The Undertaker's Daughter (5 page)

He and his employees communicated with eye contact and barely noticeable hand motions. They never spoke to each other during a funeral. If my father looked at one of his men during the service, that man knew exactly what he should be doing at that particular moment. A quick glance to one of them meant to seat the latecomer. The slightest nod of my father’s head to another was a cue to move toward the front. A subtle hand motion toward Totty and he became the conductor of music. At the end of the funeral the men dared not move toward the casket without his signal.

In the beginning, my father hired a few part-time men to help out during the funerals and visitations, but he also took on a full-timer who knew nothing about the funeral business. Sonny was a Beacon County boy, hired because he had connections. He knew everyone outside Jubilee who lived on the farms and in the little one-street towns in the county. And my father badly needed a Beacon County representative.

Sonny was a big oaf of a man whose large, protruding ears looked as if they might help him take flight. He often placed his fists on his thick waist and looked down at me, frustrated by my mere presence.

Sonny and I were never going to be friends. I sensed his false civility immediately, which was easy to decipher by the way he became bossy in my father’s absence.

“Leave the mail alone. Go on upstairs now,” he would say.

“I don’t have to. I live here.” I would pretend to read the latest embalming supply catalog to solidify my existence.

Sonny lumbered through the hallways in stereophonic thuds, but somehow managed to quiet his footsteps during the funerals. He would station himself in the back of the chapel, his rounded shoulders only slightly squared by his rumpled suit.

In stark contrast, my father, immaculately dressed, stood in the front to one side of the casket, alert and present during the entire service. Whatever awkward emotions squirmed in the minds and hearts of funeralgoers, my father was at ease with them. While he conducted funerals, he was as comfortable in his own skin as he was in his beautiful clothes. And that was a thing of solace to those who were grief stricken. His task was to close the door on the messy sight of death and open another to the heavenly ever after. Some people thought their preacher opened that door, but from my balcony seat, it always looked to be the undertaker, whose smooth orchestration made saying good-bye a less difficult task, a more assured journey.

Especially when the preacher was Brother Vince. Oh Lord. After Totty attempted a couple of hymns, Brother Vince, who was today’s Representative of God’s Word, stepped up to the podium in front of the casket.

He began with a prayer that blessed everything from animals to tractors and finally wound down to the deceased.

Then he took his glasses off, placed them on the podium, and reached into his back pocket for his handkerchief. While he cleaned his glasses, he began his dry-bones eulogy. This funeral sermon was full of imagery of the gruesome Bible story of Ezekiel. He relied on this sermon when he didn’t personally know who lay behind him in the casket. He varied it, but the basics were always
there. Brother Vince was off and running and wouldn’t draw breath for another fifteen minutes.

Following a long piece wherein Ezekiel walked on the bones while conversing with God, the preacher’s tinny voice headed for the home stretch with a hypnotic repetition of the promise of life everlasting.

“So you see, God’s gonna breathe life into that graveyard of dry bones, he’s gonna create anew, and it says right here in the Bible that God put sinew and muscle and flesh on those old dry bones, and he’s gonna join all these rattling, brittle bones together and create an army. God commanded old Ezekiel to prophesy and to tell those dry bones to live. Dry bones can
live
! Restored to life. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. Restored to life. Restored to life. Do not despair; the bones can live again, as does our Hessie. She lives again with Sweet Jesus in heaven. Everything has all come together for her, just like those dry bones, and she now lives forever. Her spirit will be with us always. Let us pray.”

Cue Totty’s heavy foot upon the pedals as her fingers searched for the final notes.

At the end of the service my father stood in front of the casket and without uttering a word made the slightest gesture with his palms up, just a small movement right in front of his chest, and as if by magic, the congregation stood. He offered his arm to the grieving sister, which she took gratefully. His head bowed, he led her to the funeral car. He was never accused of showing false sympathy.

When it was all finally over, my father’s friend Billy, who helped out during the funerals, climbed the steps to where I sat waiting, fists on cheeks.

