and I couldn’t imagine her sprawled out on her kitchen floor. I sat in silence for the rest of the journey and worried about her bones.

On this unplanned race through the town’s streets I gained firsthand experience of the version of my father the people of Jubilee encountered not only when their family members died, but also when things were bad in other ways. He arrived on the scenes of broken bones, heart attacks, and car wrecks and became the emergency suction cup of our town.

The ambulance rolled along the gravel driveway to a little brick house where Mrs. Oakley lived alone with her cat. Sonny alighted while my father maneuvered the back of the ambulance near her front door. What a relief. This placed me with a view of the driveway, away from all the action. Before my father jumped out, he warned me again, “Not a word, not a muscle.”

I sat still waiting for something to happen. I didn’t even play with the air-conditioning vents, though I sorely wished to, and was not the least bit tempted to turn around. Except I did. I heard her front door open and some sort of automatic reflex kicked in. There was Mrs. Oakley stretched out on the gurney, and to my horror she waved at me, her skinny, long arms flailing about, obviously not broken. Her wig, and I never knew she wore a wig, was askew, and she wore a bright pink terry-cloth bathrobe. God, what a frightful sight, I thought. I quickly turned away when I heard her gabbing away to my father while she took a short ride on the gurney.

“Is that your middle girl? Well, Lord in heaven, what a surprise. Hello there, little missy.”

Oh, what to do? What to do? I remained silent and didn’t turn to her. Not a word, not a muscle, he had said. I doubt if I breathed.

When they rolled Mrs. Oakley into the back of the ambulance, she immediately rose up from the gurney and opened the sliding glass partition between us.

“Hon, have you improved your math yet?”

What? I thought. At a time like this?

It was a strange thing indeed to witness my teacher in such a vulnerable position. I was far more embarrassed than she. Didn’t she realize we were sharing an intimate moment? When I next walked through the halls at school and came upon Mrs. Oakley wearing her A-line skirt, crisp blouse, and pearls, would I ever be able to forget her pink bathrobe?