The Truth About Death (3 page)

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” her mother said. “You’ve only been here two days. There’s no reason Morris can’t go.”

“Uncle Morrie?” Hildi laughed. “Right.”

Her mother handed her the camera so she could look at the image on the tiny screen. “You’re too nice,” her mother said. “You need to be tougher, stronger.”

“I am strong,” Hildi said, flexing her muscles. “I don’t know why you don’t want me to go.”

“I just don’t. That’s all. It’s not right.”

“Uncle Morrie wouldn’t pick up a dead body in a million years,” she said. “Besides, it’s Mr. Johansen. Anders. He’s the one who sold Grandpa Bart the horses.”

“I know about the horses. That doesn’t mean
you
have to pick up his dead body. Your brother never went on removals.”

“Mah-ahm,” Hildi protested.

“What are you going to do if he weighs three hundred pounds?”

“He can’t weigh that much. Pop said he had cancer. Besides, Pop’s got the new Med Sled. He showed me this afternoon. It’s got a stairwell braking system, so you can attach it to something at the top of the stairway and just slide the body down without worrying that it’s going to get away from you.”

“That’s wonderful, Sweetie. Now put on some dark slacks and a white blouse.” Her mother started to look through the clothes that had been piled up on the bed. “You need to look respectable. Like you know what you’re doing.”

“I do know what I’m doing,” Hildi said.

“I hope so.”

“Maybe I’ll take some of your shortbread. Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Shortbread’s always a good idea. I’ll make up a tin.”

Hildi tossed the Med Sled into the back of the van. She was eager to get started on her new life. She thought of the Oldfield funeral home as a place where the important questions got asked, if not answered. A place where people were forced to confront the great contingencies of human existence. At least one of them. She thought of it as a place where
the spirit was forced to confront the mechanics of death—the embalming machine humming on the floor, like one of the little robots you see in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs, aspirating blood and body fluids into a drain that looked like a urinal attached to the wall. It was her first removal, and she was excited, though she tried not to show it. She was not afraid of the dead, and she didn’t think she was afraid of grief, didn’t think she’d be afraid of the grieving widow. She imagined herself taking Mrs. Johansen’s hand, touching her arm, reminding her of Stormy and Salty and the Amish funeral.

The Johansen farm was five miles east of town, on old Illinois 34. Her father cranked up the air-conditioning—it was the end of August, high of ninety-three that afternoon—and put a cassette into the player, and they listened to Floyd Cramer as they drove. Hildi had never heard of Floyd Cramer.

“Your grandfather loved Floyd Cramer,” Simon said. “He always kept two or three Floyd Cramer cassettes in the glove compartment. ‘On the Rebound,’ ‘San Antonio Rose.’ He was Elvis Presley’s piano player.” The notes bounced out of the speaker. Hildi’d never heard anything like it.

“It’s called slip-note piano,” her father said.

Hildi was just a little bit nervous as her father knocked on the Johansens’ side door. Mrs. Johansen opened the door and a big dog burst out of the house and put his feet up on Hildi’s shoulders.

“Don’t mind Charlie,” Mrs. Johansen shouted.

“What kind of dog is he?” Hildi asked, pushing him down and bending to kiss the top of his head.

“Just a plain old farm dog,” Mrs. Johansen said. The dog sniffed Hildi’s shoes and then raised his leg on a pot of impatiens.

The simple unreconstructed farmhouse kitchen was hot. There was no air-conditioning. The floor was faded linoleum and a box fan had been duct-taped into an open window. Mrs. Johansen hadn’t called the coroner, so there was no death certificate. The dog circled around and then curled up on a quilt.

“I’m going to need a death certificate,” her father explained.

While her father made the call to Sam Martin, the coroner, Hildi helped Mrs. Johansen make coffee—filled the carafe with water while Mrs. Johansen eyeballed the coffee into the paper filter—and got three white china mugs down out of a cupboard. “Get one for Sam too,” Mrs. Johansen said.

They sat down at the table.
It’s going to be a while.
What will we talk about?
“Would you like a piece of shortbread?” Hildi asked, taking the tin out of her bag and setting it on the table.

“That would be nice,” Mrs. Johansen said.

Hildi opened the tin. The pieces of shortbread were stacked like dominoes. Mrs. Johansen helped herself to a piece. “Real butter,” she said after the first bite.

