Curtains (9 page)

“I grew up with the changes in the business,” he says. “Unlike Dad and my grandfather, I didn’t have all the baggage of how things used to be done.” Eirik was a child of the cremation era. Which is why I was surprised when he told me about his own wishes for when he dies. “It’s against everything Dad would want,” he admits, “but I would go traditional myself. I would be in the plot with the family in Brookside, with a viewing and a service and a reception, with music I like. Dean Martin, Rat Pack stuff.”

In the meantime, having learned first-hand what it’s like to grow up with an absentee father, he’s spending time with his own
kids, ages seven and eight, taking them fishing and swimming and to weekend games of laser tag, even if it means sacrificing time at the funeral home. He wants his kids to have a father.

And what about the other non-Bardals who, by definition, can go only so far in this business before hitting the glass, or oak, or 16-gauge stainless steel ceiling? Richard will never own this place, Shannon will never own this place. They have the wrong last name. This is why ambitious young undertakers join the conglomerates where blood doesn’t matter. And maybe this is why, while I was gone settling up my old life, Natalie quit. Glenn says she went into Neil’s office one day, voices were raised, a door was slammed, and within weeks she was working at Eddie Coutu’s in St. Boniface as an arrangement director, selling Last Supper– themed caskets and urns to Italian Catholics. They don’t even have a prep room at Coutu, so she’s no longer embalming. What happened? As far as Glenn knows, it came down to a difference of opinion between Natalie and Neil on how to run a funeral home, with only one person in the room in a position to call the shots. “Focus on what you have to do and keep your mouth shut,” Richard says. This is his advice for working in a family business. Natalie’s mistake, he says, was that she was good at the first, but lousy at the second.

We’re driving to Starbuck, a small farm town south of the city, for an afternoon funeral. The back of the van is loaded with gear: wood planks, AstroTurf and the Device for lowering the casket into the grave. Starbuck cemetery is too small to have its own staff, so we’ll be “dressing” the grave ourselves. The planks are still covered with dried mud from the last interment, their ends propped on the dashboard, banging the windshield whenever we hit a bump.

Richard has been an undertaker since the late ’80s. His father was a bus driver who knew Neil through Masonic circles, and his daily route that took him past the old family funeral home on Sherbrook Street. When he got sick with cancer, he sat down with Neil, “held my arm like this,” Neil told me, gripping my forearm, and made Neil swear he’d see the boy through medical school. Neil said he would. After his father died, Richard worked at Fort Ignition selling spark plugs and auto parts, but he grew bored, and wound up at Cropo funeral home on Main Street looking for work. Instead, Neil hired him, figuring that if the boy was intent on the funeral trade it was better to have him close at hand. Richard’s been with Neil ever since. The closest he got to medical school was the prep room. He and Eirik became friends. They’d drink together at the Palomino Club and then go back to the Aubrey Street funeral home to listen to AC/DC and Rush on the sound system, just the two of them and whoever was resting on the casket bier in the chapel. Richard knew he was suited for funeral service, he tells me, when he first had what he calls “the dream.” In the dream he was in the prep room, working on a body, and just as he was about to cut into the neck to raise the carotid artery, the body sat upright. The man wasn’t angry, just confused. He didn’t know why he was on the steel table or why he was naked. He told Richard he wanted to go home. So Richard found him some clothes and opened the door, and he was gone.

“Neil says every undertaker has the dream at some point,” he says. “If you don’t, it means you’re in the wrong business.”

That would be enough to scare me back into a career at Fort Ignition, but for Richard it was a mystical moment.

“It was neat,” he says. “I guess it would’ve been worse if he was already in the retort.”

At Starbuck cemetery (established in 1902, ancient for the Prairies), he parks the van on the grass next to the open grave. There are only a few dozen headstones. Around us are nothing but grain fields, and in the distance I can see both ends of a long freight train, too far away to hear. We set the planks along both sides of the grave and cover them with the AstroTurf mats, their green tongues hanging into the hole. We use a big mat to cover the mound of dirt, presumably to disguise its purpose. Putting together the Device is like constructing a playground swing set when the instructions are in Mandarin: pipes fit into gear-boxes that fit into other pipes and then canvas straps are stretched over the frame and wound tight around the side rails. It works on friction and gravity: no batteries required. As long as the gears are locked, the straps will hold the weight of the casket. Once the brake is released, the side rails turn, slowly, held back by the gears, and the straps grow more and more slack. The casket sinks into the hole. The effect is as if God’s own hand is lowering the box. Richard says when he dresses a grave he usually turns his suit inside out. Then, when it comes time for the service, he can flip it around and no one will see the dirt. I decide I’m too superstitious to take my clothes off in a cemetery, and besides, all I’ve got is a ring of muck around my pant cuffs. I wipe them on the grass.

When we get to the church, Neil’s already there with the hearse and the casket. On top of the casket, in place of the usual spray of flowers, is a bundle of dried wheat, in honour of the dead man, who was a farmer. Inside, the church is late-model Lutheran with exposed brick and skylights, blond-wood pews and a Henry Moore-esque stone baptismal font. A sign by the door says B
LESS
Y
OU
F
OR
N
OT
S
MOKING.
Richard decides to stay, to corral pallbearers and
work out the seating for the family, who’ve yet to arrive, freeing Neil and me to head into town for lunch.

The main street of Starbuck is deserted, save four men in hunting camo outside Archie’s Meats and Groceries, loading brown-paper bundles of bloody meat into the back of a pickup truck. Only the store and the hotel restaurant appear to be open. At the hotel, the man behind the counter asks us if we want the bar or the coffee shop. If we want the bar, it’s closed but he’ll open it. If we want the coffee shop, he’s it. He opens a fridge and studies our options. He can offer us ham and cheese sandwiches, but he has no bread because it’s the end of the week. The best he can do is to thaw a couple of frozen hamburger buns in the microwave. We pour ourselves two cups of coffee and sit down. The place is painted bright pink and green, and hanging on a bare plywood wall is a picture of a chicken.

