The Undertaker's Assistant

by Amanda Skenandore

  A couple strode past them. He doffed his hat. She nodded beneath the shade of her parasol. Adeline nodded in return. Neither she nor Effie managed a smile.

  “Please, chère. You must forgive me. These past weeks have been dreadful.” She grabbed Effie’s hand and cocooned it between her own.

  For a moment time seemed to slip back, taking with it all the heartache of the past weeks. What a comfort it was to hear Adeline’s voice again. To feel her soft touch. Smell her perfume.

  “Mamm’s not risen from bed once. Odette, Béatrice, and the others have fled the heat and yellow jack. Mr. Chauvet hasn’t called once since his party, busy with business I imagine, but—”

  The mention of Mr. Chauvet jolted Effie to the present. She yanked free of Adeline’s grasp. “Of course he hasn’t called. Did you think you’d have this little dalliance with Samson and yet marry Mr. Chauvet?”

  “Well, I—”

  “He knows, Adeline. About you and Samson. That’s why he’s not returning your calls.”

  “Nonsense.” She straightened and adjusted the tilt of her hat, casting her reddened eyes in shadow. Then she whispered, “I think I can manage a petite liaison without—”

  “I told him, at the party, that you and Samson were upstairs together. I imagine he witnessed your petite liaison himself.”

  Adeline’s jaw slackened. “Fi donc! You what? Have you any idea how this could ruin me?”

  “I loved Samson—his name, his modest income, his past—all of him, and you destroyed that. You destroyed your own life too. I only helped it along.”

  Adeline slapped her. The lace gloves she wore blunted the effect, but Effie still felt the sting. Not only on her cheek but through her entire body. Adeline gasped and recoiled her arm. Her eyes were wide and penitent. She started to speak, then flattened her lips around the sound. Her shoulders squared and eyes hardened.

  Effie too straightened. Their gazes tangled for the span of several heartbeats. Then Effie stalked away, half expecting to hear the tap of Adeline’s footfalls again behind her. Horses whinnied in the street. A steamboat horn bellowed from the river. An infant wailed. But no sound of Adeline. Gone too was the smell of vetiver, replaced now by rotting fruit and the lingering tinge of sulfur.

  Effie slowed, listening to the church bell toll once for the hour, then let the crowd sweep her away.

  CHAPTER 28

  Effie drank her coffee standing, even as it still steamed, not waiting for Mrs. Neale to set out the cream. Upstairs, the other boarders clamored about their rooms, soon to descend for breakfast. She grabbed a biscuit as soon as Mrs. Neale laid out the tray and started toward the door.

  “Got some fresh-made marmalade in the kitchen,” Mrs. Neale said after her.

  Effie only shook her head.

  “A letter arrived for you yesterday.”

  At this, Effie stopped, one hand around the burning biscuit, the other reaching for her umbrella. She waited while Mrs. Neale rummaged through the console table drawer. “That crippled man came by again yesterday. A Creole lady with him. Said he hoped you was well and to remind you about some meeting or other tonight.”

  “The ward meeting.” Effie had no intention of going and wished after eight weeks they’d take her absence for granted.

  Mrs. Neale stopped her rummaging and looked at Effie. “I told him you was well, but I reckon he knows, same as I do, that ain’t the truth.”

  “The letter?”

  She pulled out several sheets of crumpled paper, old calling cards, a length of dusty twine, before, at last, the letter. “Who you know at the War Bureau?”

  Effie plucked the letter from her plump fingers and turned for the door. “Thank you, Mrs. Neale.” She didn’t bother to add she’d not be back before curfew. Mrs. Neale knew. Though the yellow jack epidemic had begun to taper and soon Effie would need a new excuse.

  Outside, she opened her umbrella and hurried across the street before tearing at the seam of the envelope.

  Dear Miss Jones,

  I regret to inform you we have no record of any Negro soldiers enlisted under the given or surname of Jonesy. There are a multitude of soldiers with the surname of Jones, but none mustered in the Louisiana National Guard or Infantry during the timeframe referenced in your letter. Please inquire again with additional limiting criteria.

