The Undertaker's Daughter (20 page)

“Where?”

“Different places, sometimes on the chest, sometimes the groin; there’s an artery under the armpit, too.”

Without going through too much detail he explained that
in
went the embalming fluid, two gallons or so;
out
went a portion of the blood.
In
went the cavity fluid to treat the organs where gas and bacteria would build up;
out
went the bile and urine. Treating the organs, he explained, prevents unpleasant odors and seepage.

“It sounds messy, but I never come in contact with the fluids. It’s all very clean. And my embalming room may be small, but it’s tidy. And it’s not true that all the blood is drained out—you can’t really drain it all and it’s not necessary, anyway.”

The blood and fluids flow from the tubing directly into a drain
underneath the embalming table and into the sewers, where, my father said, a lot worse than that goes down every day. But at that moment, I swore I couldn’t think what.

“But what does the embalming fluid do?”

“Well, it’s hard to imagine if you haven’t seen it. You can watch sometime if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s kind of miraculous in a way.
Deathly pallor
. Have you ever heard that expression?”

“No. But I’ve seen Dracula movies.”

“It’s not like that. The dead do not look like Dracula. There’s discoloration. They’re not alabaster. The fluid puts color back in the body, evens out the color underneath the skin. The skin and tissues, well, they look alive again. A good embalmer knows how to match the color of fluid with the skin tone. The sunken features disappear, the person looks more the way they did before they were ill, or you could say they look good for their age. Death is a natural thing, but it’s not very dignified. Embalming hasn’t changed much since the Civil War.” He paused. “War . . . well, embalming brings dignity to the deceased and to the family. You really want to do your best to please them. That’s what it’s about.

“Then I wash the body again and wash their hair. Of course, that’s the scene when everything is going well. But a body that’s been autopsied is different. A car wreck, or accident or something that’s disfigured the body—all those take a lot more time and care.”

“How long does the whole thing take?”

“About two hours for the embalming and another couple of hours for grooming, dressing, cosmetics, and placing the body in the casket.”

“Does anyone ever tell you they don’t want to be embalmed, or does their family ask you not to do it?”

“Hardly ever. It’s unusual.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“It’s up to them. I suggest that the funeral should be the next day. The casket should be closed. It depends.”

“On what?”

“On what kind of shape the decedent is in.”

“What if the family wants the casket left open?”

“I try to explain that it will upset them—without upsetting them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s very upsetting for a family to witness decomposition. They don’t understand what happens to the skin color, the seepage, other things that you don’t want to know about.”

I didn’t want to sound ungrateful for all the “interesting” information, but he was right, I’d heard enough for the moment.

So, this idea of Lady Madeline of the House of Usher and her awful plight was quite horrific. I picked up the book again and tried to read the story, one word at a time. It was still difficult to grasp. I remembered hearing my parents say that Miss Agnes had a brother who was only a year younger than she and they had been close. He lost his mind. She’d sent him a ton of money so that he could have the best of care. And now he was dead. And Miss Agnes lived in a big house like the siblings in Poe’s story. Was that why she liked it so much? Was this story her favorite because of her own history? I would never know, for Miss Agnes never asked me if I’d read the story and we never spoke of it again.

On Christmas Day, after we had our dinner, my mother piled food on a plate and wrapped it in tin foil. As my father pulled on his coat and prepared to leave us, I felt conflicted. I loved Miss Agnes, but Daddy left a hole when he walked out the door, especially on holidays. My mother was suddenly in a bad mood, Evelyn would
slam her door, and even Thomas would sometimes leave the funeral home to visit friends. Things kind of fell apart a little.

“Why won’t she ever come over here and have Christmas dinner with us?” I asked my father.

“She doesn’t want to intrude.”

“Well, she’s intruding anyway. You always have to leave us on Christmas Day and Thanksgiving and—”

“That’s enough. That’s just the way she is. I don’t mind.”

He took her the plate of food and stayed with her so that she wouldn’t have to eat Christmas dinner alone. She was glad to see him, and grateful for the food, and when he was gone, she was content to be alone again.

I imagined her wandering through her rooms on Christmas night. The decorative lights from other homes on her street glimmered through her front windows. She probably saved the thick piece of jam cake my mother had sent over for a late-night snack. I imagined her reading Poe in her decorative red house, while I read Poe in the funeral home.

“The raccoons ate Miss Alice Larkin’s tomatoes. What a tragedy!”

“Well, it’s just a tragedy that Morris Simpkin left the Baptists for those heathen Methodists.”

“Have you heard the tragic story of how Mrs. Pennyrile’s gooseberry pies fell off the windowsill? That blind old bird dog of hers . . . ”

Tragedy was all around us in its small and inconsequential
way. Tales of tragedy floated from house to house, from the grocery store to the pharmacy, usually accompanied by laughter and surprise. Everything, it seemed, was a tragedy, until our provincial lives were forced to redefine its meaning.

