The Undertaker's Daughter (18 page)

When she turned to pass a book or a test paper, she never made eye contact, never said a word. There was no opportunity to study her face until she, like the rest of us, was called to the front of the room to read aloud. She knew the words and read slowly, methodically, plodding along softly in a monotone.

Her skin was flawless, smooth as anything, and swarthy, as if she spent a great deal of time in the sun. Her eyes were the saddest I’d ever seen, as if they were lonely for a friend. Her thin-lipped mouth was either a straight line across her face or slightly turned down. She never smiled. She had something of a moth about her, as if she would disintegrate into powder after a certain age.

Finally released for the summer, we escaped school by running out through its doors and directly into the public swimming pool. Fed from a freshwater spring, the temperature of the water was always take-your-breath-away icy, even on blistering, late-summer days.

At the end of this particular summer, I was surprised to see Linda Mayberry at the pool, located on the outskirts of town.
Someone would have had to drive her there and then pay the fee to enter. I imagined it would have been a special treat for her. I’d never before seen her there, but there she was, alone and quiet in a bathing-suit version of her dresses, faded, out-of-date.

The pool rules included a ten-minute break each hour. She sat on a rough-looking, old towel, her ringlets heavy with water, her eyes squinting into the bright sun. Songs on the jukebox, snacks, and other sunbathers soon took our attention away from her and we forgot about Linda. Midway through the afternoon we noticed the lifeguards were acting strangely during the break. We waited for the whistle to blow, the signal that allowed us back into the water. But the whistle didn’t blow again that day. Linda Mayberry was missing.

They found her at the bottom of the pool, tucked away in a corner in fetal position. She was curled up into such a small, little ball that the lifeguard didn’t see her until she dove in for the hourly pool check. The eleven-year-old wasn’t a good swimmer and seemed to have wandered off to the deep end of the pool and quite simply sunk down without a ripple.

My father was called and brought Linda Mayberry to our house. As was our custom, I was allowed to see her after he had performed his duties, before her family arrived and before the townspeople came to pay their respects to a girl they barely knew. Someone had donated a bright new dress, probably the first previously unworn dress she’d ever received. Mildred the beautician tamed her hair. This was one of those occasions upon which my father was expected to perform better than his best. And she did indeed resemble herself, the same straight lip line, the long lashes intact, but the quietness that now encompassed her was not her own, and death at her young age made her look artificial. Not since I had touched that first dead body years ago had I any desire to do
so again. I recalled that I had placed my hand on the lapel of the deceased man’s jacket because I didn’t want to feel his skin. Yet now, I had a strong, startling urge to touch her face, to kiss it good-bye. The dead face of Linda Mayberry was already haunting me. Perhaps because I’d gazed at the back of her head for so many years, on the day of her viewing, as I stood before her casket for a few short moments, I could not let her go.

The lifeguard on duty that day crumbled under the stress and suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. She never returned to lifeguarding, or even to the pool, and some say she never really recovered from what happened on her watch.

Linda’s death was important to all of us in that classroom. We were forced to admit that we were not immortal. Any one of us might be taken by death’s hand on any random day; our youth offered no protection. The silent babies that had drifted through my father’s funeral home through the years had been upsetting, but this was different. I knew what my father had done to Linda’s body to make it presentable so that the adults could view her comfortably and whisper that she was in a better place.
She’s here!
I wanted to say.
How can she be in a better place?
I was struck by the absence of children whose parents wouldn’t allow them to come to the funeral home, as if death were a disease they might catch.

It was harder now to forget about death, more challenging to walk out of the funeral home’s front door and leave death behind for a while. I thought it might be following me, and that if I looked out the corner of my eye, it might be there, waiting. Sometimes I thought I saw Linda again in the hallway at school, and in the window of her father’s truck. But of course, she wasn’t there.

 CHAPTER 7 

O
ver the next five years the funeral home demanded more of my father and so did Miss Agnes. Her confidence in him grew year by year. She came to rely on him for more than just a friendly face at the beginning and the end of each day. The elderly lady in red and the undertaker packed their bags and set out on a yearly pilgrimage.

He accompanied Miss Agnes on marathon trips to Southern cities where she prowled for antiques. They spent long days in his station wagon coasting along to New Orleans, Williamsburg, Virginia, and to the corners of Tennessee. For hours on end he shouted to be heard, and she shouted to hear herself. They strolled through grand antique warehouses and stopped at small junk shops, until the back of the station wagon was full to the brim. He arranged shipping for items that were too cumbersome and handled the deliveries once they arrived. One year, their eureka moment came when they discovered
hundreds of feet of black, wrought-iron fencing that had once graced an old New Orleans mansion. She purchased enough fencing to surround her own mansion. These long journeys left him exhausted, and he arrived home with his tie askew, looking haggard and in need of peace and quiet, but there was no peace and quiet at home. An undertaker is not allowed to be tired or to have a bad day. His voice mustn’t carry anything but genuine concern and professionalism, and he must be able to switch on automatically.