  Sincerely,

  Lt. Jackson Humphries

  Records Division

  United States War Department

  Rain pattered against Effie’s umbrella, dripping down from its edges. The wind changed and a few drops splattered onto the paper. She watched as the ink ran and words blurred, then crumbled the letter and tossed it into the gutter.

  Owing to the rain and early hour, the streets had yet to fill and Effie hardly had to raise her eyes from slickened pavers as her feet carried her to the shop. What now? For the past several weeks she’d done nothing but sleep, eat when food was handy, attend to her job, and search for Jonesy. She’d returned to that stifling room on the top floor of the statehouse and scoured the Freedmen’s Bureau records again. His name, like her own, was absent from any of the roll books, letters, and newsprint clippings. She’d written the pension office, the records bureau, even the state penitentiary in Baton Rouge. Where else could she look? It was as if Jonesy were a ghost, a figment contrived by her imagination.

  What, then, did that say of her? Besides the misspelled name of a slave girl on a bill of sale and her own corporeal form, what proof was there of her own existence?

  When Effie reached the shop, the door was already unlocked and the showroom lamps lit. Fog rimmed the windows, but she could make out Mr. Whitmark and two other gentlemen inside. She entered through the carriageway, stamping the mud from her boots and shaking out her soggy hem. The linen she’d washed and hung the night before drooped sodden from the clothesline stretched across the courtyard. Of course, Mr. Whitmark hadn’t the presence of mind to take it down before heading to bed.

  She’d trodden light around him since the incident at the morgue, arriving early to perform her chores about the shop before he was up, or waiting until he’d locked the doors and gone to supper before balancing the ledgers and inventorying the supplies. They no longer discussed the dead as they had in the early days—which artery she’d chosen, how much fluid had been needed, what peculiarities made the procedure difficult. Indeed, they hardly spoke at all.

  She started for the storeroom when the men’s voices inside the shop caught her ear.

  “Mr. Ellis will be so pleased,” one of the men said. “It’s looking to be a tight race and a luncheon is just the sort of thing we need to galvanize support.”

  “Have you any thoughts on the menu?” the second man said.

  “Plan whatever you like. Duck, crab cakes, gumbo. I don’t give a deuce. Just have the club send over the invoice.” Mr. Whitmark’s voice came clipped and thin.

  Though she’d stopped attending the ward meetings, Effie still read the papers. Surely they weren’t talking about Nathaniel Ellis, the Democratic challenger for statehouse here in ward three.

  “Leave all the details to us,” the first man said.

  There was a shuffle of footfalls and jangle of the front door opening.

  “By chance, will your brother be in attendance?” the man asked. “He and Mr. Ellis fought side by side in the Great Struggle, did they not?”

  Even from the loggia, Effie could hear Mr. Whitmark’s sigh. “I’ll be sure to invite him.”

  Both men thanked him and bade him good day.

  She leaned against the stucco wall and watched the rain fall in the courtyard. How had the world turned so topsy-turvy in the eight months since she’d arrived? Mr. Ellis was a known and vocal White League member. He’d written letters to the Picayune encouraging hotels and ice-cream parlors and saloons to disregard the civil rights bill and refuse service to Negroes, offering to pay whatever fines the Usurper’s government leveed. He called for a return to the days of star cars when the st
reetcars had been segregated and Negroes could ride only those marked with a star. “Freedmen need a steady, shepherding hand to guide them back to their place,” the papers quoted him as saying.

  This was the man Mr. Whitmark was helping elect?

  “Effie.”

  His voice gave her a start. She flinched and straightened.

  “525 St. Ann Street. Dropsy. I’ll send Colm with the cooling board when he arrives.”

  For the span of several heartbeats, Effie just stood there, her gaze lost in the damp sheets ruffling in the wind. Rain pinged against the pavers and tile roof above. The clouds seemed so low they might suffocate them. Mr. Whitmark cleared his throat. She startled again and nodded.

  She was halfway down the carriageway, her hands laden with supplies, the hook of her umbrella wedged in her armpit, when he called to her again. “Effie, boil me some coffee before you go.”

  Her muscles clenched and she exhaled. Colm, who’d newly arrived, loitered by the gate, finishing his cigarette. He took a drag and shook his head. “You look about as lively as a corpse this morning.”

