The Undertaker's Daughter (19 page)

When we entered, she cranked the winder on the back of the doll. “Listen to this!” Her eyes danced.

The track on the old doll was a little off, so instead of “Ho, ho, ho,” we heard a strange and garbled “Ha, ha, ha.”

Of all of her toys, the Santa was my father’s favorite, and like two children they laughed and laughed when she wound it. I was a little too old now for her toys and the strange noises they made, but I smiled and told her how nice they were.

The plump, multicolored bulbs on her Christmas tree glowed in the darkening room, and the small light on her desk gave off a red aura as its glare hit her scarlet dress. Bracelets of red rubber bands clenched her wrists, and I wondered what task they performed. Christmas cards and red pencils surrounded her. I liked her office. I liked the way my shoes sounded on her wide-planked wood floors. I enjoyed sitting by her rolltop desk and felt at ease with the sweet and musty scent of papers that protruded from the cubbyholes.

I walked over to the front-window ledge and admired the long row of photographs. Over twenty individually framed school pictures of girls and boys stared back at me.

“Those are my farmers’ children,” she bellowed.

I didn’t recognize any of them; they were from agricultural families in the county. She asked for my photo every year, but it wasn’t on display with the others. My father told me later that when the farmers entered the office to conduct business, the first thing they saw were their children’s photographs. Their hearts were subliminally softened. She was a relentless and rabid businesswoman.

“I see you wore your Christmas red dress for me?”

I stood close to her so that she could hear me better. “Yes, ma’am, do you like it?”

“Why, yes, honey. It’s just beautiful. Do you like ghost stories?” she asked as she held me next to her.

“Oh, yes, ma’am! I love them.”

“Did you know that my favorite story is a ghost story?”

“Really? Me, too!”

“You tell me about yours first, honey, then I’ll tell you the name of mine.”

“It’s called
A Candle in Her Room
, and it’s about these three sisters who live in Wales . . . have you heard of Wales? . . . And one of them is wicked and then . . . oh, well, it’s complicated. There’s this doll and she’s evil. And one of the sisters has an accident and she can’t walk, and then the book changes and you read someone else’s story, the daughter of the wicked sister, and . . .”

But in my passion to tell the story of what I thought was the best book I’d ever read in my whole entire life, I’d made a mess of it, and I could see I was losing Miss Agnes. She nodded, but I’m not sure how much she heard.

“Anyway, it has a happy ending,” I said as loudly as I could.

She moved her ever-present VC Fertilizer writing pad closer to her and picked up a red pencil. “Go to the library and see if you can find this book.” She wrote neatly across the pad
The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
. Then she wrote, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and underlined it three times.

“Read that story and tell me what you think.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”

Then we both remembered that my father was sitting in the corner.

“Merry Christmas, Miss Agnes.” I wrapped my arms around
her soft frame and gave her a present covered in shiny red paper.

“Merry Christmas, honey.” She handed me a cloth-covered diary. It was red, of course.

“She’s a character, isn’t she?” I asked my father on the way home.

“She’s been a good friend to me.” I could tell by the tone of his voice that her friendship was something he greatly valued.

Miss Agnes continued to introduce my father to people who were not in the Old Clan’s camp. Perhaps this was her Christmas gift to him, a word to her business colleagues that Frank Mayfield was a good friend and a reliable, caring undertaker. Despite the predations of Alfred Deboe, my father’s business was thriving with her help.

Before the library closed for Christmas vacation, I approached Theo with the piece of paper Miss Agnes had given me. “Can you help me with this?”

Theo wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and placed them now on her delicate, pale nose. The snow had begun and we both turned toward the windows, which trembled from a swift wind. Theo clutched at the cardigan she wore on her shoulders. It was four o’clock and the room was dark and quiet.

“Hmm,” she said peering down at me. “This is a ghost story that you may not be ready for.” Theo’s voice sounded as if she didn’t talk much, as if her vocal cords had turned into pillows of dust.

“But you gave me that other book to read—the one with the doll in it, you know, the girl used witchcraft with it.”