Miss Agnes permeated my life, too, in ways seen and unseen. When I was old enough to walk downtown on my own, I often saw her, a round, red dot as she approached from the north end of Main Street and I from the south. We converged in the middle of the sidewalk exchanging greetings while people walked around us. Sometimes, when I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her, I hid around the corner and spied on her as she studied the mannequins in Helen’s Dress Shop window, or I peeked into the hat shop and watched her try on large, saucer-shaped red hats. One day I followed her into Mr. Benchley’s Department Store. Mr. Benchley’s was the largest store in Jubilee, so it was easy to find a vacant aisle. Curious about her purchases, I hid behind stacks of bib overalls.

When she shuffled in, Mr. Benchley knew exactly how he would spend the next half hour. Almost any type of clothing item could be found in Mr. Benchley’s store except the red underwear that Miss Agnes required. Mr. Benchley stood by, pen in hand, ready to place a special order for her. She requested red undergarments without regard to Mr. Benchley’s sensibilities. “Three bras, six pair of underwear, a slip,” she thundered as if she were ordering a ham sandwich with mayo and lettuce. From the high ceilings
to the floorboards in his barnlike shop, the air held on to her voice.

We were allowed to leave the school grounds during lunch, and I often saw her sitting on a stool at the lunch counter of Elvis Perry’s Prescription Drugstore and Café. During mealtimes the odor of bacon and hamburgers overpowered the medicinal smell of the cramped shelves. The door swung open and a dozen of us descended upon Elvis and his grill. In the back of the store, the lunch counter offered only five or six stools, and Elvis always saved Miss Agnes a seat at breakfast and lunch. She dined in the company of the men who drank coffee away from the chattering tongues of their wives, wives who weren’t threatened that their husbands began their day with Miss Agnes, for long ago she’d ceased being attractive to the opposite sex. Years of eating in the few greasy dining establishments the town offered had added to her girth considerably. She carried herself as well as a short, round woman possibly could. She looked over at me, so there was no way to avoid a public meeting. While I waited for my hamburger, I hesitantly approached her. I was never sure if I should disturb her lunch, but she was always glad to see me.

“Well, hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee.” She rested her fork and knife on the green-and-white plate of half-eaten chicken-fried steak. I coveted her gravy-smothered mashed potatoes.

I leaned close to her ear. “Hi, Miss Agnes.”

She reached into her cavernous red bag and pulled out a fifty-cent piece. I thought she had hundreds of them because whenever she saw me, she gave me one. It was more than enough to pay for my hamburger and Coke.

“My father said it would be impolite not to take this. So, thank you, ma’am.”

She wiped her mouth and cackled.

“Here you go. This is for you.” I pulled a piece of paper out of my book satchel.

She once told me, “Poetry is marvelous,” so whenever I thought of it I copied a poem out of
A Child’s Garden of Verses
. I considered it an even trade. I tried to write a poem for her once, but it was terrible and I threw it away.

When I left Elvis’s, my classmates were on my heels.

“You know she’s crazy, don’t you?” Lucy Ann was dead serious.

Here we go again
. “No, she’s not.”

“My mama says she is. She’s got dead animals in her house and hides all her money under her mattress instead of putting it in the bank.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“ ’Cause I’ve been to her house, and if there was a dead animal in it, I would have smelled it.”

“What about the money?”

“What? Do you think I looked under her mattress?”

“You haven’t been through her whole house,” one of the boys piped up.

“Yes, I have. She has a playroom with a table set for a tea party and everything.”

“Tea party? What’s that?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s when you sit at a table and someone serves you Cokes and potato chips and cookies. Or sometimes, you can have iced tea in a teacup. That’s what they do in England, where it was invented.”

“What crap,” he said.

But I knew that when Christmas season arrived, those very
children would be lining up on Miss Agnes’s office stairs to claim whatever she handed out that year.

When Jubilee’s citizens tore November from their calendars, the atmosphere became charged with a month of goodwill. The less fortunate and elderly were attended in a more generous way as boxes of toys and food were distributed to those in need. Women tore through pounds of sugar and flour baking enormous quantities of cakes and cookies. Eggnog floated in thick, creamy pools in crystal punch bowls, and the whole town smelled of cinnamon and evergreen. Jubilee transformed into a picture-postcard twinkling fairyland.

I secretly hoped that no one died during the holidays, but couldn’t say it aloud because of the electric bill, the employees’ salaries, and a dozen other things of which I was reminded whenever I expressed that wish.

In the days of December the frost on Miss Agnes’s office window was so decorative it looked as if someone had painted it. Northerners misunderstood Kentucky winters; the humidity and heat gave way to icy roads and sharp, cutting winds that whipped through our clothes. Traditionally, during the Christmas season Miss Agnes’s farmers hauled a seven-foot tree up the stairs to her office. She collected unique tree ornaments from Germany, Austria, and who knows where else. The same children who filed into her kitchen on Halloween eagerly formed a line in her office to view the biggest tree in the county and to receive a trinket and a Christmas cookie, the cookies faithfully supplied by a farmer’s wife.

The streets were deserted tonight, and my father and I rushed from the car to escape the cold. Miss Agnes sat at her typewriter holding a worn, stuffed Santa doll. She never crossed her legs like a lady when she sat; her dress fell in between her slightly parted
legs. Enveloped in red clothing that did little to hide her paunch, all she needed was a beard and a Santa cap.