The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  “It was Salty,” Hildi said.

  “That was right after Van Gogh’s Irises sold for fifty million dollars,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yeah,” Morris said. “Right after the stock market collapsed.”

  Salty was a small-boned, flat-footed Tennessee Walker. Bart had bought her after the Amish funeral, and then Hildi’d thought she’d be lonely, so she talked her grandfather into buying the second horse, Stormy, a broken-down quarter horse. He’d made a paddock in the lot in back, which had since been turned into a parking lot, and when the city had sent him a notice that he couldn’t keep horses in town, he’d said it was part of the business, that he needed the horses for Amish funerals. So he’d been granted a variance.

  “It was sad,” Louisa said. “Bart and a couple of the conductors got the body into the buggy and Bart brought it back here, and then he went back to the station to get the rest of the family, a wife and two little girls. He brought them back here too. They didn’t have anyplace else to go. I fixed sandwiches, and we all ate in the kitchen, and they slept on the floor up in Simon’s tower. They held themselves together.”

  “The Amish don’t make a big fuss about death,” Simon said. He was standing in the doorway. “It was like a Jewish funeral. Plain box. No embalming.”

  “They must feel something.”

  “Yes, but it’s different. We’re all trying to find ourselves,” Simon said. “The Amish are trying to lose themselves.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Hildi said, struggling to get up off the sofa.

  “Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said. She turned to Simon. “Can’t you call Gilbert? He could take Henry with him.” Henry operated the crematory and sometimes worked as a greeter. But Simon shook his head. “Or wait for Able to get here.” Able, Simon’s younger brother, was a funeral director in Kewanee.

  “He won’t be here till eight o’clock,” Simon said.

  “Or take Morris,” she said. “It might be an interesting experience for him, something to remember.”

  “Whoa,” Morris said.

  “At least let me finish the story,” Louisa said. “We had the funeral the next day. Bart took the body to Hope Cemetery in the buggy, and then came back for the family. He let you drive,” she said to Hildi. “I remember. That was the first time you ever drove a horse and buggy. Probably the last time too. That night they got on the train to Kewanee. Bart never charged them.”

  Bart hadn’t charged them for the funeral, and Louisa remembered all the unpaid invoices she’d found in his desk when she’d started doing the books, and she began to cry. She didn’t think she had any tears in her for Bart, not after the last couple of years, but now they began to dribble down her cheeks. Elizabeth brought a box of Kleenex and sat down next to her on the sofa and put her arms around her. After a few minutes she freshened Louisa’s drink and then poured some white wine for herself.

  PART III: ELIZABETH

  Whom would I commission to paint this scene? Elizabeth asked herself. There wasn’t anything especially dramatic or picturesque about it—her mother-in-law’s tears catching the light as she sipped her whiskey, her husband and her daughter standing next to each other in the wide doorway that opened into the upstairs hall, Morris still posing in front of the fireplace, Alexandra patting her husband’s arm before sinking down into Hildi’s place on the sofa, a pair of Waterford tumblers sparkling on a silver tray—so it wouldn’t be Caravaggio or Rembrandt. Not Leonardo. It would have to be a Dutch genre painting, a cozy living room with a memento mori—a skull sitting on top of one of the bookcases. Not that this family needed to be reminded of death! They lived and breathed death. At times it was exhilarating. Made Elizabeth think about what she was doing. But it was hard, too. She didn’t want her husband to go on a removal just as she was about to put on the potatoes, didn’t want her daughter to go with him, didn’t like the way that Death trumped everything. There was Gilbert, of course, always ready to step in. Loyal to a fault. But there was something cold about Gilbert. He would never have let the Amish family get away without paying. Simon, like his father, let people get away with it—hard times in Galesburg after the Maytag closing—but at least he wrote the losses off on their taxes.

  Maybe De Kooning, she thought. Wouldn’t that be something!

