As Bright as Heaven(28)

“Have you seen them?” one of the boys says. “Did they choke on their lungs?”

“I’m not allowed right now where the bodies are,” I say, very aware that I can’t provide the assurance that none of the deceased have choked on their own lungs. The smartest person in our class says that’s impossible. If any of us could provide the proof that Wendell is right, it should be me. For the first time ever, I feel like it’s to my advantage that I’m the daughter and niece of undertakers, and yet I can’t give my classmates what they want.

There is silence for a few moments as they contemplate the fact that I might have been a fount of information if children weren’t always kept away from everything important.

“Why is this happening?” Ruby says quietly to no one.

And none of us can answer her.

The door to our classroom opens, and Miss Darby steps inside. She tells us all classes have been canceled until further notice and that we are to head straight home. She admonishes us as we gather our things to work on our lessons on our own, but no one is listening to her. The only time school has ever been closed for more than a day was for a blizzard.

Ruby turns to me. “Do you think we’re all going to die?” Her voice is but a whisper and her brown eyes are wide with worry.

But I don’t get a chance to answer her. Her brother calls her name from the entrance to our classroom and tells her to come. Their mother is waiting outside to take them home.

When I step outside, I feel numb, like I’m in the middle of a dream. A little voice is telling me I need to hurry along to Willa’s end of the school so that I can walk her home. But I just stand there on the street corner for a few minutes as classmates and parents rush by to get away. Some of the adults are pressing handkerchiefs to their noses and mouths. One man whisks past a streetcar signpost and a No Spitting! sign peels away from it at the tug of his coat. It floats away on the wind, and no one notices.

There are still little piles of parade confetti in the gutters, but they’re all wet and matted now. You can’t tell the clumps of mush had just a few days earlier been anything pretty to look at.

I wonder if this is what Jamie feels over there in France, this chilly, empty fear that something bad is happening and it’s so quiet and quick you can’t even name it. I haven’t heard from him since the middle of September, nearly a month ago, even though I’ve written him nearly every day since the parade. The Sutcliffs would have gotten word if something bad had happened to him, and they’ve heard nothing, either.

I finally start to make my way toward Willa’s part of the school, and I am already penning in my head what I will write to him when I get home. I won’t tell him how awful it is here, nor will I lie and say it’s all wonderful. I will just tell him we are all getting by and doing our best and hoping and praying every day that the flu and the war will both come to a quick end. I look down into the gutter as I walk and I see a small clump of parade confetti, tucked under some leaves, that isn’t soaking wet or dirty. I instantly reach for it and slip the little cluster into my coat pocket.

I’ll separate the tiny pieces of damp paper when I get home, let them dry, and then put them in the envelope along with the letter I write. When Jamie opens the envelope in some faraway field in France, the confetti will fall out and it will surprise him and he’ll think of home and smile.





CHAPTER 19



Pauline


The back door into the funeral home starts to open, and I stand ready to tell whoever is on the other side of it that they cannot deposit their dead with us. Simply locking the door and putting a sign out that we will accept no more deliveries is not sufficient, as most will leave the sheet-wrapped cadaver on the stoop anyway, with a hastily written note pinned to its chest. It’s been only nine days since the parade.

“Don’t let anyone leave a body,” Fred told me when he left for the morgue an hour ago. “I don’t have any more caskets. I have no place to put another corpse. I can’t keep lining the embalming room floor with them.”

He looked to me with weary, bloodshot eyes, and I assured him I would do as he asked even though it meant staking my position in the mudroom amid the ghoulish rows of flu victims covered in horse blankets. There are too many here for one undertaker to attend. In a matter of days, this terrible sickness has turned our little world upside down. Bright Funeral Home had been a quiet, peaceful place for the most tender care of the dearly departed. It was almost like a library or a church. It was a calm, respected place where life was honored and hence affirmed, strange as that might sound. But now this place is like a terrible corner in someone’s nightmare. Before Fred left for the morgue, I had to position Evie at the front stoop lest any desperate soul try to break down the front door and bring their dead through our living quarters.

Fred has run out of ice to keep the bodies cool, and the odor of decomposition—imagine putrid meat slathered in sugar gone rancid—is wafting about me despite the scarf tied around my nose and mouth. It is not a human smell. Nothing about the bodies smells or looks human. It’s only when a stray finger or a lock of hair or a toe finds its way out of the fabric cocoon that it’s clear that under the layers of blankets and canvas are people whom my bizarre companion has called to itself. At least that is what common sense would have me believe—that Death has been gorging itself on the innocent of Philadelphia since the parade. And not just Philadelphia. Everywhere. From one end of America to the other and beyond. And yet something keeps me from calling down curses on my companion. Even now I sense the enemy is not who we think it is. My companion hovers kindly in the hellish corners in the funeral home. Like a valet, like a dance partner.