The Undertaker's Daughter (12 page)

O
n a raw January night in 1960, Miss Agnes Davis turned out the light in her office and locked the door of the business she’d owned and operated for over thirty years. Adjacent to her office, the massive doors to her warehouses filled with fertilizer were already bolted for the evening. She climbed into her odd-job man’s farm truck and scarcely five minutes later thanked him for the ride and disappeared through the tall, white columns of her home.

She rattled around the spacious rooms of her antebellum mansion and turned on the lamps, fired up the furnace, and secured the doors. When all of this was completed, she reached for the decanter of fine Kentucky bourbon and poured herself a generous amount into a crystal glass. She thought of happier times, days unlike today, the first anniversary of the death of her only sibling, her much-loved brother, Urey. There were still a few things her wealth could not buy.

She stepped onto a red satin footstool and climbed into her imposing half-tester bed. The half canopy, covered in the same magnificently faded red satin fabric, was neatly ruched to create a swirling effect above her head.

Miss Agnes woke in the middle of the night feeling not quite right. The thought occurred to her that she might not have taken her medication correctly, or maybe she’d had a little too much bourbon. Perhaps the best thing to do was to go to the hospital. For the first time in a long time, she had a choice of whom to call. She could either call Alfred Deboe, whom she despised, or she could call that new young man in town.

My father, at this point only recently arrived in Jubilee, drove to Winter Street and pulled up to a beautiful, old Southern home. Not knowing his way around the place, he chose the front entrance. Quickly, he passed between the tall, white columns of the long porch and rang the bell. A short, rotund lady answered the door and introduced herself as Miss Agnes Davis. She was ready to go. She stood a little unsteadily, dressed as if she were going out for the day in a red coat, which was carelessly buttoned, carrying a bottomless red bag. Her hair was leaning toward one side. He’d seen this middle-of-the-night, disheveled look upon many occasions, but never had he seen it quite so vividly.

“Ma’am, I’m Frank Mayfield, and I’d be happy to take the cot out of the ambulance for you.”

“Speak up, boy. I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“Do you want the gurney, Miss Davis?” he yelled into the night.

“I can walk. Call me Miss Agnes.”

“Well, Miss Agnes, let me take your bag for you then. Here, hold on to my arm. We’ll take this real slow.”

During Miss Agnes’s lengthy hospital stay my father lost several death calls to Alfred Deboe. He discovered that not only had
Deboe reaped the benefits of the hospital administrator’s vendetta, he had also begun a campaign sending flowers, a dozen long-stemmed roses no less, to the patients my father had driven to the hospital. When the patients died, their families, who appreciated Deboe’s thoughtful touch, chose him as their undertaker.

Deboe’s steely grasp on the community alarmed my father, and it woke him from some idea he’d had of friendly, small-town competition. He felt compelled to do something, anything really, to create a neutralizing effect.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that woman I picked up the other night, Miss Agnes Davis. I’ve been thinking about her lying in that hospital,” my father told my mother one day. “We don’t charge for ambulance calls—sometimes we get a little money for gas—and that’s okay, we can’t really charge if Deboe doesn’t. But I’m tired of hauling patients around and not burying them. And I’m afraid she’s going to die on me. I can’t afford to send her long-stemmed roses, but I’m thinking I could send her some carnations. I heard she likes red—I could send her a dozen red carnations.”

“Well, who is she?” my mother asked.

“I don’t really know anything about her. But she’s old enough to die.”

Miss Agnes didn’t die on him. She called him from her hospital bed and thanked him for the flowers. And wouldn’t you know it? Carnations were her favorite; she didn’t even like roses.

“When I get out of here,” she roared through the phone, “I want you to take me home. It’s got to be you and not someone who works for you. I don’t want anyone else to take me.”

A few days later my father was at the hospital and thought he would drop by to see Miss Agnes. The nurses told him she’d not received many visitors during her stay. She was an intensely
private woman, and most people knew they would be unwelcome at her bedside. The farmers, her customers, would never dream of visiting her when she was indisposed.