  Elizabeth had come to Galesburg from Princeton University, where she’d studied iconography with Kurt Weitzmann, and like a lot of new faculty in her cohort, she hadn’t been planning to stay in the Midwest once she’d published her dissertation, hadn’t been planning to marry one of her students, hadn’t been planning to marry a funeral director. But then she’d met Simon, who’d swaggered into her classroom in the Fine Arts Center in his combat fatigues. He’d been twenty-three, older than most of the students, and she’d been twenty-seven, younger than most of the faculty. He was going to school on the GI Bill and working for his father. He’d been a “mortuary specialist” in Vietnam, and he wrote a paper about the failure of Art to stand up to the things he’d seen in the mortuary in Da Nang, in order to erase the images that he couldn’t stop seeing in his dreams. Beauty itself was impotent, he argued, and so were the attempts of Art to confront Truth: the Isenheim Altarpiece, Goya’s Third of May, Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà … they couldn’t shock you or numb you like a box of putrid body parts or a face covered with mold and crawling with maggots, the skin slipping off. Day after day. They’d been equipped to process 350 bodies a month, and they were getting almost a hundred a day. It was the only job in the army, he’d told her, that you could quit! But Simon hadn’t quit.

  And she hadn’t quit either, had never lost her faith in the healing power of great art, and years later she’d decorated his hideaway up in the octagonal tower, which she called a belvedere, with good quality prints—Lascaux, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Renoir, Pollock, De Kooning, and even a painting done by an elephant—so Simon would have something beautiful to look at when he wanted to get away from his work. She’d wanted him to see what she saw when she looked at Rembrandt’s Side of Beef or Pollock’s Alchemy, or a still life by Morandi, and she had wanted him to learn from Chardin to see the beauty all around us, to feel the emotional impact of colored pigments.

  She’d stopped short of framing them, but she had labeled each one with the painter’s name and dates. There wasn’t much wall space, just room for twenty-four prints, in columns of three, between the eight pairs of high windows.

  Now she was fifty-six years old, still attractive. One of her colleagues, a man Elizabeth had always admired, had propositioned her only last week. She hadn’t been tempted. She and Simon had been lucky in love. And lucky in their vocations. She was preparing a paper on a series of odd figures—figures that didn’t belong—in medieval and early Renaissance iconography, and would be presenting her paper at the CAA conference at New York University in the spring. And Simon—well, people kept dying. The phone kept ringing. And like Hermes, the Greek god of transitions and boundaries, Simon kept on conducting the souls of the dead from this world to the next.

  She had a pork roast in the oven. All she needed to do was boil some baby potatoes and make a salad. Without Simon and Hildi there’d be nine—she counted on her fingers—including the kids. Eleven, if Simon’s brother Able and his wife, Marilyn, showed up.

  There’d be enough left over for sandwiches tomorrow. Elizabeth and Simon’s son, Jack, and Jack’s wife, Sally, would be coming from New York in the morning. They were going to rent a car at the airport in Peoria. She went upstairs to speak to Hildi.

  PART IV: HILDI

  Hildi was looking out her bedroom window, trying to picture the parking lot as a paddock, trying to remember Salty and Stormy, when her mother snapped a picture with a new digital camera. When Hildi heard the camera click, she turned around and smiled. She’d been rummaging through a suitcase, which was open on the bed, looking for something to wear on the removal.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” her mother said. “You’v
e only been here two days. There’s no reason Morris can’t go.”

  “Uncle Morrie?” Hildi laughed. “Right.”

  Her mother handed her the camera so she could look at the image on the tiny screen. “You’re too nice,” her mother said. “You need to be tougher, stronger.”

  “I am strong,” Hildi said, flexing her muscles. “I don’t know why you don’t want me to go.”

  “I just don’t. That’s all. It’s not right.”

  “Uncle Morrie wouldn’t pick up a dead body in a million years,” she said. “Besides, it’s Mr. Johansen. Anders. He’s the one who sold Grandpa Bart the horses.”

  “I know about the horses. That doesn’t mean you have to pick up his dead body. Your brother never went on removals.”

  “Mah-ahm,” Hildi protested.

  “What are you going to do if he weighs three hundred pounds?”