I ask Neil about the dream.

Some people, he says, are born into funeral service. They have the name. They have no choice. Others think they’ll make a whack of money, and they get into the trade for the nice suits and expensive cars, but they don’t know how hard they’ll have to work, answering calls at 3 a.m. and doing removals on weekends. Then there are those with natural talent. Natalie, he says, has it. She could tell just by looking at a body what chemical index to use in the embalming room. She set features like a sculptor. It’s too bad, he says: Natalie had this idea I favoured Shannon over her.

“Do you?”

“I’m grooming Shannon for bigger things. She has natural talent too. She understands families. She understands where this business is going. If Natalie had stayed I would’ve given her all the
space she needed in the prep room. It was hers. But I guess you can’t have two queen bees in the same hive.”

Or two brothers: Jon, it turns out, has left the funeral home too, to put all his efforts into becoming an electrician.

The sandwiches are delicious. As we’re leaving, the man behind the counter says it’s a good day for a burial. In our black suits we’re either funeral directors or mobsters, and he guessed right.

“I want it storming for mine,” he says. “Same as when I came in. I come from a farm family. So I’ve been crying from day one.”

Back at the church, Richard fills us in on recent developments. The brother and sister are at war, he says. The sister hasn’t been home for thirty years and the brother thinks she’s only come back so she can get her piece of the dad’s estate. He’s seated them on opposite sides of the chapel. The pastor raises her hands and says, “We’ve come to hear the good news for Jim and for us. Please be seated.”

A few hymns later the guests are sent downstairs for sandwiches and raisin buns and coffee while we load the casket into the hearse. Neil and I hustle to the cemetery in the van, and Richard follows, leading a procession of cars. Pallbearers lift the casket onto the straps of the Device and I hold my breath. The pastor makes the sign of the cross on the lid with dirt from our Gerber jar, and Richard flips the hand brake with his foot. Unlike at city cemeteries, they’re not shy here about seeing the box all the way into the hole. The casket lurches, and stops. Richard kicks the Device. Now the casket sinks slowly until it hits bottom, and I can breathe again. The brother produces an ice cream bucket filled with dirt he brought from the farm. He drops a handful into the grave and I can hear it scatter on the wood. Then he hands the bucket to his sister. She won’t take it.

When they leave to join their friends for lunch at the church, Richard and I strike the set, folding up the greens and dismantling the miraculous, if temperamental, Device. I look into the open grave, at the dirt on the lid and the sheaf of dried wheat, and I think of what Neil said: The funeral home works very much like the family farm.

T
O
K
EEP
T
HINGS THE
W
AY
T
HEY
A
RE
, W
E
H
AVE TO
C
HANGE

S
ummer at the Factory means the smell of freshly turned earth from Brookside cemetery, and Zep bug spray, which Shannon uses to fog the dressing room to keep flies off the customers.

“The last thing you want is to open the casket and have a fly come out of someone’s nose,” she says. Shannon’s full of helpful hints. When threading a needle in the prep room, she says, resist the urge to put it in your mouth. Moisten the end with water from the sink: “Never lick anything in a funeral home.”

I remember when I first came in here, how gruesome those curved needles looked, what it felt like to poke one through leathery skin. Neil told me to be patient, that my natural fear would evolve into something deeper: respect and awe for the body. We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their
problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpse-handlers. That’s us. In time I’d get used to my social role. And the people I worked with would get used to me, once they figured out I wasn’t after their jobs. This is a cutthroat business, he said, the corporates are panicked over low death rates and new competition from low-end discount cremationists. They are laying off staff. Every new face in a funeral home is a threat to someone’s groceries.

At first my co-workers were polite but guarded, explaining and demonstrating technique while I took reams of notes, and absorbed the mantra:
We do this for the families
,
we treat the dead like we’d treat our own fathers and aunts
,
each case is handled with respect and dignity
—all fuzzy noble notions made fuzzier by repetition. When Glenn showed me for the eighth time how to operate secondary and primary burners on the retort he must have wondered: when is this guy going to leave? But I didn’t (or I did and came back), and soon enough they grew bored with my presence, a good sign that I was fitting in. I did my removals, and cleaned orifices and fingernails, and I wet-mopped and swept my way from suspicious novelty to the guy who could be trusted on scut jobs, like picking up Super Glue (for closing lips on difficult cases) and a curling iron at Costco. I’d joined their caste. But I still can’t sew up dead skin without feeling my own skin prickle. I’ve tried imagining it as not unlike trussing a pork roast, but these pork roasts at Neil’s have hands, and fingers, and suntan shadows where wedding rings used to be.

I still find the morning meetings brisk and confusing. Richard chairs them from Aubrey Street, while the rest of us crowd around the speakerphone in the dressing room at the crematorium. Neil’s in his office eating bran flakes and hot water, the same breakfast
his grandfather ate every day. He’s on speakerphone too, even though if we punched a hole in the dressing room wall we could reach through to his office and touch him.

“Concrete liner’s been ordered, cemetery’s been ordered,” says Janice, one of the undertakers, reporting on the case of a woman who’ll be on view at Aubrey this afternoon at one o’clock, with a service and burial to follow. “Flowers are ordered, they’ll go to the church except for a single rose to come here, and that’s for the family to put in the casket. Family’s providing the music on their own, pastor is handing out bulletins and they’re going to Robin’s Donuts after the burial.”