But she wanted to see my father. He sat in the chair next to her bed and they spoke briefly. He told her where he was from, about his family, the brother who had died, and that his father had been a farmer.

“You are welcome in my home. I’d like you to come and see me when I’m feeling better,” she told him.

Later he discovered that this was a most unusual invitation. Miss Agnes was not in the habit of inviting anyone to her home. She opened her kitchen to her customers’ children one night a year on Halloween, when she felt like it, but few people were ever allowed past the kitchen into the main house.

In small increments of time my father and the lady who wore red came to know each other well. As every coin has two sides, so did Miss Agnes. One side, bright and shiny, spoke of her worth, although her exact worth was known to but a few. This side of the coin liked publicity, thrived on it even. She gave interviews to the fertilizer trade magazines at the drop of one of her favorite red hats. The town’s newspaper was welcome to photograph her in her office surrounded by her unique collections of farming implements, toys, and antiques. Her door was open to the farmers from early morning to evening, six days a week, and during the planting season she bought pies and cakes and delivered them to the farmers’ wives.

Turn that coin over and the markings weren’t as clear. When she switched off the light to her office, stepped down the steps onto Main Street, and made her way home, which, until the time she met my father, was in the seat of a farm truck driven by her single employee, she shut the door against the town of Jubilee.
Outside working hours she was a recluse, a loner, whose inner circle had dwindled to a handful of professionals: her doctor, lawyer, and banker were the remnants of a formerly active social life.

Over the years I overheard snippets of my parents’ conversation about Miss Agnes. Around town, a rumor here, a remark there, filtered through to me. In this piecemeal way I came to understand the woman who became my friend and benefactor. Of all the gifts she gave me, the one I treasured most was a box of letters.

I imagined her, dwarfed behind her massive desk, an antique lamp sharing space with her manual typewriter, her hands stained from the carbon paper she used to make copies of the personal letters she typed to her sister-in-law. In the letters I subsequently read she wrote of her past; her fears and worries and her generosity toward her brother shone through.

I found a dusty, old scrapbook among the box of letters. In it were clippings, notes, poems, and memorabilia carefully glued onto the pages by Miss Agnes’s mother, Laura. The mid to late nineteenth century was displayed and preserved in vibrant colors. The scrapbook contained mourning cards, vivid clippings of fashions of the times, obituaries of young children, and the announcement of their arrival in Jubilee.

I learned that in 1889, when she was four years old, Agnes, her younger brother, Urey, and her parents boarded the Princeton, Kentucky, train to Jubilee. For the next fifteen years the Davis family made their home among hundreds of boys. Agnes’s father, Richard, had taken the position of superintendent of the Boarding Hall of Jubilee’s Beacon College for Men. Agnes’s mother faithfully kept a clipping of the announcement of their arrival.

Agnes did not sit on the sidelines while her brother reaped the
benefits of living at the prestigious college. As a young girl she took lessons from a German boxing master, learned to shoot a pistol and race across the football field. If the boys ever got a little rough with her, she picked herself up and refused to shed a tear.

Her father eventually passed the bar exams and set up a law practice in Jubilee. As the Davis family’s fortunes rose, they moved into a proper house, where Agnes became a young lady in Jubilee town society, joining the literature, music, and card clubs.

With every good and honorable intention she married a man from her mother’s hometown and moved to Princeton to begin her new life. In a little over two weeks’ time, Agnes took the train back to Jubilee—alone. She told friends she came home expressly to learn how to make biscuits. Agnes never returned to Princeton, and her husband never joined her in Jubilee. She was either divorced or the marriage was annulled, and the reason for the change of heart will never now be known. If she confided in my father about her short stint with matrimony, he never betrayed her confidence. She would never again marry; neither for the rest of her life would she attempt to cook a meal.

Not only did Miss Agnes forgo cooking, my father learned that she didn’t find it necessary to learn to drive the big, black Buick that dominated her driveway. Her odd-job man drove her to and from work, but he was getting on in years and so was she. She was tired of climbing in and out of his farm truck, so she asked my father if he would mind taking her to work. No one walked in Jubilee unless they were poor.