When I viewed the bodies of the Sheridan family, I struggled to make them speak to me. I searched their faces for some kind of explanation. How silly I felt, but I could not stop hoping I would learn something about what had happened to them. They were arranged in a semicircle in the chapel—four caskets, three adult-size and one smaller, junior-size casket, built and used for that awful occasion. Gunshot wounds were concealed beneath their clothing, or, in Mr. Sheridan’s case, his temple was covered with makeup, his hair combed to cover a lump.

I was about twelve years old when Mr. Sheridan loaded his shotgun and shot his wife and two children. The boy was a teenager and the girl, younger than me. Then he turned the gun on himself. His wife didn’t die immediately and was taken to the hospital, where she died soon after, but not soon enough, for she fully comprehended what had happened, a catastrophe in itself, a bitter horror of a truth to swallow before her death.

We remained troubled by the Sheridans long after they were buried.

I had already peered into the faces of many dead bodies by that time, though not as long and as hard as I did the morning my father created that sad semicircle. I looked for meanness, for insanity, for some tormented explanation from the dead man’s face. Of course, I found nothing but a shell of a man, a shell of a family. My father worked particularly hard to form Mr. Sheridan’s expression. There could be no slight upturn of his mouth, nor could there be even a hint of a grimace. His face was blank, his mouth a straight line, his expression without tension, but also without humanity,
because no matter how he actually looked lying in the casket, his deed determined how he would be perceived.

Dead children never look natural. The Sheridan children did not look angelic or as if they were merely sleeping. They looked dead and too young to be so. But it didn’t matter what they looked like; the particular features that made them unique individuals could have been those of any of us. The shock lay in that.

When Jemma came downstairs to see them, she approached the caskets already visibly shaken. “Why?” she asked. “How could something like this happen? I don’t understand.”

Our parents didn’t try to hide death of any kind, but on this occasion, my father sent her away. “Some people . . . they’re just crazy,” he told her. “Go on back upstairs to Belle. She’ll make you some peanut butter and crackers.”

I’m sure there must have been other murders in the previous history of Beacon County, but no one could remember a single one, it had been so long ago. The event impacted our community in such a way that the visitation period for the family was like a huge car wreck. People lined up to see the Sheridans because they were curious to look calamity in the eye. Tragedy, always a magnet for the creation of celebrity, drew them in by the hundreds.

Though we were mobbed during the visitation period, the funeral service was lacking, one of the least attended.

“What did the preacher say in the service?” I asked.

“It was short. He just made some very general sort of remarks. About how sad things happen. He said it was a tragedy.”

We never learned why Mr. Sheridan murdered his family. He was poor and sometimes hit the bootleg whiskey, but many in our vicinity were like that, too. It was an unsatisfying and general conclusion. The preacher told me privately that Mr. Sheridan would be punished in hell. But I said nothing to that, because I
saw no God in the scene before me, no heaven, no hell. Prayers would not have prevented this tragedy. When the Sheridans were finally buried, for it seemed their short time under our roof was elongated somehow, I no longer prayed for bad things not to happen. I knew they would.

 CHAPTER 8 

W
ithin a few years of our arrival, my father managed to encroach upon Alfred Deboe’s domination of the funeral business in Jubilee. Half of the business now went to us, in spite of the Old Clan’s continued efforts to thwart it. My father was more energetic and outgoing than Deboe. People liked him, even when they didn’t want to. The pace of death picked up at our funeral home through his efforts and the connections he made through Sonny and Miss Agnes. Often two, even three, funerals needed his attention at once. Visitation hours were extended so that a constant flow of people passed through the doors from early in the morning until late at night. Cars peppered Main Street and snaked around the block; men and women streamed out of them and spilled into our home. An abundance of flowers, delivered like clockwork, permeated the air with their fragrance. My father and his employees rushed around quietly with purpose as they attended to the needs of the mourners of Jubilee. A shuffle of
gurneys and caskets in and out of the embalming room occurred out of view of the public. I wondered if the elderly population of our town was in danger of becoming extinct, such was the succession of deaths from old age. This was quite a lot for our little funeral home to handle. Something had to be done.

The calamity that marked the end of my childhood came when my father decided to remodel the funeral home. I watched with great distress as the veranda fell to the blows of the demolition team. Mr. Riley, the painter, tried to console me by letting me help him paint the new white brick facade. My homey seat now destroyed, the funeral home looked even more like a business than a home. The loss of the veranda was my father’s gain, for now there was room for more of Jubilee’s dead, and that was the point of it all. Somehow I felt as if I might lose something of my father, too. On the swing I could hang around without being in the way. I could monitor the events on Main Street. I was often the first person to see a visitor approaching and run inside with the announcement. How was I to make myself useful without the veranda and swing?

My father and I stood on the sidewalk and watched Mr. Riley paint
MAYFIELD & SON FUNERAL HOME
with broad, black strokes across the white bricks.

“So, do you think Thomas is going to be an undertaker?”

“No, I very seriously doubt that.”