The Undertaker's Daughter (41 page)

It took him two hours to prepare himself mentally to perform the task before him. Weeks later, Rex said that he knew that after doing that, he could embalm anyone in his own family. It was like stepping out of his emotional attachments. As Rex set out to perform the task at hand, men from the funeral home continued to knock on the door.

“Everything all right in there?”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Sure you don’t need some help?”

“Hell, no,” he said, “no one’s going to do this but me.”

Then he embalmed my father, one undertaker in the hands of another. It was late when he turned off the light.

Rex and I never discussed the details of how he managed to perform his duties that day, the day my father died. Many years later we spoke about it. The images of my father’s death emerged and took my breath away. I ended the phone call and sat silently as a new wave of grief tremored within me. With a little gasp I realized that the grief wasn’t new; it had never really disappeared.

T
he next evening our family arrived for the private viewing before the funeral home was opened to the public for visitation. Rex wore his impassive undertaker’s expression when he opened the door to the chapel. It was one of those stifling-hot summer nights; lightning flashed through the sky, and inside the air-conditioning was on full blast. Rex walked on one side of my mother and Thomas was at her other side. Jemma and I held hands, and Evelyn walked along behind us. It was an interminably long walk.

As we approached and my mother caught the first glimpse of her husband lying in a casket, her knees buckled underneath her and her head tilted back into a near faint. Her knees hovered only inches from the floor as Rex and Thomas held her by her elbows and lifted her to standing. My mother was not the fainting type and was not given to dramatics, but I think she must have suppressed an overwhelming urge to wail, for some strange sound came from her. At that moment the lights flashed and went out completely. The roar of the air conditioner stopped and the room was plunged into darkness and silence. We stood frozen like ice sculptures in the black air until, just as suddenly, the lights came sputtering back on and the air conditioner revved up and broke
the terrifying silence. I think someone involuntarily cursed, and a collective gulp of relief filled the air. We looked at each other incredulously and began walking again as if Moses had just parted the sea.

Poor Rex, I thought. A blackout at my father’s viewing. Was it his last little prank? My father might have been saying, “Are you on your toes there, Rex? Remember what I taught you? Remember that day in the church?”

He and Rex had been setting up casket trucks in the front of a church, preparing it for a funeral. After they placed the casket on the trucks meant to hold it, they noticed the casket wasn’t perfectly centered. The church’s casket trucks weren’t as long as they should have been, and the casket teetered enough to make Rex antsy. My father called him into the vestibule and told him, “If the casket falls off the trucks, just calmly walk down there and look at your watch as if to say, ‘Yep, right on time.’ Behave as if you planned it that way all along. Whatever occurs, just let it happen, and don’t show that you’re nervous. Deal with it and then move on.”

Rex said my father was always calm on the surface. “He might have been as nervous as he could be, but you never saw Frank sweat. You never saw anything throw him off his game.”

Now he lay in a fifteen-gauge casket shaded to look like bronze. It had a brownish edge around it and a brush finish. The velvet interior was a light taupe. Fount and Rex had dressed him in a brown suit that my mother had chosen, though I thought he had looked better in black. The enveloping scent of mortuary cosmetics rose from his casket.

I was afraid that someday, some year, I would walk down a street far from Jubilee and would not be able to recall the face of my father. So on this day, the last one that I would see him, I tried
to memorize his face. I traced the line of his strong jaw and made a note that his face held traces of both his father’s and his mother’s. He was more handsome than his brother and darker than his sister. In him, I saw his family and the new one he’d made in ours.

He had not been ready to die. The doctors told us he fought and fought and held on for as long as he could. He died not knowing what would happen to us; our inheritance was still in litigation and two of his children not yet established. And he died before he made complete amends to his wife, although she had begun to feel his contrition. There wasn’t enough time for a complete life.

Evelyn stood beside Jemma and reached for her hand. Jemma, cold and brave in her grief, moved away, but not before she whispered, “Don’t
ever
touch me again.” Her first and only words to Evelyn since what we had begun to call “that day.”

Evelyn then moved beside me and linked her arm in mine. I removed her arm and, without taking my eyes off my father, felt my feet slowly step away from her, as if in a dream. His death had only strengthened my resolve. I’d still not said a word to her. I felt her neediness and it was pitiful, but it didn’t move me enough to allow her in. She sniveled and moved over to our mother, the one person who always stood by her.

When Rex opened the doors that evening, people poured in. Streams of men and women from all four corners of the county formed a line to pay their respects. Many were disappointed that Frank would not be there to bury them. They seemed as stunned as we were. When people thought of my father, they thought of their own deaths. They couldn’t help it; it was an unconscious reaction to the sound of his name. And somehow it didn’t seem right for an undertaker to die young.

Then Fletcher Hamilton strolled in. I watched as he scanned the chapel thoroughly, slowly making his way through, shaking hands.
Oh, yes, of course,
I thought.
He wants to be seen.
The light on the registry podium cast a yellow glow over his face and I wished at that moment that I could read his mind.
What a chilly old soul he must have,
I thought. I avoided him so that I wouldn’t say anything that would later embarrass my mother, or myself. When he entered the chapel, I stood at the door behind him as he walked down the aisle toward my father’s coffin. He lent the scene a surreal aura and I wanted to demand that he leave, and then I saw my mother’s red-rimmed eyes glance toward him. She drew in a breath and sagged a little. I could think of nothing better than relieving my waist of a rather beautiful black patent belt and wrapping it around his neck until his face turned purple and he begged for his life. He soon left, his show of concern duly registered by the town.