“Is it over?” I whispered.

“Yes, you can come on down now.”

I ran. I ran anywhere I could, just to feel what it was like to move again. The silence downstairs was abruptly broken, the rooms were vibrant with action all around like a circus ring with each performer soaring at the height of his or her act, an organized chaos. As my father led the cortege to the cemetery, the employees rushed around in unison. They carted flowers out, maneuvered chairs to clear paths, cleaned as they worked, loaded the flowers into the van, and rushed to the cemetery so that the flowers would magically appear at the burial site before the slow procession arrived. Totty gathered her music and tidied up the hymnals. My mother manned the all-important instruments of the trade—the phones. She raised the volume, because no one knew when, but the ritual would begin again at any moment.

I wondered why my father chose to wake up every morning to take care of dead people. But I never asked, for as the years passed, I could imagine him doing nothing else.

He grew up on farmland during the Depression, a place called Red Hill, not far from my mother’s family, with fertile land that produced a bounteous supply of food and goods. They were free from worry about their next meal when so many others suffered. His mother, Katie, a statuesque, handsome woman, was quietly proud that she bought only sugar, coffee, tea, and flour at the general store owned by her sister, Marybell, and Marybell’s husband, Wallace. Everything else was at their doorstep.

My grandmother Katie was industrious and created her own little business by selling her top cream at the store. My mother said a surprise spot-check of her mother-in-law’s house would produce less than a teaspoon of dirt. Katie wore dresses on the farm, great flowing things that whipped around her legs as she moved about. She loved big hats and coats with huge fur collars. Her husband’s idea of dressing up, on the other hand, was a fresh
pair of heavy cotton work pants, and though I never saw him wear a suit until the day he was buried, I was given photographs to prove that he did.

My father’s childhood was full of noise, a completely different home life from my mother’s. His brother and sister were not much older than he, and the three were a raucous trio. A slew of cousins, among them Marybell and Wallace’s children, often visited the farm, where they roamed the countryside unbridled.

As quietly behaved as we were at Bretta West’s house, when we visited my father’s family, we were free to be as noisy and playful as he had been. Being older, Thomas and Evelyn were more accustomed to visiting our grandparents’ farm. On the weekends, with the congregation of the cousins in full session, they took turns riding the ornery horse and fished in the farm’s expansive lake. They played football and cowboys and Indians. Too young to be included in such games, I was unaccustomed to farm life; to me it felt like visiting another country in which there were countless miserable tasks like cleaning the chicken coop and hauling water from the well. If not for one vivid detail, I would scarcely remember the house before my grandfather installed indoor plumbing: the outhouse terrified me. The wind whipped around the wooden shack and banged the door open and shut. It was so dark inside I groped to find the seat, which was too big for me. I closed my eyes and prayed that I wouldn’t fall in and that no spiders would crawl up from the depths of the pit. I worried about splinters.
Good grief,
I pleaded,
take me back to the funeral home
.

My father was the youngest of the three, and although his father was quite straitlaced, his mother indulged him. Aware he was not inclined to work the land, his parents never forced him.
He gravitated to the city of Lanesboro, which overlooked the Ohio River, originally known as Yellowbanks for the color of its soil. The action of the river town spoke to him, and the buzz of people made him feel alive.

He enjoyed wearing the kind of clothes that were out of place on the farm. It was no surprise when I learned that he spent his high school vacations working in the menswear department of J. C. Penney’s. The management placed him in the men’s glove department, hardly a hub of excitement in the hot summers, but it was a natural fit and better than the fields.

On a late summer’s day in 1942, Frank sat with his elder brother under the big shade tree by the lake on his family’s land. Everyone called him Jimmy, but of course he was James Maple to my father. As the two skipped pebbles into the quiet water, he discovered that James Maple had no intention of being a farmer either. Sitting on a spot of land that offered so much life, James Maple told him that when he returned from Europe, he was going to be an undertaker. Frank had laughed.

