All of Uncle Fred’s books on undertaking are lined up like soldiers on the bookshelves in his office. It isn’t that hard to understand how something works. You just need to know which book to open and read the words inside it.
He also has a book called Lepidoptera, and the pages inside are filled with exquisite color drawings of butterflies. Seeing the book the first time reminded me that Maggie had once wanted a set of mounted butterflies under glass that she’d seen in a store in Allentown. She told me about them right after we’d found out Henry would not get better. I told her the butterflies are killed to be put on display like that. It was a cruel thing to say, and she looked so sad, so disappointed. I went back to her a couple days later and told her butterflies don’t live very long anyway. And that I was sorry I had been so harsh to say what I had. She’s never mentioned them again.
I don’t know if I will show Maggie that book. So much has changed since Henry died. I hope she still thinks butterflies are beautiful. I think they are. We shouldn’t think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn’t be here.
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 smell like, 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.
“What’s inside it?” I ask, and I know she knows the answer. She just doesn’t want to tell me. I accuse her of not knowing.
Evie just shakes her head like I’m an idiot for not knowing myself. Or for wanting to know.
“Do I have to go tell them you’re in here?” she finally says, in the you’re-going-to-get-in-trouble way that big sisters are famous for. Except with Evie, she doesn’t want you to get in trouble; she just knows you will.
“Go ahead,” I say, more interested in getting answers than obeying all the rules.
She stands there a few seconds, no doubt contemplating what I’ll do when she leaves to go tattle on me. I might stroll over to that cupboard and look inside the tins and drawers and learn things even she doesn’t know.
But then Evie opens her mouth and says one word. I can’t tell if she’s gloating or not when she says it. I don’t think she is.
“Formalin,” she says, calmly. Quietly. Like we are in church. “That’s what’s in that tank.”
The word means nothing to me. She could’ve made it up for all I know.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I say.
She shakes her head like I’m a child. Like I’m Willa.
“Tell me what it is,” I repeat, and when she says nothing, I point to the other tank, the darker one on the other side of the table. “And I suppose you know what’s inside that one?”
Evie turns on her heel. “All right. That’s it, then.” Off she goes.
If I follow her, begging her not to tell, she probably won’t. But I don’t. My heart starts to pound inside me, but I take several more steps forward anyway. I don’t care that Papa might send me to my room for the rest of the day. Or that he might even strap me, though I don’t think he will. Since Henry died, Papa hasn’t threatened a strapping to anyone, not even Willa, and sometimes she sure needs one.
I want to know what takes place in this room, and I’m not leaving until I find out. It’s not until I hear footsteps coming down the hall that it occurs to me Uncle Fred might be so angry with me that I won’t be allowed to go with Jamie and Charlie to Hog Island after church tomorrow. Or worse, he’ll tell Papa he’s changed his mind and we’ll have to go back to Quakertown, where we’ll all be rolling cigars for the rest of our lives.
My throat feels tight and my face is warm from shame and dread as I turn toward the doorway and those footsteps. But it’s not Papa and Uncle Fred both. It’s just Papa. I wonder if Evie told all three of the adults where I was and it was Papa who’d said, “Let me talk to her.”
“Evie said you were in here.” Papa’s voice is soft and hard at the same time, like it’s wrong that I disobeyed but there are worse things I could’ve done. Still, it’s a strange thing to say. He hasn’t demanded to know why I am in the embalming room; he’s just stated that I am, which is already as plain as day.
“I want to know what all this stuff is for.” My voice cracks a little, the way it does when you’re about to cry but haven’t started yet.
He steps into the room to meet me fully in the middle of it and looks around. “I did, too,” he says. And for a second it’s like we are the same age. “I stood in here and looked at all these things, and I wondered same as you what everything was for. And I’ll tell you if you want me to.”
I nod.
“All of the things in here are used to make it seem that the dead person has just fallen asleep in this world and will shortly wake in the next. People have an easier time saying their farewells that way.”
“But you already told us that. What is all this stuff for? Why do you need it?”
“Well, let’s see,” he says.
We step close to the cupboard, and I can see now that the tubes and bottles and tins look more like theater cosmetics than stuff in a doctor’s office. Papa picks up a container and opens it. There is waxy paste the color of flesh inside.
“Sometimes when people die it’s because they got hurt,” Papa says. “It’s too hard to look at those who got hurt so badly they died. So, Uncle Fred uses this restorative wax and the other things here to cover up injuries.”
I pick up a little roundish stick with funny metal loops at either end.
“That’s a modeling tool. For shaping the wax.”
I point to a little brown box labeled Eye Caps.
