"So it's a big deal when you
die, huh Jack?" said Tom as Jack carefully wheeled the metal stretcher
through the door into the basement work room .
Well, we try to make it nice for
you and your family," he said.
"Memorable, huh?"
"Well," said Jack,"
not too memorable. It isn't a wedding."
"No, far from it," said
Tom, and even though not a single tiny muscle in his entire body moved, Jack
could clearly hear the man speak as well as the fidgeting in his voice.
"Don't be nervous, Tom,"
said Jack, "everyone goes through this."
"Will someone come to meet
me, Jack?"
Jack had heard this question
hundreds of times, but he had no answer. He didn't know what happened after the
final curtain. The dearly departed were clueless at this point and Jack
presumed Tom would find answers in short order. Jack knew the dead man
would soon stop talking, the chatter simply ending. The talkative spirits
always left their bodies behind and went somewhere, perhaps to a grand
induction ceremony in the heavens. Some of them came back
after they were interred and their voices resumed, but in a different
way. In any case, there was never any mention of being visited, picked
up, judged, sanctioned, punished or any of the other expectations one might
have of life after death.
"Tom, I have to do my undertaker job now. Don't be scared."
"It won't hurt, will it
Jack?"
"Of course not, you're
dead."
"It hurt a lot when they were
jumping on my chest in the hospital."
"You were still alive
then."
As much as science and
medicine had progressed in the past hundred years, the basics of
embalming had not changed much. Jack cleaned the body with disinfectant,
then replaced the fluids and viscera with preservative chemicals. Next
would come the dressing of the deceased in clothing last worn to a niece’s
wedding ten years ago. Then it was time to pretty him up with natural
looking cosmetics made especially for dead folks.
“Not THAT suit,” said the newly
dead man as Jack removed the garment from the plastic bag Tom’s sister had
dropped off. “I HATE that suit.”
Jack recognized Tom’s reaction as
bizarre, coming from a corpse, but he was used to this kind of behavior.
“Oh, come on, Tom, I think it
looks great!” Jack lied. “It’s the perfect color to match your skin tone
… now that you’re dead.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said
Tom. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes, of course,” said Jack.
“And the rose colored ceiling lights over the casket will give it a nice warm
tone. It’s a perfect funeral suit.”
“Still,” said Tom, “I’ve never
liked Glen Plaid. My wife bought me that suit without my even trying it
on.”
Jack paused a moment, suddenly
uncomfortable. Then, trying to sound as natural as possible, he spoke.
“How’d she know it would fit?” he
asked.
“You know Margie,” said Tom.
“Told me it was a 42 Regular and I’d better lose weight and fit into it before
Easter.”
Jack felt a pressure in his chest
as he fiddled with the aspirator. He rubbed the spot where the pain
gnawed at him. Eating his usual salami and provolone sandwich while embalming
might be why he was getting a lot of heartburn lately.
“Twenty years I was married to
that woman,” said Tom, “twenty years of pure hell. What was it my buddy
Artie used to say about his wife … ‘I could have killed her seven and a half to
ten years ago and been out of jail by now.’ ”
“You don’t remember how you died,
Tom?”
“No, I hadn’t even thought about
it.”
“It seems,” said Jack, “that
Margie shot you.”
“No!” exclaimed the corpse.
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing! Why?”
“Don’t know,” said Jack, “but you
must have really pissed her off.”
“She’ll go to jail!” said
Tom. “That’s terrible. She’ll lose the house and have to give away
that foolish dog. And some shyster will take every penny of my hard
earned money for a so-called defense that’ll fail miserably. She’ll
wind up in prison. You gotta help us, Jack.”
“I can’t help. Your life is
over, Tom, you can’t affect anything any more.”
“But you can,” said Tom.
“Tell the police you spoke with me and I went at her with a butcher knife or
something. That’s why she shot me. In self defense.”