“My mother makes it,” Hildi said.

Mrs. Johansen sat with her legs slightly apart, leaning forward and putting her hands on the table. She slapped her leg and Charlie came over and put his head on her knee. She put a hand on Charlie’s head. Hildi put
her
hand on Mrs. Johansen’s
other
hand, which was flat on the table. After about thirty seconds Mrs. Johansen pulled her hand away. “There’s a bottle of bourbon under the sink,” she said, motioning with her arm. “Would you get it out, and then pour me some coffee? It’ll be ready in a minute.”

“These mugs are just like the ones we have at home,” Hildi said, setting the whiskey down on the table.

“How about a game of pinochle?” Mrs. Johansen asked. “To pass the time.”

Simon, still on the phone, nodded.

“I’ve never played pinochle,” Hildi said.

“It’s easy,” Mrs. Johansen said, shuffling the cards. “You can pick it up in no time. You play with a forty-eight-card deck. In each suit you’ve got two aces, two tens, two kings, two queens, two jacks, and two nines. The tens outrank everything except the aces. You just have to get used to that. Just think of the queen of spades in hearts. Or just say ‘ace, ten, king’ over and over. Your aces, tens, and kings are counters. You get points for them. You can win tricks with queens, jacks, and nines, but you don’t get any points. But let’s play a practice hand and you’ll soon catch on. You play euchre? You know what a ‘bower’ is?”

Hildi shook her head. She got up to pour the coffee.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Johansen said.

Mrs. Johansen held her cards in one hand and kept the other on the dog’s head, except when she took a trick or laid down her cards. When she finished her coffee she poured some bourbon into the cup. She looked at Simon and Hildi, but they shook their heads.

They played for fifty cents a game and twenty-five cents a set. At first Hildi kept reneging, but by the time the coroner arrived she was laying down her melds with a flourish and gathering in tricks right and left. She was almost sorry they had to quit.

The coroner, Sam Martin, didn’t bother to knock. He came through the screen door, looked around, leaned over to pat the dog, which sniffed at his crotch. “Haven’t seen
you
in a while,” he said to Hildi, pushing the dog away. Mrs. Johansen asked him if he wanted to play.

“Not tonight, Alice,” he said. “I’ll just step upstairs.”

“I already cleaned him up a little.”

The coroner put his hand on Mrs. Johansen’s head. “You didn’t need to do that, Alice. That’s what you’re paying Simon for.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s what he would’ve wanted. Keep the door at the bottom of the stairs closed or Charlie’ll be up there in a jiff. I had to leash him to pull him out of the bedroom.”

The coroner went upstairs. Mrs. Johansen dealt another hand, but they didn’t play it. They just let the cards lie. Mrs. Johansen poured a little more bourbon into her cup and passed the bottle around. Hildi didn’t mind Scotch, but she didn’t see how anybody could drink bourbon. But she poured a splash into her cup anyway, on top of an inch of cold coffee.

The coroner came down and sat with Mrs. Johansen while Hildi went upstairs with her father. Mr. Johansen’s neck and fingers and ankles were rigid, but his shoulders and thighs were flaccid, and they had no trouble wrapping him in a sheet and rolling him onto the Med Sled and strapping him in. He was wearing blue flannel pajamas and his hair had been combed. His was the second dead body she’d touched that day.
What is it like to touch a dead body?
She couldn’t say.
Just an empty shell?
She didn’t think so, and she knew her father didn’t think so either. He didn’t have to say it, but a dead body was something holy. Otherwise you might as well just put it out with the trash.
Does the spirit of the dead person hang out for a while to see what’s happening?
She didn’t believe that either. But she thought about it, picturing Mr. Johansen’s spirit up in a corner of the ceiling, looking down. It was a large room with a braided rug on the floor, the edges worn where Anders Johansen had put his feet down when he got out of bed in the morning.

They slid the Med Sled down a narrow hallway and around a sharp corner to the top of the stairs. “Piece of cake,” her father said. He locked the stairwell braking system at the foot of the Med Sled to a newel post so it wouldn’t get away from them as they slid it gently down the stairs. “Easier than carrying him,” her father said. Mrs. Johansen had put the leash on Charlie and held him with both hands while they pulled the body through the kitchen, out to the van, and onto the lift.