  “He can’t weigh that much. Pop said he had cancer. Besides, Pop’s got the new Med Sled. He showed me this afternoon. It’s got a stairwell braking system, so you can attach it to something at the top of the stairway and just slide the body down without worrying that it’s going to get away from you.”

  “That’s wonderful, Sweetie. Now put on some dark slacks and a white blouse.” Her mother started to look through the clothes that had been piled up on the bed. “You need to look respectable. Like you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do know what I’m doing,” Hildi said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Maybe I’ll take some of your shortbread. Do you think that would be a good idea?”

  “Shortbread’s always a good idea. I’ll make up a tin.”

  Hildi tossed the Med Sled into the back of the van. She was eager to get started on her new life. She thought of the Oldfield funeral home as a place where the important questions got asked, if not answered. A place where people were forced to confront the great contingencies of human existence. At least one of them. She thought of it as a place where the spirit was forced to confront the mechanics of death—the embalming machine humming on the floor, like one of the little robots you see in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs, aspirating blood and body fluids into a drain that looked like a urinal attached to the wall. It was her first removal, and she was excited, though she tried not to show it. She was not afraid of the dead, and she didn’t think she was afraid of grief, didn’t think she’d be afraid of the grieving widow. She imagined herself taking Mrs. Johansen’s hand, touching her arm, reminding her of Stormy and Salty and the Amish funeral.

  The Johansen farm was five miles east of town, on old Illinois 34. Her father cranked up the air-conditioning—it was the end of August, high of ninety-three that afternoon—and put a cassette into the player, and they listened to Floyd Cramer as they drove. Hildi had never heard of Floyd Cramer.

  “Your grandfather loved Floyd Cramer,” Simon said. “He always kept two or three Floyd Cramer cassettes in the glove compartment. ‘On the Rebound,’ ‘San Antonio Rose.’ He was Elvis Presley’s piano player.” The notes bounced out of the speaker. Hildi’d never heard anything like it.

  “It’s called slip-note piano,” her father said.

  Hildi was just a little bit nervous as her father knocked on the Johansens’ side door. Mrs. Johansen opened the door and a big dog burst out of the house and put his feet up on Hildi’s shoulders.

  “Don’t mind Charlie,” Mrs. Johansen shouted.

  “What kind of dog is he?” Hildi asked, pushing him down and bending to kiss the top of his head.

  “Just a plain old farm dog,” Mrs. Johansen said. The dog sniffed Hildi’s shoes and then raised his leg on a pot of impatiens.

  The simple unreconstructed farmhouse kitchen was hot. There was no air-conditioning. The floor was faded linoleum and a box fan had been duct-taped into an open window. Mrs. Johansen hadn’t called the coroner, so there was no death certificate. The dog circled around and then curled up on a quilt.

  “I’m going to need a death certificate,” her father explained.

  While her father made the call to Sam Martin, the coroner, Hildi helped Mrs. Johansen make coffee—filled the carafe with water while Mrs. Johansen eyeballed the coffee into the paper filter—and got three white china mugs down out of a cupboard. “Get one for Sam too,” Mrs. Johansen said.

  They sat down at the table. It’s going to be a while. What will we talk about? “Would you like a piece of shortbread?” Hildi asked, taking the tin out of her bag and setting it on the table.

  “That would be nice,” Mrs. Johansen said.

  Hildi opened the tin. The pieces of shortbread were stacked like dominoes. Mrs. Johansen helped herself to a piece. “Real butter,” she said after the first bite.

  “My mother makes it,” Hildi said.

  Mrs. Johansen sat with her legs slightly apart, leaning forward and putting her hands on the table. She slapped her leg and Charlie came over and put his head on her knee. She put a hand on Charlie’s head. Hildi put her hand on Mrs. Johansen’s other hand, which was flat on the table. After about thirty seconds Mrs. Johansen pulled her hand away. “There’s a bottle of bourbon under the sink,” she said, motioning with her arm. “Would you get it out, and then pour me some coffee? It’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “These mugs are just like the ones we have at home,” Hildi said, setting the whiskey down on the table.