I breathed in the heady mix of flowers and the cheap perfume in which someone near me seemed to have bathed. I stared at the carpet and wondered who chose dark green. I tried not to look at the casket, but it wouldn’t be ignored. An inner dialogue took over as I shook hands with people whom I had lived among for so many years. I listened to their condolences as a suffocating fear lodged in my throat:
What a fine mess you’ve left us with, Daddy. What are we going to do now?
As if it were his fault that he died, that somehow he could have prevented this big black void of unknowing. I consoled myself with the thought that I could leave this place now. A calm, clear prospect of freedom pulled me around as I faced friends from college, who had surprised me with their presence.

When the public went home that evening, I had less than two minutes of private time with the undertaker in the casket. It’s hard to look at people you love lying there in their final house. I knew that already, but now, the evening before his funeral, my
experience, layered by all those years of intimacy with the dead, deepened. There’s something to be said for a closed-casket service. There’s something to be said for not embalming. I sat down and closed my eyes. The room was full of something, but I had no idea what it was. Maybe I’d lost the ability to feel anything.

Rex came into the room. He looked awful; he’d been up for over twenty-four hours and his eyes were pink and swollen.

“There were not many things that your daddy and I didn’t talk about. When you spend as many hours of the day and night with each other as we did, especially when we weren’t busy, we just got to know each other real well. We developed a very close, meaningful relationship that I never will forget. I’ve said on many occasions that I was closer to Frank than I was to my own dad. I wouldn’t ask my father for his opinion of anything much, but I spent a lot of time talking to Frank about things. He was a real mentor to me. I got to the point where I won his confidence. He knew that I could do the job without a problem or concern about my ability to handle anything that came down in the funeral business. And that came from him. He taught me well.”

For a second—just one short second—I thought I should forget all my plans, go back to college, and marry Rex. After I recovered from that moment of moral cowardice, I realized from Rex’s soliloquy that my father had created some sort of relationship with his partner that he’d never had with Thomas. I felt an overwhelming sadness for my brother then. It was the first moment during the last twenty-four hours that I’d felt anything at all.

“Do you need anything?” Rex asked. “Can I get you anything?”

“Just my daddy, Rex; just my daddy. Can you do that?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

T
he morning of the funeral, a wagonload of food arrived early at our house. Belle came into my room with her arms folded. She always folded her arms when she was ill at ease.

“I’m real sorry ’bout yer daddy.”

“I know you are, Belle. Are you coming with us today?”

“No, no, I’s gonna stay here and gits things ready for later. I’m real sorry. Jest real sorry ’bout yer daddy.”

August is not my favorite time of year. My father was buried in August; the sun was bright and it was humid and steaming hot . . . so hot that I refused to wear black. A long-sleeved, deep-wine-colored blouse and a heavy, khaki cotton skirt were not much help deflecting the sun’s harsh glare, and at once I regretted not wearing the black silk dress destined for this occasion. I think it was an act of rebellion.

The premature funeral left me numb. The preacher intoned the service with a monotonous chant I’d heard so many times. Now, when I needed them, the words had lost their meaning. I had a sense that we’d done this a thousand times before, and I felt ashamed for feeling it. I couldn’t believe that this time, this service, this ritual, was for my father. Totty played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” I looked over at her glistening eyes. One of my father’s friends sang a hymn; his face turned beet red as he strained and stretched for the high notes. We had tissues in our hands, but mine was dry. I scanned the arrangements of gladioli, their smoky stems stretching, stretching like crooked claws. They were the most popular choice because they were the least expensive. I was weary of them. I hoped to never see another gladiolus.

After the service, the cortege made its way down Ninth Street, and in the polite, respectful tradition of some places, passing cars
pulled to the side of the road as we crawled to the cemetery. None of us spoke. Groomed all of our lives to be comfortable with the death of others, we were naturally uncomfortable with the passing of one of our own. We didn’t grieve more or less than anyone else just because we knew the rituals better than most.

At the cemetery, Rex stood at the head of the casket just as my father used to. I didn’t hear the preacher’s words, finding solace instead in the images around me. The coveys of women who looked like fluttering blackbirds gave credence to the old belief that black garments were thought to bestow invisibility upon the grieving, thereby protecting us from vengeful spirits. I’d always felt comfortable in this necropolis. I remembered days of skipping happily along the roads of this cemetery, and realized I would never do that again. The crape myrtles normally gave shady rest in the abominable heat. But on this day the sun in the cloudless sky spilled into every dark corner of the cemetery. The light struck the tombstones that stood near the freshly opened earth. The granite sparkled. I wondered if Bobby and Luther had dug my father’s grave. I forgot to ask. So this is how you buried an undertaker—just like everyone else. The difference was that our family knew each step, each station, in the ritual. We knew that Rex had excelled. After the brief lapse of the power outage the night before, every movement today was seamless, the attention to detail faultless. Our family sat on chairs in front of the casket, and others stood behind us, around us, beside us. Here we were then, the undertaker’s women, sitting in a row in front of him.