The Undertaker's Daughter (34 page)

“Can’t we just find a cat that’s already dead?” I asked.

“Why, sure. There’s one on every corner,” my father said.

“I know of a big ole stray cat. She’s pregnant though,” said Mr. Whitlock.

“There you go. You can kill a pregnant cat.” My father sounded serious.

“How could I do that? I can’t do that. Can’t you find a cat and kill it?”

“Oh, no. You have to kill it. I’ll help with the embalming. But you have to kill it.”

“Can’t we just find a possum or squirrel or something that’s already dead?”

“Roadkill? You want to embalm roadkill?” My father laughed.

“Maybe you can run over the pregnant cat,” suggested Mr. Whitlock.

“I can’t run over a pregnant cat! Just forget it.”

Meeting over.

I borrowed someone’s ten-year-old butterfly collection that year for my science project. The butterflies were so old that a few of them disintegrated into dust.

If I ever had any lingering doubts about following in my father’s footsteps, the unsuccessful cat-embalming project put paid to that. Though their approach was lighthearted, clearly I was being tested. And this test, at any rate, I had failed.

T
he ritual of visiting Miss Agnes remained constant and I found it comforting. I still dressed up for our visits, and for once conservatism and fashion merged congenially. I slipped out of the bad denim and tossed a maxi dress over my head, grabbed a crocheted shawl, and arrived at Miss Agnes’s doorstep a seventies belle. Out of long-standing habit, my father continued to direct the visits. “Show her this, show her that . . . and tell her about the time . . .” Her eyes told me that she could still hear a little, and shouting at her no longer bothered me. She displayed clippings from the newspapers of various articles in which I was mentioned, and a few about her. I had grown fond of her over the years. We were content to be in each other’s company without the need of many affectionate reassurances.

By the beginning of the 1970s her squat, red figure was still an acceptable eccentricity in Jubilee, but outsiders found her too odd. She was curious to see the first indoor shopping mall, recently built in a town near us, and asked my father to take her. Miss Agnes meandered through the mall in her big red hat with her yellow hair sticking out at the sides, her arms and neck laden with red beads. She had not changed her appearance in any way for at least forty years. My father was sad and uncomfortable that people pointed and gawked at her.

Thirteen years ago he had taken her to the Jubilee hospital for the first time, and now, when she became ill in her old age, she would only be content in a hospital that was a forty-minute drive away. He drove back and forth every day, twice a day, to see her. He resolved issues with her nurses and doctor, brightened her room with flowers, and arrived in the evening with a plate of her favorite foods.

When she asked for me near the end, I entered her hospital room wearing the dress she had requested. The high collar and
long sleeves were virginal looking, and the white, eyelet cotton fabric floated to the floor. I came as close as I ever would to resembling an angel, and that was no small achievement. At the end of this frigid November day on which the sun never bothered to appear, I shivered in the thin dress. I fervently hoped that I wouldn’t run into anyone who knew me because I looked ridiculously out of season. Her private room was bright and sterile and quite large. She sat up in bed waiting for our arrival. It was the first time I had ever seen her without her aura of red. The white hospital gown softened her features and stole a little of the power the other, vibrant color had given her. A nurse rose from a chair and left the room. I stood beside Miss Agnes and held her old, spotted hand. During this final meeting it seemed strange to yell into her ear, but I bent down as my father had and raised my voice.

“Miss Agnes, you’re looking real well,” I lied.

“Why, honey, thank you so much for coming such a long way to see me.”

“I’ve brought you some cookies.”

“Let’s have one then, honey. Frank, you want a cookie?”

“No, thank you, Miss Agnes. Those are for you.”

She asked me to sit in the chair and I pulled it close to her bed.

“Your daddy’s taken real good care of me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her hair spread over her shoulders like a curly broom, and I thought she looked like a child who had deep folds in her skin. The cookie crumbled on her blanket; she only nibbled a bit. I wiped the crumbs away. I asked her if she wanted me to read to her; she said no, it was too much of an effort. We talked a while longer until she was noticeably tired, and my father led us in our farewells.

At home, I scrambled to find something she’d written, something to which I’d paid little attention at the time: a piece of paper upon which she’d typed a few words about Poe and death. The tingle of my first regret rushed through me. Now I wished we’d discussed her favorite story after the Christmas visit when she’d asked me to read “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Now I wanted to know why she was so attached to the story. Now, it was too late. I found the paper with her words typed neatly across the page; oddly, the ribbon had just begun to fade as she typed the last of them.

I read her words: “Somehow, I feel that I shall continue to hear the hushes, until the hush of death closes over me, as silently as the waters of the tarn over the House of Usher.”

What were
the hushes
? I hoped to discover the meaning of these words at the library. I sat in a corner in the back and read the story again, scanning for
hushes
, but found no mention of the word in Poe’s story. The hushes were hers alone. It occurred to me that she must have been talking about silence. Miss Agnes lived alone all of her adult life, most of it in the big house, roaming from room to room, the beloved antiques her only companions, except for the friendship of my father. The hour or so he spent with her every day in that house, the hour that I sometimes begrudged her, was the only time her house was not filled with silence.

A few nights later, the crunching of the tires of the ambulance on the gravel under my window woke me. The windowpane was ice-cold and frosty. It was so cold that the exhaust from the ambulance rose up in a fury and bathed both my father and Rex in a thick fog. The night had deepened; it was too late for anything but death. They opened the rear door and pulled out the gurney. I knew it was Miss Agnes even though a sheet covered the body.
My father’s nightlong vigils at the hospital had ended. Then, as they lifted the gurney onto the ramp, I heard a loud thud.

“Ah! Oh my God, he’s dropped her!” I shouted to no one.

