A Sibling in Always Part One Chapter Two

Just another regulation

A second handle you must hold

My Gadsden flag tricks some duct tape

Then something gets stuck to the side

An awful grate that I must fix

I tilt it back; I am so smart

The dulled blade is invisible

I fall forward then I struggle

   I wonder how long he will last. The last few gravediggers have been older men, most of them carpenters or plumbers who are out of work. Men who believe in making money by sweating and sore muscles. Others had been drunks: desperate and willing to do anything for money. They all managed to get it done, but even the most hardened of them didn’t last long. I have turned the spade on many graves. Grave digging was my first job – my uncle forcing me to do it through my teens, so I know first-hand just how hard the work is. I hope the new man will last. He’s not very tall. Neither am I, but from what I can observe, he seems to be in decent shape. That will help him. If the first grave doesn’t cause him to turn in his resignation, then he may be around a while. Normally I don’t help at the cemetery. I don’t typically like the other men my uncle hires; they always look at me suspiciously -- especially the old grizzled ones. I can tell they don’t know what to make of me, and they looked at me with a bit of old-fashioned distrust.

   “So you mean to tell me, you’ve seen weirder than this?” Mason asks.

   “I have. Several times. This one is more violent than most, but not stranger.”

   “What was the weirdest?”

   “It’s hard to say, really. I’ve seen so many over the years.”

   “Okay,” Mason protests. “This guy grinds his face off in a lawnmower, and you’re telling me that it is hard to say what you have seen that is weirder than that.”

   “It’s weird you are not running out of this room. That is strange to me. I’ve been doing this for years. Is this your first job where you had to be around dead bodies?” I ask.

   “It is,” he says. “But I have seen dead bodies before and not just at funerals.”

   “Where then?”

   “I witnessed an accident once. This guy was on a scooter and a car hit him. He went flying. The driver of the car came through the windshield. Both of them died within a few minutes. So what happens now?”

   “What do you mean?”

   “With the body? What do you do with it?”

   “Most people who do what I do just follow the process you learn in mortuary school.”

   “Well, aren’t we the cryptic one? I asked what you do.”

   “Have you ever been to a funeral here before?” I ask.

   “No, I haven’t but I heard about them. I heard they are different here. I heard there are people that come just to see the bodies, not knowing the family or the person who died. You know anything about that?”

   I see my reputation precedes me. None of the other people we have employed here gave a damn about me or what I did. Mason seems to be another story.

   “It’s just something that happened over time. I studied, I guess you can say: cosmetology, anatomy, sculpture. I even took some dancing classes just to get an idea of how the body moves. But, I guess it was something more than that. It’s not about just picking out the right shade of lipstick, so grandma doesn’t look too slutty. It’s about getting inside the bone structure. Really seeing what is there. But you don’t want it to look like Claymation. It has to be real. When I embalm a body that’s what happens. They look real. Most bodies are easy, peaceful deaths, but not this guy. The one we have here, he is going to be more of a challenge.”

   “I would imagine,” Mason says.

   “It’s because some of the facial bones are damaged, but it won’t be too bad.”

   “In all honesty, I knew some people who used to come here, just to see your handiwork. Of course, they didn’t know it was your handiwork at the time. I didn’t until just now. I just knew there was the little funeral home across the river where the bodies looked like they were going to get up and walk away at any second,” Mason says. “I mean, I know when I’ve gone to funerals for people in my family. Grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, others, well, they just didn’t look right. Uneven makeup smeared on their faces – their hands awkwardly folded.”

   “We run those people out when we figure out why they are here, just so you know,” I say.

   “What’s that like?”

   “What’s that?” I ask.

   “Having a skill like that? I don’t think that I have anything like that. Well, not think, I know I don’t have any abilities like that.”

   “I’ve seen your resume,” I say to him.

   “Yeah, I know. I have a Master’s degree.”

   “In Humanities, I believe.”

   “Yeah, in the Humanities,” he says. “So go ahead with the obvious question.”

   “Why did you accept a job digging graves?”

   “I’ve accepted all kinds of jobs. I’ve bounced around a bit -- a job hopper. I don’t tend to stay at jobs very long either, so don’t get too attached to me.”

   “I don’t know if that answers my question,” I reply.

   “I’m sure it doesn’t. We’ll just say I was always one to question contentment, and my education just reinforced that. Get to know me better and I may tell you more. Now let me ask you something?”

   “Sure.”

   “You can make corpses look like they are back from the dead, but you’re still going to show me how to dig a grave?”

   “Yes. They are specifications you have to follow. You also know you are going to be driving the hearse as well?”

   “Yeah, your uncle mentioned that. Mr. Parsons, I mean.”

I snicker a little.

   “Yeah, Mr. Parsons. You’ll need keys for it, and you’ll need keys to the truck too. While we’re on it, we should get to it.”

   Mason looks back at the body with the nearly severed head, “What about him?”

   “I’ll get back to him later. Cover him up for me.”