My father could have told me himself that it was first his elder brother’s dream to become an undertaker. But the war intervened and sent the brothers on two entirely different paths. Frank served on the ground in C Company of the 137th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Division. James Maple spent the war in the air, on the underside of a B-17 as a ball-turret gunner. When his plane was shot down over Germany, he was captured and held prisoner. James Maple never became an undertaker, or anything else. Years later his bones were sent back to Kentucky in a sealed box. My father, suffering the effect of his own war wounds, received the box on behalf of his grieving family from the hands of an undertaker.

One by one they trailed into the funeral home.

Traces of lavender water lifted the air. Black hats punctuated the chapel like spots on a dalmatian. They sat in dark rows and held hemstitched handkerchiefs dotted with embroidered violets. Trimmings of black lace decorated a collar, the cuffs of a blouse. The metal clasps of their Sunday-best pocketbooks invaded the silence. Snap, click. Face powder settled darkly in the creases of their faces, and the palest lipstick stated, “We are still women, after all, and we like a little color.” They wore stockings the thickness of flannel, and a cloud of Evening in Paris floated behind the footfalls of their sturdy black shoes, swollen with imprints of bunions. Cotton gloves hid brown-speckled hands.

They were the widows of Beacon County. Mourning in unison, these blackbirds offered a long line of support for the most recent addition to their clan. It was odd, but I knew from a young age, when I scarcely knew the meaning of the word, that I would never be a widow of Beacon County. I thought of the future as a blank space to fill and it existed somewhere other than this house of death, somewhere other than the streets of this town. Years later I would remember the widows with a sensation of claustrophobia, a slight fear that I had only narrowly escaped their course.

Standing slightly apart from the others was Mrs. Foxwood. She was well acquainted with each of them, but was not yet a member of their society because Mr. Foxwood was alive and, if not kicking, then still shuffling along.

Mrs. Foxwood spoke aloud to Jesus quite a lot. A trace of garden dirt was always under her nails, and I thought this made her prayers the humblest I’d ever heard. With her head tilted back, she opened her eyes wider and wider, until it seemed she strained to see the heavens right through the ceiling. Her throat lengthened, lengthened, lengthened, until it concertinaed at “Thank you, Jesus. Amen.” She could beat a horse down to its knees with one of her prayers. I observed this every Sunday for an entire year when she was my Sunday-school teacher—the longest year of my life. The Foxwoods lived frugally, remained childless, and plodded through life in our community without a fuss. Married for over sixty years, Mrs. Foxwood always included her husband in her Sunday-morning prayer: “God bless Albert.” Mine was slightly different: “Please, Lord, can this be over now, for I am hungry, sleepy, and in need of a pee.”

When Mr. Foxwood passed over yonder at last, his body was laid out in our chapel. His burial suit looked stiffer than his alive suits, and his back seemed straighter in repose. I wondered if this pressed-out version of her husband might bother Mrs. Foxwood. Albert in life had always seemed creased.

Sometimes . . . actually, quite often, I lingered where I should not have been. On the morning of Mrs. Foxwood’s private view of her husband, I was on a raid of the snack machine when I heard the front door’s jingle-jangle. My father greeted Mrs. Foxwood in his undertaker’s voice. She had arrived early and I had no time to skedaddle upstairs, though I remained undetected, guiltily, with my hand on a candy bar.

He escorted her to the chapel, stood with her for a moment, then stepped away and into his office. Here was my chance to escape. The chapel had no door, just a gaping space that I had to pass to reach the stairs. Mrs. Foxwood stood with her back to me. I’d
become familiar with all of her church frocks; now she was draped in her new widow’s black. I felt bad for her. Sixty years, that’s a long time, I thought, practically forever. She’s going to miss him terribly. I began to back away, but when she raised her hands, I knew a prayer was coming and I couldn’t resist. It was the shortest I’d ever heard from her.

“O dear Lord,” she whispered, “I just want to thank you today. Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to finally put this bastard in the ground.”