They went back into the kitchen and sat down with the coroner and Mrs. Johansen to take care of the paperwork. The cards from the last hand of pinochle were still facedown on the table.

“You going to be all right here all alone?” Hildi asked.

“My sister’s coming from Peoria,” she said. “But I’ll be all right. Thank you for asking.”

It was now almost midnight. Halfway home her father turned off Floyd Cramer and started to sing. “ ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.’ ” Hildi was a little self-conscious. But when her father sang the first verse a second time, she sang along with him. Softly at first, then with more confidence. “ ‘You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.’ ”

They sang “Home on the Range,” “Camptown Races”—“ ‘Doo-dah, doo-dah’ ”—and “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” and Simon pulled the van into a spot on Cherry Street in front of Duffy’s Tap, an old-fashioned bar with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said
HOME OF THE POOR AND UNKNOWN
. Simon rolled the windows down. In the bar they both ordered drafts and took their glasses to a booth, where they sat across from each other.

“I always used to stop here with your grandfather,” her father said.

“It smells good,” Hildi said. “If you like the smell of stale beer.” She lifted her glass. “Which I do.” The beer tasted fresh and clean after the bourbon-coffee mix. “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “if you could have a funeral that tells the truth about death? Something not based on lies and fairy tales. I reread
Anna Karenina
earlier this year. When Josh and I were splitting up. It’s such a wonderful novel, but Levin just can’t come to terms with death at the end. Or Tolstoy can’t. Can’t leave it alone. Keeps clamoring for a fairy tale, and when he gets one, it doesn’t ring true. Not compared to Anna’s suicide.”

“What’s the truth we should be telling?”

“I’m not sure it’s something you
tell.
Maybe I just mean, there are things we could do differently.”

“For example?”

“You know what we should do, Pop? We should get a dog, a big dog.”

“A dog?”

“You know, like Charlie. The kind they take to old people’s homes now. A therapy dog. They’re specially trained.”

“You mean so they don’t bite the old people?”

“No, Pop. I’m not joking. Don’t you think dogs are comforting in a really deep, uncomplicated way? A dog would go right to the person who’s grieving hardest. Look at Charlie. He could be a therapy dog. There must be a school for therapy dogs in Peoria or the Quad Cities.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“If there’s a dog in the frame, it’s a better frame, don’t you think? And we could get some different pictures too. Get rid of the clichés, all the sunsets and sunrises. Bring in some works by local artists. Maybe turn the visitation room into a
gallery. I’ll bet the Civic Art Center would be glad to cooperate. Get some bright colors in there and in the hallways. Josh and I went to a funeral home in Berkeley where they had a regular gallery, a place for local artists to sell their paintings.”

“This isn’t California, Hildi. It’s the Midwest. The middle of the Midwest.”

“Oh, poo. We could set a new trend.”

“Trends are always new.”

“I guess I mean something about a funeral being a celebration of the dead person’s life.”

“You couldn’t get more trendy. ‘We are here to celebrate the life of …’ The latest thing is the tableau. You know, for somebody who liked to go to the beach and drink beer: you prop the body up on a beach chair and pour a lot of sand on the floor, get a cooler full of beer, hire a comedian to make beer jokes. Or prop the body up on a motorcycle, as if it’s going sixty miles an hour. It’s being done. Drive-through viewings too.”

“That’s
so
California,” she said, “but it’s true, isn’t it? I mean about a funeral being a celebration of a person’s life.”

“Yes, it’s true. But it’s not the whole truth, and it’s not wholly true. It’s too simple. Death is a mystery, not an excuse for a party. There’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, and you don’t want to get them mixed up. You don’t want people grieving at a baptism, do you?”

“I agree, Pop, but don’t you think there’s more we could do? Make it possible for the families to help prep the body, for example.”

“Let me explain something to you, darling daughter. People don’t want to help prep dead bodies. They want dead bodies
out of the house. Why do you think they pay me to collect dead bodies and prep them? Why do they call in the middle of the night instead of waiting till a decent hour?”

“I know, Pop. But what I’m feeling right now … close to Grandpa Bart. Mr. Johansen too. Something important has happened, and we’re part of it. Not just spectators. Didn’t the family used to wash the body in the old days?”