Head to Head

LIFE WITH FATHER

Nobody knew what really went on in the embalmer’s house. It appeared normal enough where it sat on a dirt road on the outskirts of town. Surrounded by dense woods of white oak, maple, and hickory trees, the house was constructed in 1902, but now the white clapboards had been repainted countless times through decades of families. A converted coach house stood at the back of the property, where a wide creek rippled over smooth, tan rocks. Both structures had been neglected and had weathered to gray, and the white curlicues along the ceiling of the porches and the once ornate banisters were peeling paint, giving a forlorn, abandoned look to the place. The dining room in the main house had a curved turret window seat that overlooked the wraparound porch, and above the dining room, on the second story of the turret, was a large master bedroom.

The property had belonged to the same family ever since the houses’s construction; in each generation the oldest son was always the owner of the house and an apprentice in the lucrative embalming trade. Inside, the rooms remained timeless, spacious, and dark with faded floral wallpaper and massive mahogany furniture, which intimidated children in the dark of night. The attic was unfinished and dusty, with old trunks and books and the smell of mothballed clothing.

No one ever visited the house unless they wished to have a corpse prepared for a funeral and burial at one of the town mortuaries. The embalmer worked in the chilly basement of the house. A special door had been constructed under the side porch, where a ramp led into the laboratory workroom. The bodies would arrive in ambulances or black hearses, and the workers lowered their voices as they rolled them down the brick sidewalk to the cellar door.

The embalmer was a big man, rawboned and strong, able to lift by himself corpses of any weight onto the cold steel tables in the cellar. He had black hair cropped close to his scalp and a full beard, which he sometimes forgot to trim. He lived in the house with his wife and their child. He was a strict man who demanded that rules of family conduct be followed to the letter. If they were not, if the woman or the child disobeyed his decrees, he would walk slowly to where he kept the old razor strop on a hook inside the door at the top of the cellar steps. This means of punishment had been in the family for as long as he could remember. His father had used it to make a man out of him, and his grandfather had wielded it before that. It was black leather, worn thin now, with bits of brown showing through, and the metal buckle on the end was tarnished and half-broken, so that it left strange, irregular scars on flesh that looked like half-moons. The embalmer had many half-moons on his back. So did the wife and child.

By the time the child was old enough for the mother to teach him to read and do sums, they both had learned to behave in a way consistent with the embalmer’s house rules. The mother kept the child close to her every minute of the day, and sometimes they sneaked out of the house and took a walk in the woods so the child could run and play. When they were far enough away from the house, they quit whispering, which was one of the rules—everyone in the house always spoke in a reverent whisper. They never stayed away long and made sure they returned home with plenty of time to prepare the evening meal, because the only time the embalmer left the dead bodies in the cellar was at night. A formal evening meal had always been the custom in the embalmer’s household. Although they had never once attended church services, all three of them dressed in their Sunday best for the dinner hour, spent in the big dining room with its brown wallpaper depicting Chinese peasants pulling carts of rice, with cloud-ringed mountains in the background.

The meal routine was set in stone. The mother would give the child a bath, and then she would wash herself because the embalmer demanded cleanliness. Once they were dressed formally, she would lead the child by the hand to the kitchen, and the child would sit quietly at the kitchen table and watch her cook. If they spoke at all, it would be in whispers, because one time the embalmer had come upstairs early and caught them breaking the rule. But that had only happened once. After they healed from the punishment meted out by the embalmer, neither mother nor child ever again spoke above a whisper, not even outside in the woods as they’d done before.

At exactly five minutes after six each evening, the mother would place the food on the dining room table, on warming trivets lit by tiny, white tea candles. Then she would pull the heavy brown velvet curtains tightly together, turn off the electric light suspended over the table, and touch a flame one by one to the tapers in the five-light candelabras positioned in the exact center of the sideboard and at the exact center of the table because the embalmer liked to dine by candlelight. Then mother and child would take their places across from each other, fold their hands in their laps in exactly the correct manner, right hand on top of the left, with right thumb resting inside the curled fingers of the left hand. Silently, they would sit and listen for the embalmer’s slow footfalls as he mounted the cellar steps.