  “How about a game of pinochle?” Mrs. Johansen asked. “To pass the time.”

  Simon, still on the phone, nodded.

  “I’ve never played pinochle,” Hildi said.

  “It’s easy,” Mrs. Johansen said, shuffling the cards. “You can pick it up in no time. You play with a forty-eight-card deck. In each suit you’ve got two aces, two tens, two kings, two queens, two jacks, and two nines. The tens outrank everything except the aces. You just have to get used to that. Just think of the queen of spades in hearts. Or just say ‘ace, ten, king’ over and over. Your aces, tens, and kings are counters. You get points for them. You can win tricks with queens, jacks, and nines, but you don’t get any points. But let’s play a practice hand and you’ll soon catch on. You play euchre? You know what a ‘bower’ is?”

  Hildi shook her head. She got up to pour the coffee.

  “Never mind,” Mrs. Johansen said.

  Mrs. Johansen held her cards in one hand and kept the other on the dog’s head, except when she took a trick or laid down her cards. When she finished her coffee she poured some bourbon into the cup. She looked at Simon and Hildi, but they shook their heads.

  They played for fifty cents a game and twenty-five cents a set. At first Hildi kept reneging, but by the time the coroner arrived she was laying down her melds with a flourish and gathering in tricks right and left. She was almost sorry they had to quit.

  The coroner, Sam Martin, didn’t bother to knock. He came through the screen door, looked around, leaned over to pat the dog, which sniffed at his crotch. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said to Hildi, pushing the dog away. Mrs. Johansen asked him if he wanted to play.

  “Not tonight, Alice,” he said. “I’ll just step upstairs.”

  “I already cleaned him up a little.”

  The coroner put his hand on Mrs. Johansen’s head. “You didn’t need to do that, Alice. That’s what you’re paying Simon for.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s what he would’ve wanted. Keep the door at the bottom of the stairs closed or Charlie’ll be up there in a jiff. I had to leash him to pull him out of the bedroom.”

  The coroner went upstairs. Mrs. Johansen dealt another hand, but they didn’t play it. They just let the cards lie. Mrs. Johansen poured a little more bourbon into her cup and passed the bottle around. Hildi didn’t mind Scotch, but she didn’t see how anybody could drink bourbon. But she poured a splash into her cup anyway, on top of an inch of cold coffee.

  The coroner came down and sat with Mrs. Johansen while Hildi went upstairs with her father. Mr. Johansen’s neck and fingers and ankles wer
e rigid, but his shoulders and thighs were flaccid, and they had no trouble wrapping him in a sheet and rolling him onto the Med Sled and strapping him in. He was wearing blue flannel pajamas and his hair had been combed. His was the second dead body she’d touched that day. What is it like to touch a dead body? She couldn’t say. Just an empty shell? She didn’t think so, and she knew her father didn’t think so either. He didn’t have to say it, but a dead body was something holy. Otherwise you might as well just put it out with the trash. Does the spirit of the dead person hang out for a while to see what’s happening? She didn’t believe that either. But she thought about it, picturing Mr. Johansen’s spirit up in a corner of the ceiling, looking down. It was a large room with a braided rug on the floor, the edges worn where Anders Johansen had put his feet down when he got out of bed in the morning.

  They slid the Med Sled down a narrow hallway and around a sharp corner to the top of the stairs. “Piece of cake,” her father said. He locked the stairwell braking system at the foot of the Med Sled to a newel post so it wouldn’t get away from them as they slid it gently down the stairs. “Easier than carrying him,” her father said. Mrs. Johansen had put the leash on Charlie and held him with both hands while they pulled the body through the kitchen, out to the van, and onto the lift.

  They went back into the kitchen and sat down with the coroner and Mrs. Johansen to take care of the paperwork. The cards from the last hand of pinochle were still facedown on the table.

  “You going to be all right here all alone?” Hildi asked.

  “My sister’s coming from Peoria,” she said. “But I’ll be all right. Thank you for asking.”