  Another exhale. She started to turn back to the kitchen, but his voice stopped her.

  “Off with ya.” He ground his cigarette into the stucco wall. “I’ll fetch his lordship the coffee.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Mr. Whitmark dispatched her to yet another dropsy case. She’d stayed busy during the intervening days with two more yellow jack deaths and a woman lost to childbed fever. Her feet ached before even arriving at the small cottage in the Marigny, the soles of her boots already starting to wear thin. She’d passed within a block of Mrs. Carrière’s home on her way, and kept her head down lest she spot her among the morning crowd.

  Distance, she reminded herself, even as her ears strained to pick out Mrs. Carrière’s voice or Jonah’s carefree laugh amid the street’s banter. She’d spent nearly every day of her remembrance alone—even those days in the company of Captain and Mrs. Kinyon. It ought to be easy to return to such a life. Damn her ears, her wistful heart and weak constitution. Damn herself for ever falling out of practice.

  She mounted the whining steps of her destination and rapped lightly on the door. A middle-aged woman answered, her graying hair pulled taut in a low bun. Beneath her sagging, sallow skin, the planes of her face were arrestingly familiar. Sharp jutting chin, peaked nose bridge, tall forehead. Effie found herself gaping, her hands sticky and pulse pounding.

  “Oui?” the woman said, her voice hard and raspy. Other words, vilaine négresse and diseased as ta mamm, rang in Effie’s mind.

  An impatient stamp of the woman’s foot jolted Effie to attention. She dropped her gaze.

  “Miss Jones, missus—er—ma’am. With Whitmark Undertaking.”

  The woman humphed and turned back into the house, leaving the door open for Effie to follow. With each step she took through the parlor toward the bedroom, Effie’s nerves wound tighter. The house smelled of summer mold and old furniture. Today Colm had arrived before her and draped the mirrors and portraits in black crepe. The arms of the mantel clock sat fixed at twelve to midnight. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Why then did her every muscle itch to run?

  Inside the bedroom, she laid out her supplies on the dressing table. Colm had set up the cooling table by the window and moved the body over from the bed. She smoothed back the covers with a shaky hand and turned to regard the body. Disease had ravaged this man before death—bloating his arms and legs into elephantine appendages. His skin was stretched and shiny, his abdomen round as a globe. But it was his face, gaunt and whiskered, she couldn’t look away from.

  An image flashed before her mind’s eye: this very same face, younger and backlit in blinding sunlight. She reached out to the body. Closed the gaping mouth. Peeled back an eyelid to reveal a brown iris. Recoiled.

  Yes, this was the same man.

  Effie’s knees went soft. She shuffled backward and sat on the bed. The stench of this man struck her. Shit and urine and several days’ worth of decay. But he had only died last night, and likely hadn’t pissed in days on account of the dropsy. Still, the smell was everywhere. In the air. On her skin, her clothes, her hair. She closed her eyes, but not even the blackness brought her calm.

  Her mind’s vision adjusted to the dark, and though she could feel the lumpy, moss-filled mattress beneath her, she was in a shed. The shed she’d remembered from before. In the light that stole between the wood siding, she saw her mother. Her beautiful, frail mother.

  “Viens-ici, Effie. Come here.” Her trembling hand smoothed down Effie’s unbound hair. “Mon petit oiseau. Mon coeur.” She gathered Effie up in her gaunt arms and rocked her while she hummed.

  Too soon the humming stopped and the memory crept onward. No more light through the siding. Her mother stiff now and sleeping. Too tired to wake and play. How could she sleep with her eyes wide like that?

  The glow of sunlight came again, brightest beneath the locked door. Maman sleeping still. Eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. Dull. Hazy.

  Effie lay down on the dirt floor beside her. How cold her skin was. How damp and sticky. She pulled her mother’s arm around her and said her name over and over that she might wake.

  Maman.

  Maman.

  Maman.

  Effie opened her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself. Her entire body shook. In the quiet of this man’s bedroom, she could hear the moans and retching that had preceded her mothers’ stillness. The tang of vomit and diarrhea stronger now than the scent of death. Effie slipped from the bed onto the carpeted floor. Sweat clung to her forehead, even as her skin prickled with a chill.

