Chapter 16: Where There's Smoke....
Written July 7,1998.
Every town has to have one.
It's an interesting occupation, undertaking. Devoting your life to
the service of the dead. Not for the seeker of approval. The
satisfaction rating from your clients is nil. The return business is
non-existant. Every customer is a one-off.
Undertakers seem by definition to be quiet, refined, retiring people
with a penchant for dark clothes, frock coats and tall hats.
Now consider the antithesis of all the foregoing.
Heironymus J. Whitehouse had spent a considerable portion of his
early life as a Mississippi river-boat gambler. He had then toured
as barker for the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show, emulating the
famous Bill in dress, hair and beard-style and mannerisms. Selbyville's undertaker.
Now unless an area is quite large, there really isn't enough
shuffling off of the mortal coil amongst the local community to
justify a full time go-between, so in a lot of smaller communities
the undertaker also has to work at a different occupation to keep
his own body and soul from parting company and therefore requiring
his own services. This is a bit like the old saying "Physician, heal
thyself", but harder.
Whitehouse also delighted in the position of Justice of the Peace.
So between keeping records for the state, marrying folks that were
too close to the imminent state of parenthood to be hitched by the
Reverend Jeremiah Little, witnessing, stamping and dispatching,
Heironymus Whitehouse kept body and soul in close and well-fed
proximity.
Now a close relationship has to of neccessity develop between an
undertaker and a man of the cloth.
Jeremiah Little was the epitome of the funereal parson.
However, Whitehouse took over. He would enter the premises of the
remains and kin with his silver topped ebony cane under his arm,
pulling his leather gloves from his manicured hands, slap the male
mourner on the back so hard in greeting that in at least one case a
set of teeth minus their owner planted a kiss on the cheek of the
corpse, enfold the female mourner to his huge chest in combined
comforting hug and grope, pat the children on the head to the point
of whiplash, all the while declaiming homilies on the foul weather,
the stock prices, the gastric side-effects of lunch and what a shame
that
(insert name here) had passed away because only this very week
(he/she) had promised to
(pay back the money/buy the next round/
return the sundry borrowed item/lend $20).
It happened that that winter a bitter bout of flu attacked the
valley, resisting all efforts on the part of Dr. Bill Johnstone to
combat it. It laid the community low with half the poulation in
their beds and the other half tending them. For the first time in
its history the Toenail Ridge Shortline cancelled trips due to lack
of staff. Fortunately, while many people ailed, this particular
strain was not the virulent one that caused death by the thousands
in the late teens, so while many were cold, few were frozen in a
manner of speaking. But one lonely itinerant, resident in the
hotel, succumbed to the virus. He had lain in fever and ague for a
number of days before Lois and the hotel staff had appreciated his
absence, and when Richardo used his pass-key to enter the room, the
poor fellow was on his last legs. (Well, actually, he wasn't, he was
flat on his back, but that's the way the figure of speech goes.)
Needless to say, they got the good doctor in to see to the patient,
but to no avail.
So it came that Whitehouse was summoned in his official capacity, to
take care of the arrangements and see that the proprieties were
observed. (Up to the limit of the contents of the stranger's wallet
contents, of course. No point in going overboard on these things.)
Well, unfortunately, it turned out that when Sheriff Dillon went
through the young fellow's belongings, one of the things he seemed
to have possessed in large quantities during his brief life was
absence of cash. Now a finding like that doesn't put a smile on the
normally rubicund and beaming countenance of the undertaker.
Usually in these circumstances the sale of the chattels of the late
individual will help recover some costs, but it seems that not only
had this poor lad not given a true name when he registered at the
hotel, he hadn't paid his account up to date either, so any chattels
that may have put him snug in the ground went into Richardo's poker
fund instead, to offset the room & board bill.
Sheriff Dillon sent telegrams via the Toenail Ridge Shortline wire
to Rowel and even as far as Portland and Seattle, trying to
ascertain the identity of their visitor, but all to no avail. A lot
of communities have a special place to bury indigents, it's called a
Potter's Field. Lots of folks think that it's called that after some
reference in the Bible, to do with 30 pieces of silver and so forth,
but the truth is, it got to be known by that name because the
eventual residents were there because they didn't have a pot to do
the neccessary in, or a window to pitch it out.
