CHAPTER 8
Maggie
I’m not afraid to see a dead body up close.
That’s not the reason I have waited until the embalming room is empty before sneaking inside it. I already saw that first body the day we got here, and then another one in the viewing room a week later, and another one the week after that.
Charlie asked me a couple days ago if I knew there were dead people in our funeral home. When I answered, “Of course,” he asked me if I was afraid of them. It was almost a surprise to me to tell him I wasn’t. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I’m not afraid of them. I don’t want to see a bloody, torn-up one, but I’m not scared of the ones that are just lying there. I could tell by the way Charlie asked that he is a bit afraid. I’d wondered if Jamie would be afraid of them, too. Probably not.
“Sometimes I have to help Fred move them,” Charlie had said. “Before your papa came here, I helped him a lot. If Fred had a heavy one, I had to come help him move it. I was afraid the dead man would reach up, grab me around the throat, and thrash me.”
“You know they can’t do that, right, Charlie?” I’d said. “You know dead people can’t do anything.”
“But they look like they can.”
When he said this, that was when I decided I wanted to know what Uncle Fred and Papa actually do to dead people to make them look like they’re still alive. When I heard Uncle Fred say to Papa that today’s a good morning to hang the new sign out front—which now had Papa’s name on it, too—I figured there were no new dead people waiting to be taken care of. The embalming room would be empty.
Uncle Fred doesn’t want us to know that’s where he gets the bodies ready for the funerals, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s what the embalming room is for. I just want to know how he gets them ready. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. I know what Mrs. Brewster, the hairstylist, does, although I heard Uncle Fred tell Mama if she wanted to start doing the hair instead of Mrs. Brewster, he’d be fine with that. But he and Papa do something else to the bodies. I want to know what it is.
Papa and Uncle Fred have gone outside to the front stoop with a ladder and toolbox, and Willa is with them to watch them hang the sign. Mama and Evie have decided it’s time to make sense of Uncle Fred’s way of organizing the kitchen pantry, which is to say it’s a mess and he has no way. I am supposed to be upstairs making my bed. It’s Saturday, so I don’t have to get ready for the new school Willa and I go to now, and I don’t yet have new chums to play with. Papa promises I will, but city children are slow to welcome country children, especially when you live with two undertakers and dead people every day.
It is easy enough to bypass the stairs to the bedrooms and instead take a left to the kitchen, and then down the hallway that leads past the viewing parlor and casket room, to the last door at the end of the house. The door is closed, and I knock even though I know there is nobody inside, dead or alive. I hear nothing by way of response. As I open the door, I glance back down the hall to make sure I’m still alone.
I don’t know what I thought the embalming room would smelllike, but I wasn’t expecting a mix of forgotten eggs and moldy onions and candle wax. One window with smoked glass and situated high up on the far wall lets in a sad kind of light.
The embalming room is about as big as a bedroom, but the floor is tiled like a kitchen floor. It looks a little like a doctor’s office but with nothing soft in it, no blankets or pillows or curtains. Nothing that makes you think this is a place where somebody helps you get better. There is no woodstove or grate or heater to chase away the winter chill.
The table in the middle of the room is made of metal and has big wheels with long spokes. A cart with scissors and blades and needles is pushed right up next to it. There are other instruments on the cart, but their shapes are strange to me. The big electric light that hangs down over the table doesn’t look anything like the pretty electric lights in Uncle Fred’s other rooms. This light is big and gray, and the shade is like an upside-down mixing bowl someone forgot to paint.
Along the wall is a cupboard. Bottles the color of coffee sit on its shelves along with tins of what looks like cornstarch and lard and brown sugar, but I know that whatever is inside them doesn’t belong in a kitchen. Next to that cupboard is a countertop. I see a hairbrush and a tray of creams and lotions and tubes of who knows what. Thick rubber gloves and an apron hang on a hook on the wall.
Close to the table and strapped to a tall, ladderlike frame is a copper tank with a skinny pink hose coming out of it that is looped around a brass handle. Another tank sits on the other side of the table. It is short and dark, with black tubing at its top and bottom. The bottom one leads to a grate in the floor.
I know the table is where Uncle Fred lays out the bodies and puts the suits on the men and the church dresses on the women. Mrs. Brewster surely brushed their hair with that brush and probably used those creams to make them look good. But I’ve no idea what the rest of the equipment is for.
I’ve taken two more steps inside when Evie comes up from behind me, making me jump, and tells me I’m not supposed to be in there.
I swing around, pretending she didn’t startle me. “It’s empty,” I reply. “There’s nobody in here.”
“You’re in here. And you know you’re not supposed to be.”
I’m about to tell her to mind her own business, but then I think she might be as curious as I am to know what Uncle Fred does with the bodies. “I want to see what’s in this room,” I say. “We live here now. It’s our home. Shouldn’t we at least know what Papa will be doing?”
“You already know what Papa will be doing. He told us.”
Now, what Papa told us when he sat us all down was that Uncle Fred helps folks say good-bye to people who have died by making their bodies look nice for one last visit. Papa is doing that now, too. That had been an answer for Willa, not for Evie and me. I reminded Evie of that.
“What does it matter what Papa will actually have to do? We’re not supposed to be in here,” she says.
“Don’t you want to know what all this stuff is for?” I shoot back.
But Evie has that look on her face that tells me she already does know. Somehow she’s figured it out or she’s gotten a book at the library and read up on whatever embalming is. Or maybe she’s cornered Papa and asked him when Willa and I weren’t around, and because she’s fifteen and I’m only twelve, she was able to convince him she’s old enough to know.
I suddenly don’t care if she runs back and tells every adult in the place that I am snooping in the embalming room. Maybe I’ll get a few answers if Papa and Uncle Fred come barreling down the hallway to make sure I’m not breaking something important or setting the room on fire. I take another step. Evie sucks in her breath behind me.
“What’s that for?” I point to the gleaming tank with the thin, rosy-colored hose coming out of it.
When Evie doesn’t answer, I turn around to face her. She is staring at the tank.