  All these months of searching for her past, her family, and here it was. Her master stiff upon the cooling table. Her mistress shuffling about in the next room. The memory of her mother in some lightless shack. Sick, dying, dead.

  Effie gasped as if her windpipe had narrowed to a thread. She clawed at her collar until the button popped free. It bounced and rolled over the floor, wobbling to a stop beneath the cooling table. Now, at least, she could breathe.

  Minutes passed—they must have—though the mantel clock in the parlor remained silent. Effie’s chill warmed into a fire. Her muscles hardened. She rose and walked to the dressing table, studying her tools. Instead of picking up the trocar to tap the excess fluid bloating the body, she grabbed her scalpel. She ripped the dead man’s thin nightshirt from hem to collar, laying bare his grotesque body. His belly button protruded like a tumor. His manhood hung shriveled between his bulbous legs.

  Effie raised her scalpel and slashed at the femoral artery in his inner thigh. No care and little forethought to the cut. The sharp blade sliced easily through his skin, fat, and veins. Milk-white fluid oozed from the tissue. She slashed at him again. And again. Deep, ragged, ugly. The opposite femoral. The inside of his arms and armpits to get the brachial and axillary too. Not one cut but several, eviscerating the arteries.

  She remembered now. All of it. The little farm just outside the city. Her mother’s sweet voice and gentle touch. Her mournful humming. The shed they slept in at the edge of the yard. Hot in the summer. Frigid in the winter. Too close to the outhouse to escape the flies and smell. Another slave shared the shed, a man as old and twisted as the oak that shaded the yard. But Massa came some nights too and slept beside her mother for a spell.

  He and the old slave had been in town when her mother fell ill. Missus was all too happy to lock them in their shed, claiming she feared the pestilence would spread.

  “L’enfant never cried for help,” she’d said when Massa returned from town some three or four days later and unlocked the shed. “How could I have known?”

  But why would Effie cry out—a girl no older than four, excused from her dawn-to-dusk chores, in the company of the one person who’d truly loved her?

  Effie reached the man’s gizzard-like neck and stopped. Milky, blood-tinged fluid slickened her hands and splattered her sleeves.
She used his nightshirt as a rag and wiped clean her fingers before making her final cuts. These were steady, careful. She sliced through the skin on either side of his windpipe to reveal his twin carotids. Then she turned the plane of her blade parallel to the artery and cut downward, filleting the vessel in two.

  Her hands no longer trembled. Her skin had cooled. The harrowing smells and sounds and sensations had folded back into memory. She cleaned her blade on the nightshirt and packed it into her embalming cabinet.

  Mr. Whitmark would arrive soon to discuss casket and funeral options with her missus. Undoubtedly he’d stop in to check on Effie’s progress, sour-faced and silent, as he oft did since the morgue. Best be gone before then.

  She grabbed her needle and thread and sewed up the incisions with quick, uneven stitches. His wife had laid out a fresh set of clothes and Effie dressed him, not bothering to align the buttons or straighten his necktie.

  Hard to say when Mr. Whitmark would notice she’d not injected any preserving fluid. An astute embalmer would realize right away from the color of the skin and softness of the body. But Mr. Whitmark mightn’t notice for hours. If he had Colm straighten the body after they moved it into the parlor, longer still.

  Likely tomorrow the smell would alert them. Her missus first, when she awoke.

  Effie packed up her embalming cabinet and closed the latch. The other supplies—the fluid and those in the dressing case—technically belonged to Whitmark and she would leave. She also left his button, shined back to its original splendor, resting on the cooling table beside the body. Of all the buttons to have stowed in her pocket that morning, what great portent it should be his.

  Before lowering the curtain over the cooling table, she glanced again at the man’s gaunt, bewhiskered face. She had his wide-set eyes and chubby earlobes. Her fingers clenched around the velvet. The silk tassels quivered. Would that she could cut those features from his face. Or her own. But she’d already cleaned her scalpel and the idea of unpacking it again seemed more laborious than a day’s hard labor.