Well Heironymus Whitehouse was not about to put some no-payer in a
proper coffin, certainly not if he was doing it at his and the good
towns-folk's expense. And he certainly wasn't going to pay the
grave-digger, drunken old Billie Carter, to dig a proper hole when
nothing would come out of it. So there! Humph.
Whitehouse had a few words in the ear of the carpenter, old Dave
Munzbuck. One thing an undertaker
never has to deal with is client complaints.
It didn't take the carpenter too long to select the ideal crate and
transport it to his workshop where he sealed it, sanded down the
rougher planks, hinged a lid, and stained it in old coffee grounds
and axle grease.
Most of the local folks were still poorly from the flu by the time
that the funeral for the itinerant came around, but in an era and
area where entertainment was what you could produce yourself, a
considerable number of locals managed to show up for the send-off.
Heironymus J. Whitehouse had arranged for Chilly John from the
General Store to pick up the loaded crate from his premises, using
the horse and cart more usually employed in the delivery of grocery
staples and furniture. CJ didn't mind the extra few dollars he
occasionally earned acting as hearse hossler and he arrived in
plenty of time to fulfill his task at the rear of the funeral
parlour. Clay helped with loading the crate and CJ set off up the
hill to the church of Little's.
Unfortunately, the one flaw in CJ's arrangement with Whitehouse and
the cart was that the cart's owner, Michael Cotton, didn't know
about it. Normally, Cotton didn't spare a thought for his
brother-in-law CJ from one end of the day to the other provided he
was available if needed around the General Store. But by pure bad
luck, this day Cotton happened to be chatting with Lazyacre out the
front of his store again when he looked up and to his surprise saw
his own cart and his own horse, driven by his own hired help,
passing by laden with a crate of which he had no knowledge
whatsover.
Well, it didn't take very long at all for Cotton to excuse himself
from Lazyacre, jump into the street and hail his driver, demanding
to know why, where, how come, who pays, who authorized, why is this
so? with hands on hips and eyebrows furrowed. What's in the crate?
Where is it going? On who's sayso?
Oh, dear.
Poor Chilly John.
As if life hadn't dealt him a pair of twos in a game of Jacks or
better already, with his permanent shivering, and his stutter, and
his mortal fear of his brother-in-law, now to be caught red-handed
again! This time, fortunately, not in the company of a sheep (albeit it had been
a particularly attractive one....), but caught all the same, by the
same nasty task master, made to cower like a grade-schooler before
the teacher when caught with finger up nostril.
So he did the only thing that is left as an option to a basically
honest person when caught flagrantly in breach of all the rules.
He lied through his teeth.
"W-well, M-michael," he began, and went on to explain that he was
engaged on a mission of the most humane kind, delivering much needed
medication to combat the flu epidemic at the behest of Doc Johnstone
and people were dying for want of this shipment and he, CJ, had been
told that minutes were of the essence, and the sooner it arrived,
the sooner the valley would bless the name of Michael Cotton who had
so generously loaned his cart and horse for such an heroic and
beneficient purpose.
Now there are few things in the whole wide world more likely to
soothe the ruffled feathers of the righteously outraged individual
with right on his side and morality in his heart than a major stroke
of the self-esteem bone.
Well, under the circumstances it took Michael Cotton less than a
second to read the banner headlines in the next issue of the Toenail
Ridge Examiner (BLESSED LOCAL STORE-KEEPER SAVES VALLEY WITH GIFT OF
LIFE!!!) before he gave his whole-hearted approval to CJ's quest and
bade him God-speed on his errand of mercy! In fact, he cried "I will
accompany you, to dispense healing balm to the poorly and help the
ailing rise from their beds of pain! Praise be the LORD!!!!"
And so saying, he clambered up onto the cart and seated himself
beside Chilly John.
