The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(70)
Artie and Dorothy stood behind her, their voices drowned out by the noise from the oven. She resisted the temptation to walk over and peek inside the glass doors, not knowing what she would see. An iron cupboard with doors and drawers stood against the far wall, with a few iron boxes on the floor in front of it, filled with something. Bolts, it looked like, only bigger than the ones in Ilka’s toolbox back in Copenhagen. She walked over to check it out.
From behind, Dorothy said, “Hip operations and artificial knees, complicated broken bones. All the reserve parts from the dead end up here. I sell them; I get a good price for titanium. The former owner donated the money to the local athletic club. Nowadays it takes a long time to fill the box up.”
“How long does a cremation take?” she asked, now that Dorothy had warmed a bit to her.
“Three, four hours. If it’s a kid, it doesn’t take quite so long. It’s all a matter of size.”
Interesting, Ilka thought. There was something in Dorothy’s eye, now that she was talking about her work. As if fire was a craft she could control. A passion she wanted to share. “How hot does it get in there?”
A long iron rod with a short, wide scraper on one end stood up against the wall. Dorothy walked over, opened the glass doors, and stuck the poker inside. She pushed around whatever was in there, and the flames leapt up again. “It can get hotter, but you cremate at between a thousand and twelve hundred degrees. It takes a while for the bodies to start burning, but when they start the heat is stable. It helps if the body is in a wooden coffin so the flames have something to work with.”
Ilka nodded. Not that this interested her, but suddenly it felt important to break the ice, even though she had no plans to see this woman in coveralls again.
While they stood talking, she remembered the urn. She went out to the hearse to get it, and on the way, she heard Artie ask if it was okay to come by after supper. The woman nodded and suggested he bring along a bottle of wine.
It was quiet outside. A slight breeze whispered in the trees surrounding the farm buildings; on the steps stood several large, elegant glazed pots, blue, green, and yellow, that didn’t at all match the tall woman in working clothes. Despite the circumstances, Ilka wasn’t uncomfortable. The relationship between Artie and the woman did bug her a bit, which surprised her. She picked up the box containing the urn, walked back, laid it beside the coffin, then waited for Artie to say good-bye. On the way to the hearse, she noticed an old metal sign leaning against the end of the house by the covered coffins. CREMATORIUM.
She looked around for a moment, but other than the old sign, nothing pointed to this being an authorized crematorium.
“What is that place?” she said as they drove up the hill. She was still upset about being rejected at the Oldhams’ crematorium, and she was tired of it all. All the enthusiasm she’d felt that morning, the determination to turn things around, had gradually slipped away without her realizing it. And now this. It felt like they’d been let in through the back door to get a body burned. A body they otherwise couldn’t get rid of. “It can’t be a legal crematorium, can it?”
Suddenly she felt old, older than these hills, and she shivered even though the sun was blazing. She couldn’t take any more. Maybe it was the men from the American Funeral Group that morning, acting as if they already owned the business. That had seriously shaken her, surprisingly so, and as the hearse rattled down the gravel road, she couldn’t see any use in staying to fight for the funeral home.
Artie forced the hearse up the last stretch of hill. “It is; it’s actually legal. It’s a closed crematorium, or not really all the way closed, of course; it’s just that Dorothy doesn’t run it as a crematorium anymore.”
“Who is she?” She stared in the side mirror. At the bottom of the hill, the farmhouse, the red stone building, the tall chimney with wisps of smoke curling up out of it as if it were about to vanish from sight.
“Dorothy is a potter and artist. She bought the place five or six years ago to use the big ovens for her work.”
“She burns clay in those ovens! And bodies?”
Artie sighed and ignored her outburst. “She fishes down at the lake occasionally. That’s where I met her. She went to an art institute in Ohio where an old friend of mine in Key West went. Though they didn’t know each other. When she told me where she’d moved to, we talked some about that, and she’s helped us a few times with interments where there weren’t any relatives.”
“The homeless, you mean, who also deserve a decent burial,” she said, repeating what she’d heard one of the first days she was in Racine.
“Your dad made a big deal about everyone being treated with dignity after their death, including people without much money. Not all funeral directors in town see it that way, but Paul did. So, Dorothy let us use her oven.”
“But is she allowed to do this?”
“She’s not allowed to do the burning herself; you’re supposed to be a certified undertaker. But I am. All she has to do is renew her license every year; then it’s a hundred percent legal.”
“But Mrs. Norton has paid for her cremation.”
He nodded. “And she will be cremated. We’re paying Dorothy for helping us, of course. Just not as much as the Oldhams charge.”
“And we get the same out of it?”