Indeed, she had. She’d told me I looked like a girl who might enjoy a ghost story. I don’t know why she said that. She moved slowly to the
P
shelf in her granny shoes.

“This is a different kind of ghost story. But if you want it,” she said slowly, “I’ll stamp it. I just hope it doesn’t give you nightmares.”

“I live in a funeral home, Theo. I’m bound to have nightmares.”

Theo was right. Although, the story didn’t give me nightmares, Poe’s colorful language and my difficulty in reading it almost did. I could scarcely understand the thing. Our next meeting would probably be on Valentine’s Day and I didn’t want to disappoint Miss Agnes, so I hightailed it back to the library.

“Theo, I need a summary, please, ma’am. I need to know if this story is worth spending the whole Christmas vacation trying to understand it.”

Theo never reacted to anything or showed an ounce of emotion. If she ever had a sense of humor, I never came across it. My father snapped stems off flower arrangements in the chapel and sent me to school with them to give to my teachers. They looked at me with amusement when I presented them because they were sure to know their origin. Theo wasn’t moved by the flowers I brought her, or the conversation I attempted, but she always came through for me and I depended on her.

“The narrator tells us of a brother and sister who live in a large, crumbling mansion. Both are ill in different ways. Both are crazy as loons, but they’re very close to one another. Lord Usher buries his sister alive in the house. She breaks out of her entombment and falls upon him as he collapses and dies from terror and despair. The narrator escapes and bears witness as the house crumbles into the lake.”

“Why did he bury her alive?”

“She had a disease that left her paralyzed at times and he thought she was dead.”

“My daddy said that if a person wasn’t dead before they were embalmed, they sure would be after.”

“Child, I’m sure that the Lady Madeline was not embalmed. And you must remember, it’s not a true story.”

Well, whoever heard of anyone not being embalmed? I certainly had not.

If death was the last taboo, then embalming was the last, last taboo. People wanted the service performed, it was inherent to the Southern way of death, but, boy, they sure didn’t want to know anything about it.

Though I roamed the rooms of the funeral home from the beginning of my life, mine was a gradual awakening to the fact my father was not only a funeral director, but also an embalmer. I’d traipsed in and out of the embalming room hundreds of times before I summoned the courage to ask my father exactly what he did in that room that took so many hours. Why did he do it immediately after he collected a body, sometimes at four o’clock in the morning, or on a Sunday when the rest of our family clung to our hymnals and sang “Blessed Redeemer”?

He never blustered about embalming’s being an art. He never relayed how many people held back tears as they said, “It looks just like him.” Or, “Frank, she’s just how I remember her before the illness set in.” But I knew, I knew by the number of people who told me so.

Many people of Jubilee remembered stories their grandparents told them about what it had been like when they lived in remote areas in Kentucky, such as Appalachia, where undertakers were few in number, and where, even if the undertaker happened to pass through, they couldn’t afford to embalm Uncle Jed. The family placed Uncle Jed’s coffin in their parlor and did the best they could. They laid coins on his eyes, not only to prevent them
from popping open, but also to stop the devil from entering his body. A cloth tied around his jaw and head made him look as if he suffered from a toothache, but was necessary to prevent a gaping mouth. With difficulty, they folded his arms and stuffed a towel that had been soaked in a soda solution around his body to prevent discoloration. Finally, strong-smelling spices, fresh cedar chips, or eucalyptus leaves were placed in the coffin, especially on humid summer days.

On porch-sitting evenings friends spun tales about “the rigger mortis” and relayed disturbing experiences their families encountered back in the day. Ida Mae Clark’s great-grandmother told her that right in the middle of Ida Mae’s great-grandfather’s funeral service, the old man sprang up from the coffin. The preacher stopped the service while the men pressed the corpse back down. But when the poor man finally lay supine again, his legs rose. The men rushed back to the coffin and held his legs down, but his back rose again. With the service now completely at a standstill, one of the congregants ran to the nearest barn and arrived back swinging a hammer. The men tucked Ida Mae’s great-grandfather back into the coffin and nailed the lid shut. The preacher quickly ended the service.

