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.
He took the boy along when they exhumed the old Harmon woman after the family decided to rebury her remains up north. Coloreds from Red Row, they had gotten rich in Chicago and wanted to dig the old matriarch — the last of them buried in this part of the world — out of the South’s bloody ground. A coroner’s assistant and a great-grandson down by train and himself and the diggers had driven out there. He and the boy had ridden in the big squared-off Cadillac carved-panel hearse. When they dug down through the yellow, black, gray and red sectionated earth they found the coffin broken through — sometimes after time the weight of the soil itself would collapse the casing — and the body decayed away to the bones. They had brought the remains up in pieces. The grandson had gotten sick off in a tea olive bush. But the boy had been spellbound. He wanted to touch the fragments. A belt buckle, the lapis lazuli necklace she was buried in, were intact. The skull lay in its nest of white marcelled hair. Here and there bits of curled tissue like wispy fried pork skins.
She had spent the last fifty years in the ground. Since shortly after the Civil War when for a moment it seemed black folks might have a living stake in the world’s bounty. But that had been only a dream that faded in the hot sunshine of a Dixie June.
As the fragments lay on a white cotton sheet in the tinlined box they would be transported to Chicago in, the boy had reached into the box and taken the skull into his hands. The grandson, a lawyer from Cedar Park, had been too busy upchucking to pay any mind. But Oliver let slip a quivery whistle of alarm. A small outcry, smothered by his habitual discretion. The boy hadn’t noticed. He turned the skull in his hands, examining it. Nothing disrespectful, Oliver realized; the boy just wanted to study it.
“Boy,” he said, “you’d probably better put that bit of holiness down.”
The boy looked at him with a wise and wondering expression. His eyes were lighter colored than usual in one with skin so dark. They were almost hazel.
“Did they stitch her up?” he asked.
“No, son, the lady died of old age.”
“But what are these?” he said, indicating the scantlet seams where the skull plates joined.
“That’s just where the skull grows together.”
“When does it grow?”
“Inside the mother’s body, and later when we’re little.”
“We’re just a bunch of pieces, aint we?” He laid the skull gently back in the box. The remnants had a dry smell like unbrushed carpet.
“Why holiness?” he asked, getting to his feet. He skeeted the soil off the knees of his overalls.
“Cause the minister prayed over her,” Oliver said. The grandson was wiping his hands on a piece of shaggy green moss.
“What about the ones he didn’t pray over?”
“The preacher’d say they are on their own.”
“Aye.” A tear welled in the boy’s eye.
He was remembering something, Oliver thought.
In a way he was. His mother, fled into the wilderness, was always with him, the sadness was, but this sadness had spread out, like a creek flooding the woods, until it soaked everything. He was thinking about all those folks traipsing around in the world, falling over dead or knocked down or sinking into deep waters, who never had anybody to pray for them. These others — they had somebody. Even Mr. Buster Carrie he read about in the paper, knocked down by a heart attack as he purchased a pork roast at Cutler’s Butcher shop, or Miss May Wetherburn, whose dress caught fire as she bent over the stove to stir a pot of caramel candy, or Scooter Ellis, visiting from Arizona, the negro paper said, who fell off the mule he was attempting to ride and busted his head open on the iron foot scraper on the steps of the Masons’ hall; he expected that each of them had plenty of folks ready and willing to shoot prayers up to heaven or wherever they went.