“I don’t think they’d believe me,
Tom. And besides …”
“But, you gotta try. For my
sake. For Margie’s sake. For gosh sakes, man, don’t let her life be
ruined!”
“How would I explain my talking
with a dead man?” Jack said. “And besides, she … Tom?”
He got no response. “Tom?”
Jack inquired.
Still no response. It often
happened this way. The corpse would get excited about something and go
howling off into eternity, his soul cursed with a problem he couldn’t solve,
and being dead, shouldn’t have worried about anyway. Like the time Jack
was asked by the late Harry Bonaparte … just as Jack was giving him the
formaldehyde … to remind his wife to have the snow tires taken off in the
spring.
Jack didn't know why, but after a
body arrived at the cemetery, he might hear the dead person speak again, but
not see them And while each of their bodies was buried beneath the
proper headstone, not all of their voices returned. . Even to
Jack, some of the dearly departed were mum for eternity. Others talked
incessantly. Jack wondered if the silent ones had gone to some place
better, or possibly worse. He wondered if one place might be heaven and
the other hell. He had a sense the other quiet place might be heaven, but
although the talkers down here in the graveyard always appeared to be trying to
work out a problem by mainly talking to themselves, they seemed happy enough.
Weeks later Jack walked down a
deserted lane of the cemetery on a lovely summer afternoon, lovely except for
the heartburn he didn’t seem able to shake, the pain sometimes feeling like a
hot coal inside his chest. He listened to the voices coming from a
variety of dead spirits, some over two hundred years old. Jack imagined
the dead sitting on their headstones ass they spoke to themselves.
Not often did they address each other They were very self absorbed,
evidently unaware that only an occasional visitor heard them. It was
difficult to interrupt them with a question. Some Jack had never reached.
It was like listening to someone on the radio. You couldn’t ask a question,
couldn’t talk back. You just listened and learned the strangest things,
sometimes interesting, sometimes not. A former town mayor from a century
ago had been the source of much of Jack’s knowledge of the area’s unrecorded
beginnings and political intrigue.
Approaching Tom’s headstone, Jack
could hear the fellow was now back on line, still talking about Margie.
As Tom droned on in his monologue, he didn’t seem to be listening very much to
Margie, as she chattered away in the grave next to him. As in life,
evidently, they were like two ships passing in the night.
“I should have at least tried to
get away with it,” said Margie, “rather than shoot myself. My dress was
absolutely ruined! Why didn’t I wait a few minutes and think things
out? No, I had to immediately go out in a blaze of glory!”
“I can’t imagine her doing
anything to mess up her hair,” said Tom, interrupting himself, listening with
one ear.
“I could have said he came at me
with a knife,” said Margie. “I might have beaten the rap. I so much
miss the dog.”
“You know what I think,” said Tom
to himself, “even if her lawyer didn’t steal all my money, she probably would
have given it to him when she married the bastard. She was always a big
flirt.”
“Hush up, Tom!” said Margie, “I’m
trying to think this through.”
Jack’s heartburn was worsening and
he was getting quite irritated. “Tom, Margie,” he said, “what does it
matter now? You’re both dead and gone.”
A buzzing in his ears that Jack
hadn’t noticed until it stopped became quiet. How odd, he thought.
Only now did he remember a buzz in the background throughout his entire life.
Tom was correct, Jack now
decided. That suit looked terrible on him.
“Well,” said Tom, “that’s a hell
of a thing. For you to tell us we’re gone. We’re right here.
With you, Jack.
Jack was confused. He hadn’t
expected to actually see all of these folks sitting on their headstones.
“I can see all of you,” he
said.
“We can all see you now,” said one
voice after another from everywhere around him.
The cemetery’s caretaker found
Jack dead of a heart attack, leaning up against Tom’s headstone, a quizzical
look on his face. It was too bad, to die suddenly like that. But at
least Jack could now have a proper conversation with the dead. And
besides, he could sense Margie giving him the eye.
copyright 2010, David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet, South
Carolina