   The cemetery isn’t far from the funeral home. Mason asks me to drive. He knows Louisville well, but he’s spent little time in Always. Not that Always is a confusing place to navigate, but I don’t mind driving. The bed of the truck is loaded with shovels, pick-axes, posthole diggers – almost anything you can imagine to dig a hole. Also, stakes and rope for measuring it out. I’ll have to show him the way around the cemetery too. The old part of the graveyard is a nightmare, with no rhyme or reason to it, but since the 1950’s it has been a grid.

   “So, Horace, all graves have to be dug by hand,” he says as he exits the truck. He begins pulling shovels and stakes out of the bed. “Why, in the name of hell, do you have to dig them all by hand?”

   “From what I understand, that rule went into place when I was a kid. The mayor’s wife died and was buried here at this cemetery. While the gravesite ceremony was going on, there was a backhoe digging a grave the whole time. So the family is here trying to have a peaceful moment, and they are hearing the gears and hydraulics in a clunky machine the whole time. The mayor went to the council and began ranting and raving about it. Not long after, there was a new ordinance in place. It’s been that way over twenty years,” I say and extract some tools from the truck bed myself.

   “You said there were specifications?” he asks.

   “They are simple too. Three feet wide, eight feet long, and guess how deep?”

   “Hmm? Six feet,” he replies with a smile.

   “You guessed it.”

   “Okay,” he says. “Where do we start?”

   Where do we start indeed? I can still remember the first grave I dug. The whole time I was thinking about what it was: a hole someone was going to be shoved into until the end of the earth. Unless a road or a new strip mall needed to be built, that is. I remember my mother protesting. That was before she was committed. She never wanted me to go into the family business, I guess. She never fully stated it, but, in the only way she could, she protested every step I took in my progress.

   “I don’t want you to end up like Owen,” she said every time.

   “First, we need to measure and stake. I’ll be honest; you may or may not do that every time. You get a couple dozen of these under your belt and you may not need to,” I say.        “It’s also important you have it lined up with the graves around it. That comes more into play when the stone is set, but you want to make sure there are nothing but straight lines.”

   He begins to put on thick, leather gloves and motions to me, “What do those markings mean?”

   “That’s showing you the grid. It’s simple. If you look at that tree you’ll see a letter, and if you look at the corner of the road, you’ll see a number. Like this one Q18. Then, that is the section on the grid. I’ll explain it more later. But you want to make sure you are in the right place. It won’t take you long to figure it out.”

   “Have you ever dug a grave in the wrong plot?” he asks.

   “No, Seth would go ballistic.”

   “Do you and your uncle get along, if I can ask?”

   “Somewhat,” I say and pause. “Well, no, not really.”

   “I can leave it at that, I suppose. Who is going to be buried here?”

   The old man, I think. As a boy, he was our local mad man. He roamed the streets of Always, shouting at the top of his lungs. I was horrified of him. Like my uncle said, he used to be a doctor, but those days were well and over. By the time I was old enough to understand anything, he was just a raving lunatic. They say he lived all over. That he nearly haunted a place when he was there, dead inside and waiting for the rest to go. When he was found it was in one of two tiny apartments above a rather terrible restaurant. The health department had shut the place down more than once, and the old man had fallen victim to the rats. I’ve seen that happen numerous times.

   People die all sorts of ways. I think I have said that already. I have seen people burned and frozen. It’s odd but a frozen body will often come to me naked. Paradoxical undressing, they call it. Something about freezing and nearing the death-point of it makes people feel like they are burning up. They shed their clothes. On the other side, people who have been burned will often feel cold, as the heat is escaping their bodies through their wounds. I’ve seen people who have jumped off buildings in Indianapolis and Louisville. Their organs spill out into the body bags they arrive in.

   Oh, and it is not just rats. Dogs and cats too. I remember one occasion when a mother and daughter lived together. They took in any stray dog that passed by their home. The daughter became bed-ridden and the mother took care of her. Until the mother had a heart attack, that is. They lived outside of town and they didn’t have a phone. Once the dead woman began to smell, the dogs started to feed off of her. The saddest part was that the daughter and the mother slept in the same room. The daughter got to witness the whole thing. She died a few days after they were discovered. She had been drinking her own urine to stay alive, but she had also gone without her medicine. We took their case out of charity.

   In a town like Always, we mainly get old men and ladies. But my uncle has been building his business since I came into my own in the embalming chamber, now he’s built a cottage industry. You’ve heard of destination weddings and vacations, why not a destination funeral? Don’t think it will sell? I didn’t at first. You go to Hawaii or Paris for a destination wedding. You go to a little town in the middle of America for a destination funeral. But my work had become known. Now, we receive the most disfigured bodies, and I am to make them look whole again.

   “Just some old man,” I tell him.

   It is time to start digging and it is time to see what Mason is made of. With a name like Mason you would expect him to be made of stone, but he doesn’t appear to be. He seems kind and approachable. I assume there could be a certain acerbic quality that he is not letting out yet. My first few graves were terrible. I thought about running away. I remember being down to my waist in the thing, wishing it was my own grave I was digging -- the smell of the dirt and the worms I found in the soil. I would think how the vaults would someday rust and they would make their way to the coffins outer edge, then they would keep digging.