“Uncle Fred puts those under the eyelids. To keep their eyes closed.”
I look up at Papa, imagining someone’s eyes popping open after they’re dead. “Why don’t they stay closed?”
“There are a lot of things about the body that start to change when a person dies and the soul leaves.”
“It starts to rot,” I say, and I don’t know why I say it, because it makes me shudder.
He reaches out to touch my shoulder.
“What’s in there?” I say quickly, pointing to the tall, shiny tank. The funny smell is coming from it; that’s certain. I can’t remember the word Evie said for what is inside it.
“That’s the embalming fluid. It goes into the body to make it look good for just a little while longer so that everybody can gather to say good-bye. It can be dangerous to work with if you’re not being careful, though. That’s why Uncle Fred says this room is off-limits.”
“Why is it up so high?”
“Gravity helps the fluid get inside the body.”
“You have to cut the people to put that little hose in, don’t you?”
“Just a little cut, Maggie. Uncle Fred fixes it when he’s done. You can’t even tell.”
Somehow I know right then the other tank is for taking out the blood to make room for the special liquid. Farm. Farm . . .
I will have to ask Evie later to tell me again what it is.
And then I ask Papa the question he probably knows is the real reason I’m in the embalming room. “Did someone do that to Henry?”
Papa puts his arm around me. “No. We didn’t need to wait to say good-bye. Everyone who loved Henry was right there. And he already looked perfect, so nobody had to fix him. Remember?”
Of course I remember. Does he really think I’ve forgotten? This is a room for dead people who need to look like they are only napping.
“Is Uncle Fred mad at me for being in here?” I ask.
“He doesn’t know.”
So Evie only told Papa, no one else. She must have whispered it in his ear.
We are quiet for a minute or two. “Is Mama going to do their hair?” I finally say, for she had told me she’d asked Uncle Fred if she could. It didn’t strike me as curious when she first said it, but now that I know more about this room, I’m wondering why she wants to. Mama seems different here in Philadelphia. Happier, if that’s possible, and that seems strange to me because we’re here without Henry, and Quakertown—where he’s buried—is so many miles away. This is the strangest room in the world to want to be in.
“I think so,” Papa replies.
“Why does she want to?”
Papa shrugs. “Sometimes we need things to do to keep our mind off other things.”
“Things that make us mad.”
“Or sad. Yes.”
Mama doesn’t seem mad or sad to me, but she does seem like something. But not mad. Not sad. Something else.
“Can I help her in here sometimes?” I ask.
Papa stares at me for a moment. “What for?”
“I want to help her. Hand her the curling rods. The lipstick. That kind of thing.” That’s what I tell him, but really, I just want to be near Mama. I want to know why she’s such a strange kind of happy. Although happy isn’t the right word. I don’t know what the right word is.
He is quiet for
a moment, no doubt thinking the same thing I just was. This room is a weird one to want to be in. But it’s not all bad, what happens in this room. I think it’s mostly good. Ugly is made pretty again. Isn’t that a good thing?
“I just want to help her,” I say. “I’m not afraid of the bodies. And I won’t touch anything I’m not supposed to.”
“I’ll need to think about it,” he says, in a way that sounds more like no than yes. “Come. Let’s both get back to what we were supposed to be doing, hmm?”
I ask him as we turn to leave what embalming means and he says it got its name from balm, a sweet ointment that makes a wound feel better. Like in the hymn. The Balm of Gilead. A balm that heals the wounded soul.
“Then why does this room smell so bad?” I ask as we step across the threshold and into the sweeter air of the hallway.
And Papa says he doesn’t know.
I guess I don’t mind not knowing the answer to that because I am not in trouble for going inside in the forbidden room. I’ll still be allowed to go to Hog Island tomorrow with Jamie and Charlie. And I might be able to help Mama do the hair.
Besides, now I know everything else about that room.
CHAPTER 9
Willa
Our new house in Philadelphia has three stories and there are two front doors. The one painted gray that faces Charlie and Jamie’s house is the one we’re supposed to use, not the one around the corner that faces the other street. That other one is painted green. It’s for Uncle Fred and Papa and the bodies.
I am not allowed to go into the funeral parlor when there are families inside, because Uncle Fred said they will be sad and maybe crying. I can go in the room where the long boxes are, but I am not supposed to touch them or climb inside them. The room at the back is the Elm Bonning Room, and I am not supposed to even touch the doorknob of that room. There are dangerous things inside that could hurt me. Maybe a tree ax or something. The dead people go in there to get ready for heaven. Maggie isn’t afraid of the dead bodies, so I’m not. If they got up off the table and started chasing me with their arms stretched out, then I’d be afraid.
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