I put my fist up to the window and hurriedly wiped my breath from the cold glass. They scrambled to put her right. I couldn’t believe it. Never, in all of the years, with all of the bodies that had passed through our doors, had my father dropped anyone. But he sure did drop Miss Agnes.

The next morning I rushed downstairs to the office, where he sat staring out the window.

“I saw you bring her in last night, Daddy. You dropped her, didn’t you?”

“Never dropped anybody.”

“I know. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” He paused. “I don’t know. She just slipped off.”

He’d already laid her out. He must have worked into the early-morning hours. I don’t know how he managed to embalm her. I wondered how he could. It would be like trying to embalm his own mother.

Inside the chapel I placed a chair close to Miss Agnes and waited to see if she was hanging about. Perhaps she’d be confused, or ornery about leaving us, but I didn’t feel her. As far as I could tell, she was gone. So engrossed was I in Miss Agnes’s change of state that I didn’t notice that Rex had entered the chapel. I jumped.

“Sorry . . . I forgot,” he said.

Rex was the most sensitive of men. He noticed all manner of things that most young men never noticed. He knew not to sneak up on me in the funeral home, since he knew I jumped when people didn’t announce themselves, even in daylight. He’d recently become a partner in the business. He was a self-motivated
man. Once, when we were away, he stripped the embalming room wall of its tired and faded wallpaper. He admitted he couldn’t stand to look at it another moment. He painted all weekend, and upon our return we were welcomed by the embalming room’s dazzling white walls.

Helplessly addicted to Cokes, Rex already held one in his hand this morning. His glasses slid down his nose and with his free hand he pushed them back up.

“Your daddy’s hurting. I can see it,” he told me.

“Yes, I know. He’s going to bury his best friend.”

“You know, before Frank made our partnership official, he asked me to go meet Miss Agnes.” Rex already had an undertaker’s voice, soft, with genuine reverence. “Frank told me that he wanted to hear Miss Agnes’s opinion, he said it meant a lot to him. So I met with her at the hospital. I was a little nervous; she was such a legend and all. But even in her illness she was a genteel Southern lady.”

“Genteel? Never heard her described in that way.”

“I know she was a hard-nosed businesswoman, too, but she was very cordial with me, very soft. It was a short visit because she was severely ailing at that point.”

My father walked into the chapel then. He had taken his jacket off, and in his white shirtsleeves he looked industrious. He held the familiar palette of lip colors in one hand and his long, thin brush in the other. He touched up her lips with just a faint hint of color. I’d recently been wondering about the purpose of all of this. Was it really necessary to see Miss Agnes lying in what increasingly seemed to me an unnatural state? I watched as he made her lips come to life. He’d called upon a small casket company to make Miss Agnes’s bespoke casket. I’d never seen a red casket before. It was hand-painted and made of steel.

“Is that velvet?” I asked him.

Inside, the casket was lined in white velvet, and a strip of red velvet bordered the pillow and the interior band of the casket.

“This was what she wanted.”

“Where did that dress come from?”

“Aunt Ruby made it.”

I smiled at the coincidence that my aunt’s name was that of the color of Miss Agnes’s life. “She would have liked that.”

My mother’s sister sewed the red velvet dress by hand and trimmed the empire waist with a red satin ribbon. Many people asked my father if he would make a replica of her casket for them. Could they place a special order for one? they asked. But he refused.

“There will never be another like it while I’m alive,” he told them.

During visitation, Beacon County’s farmers filled the funeral home in their Sunday best, and Jubilee’s citizens came by the droves, a few to pay their respects, most out of curiosity. Her lawyer, who served as a pallbearer, wore scarlet trousers. Red flowers of all types filled the chapel. Large and small arrangements were delivered in no other color. The room became a crimson garden, and flowers spilled into the hall and to other sitting areas.

My father graciously spoke to people who had never cared about her, who only stopped by to see what kind of send-off she would receive. Some were sympathetic toward my father and knew that when you spend that much time with people, they are your family and you grieve for them when they are gone. After the last visitor departed that night, he locked the doors, pulled a chair up to her casket, and sat with her for a while. Then he drove to her house as he had done every night for almost thirteen years and turned on the lights to deter vandalism.

The next day at her funeral many of the town’s aristocracy who had snubbed her and been snubbed by her were noticeably absent. Those Old Clan members who had tried so hard to gain entry to her home to cast their eyes over her antiques stayed at home that chilly afternoon when Miss Agnes was lowered into the ground beside her beloved brother and parents. At her burial my father placed a blanket of red carnations on her casket. That was the way in which their relationship began, and that was how it ended.

Jubilee’s opinion was divided as to how Miss Agnes should have handled her affairs. The gossip began immediately.

“Frank Mayfield got the whole thing.”

“Did you hear? She left him the whole estate.”

“That’s the only reason he did what he did . . . just so he could get everything.”

“If anyone deserved it, Frank Mayfield did.”

“Your daddy worked for everything he got, and more. Shoot, I wouldn’t have wanted to be at her beck and call.”

“What’s a man want with an old lady like that?”

“Nobody else would have done what he did for her. No one else would have left his family’s Christmas dinner table to take a cantankerous old lady a plate of food.”

“That Frank Mayfield is a con man.”

I was incensed that even one person in Jubilee could believe that my father had actually planned to inherit. Anyone who knew Miss Agnes was well aware that she could not be coerced into anything. Years later, I learned that she had been clear with him about her intentions early in their friendship. Fearful that it might fall into the wrong hands if something happened to her, she secretly deeded her house to him. Perhaps it was also her way of keeping him loyal, I don’t know. I cannot imagine that he would
have behaved any differently toward her whether or not she left him her estate.