What a tall tale. Think of the effort used to sit up in bed after a night’s sleep. If a body sits up, it’s not dead.

No one in Jubilee wanted to be laid down into the earth by way of their ancestors. There was never any question or suggestion that my father forced embalming on any family. They not only wanted their deceased embalmed—they felt they needed it for themselves as much as anything else. No one was told it was necessary, or a health hazard or illegal not to embalm. People wanted their loved ones to look good and smell nice. It was as simple as that.

When I first asked my father what embalming meant, what it entailed, I had no expectations. I thought it was best to know and get it over with.

“What’s the first thing you do?” I asked him one day when he was in the chapel. He was fooling around with the floor lamps and rearranging baskets of flowers.

“We check to make sure the person’s dead.”

“Oh, no. You don’t. Do you mean that sometimes when you collect them, they’re still alive?”

“Of course not,” he said as if I should know better, “it’s a good habit, that’s all.”

“How do you do that?”

“Check for a pulse and a heartbeat. Maybe even rub the breastbone, because that really hurts.”

“Daddy!”

“Well, you asked.”

“Then what?”

“Do you know what rigor mortis is?”

“Umm, not really.”

My father described the condition that is the link to all the jokes about “stiffs.”

“It’s only a temporary thing, but basically, the muscles stiffen. It begins in the eyelids, neck, and jaw, and in an hour or two it spreads. That’s why the next step usually involves massaging the hands and limbs, to work it out. And that’s why I don’t wait to embalm. I set the facial features pretty quickly. I close the eyelids. You might hear people say they’re sewn shut, but that’s not true. I glue them with a special glue. I sew the jaw together. Set the mouth. That takes time to get right. You don’t want a smile, or a frown, just something peaceful. After the embalming, there’s no going back, the features, the body, the way it lies, they’re all set.”

“How?” I couldn’t quite take it in. I was still thinking about the massaging-the-limbs bit. “How do you sew the jaw together?”

“It’s complicated. I’ve got special needles that are hook shaped on the end.”

“Oh. So that’s what they’re for.” I quickly changed direction. “Are those stories true about bodies sitting up in the casket?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. You hear all sorts of stuff, you know.”

“No. Don’t be silly. But sometimes, because of a temperature reaction the muscles of the arms, hands, and upper legs might twitch a bit. And when I place the hands on the torso, sometimes the hands will close into a fist.”

As that image sank in quite quickly, I remembered how cold a dead man’s hands felt. “Why are they so cold?”

“You know when your mother takes your temperature and how we always want it to be 98.6 degrees? That’s a healthy, normal temperature. But when you die, the body cools to room temperature. It’s usually about seventy-two degrees, maybe even a little less, that’s more than twenty degrees cooler than normal. It feels cold by comparison.”

“I guess that makes sense, Daddy, but still, they feel awfully cold. What do you do next?”

“Then I wash the body.”

“Hm. Like a bath.”

“Sort of. Like a sponge bath, and with a hose.”

“You mean you hose it down? Like washing a car?”

“Aw, hell. No, not like that, exactly. It’s very respectful. And no one is allowed in the embalming room except the staff and your mother. No one. Ever.”

“Okay, that’s enough for now.”

I pieced it together over time, short conversations punctuated
with questions. It was a great deal easier to understand after I’d studied a little science and biology. Those tall, complicated charts of the human body took on a new meaning.

“Is it true that your hair and nails keep growing after you die?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Someone at school had a book with pictures of dead people with really long hair.”

“The skin, well, it kind of shrinks. It makes the hair and nails look longer, especially if the nails haven’t been cut after death.”

“Do you . . .”

“Yes, I trim the nails and clean them.”

There were all sorts of myths about what happens in an embalming room. The most bizarre of these was that someone in Jubilee believed that the blood that was drained from the body was stored in jars, then removed from our funeral home to be buried elsewhere. Others thought he sent the blood of the dead to the Red Cross. My father said some people are just plain stupid.

“After the body’s washed, I make an incision.”