When he reached the wide entrance hall, with its twin brown horsehair sofas and seven-foot antique Bavarian grandfather clock, he would shut the cellar door, turn a key in the ancient lock, and put the key on top of the door header for safekeeping. His family would not say a word as he climbed to the second floor to take off his blood-spattered, black leather apron, wash up, and don his black Sunday-best suit and white shirt and black tie. Then they would listen to the main staircase creak as he descended to the dining room and would grow tense when he slid open the double doors from the foyer. He would loom in the threshold, a huge, dark menace, and neither of them would dare look up from their plate.

And so it was at six-thirty on the dot on this wintry night in early November. It had turned cold suddenly, after a month of Indian summer, gusting autumn winds skittering oak leaves down the cracked sidewalk and making frosty snowflake patterns on the windowpanes in the early morning. It was too cold in the house, but it had always been that way. Low temperatures helped keep fresh the dead bodies in the cellar.

The embalmer turned and closed the doors behind him, walked to the table, and as was his habit, checked to make sure the mother had set it according to his rules. The child sat very still as the father put his big hand down and measured the child’s dinner plate. There was to be exactly the length of the embalmer’s thumb between the table edge and the bottom of the Blue Willow plate, which had been in the family for one hundred years. The child let out a breath of relief when the embalmer found it exactly correct. He measured the child’s glass then, making sure it was filled with milk to only a thumb’s depth from the top rim, and then he checked that the dinner knife was a thumb’s length from the spoon, with the fork in between but not touching. The woman used a Popsicle stick that the embalmer had cut to the proper length with which to measure, and she used it religiously in all her household tasks. The father checked the child’s napkin and found it starched and ironed and folded into perfect thirds. He moved around the table and measured the woman’s place setting, then his own.

“Very good,” he whispered, patting his wife’s bowed head.

The embalmer sat down, and his family watched him so they’d know exactly when to fold their hands in prayer. He prayed about duty and obedience until the hall clock began its hollow chimes announcing the seven o’clock hour. On the third bong, he whispered amen, and the three of them picked up their napkins and unfolded them together. He picked up the platter of fried ham and forked out a piece for the child and the mother, and then put the rest on his plate. He served the steamed rice and black-eyed peas precisely the same way; then they waited for him to lift his fork, and they all took the first bite together. Tonight they ate the rice first.

No one spoke—it was against the rules to speak while dining, even in a whisper—and if they finished the food served to them before the clock struck eight o’clock, they would sit without speaking and wait for the soft bongs to commence. On this night, an unimaginable catastrophe happened at eighteen minutes before eight o’clock. The child dropped a salad fork, and it clinked against the hardwood floor and scattered grains of rice on the faded red-and-brown oriental carpet.

Everybody froze. The mother and the child looked at the embalmer, saw the ruddy flush rise up his neck and darken his face. He put down his own fork exactly a thumb’s length from his plate. He looked at the child, and the child made a low moaning sound deep inside his throat, eyes wide with terror.

The mother whispered, “Please, please don’t.”

The embalmer’s eyes switched to her, and then he moved so quickly, she never saw the fist he drove into her nose. The blow hit her with a sickening crunch of cartilage, and blood spouted all over the white linen tablecloth and pooled in the child’s plate of rice. The force knocked her chair over and onto its back, and she rolled onto her side, unconscious and bleeding.

The embalmer grabbed up the child and shook his thin shoulders until the child gasped for air. The big man dragged the child over to the mother and pushed the child’s face down close to the woman’s head. The embalmer mopped his hand over the mother’s nose and mouth until it was slick with warm red blood, and then he brought it up to the child and rubbed blood, all over the child’s face.

The father whispered harshly, “See what you did? You’ve got your mother’s blood on you now, and you can keep it there until you learn your lesson. Your mother never disobeyed me before you were born. This is all your fault. We were happy before you were born. You are an ugly, stupid brat, and don’t you dare cry. If I see one tear fall, I will put your mother back in that chair, and I will hit her in the face again. I will hit her over and over until you are obedient. Do you understand me?”

The embalmer slammed the child back into the chair, and the child ate the blood-soaked rice while the mother’s blood dried into a tight brown crust on this face. The child did not look at his mother again.

The child was five years old.