Every morning after breakfast, except on Sundays, my father drove two blocks to Winter Street to pick up Miss Agnes and drove her all of seven blocks to her office on North Main Street. She sat in the front seat of whatever vehicle he was driving that day. At the end of the day, before he climbed the stairs to have
supper with us, he drove back to her office and delivered her home. He checked on her house, made sure the locks were secure, then sat with her for a while and caught up on the day’s news. In all, he spent
thirteen years toing and froing, and hundreds of nights sitting in the grand old house that harbored no television or radio, listening to Miss Agnes’s reflections and advice. I think he trusted her business acumen above that of all others and knew that it must have taken a brilliant mind and steely determination to become such an accomplished woman in an era that tolerated few like her. He was learning.

After her failed marriage, World War I broke out, and suddenly hundreds of young men made their exodus from Jubilee. Fiercely loyal and devoted to her brother, Urey, she dreaded hearing of where he would be posted. To her relief, he served as a first lieutenant in the Medical Corps and never left the States. As a psychiatrist, he treated the men who returned from Europe with shattered minds. Soon after Urey left Kentucky to serve in various hospitals around the States, their mother became ill and required constant nursing. Agnes cared for her mother for five years until her death.

At a time when Agnes naturally expected support and consolation from her brother, his letters became increasingly disturbing. Urey was shipped out to Alcatraz, the army prison that received the military’s bad men. He worked with the men in the Pit, the nickname for the punishment cell. A flu epidemic suddenly raged through the prison and he watched men die like flies. The conditions in which they lived and the death of so many weakened his own mind and constitution while he administered to those who had already lost theirs.

Agnes and her father continued to live together in the house in Jubilee. She noticed his new and strange behavior, but
thought it had something to do with the grief they both felt for Urey. She wasn’t aware they were living on the precipice of scandal.

It might have been secret card games in a back room somewhere. It might have been the horses in this horse-worshipping state. Whatever his poison, Agnes discovered that her father, respected lawyer and former treasurer and secretary of Beacon College, had a terrible gambling problem.

It got as bad as it could get. He lost everything, practically the shirts off their backs. When he became ill, Agnes stood by him and cared for him as she had her mother. When he died, she was left alone to deal with the fallout.

It wasn’t the selling of the family house, though that was as hard as anything else she’d ever done. It wasn’t even the public auction, though seeing her piano and other furnishings being sold off was a humiliation she would never forget. What really got under her skin was the scandal it caused. The eyes that shifted away from her, the whispers that were spoken just loud enough for her to hear, the friends who no longer came calling; slowly Jubilee began to feel claustrophobic and foreign. Certainly some still spoke to her, even remained friends with her, but mostly Agnes experienced rejection. Oh, how Jubilee loved its scandals! Quietly, the social avenues closed to her, backs were turned. To her further dismay, Urey never returned to her, or to Kentucky. He met a woman from New England who made conditions before accepting his proposal of marriage; she could just about stomach Florida, but would never follow him to Kentucky.

Agnes rented a room in a house on Ninth Street, a busy thoroughfare that ran from one side of Jubilee to the other. Her small, furnished room faced onto the street. She was hungry for the first time in her life and went without meals to pay her rent. Emptiness
burned in her belly along with her desire to one day better her circumstances.

She paid her rent by taking a job as a stenographer for an old Southern judge. In the evenings Agnes used the time to become the first female reporter in Kentucky for The Mercantile Agency, which later became Dun & Bradstreet. Not content, and hungry for more, while working in the judge’s office she began experimenting with another little side business.

Sensing a gaping hole in the agricultural-supplies market and determined to fill it, she began a study program. “Honey, I didn’t know fertilizer from talcum powder,” she once told a reporter.

She devoured every bit of available literature about fertilizer. She memorized it and practiced quoting long passages in her little room. A close friend advised her to get to know the farmers in the community. He told her the best way to recognize a farmer was by the mud on his heels. So she got out on the street and spent a lot of time looking for mud. When she saw a man who looked like a farmer, she stopped him and asked him for his business.