Ginny Gall

He was not shown the working areas right off. Oliver’s experience led him to believe that the living so feared and hated death that only a special sort of person was fit to work in a funeral parlor. The first time he brought Delvin into the viewing room where the embalmed corpse of Mrs. Fretwell Jenkins lay in repose in double-ruffled collars, the boy cursed and ran out of the room. They did not have that many departed put on view. People usually kept their deceased at home after the embalming. Only the very poor, or those who for private reasons did not want the body in the house — some of those reasons being superstition, panic, hatred, flaunting of wealth, neglect or simple grief — left the deceased entirely to Mr. Oliver. If the truth be known, he liked to keep the dead close by him. Taking the body in hand, like a prodigal returned, he pampered and coddled the former person, bringing him or her into the gentleness and beauty that most lacked in their living lives. He wished for them to remain with him as long as possible. It hurt him to have to release them to the rocky soil of the Appalachians.

This affinity made Mr. Oliver one of the most effective mourners a departed soul could wish for and was one reason he had been able to build up the business so well after Mr. Mathis’s demise. He himself had handled the embalming of the not so old man, who had died of a stroke as he sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of vinegar pie. A tenderness had flooded him as he intimately handled the remains. Mr. Mathis’s sloped shoulders, saggy breasts, spindly hairless legs, horny toes, big speckled belly, his crisp private hair and tiny genitalia had fascinated him. He sat in a white kitchen chair alone in the embalming room beside the corpse as a son might sit beside his father waiting for him to wake. Oliver had no illusions about the dead awakening, but he felt in his vigil a sense of the enormity of death that was subsumed usually in his experience of loss when the embalmed and dressed-up carcass was taken from him. He placed his hand on Mr. Mathis’s cold hairless breast and did not move it for half an hour. He knew what meat came to, but he knew too that this heap of flesh was the last of what he could look to in memory. It was like a faint echo, fading gradually as he listened. As he had done for no other dead person in his life, he leaned over the plumped-out, yellow-skinned face and kissed his benefactor gently on the lips, thinking as he did how he loved him and also that the corpse needed a little more solution.

He had dressed Mr. Mathis in the suit he wore to direct funerals, an off-the-rack black broadcloth suit purchased by mail from Brooks Brothers in New York City. In the pockets he had placed the small gilt-framed picture of his mother that Mr. Mathis kept by his bed, a silver penknife, a small blue marble he had carried since childhood, a tiny gold medallion presented to him by the Negro Benevolent Society for his service to the community, a paperbound copy of Shelley’s poems marked with a small red bookmark at Mr. Mathis’s favorite poem, “Ode to Dejection,” and an ivory locket containing a photograph of a fair-haired young white woman, the secret love of Mr. Mathis’s life, unrequited. Mr. Mathis had been buried out of the Mother Holiness church over on Barlow street and it had taken all of Oliver’s strength for him not to break down during the service.

For a few weeks afterward he considered selling the business (that had been left to him outright) and moving away. But in the end he knew he was where he belonged. He wished to pass this experience and knowledge on but the child scooting around his property quick as a little roach was probably not the one he was looking for.

Delvin didn’t reappear until dinnertime. He smelled of tobacco smoke and his breath reeked of liquor like a loafer. “You are a foolish and wayward child,” Mr. O told him. Delvin grinned at him and said he might be but he sure wadn’t wasting his time petting dead folks. Mr. Oliver was ready then to whack him one and send him on his way. But something stopped him. Maybe it was a ray of late sunshine catching in the boy’s springy hair. Maybe it was an evening bird letting loose a frail sweet cry that touched his heart. Maybe a blip in his brain just then. Maybe only the sturdy-legged boy and the quickened light in his eyes. But he sighed and told Mrs. Parker to get the boy some food. After supper he invited him into his bedroom and they read the newspaper together and then Mr. O gave him a book of stories about explorations in the cold countries and the Arctic. In these stories were plenty of dead men, starved or bear-bitten or shot. Many different ways of disposing of the dead were offered. He thought this would help the boy to revise himself.