Meanwhile, up at Little's little church on the hill (He'd outgrown
the old brick bank building and coerced Little's women to coerce
their men to build him a nice little clapboard structure on the top
of Goats Hill), the Reverend, Whitehouse, and the congregated
congregation had congregated for the funeral. With some
of the valley's more distinguished residents, this may not
neccessarily have been an impediment to the commencement of the
service, what with testimonials, tributes, Masonic salutes, rambling
stories about what wonderful people they were and how much the
valley will miss them, plenty of time could have elapsed before it
came time for the deeply mourned and sadly missed to have been
noticed missing from their send-off. But the young man was a
stranger in a strange land, unknown, not un-mourned, but mourned in
a generic sort of way, so the audience to his final appearance sat
in loudly whispered silence, waiting for something, anything, to
happen.
Now about that time, the Toenail Ridge Shortline had been partly
instrumental in importing to the valley a crate-ful of Gelignite
(which is Dynamite's bigger brother), destined for the back hills
and the eventual ownership on one Adolph Kampf, lead and silver
miner. Unfortunately, the
Gelignite was carefully stored in a crate that bore too much of a
remarkable resemblance to the container of the late departed young
flu victim and, when Chilly John, at a total loss as to how to
handle the situation, drew his cart to a halt at the Selbyville
station, on the weak pretext that his current load had to be shipped
out on the afternoon freight to help the poor sufferers down the
line, the freight-handlers, Jeff and Rick, overhearing this comment,
grabbed the coffin-crate and slung it into the open door of the
afternoon combine.
Usually documentation was required on all freight shipments that
travelled the rails of the Toenail Ridge Shortline, but with the flu
epidemic and all, some things had to go by the board, and since Jeff
was assigned to ride the combine to Rowel that day, he didn't bother
with the paperwork as he knew that the crate had to be dropped at
Fenster.
Now you really don't need to be led by a ring through your nose to
see what's going to happen next, do you?
It just so happened that the night before Jeff had had to overnight
in Rowel and had taken advantage of the chance away from his
other-half to spend some time at one of the fine taverns that Rowel
boasted. Where the crate, unmarked and un-consigned,
managed through a number of errors perpetuated by inexperienced
staff filling in for those away with the flu, eventually got
forwarded to a small village in the far Southern Mexican state of
Guadelaharikari, where to this day the contents of the crate are
revered as a sacred icon and paraded publicly every year on St.
Margaritas-ante-Porcos Day.
Whitehouse had had trouble getting his gravedigger to cooperate with
the preparation of a suitable resting place for the young stranger,
no money forth-coming and all, so it was with a considerable degree
of relief that he was approached by Richardo Lamborgino in the
church and had whispered in his ear that according to the wishes of
the stranger, revealed in an unsigned note found in one of his
saddle-bags, he wished his mortal remains to be consigned to the
flames in a similar fashion to Tedium's from the brewery, that is,
the new fashion of cremation.
About then, CJ arrived, finally, with the crate from the Selbyville
station. With due pomp and ceremony it was transported into the
church where Little said the right words, Littles' Women snuffled
into their lace hankies, the men sat stoic, swallowing lumps in
their throats, Whitehouse' natural boisterousness succumbed to the
solemnity of the occasion and finally the cortege departed in due
respect for the newly completed crematorium.
Adolph Kampf complained again and again to the Toenail Ridge
management about the non-arrival of his shipment of mining
explosives, but never gained any satisfaction from them, they
repetitively claiming that all records of the transaction had
regrettably disappeared in the suspected asteroid strike that
levelled the Selbyville area on the day that that poor young
stranger was cremated.
They are as inevitable as death and
taxes.
They come into every life and interact with every person,
sooner or later.
Undertakers.
They
speak in semi-hushed whispers, leaning towards the relatives of the
dear-departed, perhaps in fear that raising the voice to normal
levels will wake the corpse who will berate them for disturbing a
well-earned lie-down.
Though
thirty years out of date, he prefered the fashions of the 1880's,
brocaded long-coat, velvet vest, white breeches tucked into
knee-high black riding boots.
His voice boomed in volume and timbre,
permanently pitched to the back of a large crowd of rubes.
He
laughed endlessly at his own jokes and utterances.
And he weighed
300 pounds.
It was to him that the local residents came when they needed a paper
witnessed, a birth registered (he already knew about the
departures..), a wedding licence applied for, in fact anything that
they didn't want to pay that fancy lawyer feller Lazyacre to do.