   Doing this for a living makes me want to be cremated.

   There were times I would imagine it was Seth’s grave I was digging. I would get enthusiastic and have to stop myself before I dug too deep.

   “I recommend you go around the perimeter first. Make the rectangle and start digging.    The grave should be a few inches taller than you and don’t forget the sides need to be as close to a right angle as you can make it all the way down, and the bottom needs to be flat. Don’t dig it out concave, keep it flat.”

   We work together for a few hours until it is done. Dirty and stinking, we load the tools back into the truck and then get into it ourselves. We head back to the funeral home.

   “Makes me want a cigarette,” he says.

   “You smoke?”

   “No. I quit a little over a year ago.”

   “Ah,” I say. “Never took to them myself.”

   “I want to watch you work. I want to see you embalm that poor bastard back at the funeral home.”

   “Always refer to them as ‘the deceased’ around my uncle.”

   “I should probably do that all the time.”

   “My apartment is in the back of the funeral home. I assume you are moving into the one over the garage?”

   “Yeah, your uncle said it was ready to go, whenever I was.”

   “He always makes that offer to people he hires. You realize it puts you at his beckon call. People die all times of the night, and he’ll want you to drive the hearse.”

   “Yeah, I got that part. We talked about it. I am on call five nights a week and he will take the other two. Seemed reasonable enough. He said most of the bodies are delivered by the coroner’s assistants anyway.”

   “Okay,” I say. “When we get back I am going to shower and change clothes then I will get to work. Do you want to run home and do the same?”

   “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to get your embalming room filthy or anything. It looked like you keep it pristine.”

   Soon I am about my work. Mason sits on a stool watching the whole time. He is quiet and respectful. I need the quiet. When I first start, I am nearly bothered by a piercing noise in my ears. I actually had my ears checked for Tinnitus once out of paranoia. When it subsides I am able to resume. Sometimes, like with the old man, I have nothing to go on. But for this man I do. His parents had brought pictures of him. In most of them he was alone, holding a political sign or wearing a goofy hat. They brought in dozens. In a few, there were like-dressed individuals, but mostly it was just this gentleman -- never a woman or a man who may be a lover or friend. Never any children. Just him smiling heartily and waving his sign.

   He had crooked teeth and dimly-lit gray eyes. His hair was salt and pepper and he looked to be in his late forties. All of that was gone now. Just the raw, red meat and gnawed bone is left. I begin by building the bones back. Mouths are always closed.

Now I am about it, and I am not sure what my hands are doing. I will just know when they are done.

   I don’t look at Mason the whole time and had almost forgotten he was there until I heard him speak, “That’s amazing, Horace. I am truly amazed.”

   “Thank you,” I reply.

   “No really, I am amazed. I don’t use that word lightly.”

   “Again, I appreciate it.”

   “I had a friend in grad school named Elliott. He was sort of like me, and he used to say he wished he could get paid to just appreciate things. He would appreciate this, I’m sure of that.”

   “What does he do now?”

   “I’m not sure, but I think he has a job in Louisville at an insurance company.”

   “I see,” I say.

   “I can’t do anything like what you just did. I sort of piddle at things, but I don’t have a skill like that.”

   “You’re educated,” I assure him.

   “That doesn’t make me able to do anything though. Education isn’t about doing things, per se. You did something there. Were you taught that in school?”

   “No.”

   “The worst part of education is people don’t understand it. They don’t know what it is about.”

   “Okay,” I say, pretty sure I know what he means.

   “But what you just did there, the way you just recreated a man’s face. That is something they can’t teach. You just have a gift for that, and you were lucky to find it. It’s like an art.”

   “A dead body for a canvas?”

   “We don’t always get to pick our medium.”

   “I appreciate everything you are saying, Mason, but I don’t know that I chose this.”

   “It seems to have chosen you.”

   I’ve heard this before. In some shape or another, I have heard this before. I have had bereft ask to meet me. They want to shake my hand or give me a hug, and they thank me, and I wonder what they are thanking me for. I want to ask them why they needed to see the body at all, but I know the answer. I know there are bodies I would have liked to see.

There are bodies I wish I could have embalmed. There are bodies I wish I could have seen into the grave. There are bodies I wish I could have seen just once, and in the meeting had the chance to say “hello” and “goodbye” in the same breath. And wouldn’t we all like to know who will be the last to see our bodies before we are laid to rest?

   “It’s time to go, Mason; it’s been a long day. The family should be bringing his clothes tomorrow. I am surprised they haven’t already. I know Seth talked to them about the coffin today, so things will be moving quickly. His viewing will start tomorrow. We have to be ready.”

   “Okay, Horace, okay. Good night, and again that was impressive.”

   I wait for him to leave and I close the door behind us. I walk slowly with him to the exit and wave good night.

   “Let me know if you need help moving,” I say. “I’m willing to help.”

   “I plan on doing it soon,” he says, “so I am going to take you up on that.”

   “Okay,” I say.

   “Good night again, Horace. One day I am going to figure something I can do that is as good as what you did tonight.”

   “If I can help you figure it out, I will.”