It
still cost to consult Whitehouse but nowhere to the same degree.
(Not that Lazyacre had one......)
They are thrown together at times
of bereavement, the one to administer to the spiritual needs of the
family and to mutter the appropriate mantras over the dear departed,
the other to see to the disposal of the empty shell, with the least
amount of pain to the relicts as possible.
He was tall,
gangly, he wore long dark clothing, he clutched his Good Book to his
chest, he muttered at that special volume immediately below
the comprehensible level that takes years of training and discipline
to acquire, so that the poor bereaved at whom the homily was aimed
assumed he or she was being offered words of solace and comfort, and
so stood nodding and straining, but may just as likely have been
subject to a recitiation of the good Reverend's shopping list.
He would descend on the
corpse, pull back the sheet, produce measuring tape from vest
pocket, measure length, breadth, thickness.
He would comment on
neccessary clothing to be supplied, inquire without pause whether
the best casket was required or did the family wish to just send
poor
(insert name here) to rest for Eternity in only the second-best
one.
He would prod here and there determining if the state of the
cadaver would require embalming or if he could save the expense due
to its freshness, he would fold the arms so that he didn't have to
break them later to get them inside the coffin.
In short, Death may
come as a thief in the night but Heironymus Whitehouse came as a
runaway train.
Man
can't do a good job in his chosen profession if the recipient ain't
in a position to reimburse a man for a good job!
(In New York City the
Potter's Field is known as the Hudson River.)
And as far as cleaning, dressing,
washing, shaving the remains, well, they could remain the way they
were!
Between them they approached Grant down the railyards
regarding some old packing crates that had been weathering out the
back of the sand-house, and they cut a deal.
The relatives may not
be happy, the kin may consider questions, but NEVER does the star of
the show utter a word against his or her treatment.
On delivery to Whitehouse's rear door, the
undertaker installed it on the usual trestles, lined it with an old
white sheet and added rope handles to the sides.
Then, calling on
the assistance of his part-time helper, Clay Shay, the body of the
young man was placed in its final receptacle.
Reverend Little hadn't exerted himself too much on this one, knowing
that no funds would be ensuing for his living expenses or even for
the odd bunch of flowers for that grieving widow Lee over in
Fenster. He picked one of the generic send-off sermons out of his
Common Book of Prayer for the Common Lot, inserted the appropriate
details, (although in the case of the young stranger, that took
considerably little time) and showed up on time at the little
Selbyville church to conduct the internment.
Consider it masturbation of the mind.
Perhaps not best done in polite company but you are always assured
of an appreciative recipient.
The only absentee,
apart from Lazyacre who didn't hold with churchified activities, and
Cotton, who couldn't close his store, regardless of the fact that
all potential customers were sitting in the church, was the guest
of honour himself, one John Doe, wearing his wooden suit.
The explosive was planned to be used to put Kampf mine on the
map, to make an impact on the world in the way of mineral riches the
likes of which has not been seen since....well, since the last time
a mineral strike put a place on the map.
In the meantime, Cotton got talking to Joe Dempsey, the
station-master, about business in general, and CJ grabbed the
opportunity to confide in Rick that maybe they had the wrong crate
and could he have it back please until he could check please,
please?
This particular tavern was featuring on the night a very
fine barrel of ale procured as a special purchase from the
Selbyville brewery, and no finer body had Jeff ever sampled in a
glass of beer.
Unfortunately, it happened that the body he was
sampling was in part part of Tedium's parts, who had very recently
met his demise in a brewery vat with the result that halfway to
Fenster on board the combine, Jeff was attacked by a fit of the
stomach cramps that had him rushing for the convenience in the
corner of the car, and there he stayed while the train passed
through Fenster, Toenail Ridge, the Whitbey bridge and Rowel,
finally emerging, pale, shaken and pounds lighter in the Rowel
interchange yards.
Well, Whitehouse sure didn't complain
about this, after all, the valley of the Toenail Ridge was one of
those fortunate places where wood grew on trees, so providing a fire
to dissipate the mortal remains was not a problem, shoot, any
community could afford a match!
Chapter 17! The triumphant return of the Saga!
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